Relevant bibliographies by topics / Digesta. Book 12, title 6 / Journal articles

To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Digesta. Book 12, title 6.

Journal articles on the topic 'Digesta. Book 12, title 6'

Author: Grafiati

Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 14 February 2022

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles

Select a source type:

Consult the top 50 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Digesta. Book 12, title 6.'

Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.

You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.

Browse journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.

Block, Kristen. "Conversion as a Communal System of the Protestant Atlantic World." Church History 88, no. 3 (2019): 759–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640719001884.

Full text

Abstract:

Katharine Gerbner's wide-ranging and provocative book connects a broad range of scholarship on religion and race in the Protestant Atlantic world prior to the Great Awakening. It is organized around her concept of an emerging ideology of “Protestant Supremacy,” which she argues was the first step toward White Supremacy. This ideology came out of evangelizing failures in the seventeenth-century colonial Americas as Protestant slaveholders reframed their own values on religious and secular freedom in the context of colonial settlement and the growth of African slavery. This argument is entirely convincing and innovative in its comparisons of sometimes separate denominational scholarship. In my comments, I hope to reflect on Gerbner's use of the word conversion, a keyword in her book's title and one that many religious historians employ in their own work. Gerbner outlined her views in the introduction to her book (pages 6–12), but a fuller version of her arguments can also be found in her 2015 article published in History Compass, “Theorizing Conversion: Christianity, Colonization, and Consciousness in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” Her engagement with scholarly definitions rightly focuses on the malleability of what defined conversion in this eighteenth century Protestant Atlantic world—both when comparing different denominations and as a process that changed over time in conversation with things like slavery. She retains the word since the baptism and conversion of enslaved Africans prompted European Protestants to rethink their definition of Christianity, and particularly prompted them to find new ways to exclude non-whites. She also argues that using the term conversion helps to validate the actions and self-articulated changed identity of African-descendant converts as they engaged with majority white cultures hostile to their inclusion in the Christian community.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Janavičienė, Daiva. "Bibliotherapy. Reading Recomendation experiencing Exclusion during COVID-19." Slauga. Mokslas ir praktika 2, no. 7 (295) (2021): 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.47458/slauga.2021.2.14.

Full text

Abstract:

The relevance of the research is based on more than a year-long restrictions experienced by people of Lithuania and worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical part presents a concept for bibliotherapic recommendations for reading. From an interdisciplinary point of view, the research integrates insights from the domains of psychology, public health, information and communication and literary criticism. Individuals experiencing psychological problems, by delving into literature which encourages reflection of humanistic values, during their in-depth reading process, can not only distract themselves from stressful everyday life but also, while identifying themselves with personages of literary works, better conceive themselves and their environment as well as find new ways to solve their problems. This justifies the applicability of bibliotherapy for those who experience social exclusion during the pandemic. The open survey collected data from 17 experts (12 members of the Lithuanian Bibliotherapy Association and 5 practitioners involved in bibliotherapy projects; 4 study participants from the health service sector (psychotherapists); 6 representatives from the education sector; and 7, from the cultural sector). A recommendatory list of books for passive bibliotherapy sessions was drawn. The list comprises 2 topics: (1) recommendations for general bibliotherapy and (2) fiction for health practitioners (81 books in total, 43% of which are accessible online). Every entry in the list includes metadata required for the identification of the work (AUTHOR and title), a brief substantiation of bibliotherapic aspects formulated by experts and the information about the accessibility of the book on the portal ibiblioteka.lt. The list of bibliotherapic literature can be also useful for health practitioners, social activities professionals, organisers of local community activities, librarians and those who wish to provide help by reading.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Nippert, Charles. "Using Virtual Reality in K-12 Education: A Simulation of Shooting Bottle Rockets for Distance." International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy (iJEP) 2, no. 4 (2012): 35. http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijep.v2i4.2215.

Full text

Abstract:

Two liter bottle rockets made from recycled soda bottles are often used in high school science classes and in introductory college courses.&nbsp; Typically, it is often more challenging to shoot bottle rockets for distance instead of shooting them straight up and measuring altitude, as is often done.&nbsp; Using a device made from pipe and wood to launch bottle rockets and control the launch angle creates a m+uch0 more interesting problem for students who are attempting to optimize launch conditions.&nbsp; Plans are presented for a launcher that allow students to adjust the launch angle. To help embellish the exercise, we supplement the bottle rocket with a model using virtual reality and a photorealistic simulation of the launch that allows the students to appreciate the optimization problems associated with water and air pressure and launch angle. Our usage data indicates that students easily adapt to the virtual reality simulation and use our simulation for intuitive experiments on their own to optimize launch conditions. &nbsp;

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Valbuena, Sebastián E., Emanuel F. Pereira, Leandro N. Massa, and Luis A. Cocozzella. "Colgajo comisural palmar: su utilidad en el abordaje de la enfermedad de Dupuytren con compromiso de dedos contiguos. [Commissural palmar flap: use in Dupuytren’s disease involving adjacent fingers]." Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Ortopedia y Traumatología 80, no. 1 (2015): 30. http://dx.doi.org/10.15417/327.

Full text

Abstract:

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">RESUMEN Introducción: El diseño de las incisiones en la enfermedad de Dupuytren es probablemente el detalle técnico más importante en el tratamiento quirúrgico. El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar una valoración retrospectiva de la utilidad del colgajo comisural palmar en el abordaje de la enfermedad de Dupuytren con compromiso de dedos contiguos. Materiales y Métodos: Entre abril de 2009 y diciembre de 2012, los autores operaron a 32 pacientes con enfermedad de Dupuytren. Se incluyeron 12 pacientes con compromiso de, al menos, 2 dedos contiguos y el diseño de un colgajo comisural palmar. Se evaluaron entre los días 3-5, 15-21, 45-60 y a los 6 meses posoperatorios. Al final del seguimiento, se constataron las recidivas, la satisfacción y el puntaje QuickDASH. Resultados: Se realizaron 13 colgajos comisurales palmares en 12 pacientes, 6 manos derechas y 6 izquierdas. Los rayos contiguos afectados fueron el 4° y 5° dedos (8 casos), el 3°, 4° y 5° dedos (3 casos), y el 3° y 4° dedos (un caso). La distancia promedio del colgajo comisural palmar comisura-vértice fue de 2,23 cm (rango 1,2-4,3) y la transversal, de 2,42 cm (rango 1,6-3,8). Siempre se pudo realizar la resección de las cuerdas patológicas y la fasciectomía parcial sin complicaciones intraoperatorias. Hubo una necrosis distal parcial, tratada con técnica de palma abierta. Conclusiones: El colgajo comisural palmar es de fácil disección y seguro a causa de su múltiple vascularización, permite una correcta visualización de las estructuras vasculonerviosas digitales y las bandas patológicas, útil en afección de dedos contiguos. <div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"> </div></div></div></div></div></div>

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Barbosa, Wuerles Bessa. "Influência hidrológica na ocorrência de enteroparasitoses em duas comunidades ribeirinhas do Médio Solimões (AM)." Revista de Ciências Médicas e Biológicas 9, no. 2 (2010): 113. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/cmbio.v9i2.4942.

Full text

Abstract:

Durante 12 meses, a ocorrência de enteroparasitoses em crianças de 0 a 12 anos foi avaliada em duas comunidades ribeirinhas da Amazônia central: Caiambé e Jutica. Por meio de questionários aplicados aos ribeirinhos e de coletas coproparasitológicas em 2008, foi possível acompanhar a ocorrência das parasitoses em ambas as localidades do estudo, conforme o nível do rio Solimões. As análises laboratoriais foram realizadas no hospital de Tefé (AM), e os resultados revelaram que Ascaris lumbricoides predominou em Caiambé, enquanto Enterobius vermicularis foi mais prevalente em Jutica, durante o período de estudo. Não houve diferença estatística entre ascaridíase e giardíase segundo o local estudado (P>0,05).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

ΧΡΥΣΟΓΕΛΟΣ, Κωνσταντίνος. "Παρατηρήσεις στο «Οδοιπορικόν» του Κωνσταντίνου Μανασσή." BYZANTINA SYMMEIKTA 23 (15 жовтня 2013): 33. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/byzsym.1089.

Full text

Abstract:

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON CONSTANTINE MANASSES' ITINERARY. &Tau;HE MOTIFS OF THE TEMPEST AND THE DRAUGHT The purpose of this paper is to present and examine two key-motifs - that of the tempest and the drought-in Constantine Manasses&rsquo; Itinerary -a 12th century poem reciting the narrator&rsquo;s dreadful experiences during his trip to Palestine, on an official mission by emperor Manuel Komnenos In the four chapters of the poem, these two motifs are treated in a literate, as well as a figurative way (as far as the tempest is concerned, a topos in the 12th century literature), in order to convey the narrator&rsquo;s own misfortunes and woes, including the two illnesses he suffered from, while residing in Tyros and Cyprus, respectively. Furthermore, the presence and the combination of the aforementioned motifs hold a significant position in the macrostructure of the Itinerary. Among other things, the study of the way Manasses uses these motifs intents to highlight the poet&rsquo;s skilful art.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Souza, Regiane, Renato Afonso Jr., Manfred Klonz, and Regis Landim. "New generation of AC-DC Current Transfer Standards at Inmetro." ACTA IMEKO 1, no. 1 (2012): 65. http://dx.doi.org/10.21014/acta_imeko.v1i1.24.

Full text

Abstract:

This paper describes the new primary standard for the ac-dc current transfer at Inmetro, based on PMJTCs and the new shunts manufactured by Fluke for rated currents from 10 mA up to 20 A. The build-up of the ac-dc current scale is described together with the uncertainty budgets which result in final uncertainties at 5 A of 6 µA/A to 12 µA/A in the frequency range from 10 Hz to 100 kHz. The recalibration of the standards after one year showed very small differences which are included in the uncertainty budget.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Schmidt, Carlo, Cristiane Kubaski, Joise De Brum Bertazzo, and Livia De Oliveira Ferreira. "Intervenção precoce e autismo: um relato sobre o Programa Son-Rise." Psicologia em Revista 21, no. 2 (2016): 412. http://dx.doi.org/10.5752/p.1678-9523.2015v21n2p412.

Full text

Abstract:

A necessidade de intervenção precoce para pessoas com diagnóstico de autismo tem sido reiteradamente confirmada pela literatura. No entanto poucas experiências sobre programas de intervenção têm sido publicadas na literatura nacional, o que dificulta identificar o modo como são desenvolvidas bem como o impacto dessas práticas no desenvolvimento da criança. Este estudo tem por objetivos descrever a condução do Programa Son-Rise com uma criança com autismo durante 12 meses e o impacto dessa intervenção sobre o desenvolvimento da criança. Os resultados mostraram que o desenvolvimento do programa na residência da família ocasionou interferências na rotina familiar, diminuindo a intensidade da intervenção. Além disso, foram observados avanços mais significativos nas áreas da comunicação e interação do que no uso do olhar e contato visual. Por fim são discutidos os pontos positivos e limitações observados nesse processo.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Preciado Babb, Armando Paulino. "Incorporating the iPad2 in the Mathematics Classroom: Extending the Mind into the Collective." International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy (iJEP) 2, no. 2 (2012): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijep.v2i2.2084.

Full text

Abstract:

Doubtlessly, mathematics is one of the most important subjects in education from K to 12 levels especially for students interested in eventually pursuing undergraduate studies in the fields of science and technology. As it has been argued in mathematics education research, not only the content, but also the form in which students learn is important for mathematics learning. Particularly, an inquiry approach permeates through the mathematics curriculum of several countries around the world. Additionally, the use of technology to learn mathematics has been increasing in the last decades, requiring teachers and professionals in education to constantly explore and learn new possibilities or affordances in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to initiate a discussion about the possible and complex forms of interaction among students, teacher, mathematical tasks, and the electronic tablet (iPad2) in an inquiry learning environment. An experience from a grade 10 classroom is used as a context to exemplify these interactions.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Espinosa-Jiménez, Josefa Anahi, Angelita López-Cruz, Miguel Angel Pérez-Farrera, and Sergio López. "Inventario florístico de la cañada La Chacona–Juan Crispín y zonas adyacentes, Depresión Central de Chiapas, México." Botanical Sciences 92, no. 2 (2014): 205. http://dx.doi.org/10.17129/botsci.30.

Full text

Abstract:

Se presenta un listado florístico de la Cañada La Chacona-Juan Crispín, Chiapas, dentro de los municipios de San Fernando, Tuxtla Gutiérrez y Berriozábal, Chiapas. Se reportan 642 especies y 31 infraespecies, agrupadas en 107 familias y 412 géneros. En Bosque Tropical Caducifolio, Bosque Tropical Subcaducifolio y Bosque de Quercus dentro de los municipios de San Fernando, Tuxtla Gutiérrez y Berriozábal, Chiapas. El Bosque tropical caducifolio fue el de mayor riqueza. Las familias mejor representadas fueron Fabaceae, Asteraceae y Euphorbiaceae. Tillandsia, Eugenia y Euphorbia fueron los géneros con un mayor número de especies. Las hierbas conformaron la forma de crecimiento más abundante (34.4%). Se encontraron 13 especies endémicas a Chiapas y 19 de distribución restringida. Quince especies están en alguna categoría de riesgo dentro de la Norma Oficial Mexicana (NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010) y 12 se encuentran en la Lista Roja de la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza. Aunque el grado de perturbación de la zona es alto, el área es importante por su riqueza de especies y presencia de endemismos.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Maidel, Simone, and Mauro Luis Vieira. "Mediação parental do uso da internet pelas crianças." Psicologia em Revista 21, no. 2 (2016): 292. http://dx.doi.org/10.5752/p.1678-9523.2015v21n2p292.

Full text

Abstract:

Investigou-se a mediação parental de pais universitários brasileiros (n=50) para guiar o uso da internet pelos filhos de 7 a 12 anos, partindo da hipótese de que as crenças relacionadas a esse uso interferem no tipo de mediação adotada. Um questionário fechado foi aplicado, e os resultados indicam que os respondentes, em média com 28 anos (± 8.58), recorrem a um tipo de mediação mista, caracterizado tanto pela estipulação de regras quanto pela supervisão, conversa e acompanhamento das atividades do filho na internet, embora demonstrem preferência pelo uso da mediação ativa e do uso acompanhado. Verificou-se que pais que mais conversam e orientam também aplicam mais regras para o uso da internet pelos filhos, entretanto as crenças parecem não afetar o tipo de mediação utilizada. Tal resultado precisa ser relativizado, uma vez que se trata de um estudo-piloto, mas aponta para necessidade de mais estudos sobre o tema.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

ΛΑΜΠΑΚΗΣ, Στυλιανός. "Βιβλιοκρισία: P. SCHREINER - D. OLTROGGE, Byzantinische Tinten-, Tuschen- und Farbrezepte, Wien 2011". BYZANTINA SYMMEIKTA 24, № 1 (2014): 341. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/byzsym.1172.

Full text

Abstract:

P. Schreiner - D. Oltrogge, Byzantinische Tinten-, Tuschen- und Farbrezepte [&Ouml;sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Denkschriften, 419.Band. Ver&ouml;ffentlichungen der Kommission fur Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters, Reihe IV, Band 4], Wien 2011, &sigma;&epsilon;&lambda;. 156 + 12 &pi;ί&nu;. ISBN 978-3-7001-6903-1

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Fullana Noell, Judit, Maria Pallisera Díaz, Josep Miquel Palaudàrias Martí, and Mercè Badosa. "El desarrollo personal y profesional mediante el aprendizaje reflexivo. Una experiencia en el grado de Educacion social." REDU. Revista de Docencia Universitaria 12, no. 1 (2014): 373. http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/redu.2014.6413.

Full text

Abstract:

En los últimos años se observa un aumento del interés por desarrollar prácticas docentes universitarias basadas en el enfoque del aprendizaje reflexivo. Sin embargo, apenas encontramos en nuestro contexto investigaciones o experiencias que permitan conocer cuál es la percepción que los estudiantes tienen de este enfoque de enseñanza y aprendizaje. En el grado de Educación Social de la Universidad de Girona se ha desarrollado una experiencia docente que tiene como objetivo contribuir al desarrollo personal y profesional de los futuros educadores sociales desde la formación inicial, empleando la metodología del aprendizaje reflexivo. El objetivo de este artículo es presentar la valoración de la experiencia a partir de las percepciones de los estudiantes, quienes valoran la utilidad percibida del módulo para su formación, la metodología utilizada y las actividades. La valoración se realiza a través de entrevistas en profundidad a una muestra de 17 estudiantes que participaron en la experiencia durante el curso 2011-12. El trabajo permite concluir que los estudiantes valoran de forma positiva la experiencia, tanto su utilidad general como la metodología del aprendizaje reflexivo, aunque reconocen cierta dificultad para llevar a cabo un proceso que implica un alto grado de introspección y de establecer los límites en la narración de cuestiones personales. Del estudio también se derivan algunos retos relacionados con la necesidad, pero también dificultad, de incorporar el desarrollo profesional y personal como eje potente del plan de estudios y aspectos relacionados con la evaluación del aprendizaje reflexivo.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Sobreiro Junior, D., I. S. Mathias, and A. N. M. Freire. "Novo acesso para colecistectomia videolaparoscópica." Revista de Ciências Médicas e Biológicas 11, no. 2 (2012): 255. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/cmbio.v11i2.6699.

Full text

Abstract:

A grande evolução cirúrgica, nas últimas décadas, deve-se ao desenvolvimento técnico da videocirurgia. São inúmeros os benefícios e, atualmente, quase nunca se apontam desvantagens, embora ainda se busquem procedimentos menos invasivos, que provoquem menor dor e que tenham melhor resultado estético. Objetivamos, com este trabalho, demonstrar uma nova variação técnica, de fácil exequibilidade e sem modificações no que diz respeito à segurança. É proposto um acesso na parede lateral do abdome, para inserção dos trocartes, das pinças operatórias e da ótica, e outro na cicatriz umbilical, de forma que, quando o paciente estiver em posição frontal ao expectador, as cicatrizes não sejam visíveis. Os trocartes laterais são posicionados na linha axilar média, pouco acima da crista ilíaca anterossuperior. Foram incluídos, nesse estudo, pacientes com diagnóstico ultrassonográfico de litíase biliar com indicação de cirurgia, e excluídos pacientes com alguma comorbidade, portadores de cicatriz abdominal, e pacientes com Índice de Massa Corporal (IMC) > 30 kg / m2. 12 casos foram operados sem intercorrências ou qualquer complicação. Identificaram-se variações anatômicas da artéria cística e um ducto anômalo no leito da vesícula em um dos pacientes. Em dois pacientes, usou-se drenagem fechada pelo orifício lateral, e um deles recebeu outro trocarte de 5 mm à direita, para melhor exposição da vesícula biliar. Todos os pacientes receberam alta dentro do prazo previsto para cada caso. A técnica apresentada neste estudo reúne características que permitem considerá-la uma opção viável para o tratamento cirúrgico da litíase biliar. Abstract Introduction: The large surgical evolution in recent decades is due to the technical development of video-surgery. There are countless benefits and currently almost never are disadvantages pointed out; however, less invasive procedures are still to be sought that cause less pain and have better aesthetic result. This study aims to demonstrate a new technique variation of easy performance and without modifications with regard to safety. Methods: The access to the lateral wall of the abdomen for insertion of the trocars is proposed, as for the surgical and optical forceps and another on the umbilical scar, so that when the patient is in prone position to the viewer, the scars are not to be visible. The lateral trocars are placed in the midaxillary line, just above the anterosuperior iliac crest. The study included patients with ultrasonographic diagnosis of gallstones with indication for surgery, and excluded patients with any comorbidity, patients with a Body Mass Index (BMI)> 30 kg / m2, and those with anatomical defects and previous abdominal scars. Results: A series of 12 patients underwent surgery without any intercurrence or complications. Anatomic variations were identified of cystic artery and an anomalous duct in the gallbladder bed in one patient. In two patients closed drainage was used to by the side hole and one of them received another 5mm trocar on the right, for better exposure of the gallbladder and biliary ductal system. All patients were discharged within the period specified for each case. Conclusion: The technique presented in this study combines features which can be considered as viable option for the surgical treatment of gallstones.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Santana, Elis Passos, and Ana Lúcia Vieira de Freitas Borja. "Queixas vestibulares em pacientes atendidos em uma clínica-escola de fonoaudiologia em Salvador-Ba." Revista de Ciências Médicas e Biológicas 11, no. 3 (2013): 311. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/cmbio.v11i3.6090.

Full text

Abstract:

Introdução: tontura é uma sensação de perturbação do equilíbrio corporal e constitui-se em um dos três sintomas mais comuns, presente em mais de 10% da população mundial. O objetivo deste estudo é estimar a frequência de queixas vestibulares em pacientes atendidos no ambulatório de audiologia de uma clínica-escola de Salvador, Bahia. Trata-se de um estudo transversal analítico através da revisão dos prontuários de pacientes atendidos no período de outubro de 2010 a outubro de 2011. A amostra foi composta por 306 prontuários delimitando uma faixa etária de 12 a 88 anos, em sua maioria do gênero feminino (60%). As variáveis nominais foram analisadas pelo Teste Qui-Quadrado de Pearson considerando p< 0,05. Foi verificado que 49% dos sujeitos relatam queixas vestibulares. Observaram-se associações entre a tontura e o sexo, a idade, o zumbido, doenças pregressas e desconforto a sons intensos. A prevalência de queixas relacionadas ao equilíbrio é alta na população estudada, e estas têm importante correlação com outros sintomas otológicos e condições de saúde geral. Vestibular complaints at patients at the school-clinic of audiology at Salvador-Ba Dizziness is a kind of disturb of body balance and it is one of the three most frequently symptoms in the world. It affects more than 10% of the world population. The objective of this study is estimate the frequency of vestibular complaints in patients treated in outpatient audiology clinic of a school of Salvador, Bahia. It is a cross-sectional study by examining the records of patients treated between October 2010 to October 2011. The sample consisted of306 medical records outlining an age range of 12 to 88 years, mostly female (60%). The nominal variables were analyzed by chi-square Pearson. The degree of p< 0,05 was considered statistically significant. It was found that 49% of subjects reported vestibular complaints. Associations were found between dizziness and sex, age, tinnitus, prior disease and discomfort to loud sounds. We conclude that there is a high prevalence of complaints related to balance, and these have important correlation with other otologic symptoms and general health conditions. Keywords: Dizziness. Vertigo. Tinnitus. Hearing loss.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Ribeiro, Isabela Tavares, Luciana Rodrigues Silva, Amanda Cunha Kachimareck, et al. "Avaliação nutricional de crianças internadas em hospital publico e hospital particular, e de suas mães, em Salvador, Bahia." Revista de Ciências Médicas e Biológicas 13, no. 2 (2015): 182. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/cmbio.v13i2.12445.

Full text

Abstract:

Introdução: A avaliação nutricional é um eficiente indicador das condições gerais de saúde da criança, especialmente durante a hospitalização. Entretanto, ela é pouco relatada na literatura. Objetivo: Avaliar o estado nutricional de crianças internadas em um hospital público e um hospital particular na Bahia. Metodologia: Trata-se de um estudo tipo coorte transversal, pelo qual foram avaliados os Índices de Massa Corporal (IMC) de 100 crianças internadas em um hospital público e 77 em um hospital particular, bem como de suas respectivas mães, no dia da admissão, entre Junho e Agosto de 2013. Foi utilizada a curva de crescimento Idade x IMC (z-score). Resultados: Das 177 crianças, 65 apresentaram IMC alterado, quatro delas com magreza acentuada, 12, magreza, 24 apresentaram risco de sobrepeso, 19 tinham sobrepeso e seis eram obesas. O risco de sobrepeso e sobrepeso foram as alterações mais frequentes no hospital público e o risco de sobrepeso, a mais frequente no hospital particular. Total de 56,3% das crianças acima do peso apresentaram mães igualmente acima do peso, enquanto que a concordância de eutrofia entre filhos e suas mães foi de 58,9%. Conclusão: Risco de sobrepeso foi a alteração mais frequente, no geral, o que está de acordo com a atual situação de transição nutricional do país. Parece haver associação entre estado nutricional da criança e das suas mães. Há necessidade deavaliação nutricional sistemática em todas as crianças hospitalizadas.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Lyan, Tszitao. "The image of Andrea from the opera “Andrea Chenier” by U. Giordano: the history of vocal interpretations." Problems of Interaction Between Arts, Pedagogy and the Theory and Practice of Education 50, no. 50 (2018): 29–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum1-50.03.

Full text

Abstract:

Formulation of the problem. U. Giordano is a bright representative of the late romantic tradition of the Italian opera of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. Among the brightest stage versions of his most famous opera “Andrea Chenier”, within this study we have selected a number of the key implementations of Andrea Chenier’s part, which show the constant and mobile signs of the interpretation of this famous opera image. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of interpreting the image of Andrea Chenier from the opera of the same name by the performers of various schools in the aspect of the interaction of historical traditions and modern tendencies from viewpoint of comparative interpretation science. Analysis of recent publications on the topic of the article. The Italian opera of the XIX century is the object of many fundamental researches. The monograph of O. Stakhevych [7] demonstrates a multifaceted approach to the problems of becoming and development the bel canto style; in the study by M. Cherkashina [9], the music theatre of Bellini and Donizetti is presented as an independent phenomenon of Italian operatic history in its first period. I. Drach [2] points to debatable and sometimes subjectivity of interpretation of the concept “bel canto”. The evolution of the Italian opera already at the beginning of the XX century is considered in the study of L. Kirillina [3]; reference information about the Italian opera can be found in English-language articles from Grove’s dictionary [17]. An interesting concept is the book of A. Mallach [14] – the author traces the very fast path of the Italian opera from verismo to modernism. As for U. Giordano’s creativity directly, beside the small articles of encyclopaedic character [12; 13], the publication of M. Morini [15] is the most fundamental and complete. It collected not only researches of the composer’s creativity, but also reviews by contemporaries U. Giordano, his correspondence, registers of his performances and music recordings. The study of C. Ruizzo [16] contains arguments about the components of verismo in the work of U. Giordano, in particular, analyzes the finale of the III pictures of the opera “Andre Chenier”. Regarding this opera, we will separate the mini-guide by Burton D. Fisher [11], the articles of I. Sorokina [8], G. Marquezi [5], H. W. Simon [6], C. Duault [10]. The authors discuss not only the dramatic features of this opera masterpiece, the figure of the main character, but also the influences that this opera made, for example, on “Tosca” by J. Puccini. Statement of the main content of the article. The opera “Andrea Chenier” is a sign composition of the verismo era, despite the fact that its main character is the well-known politician, French poet and journalist. After composing (1895) and the premiere (1896, Milan), the opera was staged in Genoa, Mantua, Parma, Turin, New York (1896), Kharkov, Moscow; Budapest, Buenos-Aires, Florence, Naples, Prague, Santiago (1897), Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Cairo, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro (1898); in 1907, in the production of Covent Garden, E. Caruso played the title role. The composer and librettist brought to the stage as the protagonist of opera bright, courageous and ambitious person, so it is not surprising that both separate arias and the party of Shenier still belong to the repertoire of many prominent tenors of the planet – F. Tamagno, J. Martinelli, E. Caruso, B. Gigly, G. Lauri-Volpi, A. Cortis, F. Corelli, M. Del Monaco, P. Domingo, L. Pavarotti, M. Alvarez. The opera “Andre Chenier” is a model of the golden age of verismo, and it is endowed with all the main features of this direction of Italian art. However, the protagonist, in addition to being a poet, is also a revolutionary, that is, an uneasy person, a hero, and it is the fact that deduces this work for the stylistic limits of verismo by demonstration of a strong, extraordinary character. These features are embodied in the musical characteristics of Chenier. The main thing in interpreting his famous Improvisation “Un di al’azzurro spazio” (the 1 act of the opera) by E. Caruso is the very elaboration, exact construction of the melodic line and the bright climax, that is, combination the features both a lyrical and a dramatic role specializations that E. Caruso was possessed in equal measure. B. Gigli’s singing (which we consider an example of a dramatic embodiment of the image) is characterized by the refinement of the mezzo voce and the richness, when he sings in full voice, therefore his performance of the Improvisation, in general, is more emotional (a high-profile register, a rhythmic emphasizing that gives a distinct organization the image). M. Del Monaco performs the Improvisation not so much playing by the shades of his strong voice as leading the almost continuous melodic line, which gives mostly lyrical colours to the Chenier’s image. The aria “Come un bel di Maggio” from the 4 act performed by F. Corelli is a model of the exalted lyrics, the lyrical culmination of the opera. F. Corelli performs the aria legato that is tellingly to the bel canto tradition, with a full sound, as if the sound hovers and penetrates everywhere through the skilful addition of dramatic notes (the last sounds of the upper tenor range – si, la of the first octave). P. Domingo interprets Andrea’s image as a whole more dramatically, but in a fairly wide range – from the pathetic (Act 1), the sublime, lyrical (recognition in love in the Act 2) to the tragic (monologue “Yes, I was a soldier” of the Act 3) and the dramatic (Act 4). His striking rubato, aimed at acutely emotional expression, is impressive, P. Domingo has literally speaking in the some parts of the recitatives and even the arias, and that, in conjunction with accelerando, fills the musical language by the speech expression. The interpretation by P. Domingo corresponds to Chenier’s status as a revolutionary hero. Conclusions. Composing the opera, U. Giordano counted on the Italian tenor in the main role, according to the traditions of the bel canto era (strong upper notes, wide range, and equal voice sounding in different registers). The tradition of interpreting the image of Chenier, laid by the first performer J. Borgatti, generally is preserved. The analysis of the most famous interpretations of the Chenier’s part (performed by E. Caruso, B. Gigli, M. Del Monaco, F. Corelli, P. Domingo, J. Carreras, and L. Pavarotti) demonstrated the leading role of the Italian bel canto school. This applies to the principle of canto &#232; riflesso, singing without forcing the sound, the role of breathing, which transforms into the singing sound, the predomination of the head register (la voce di testa), and the integrity of the cantilena. For instance, M. Del Monaco and F. Corelli are lyrical tenors; they sing brightly, with a shine light decoration of high notes. In the performance of B. Gigli, there is a constant movement forward; L. Pavarotti, F. Corelli, J. Carreras, being within the limits of the lyric and dramatic role specifications, transmit in music the power of deep feelings. Instead, B. Gigli and, P. Domingo especially demonstrate the power of drama in the role specification of the Italian tenor, thereby enhancing the heroic side of the image of Shenier. The prospect of further study of the topic is associated with the emergence of new interpretations of the image of A. Chenier in the 21st century, which opens up new dimensions of the science about art interpretation.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Connor, J. D. "The Persistence of Fidelity." M/C Journal 10, no. 2 (2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2652.

Full text

Abstract:

I. The Fidelity Reflex When Robert Stam entitles one of his recent efforts to theorise adaptation “Beyond Fidelity,” he could be speaking for a wide range of critics (54). Indeed, as the editor of two major adaptation anthologies, he is speaking for them. Stam’s principal objection is the covert moralising of fidelity discourse: “The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. … The standard rhetoric has often deployed an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the translation from novel to film” (“Introduction”, 3). There are problems with fidelity discourse beyond its implied moralising. For Robert B. Ray and Dudley Andrew, the problem with fidelity is that it makes for boring criticism. “Unquestionably the most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation (and of film and literature relations as well) concerns fidelity and transformation” (31). Part of what makes this discussion tiresome is its unswaying commitment to the historically dubious and logically unnecessary assumption that “the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text” (Andrew, 31). Linda Hutcheon, similarly bored with fidelity discussions, highlights the same logical flaw: “Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text” (7). Hutcheon may be writing 25 years after Andrew, but she still has something to gain by attacking what was, until recently, “the critical orthodoxy in adaptation studies” (7)—what Stam calls “the conventional language” and “the standard rhetoric” (3); what Ray calls (citing Jonathan Culler) “an endless series of twenty-page articles” (47). What she has to gain is the ability to talk about what interests her: “there appears to be little need to engage directly in the constant debate over degrees of proximity to the ‘original’” (7). This is a personal victory, not a disciplinary one (“Of more interest to me;” “I have always had a strong interest in what has come to be called ‘intertextuality’” [xii]). Still, it is a victory, if only on that scale. Andrew, by contrast, hoped his attacks on fidelity discourse would change the discipline. “Let us not use [adaptation] to fight battles over the essence of the media or the inviolability of individual artworks. Let us use it as we use all cultural practices” (37). Reviewing Andrew’s essay in 1984, Christopher Orr was more pessimistic about attempts to change adaptation studies, and blunt about his disciplinary aims: “Given the problematic nature of the discourse of fidelity, one is tempted to call for a moratorium on adaptation studies” (72). And looking back on Andrew and Orr, Ray agreed that harsh measures were necessary for the field, but he more or less blamed Andrew for offering a fillip to fidelity in his call for more sociologically aware studies of adaptation. “I think we more urgently need to know something else” (48). And yet the discipline resists. “All the various manifestations of ‘theory’ over the last decades should logically have changed this negative view of adaptation. … Yet … disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode—belated and therefore derivative—persist” (Hutcheon, xii-xiii, citing Stam). What I am calling the fidelity reflex, though, is not the persistence of the discourse, but the persistent call for it to end. For adaptation theory to have any chance of success, it must do two things. First, it must account for the persistence of fidelity discourse despite decades of resourceful argument against it. Second, it must account for its own blind spot: What has the campaign against fidelity failed to get at? And given this consistent failure to achieve its goals, why do critics persist in calling for an end to fidelity? II. The Conversation of Judgment How could adaptation studies have resisted such an onslaught—not simply of Hutcheon, Stam, Andrew, Orr, Naremore, Ray, and McFarlane, but also of Irigaray, Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Barthes? (Hutcheon, 21; Stam, 8-9). Ray’s answer is that the field of film and literature has remained in a “pre-paradigmatic state,” held there by the New Criticism’s “veneration of ‘art’.” (44-5). The “exigencies of the academic market” have given us a mountain of case studies that fail to add up to anything. They are the tribute paid to literature by those who would institutionalise film studies; adaptation studies make film acceptable to literature departments looking to “maintain declining enrollments in the humanities” (47), while “shor[ing] up literature’s crumbling walls” (46). As total an explanation as this is, indeed, as damning as Ray’s indictment of the field may seem, even he finds the origin of the fidelity discourse outside the academy. It lies in our ordinary discussions of adaptations: “Without the benefit of a presiding poetics, film and literature scholars could only persist [there it is again] in asking about individual movies the same unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?) getting the same unproductive answer (The book is better)” (44). For Ray, the layman’s question has poisoned academic criticism because it rests on a comparison: “Most of the articles written could have used a variation of the words in the title ‘But Compared to the Original.’” (45). Hence the danger of Andrew’s position for Ray, which offered not freedom from comparison but a typology of relationships. “But Compared to the Original” is the title of an article by William Fadiman from 1965 that attempted to nip fidelity discourse in the bud. Yet as an instance of the fidelity reflex, Fadiman was already late to the game. The locus classicus is George Bluestone’s Novel into Film of 1957. Here, we find those same “unproductive laymen” making “such statements as ‘The film is true to the spirit of the book’; ‘It’s incredible how they butchered the novel’; ‘It cuts out key passages, but it’s still a good film’; ‘Thank God they changed the ending’—these and similar statements are predicated on certain assumptions which blur the mutational process” (Bluestone, 5; Metz, 112). They not only blur the mutational process; these statements make a terrible category error. “Changes are inevitable the moment one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium” (Bluestone, 6). “It is as fruitless to say that film A is better or worse than novel B as it is to pronounce Wright’s Johnson Wax Building better or worse than Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In the last analysis, each is autonomous” (5-6). Or so Bluestone argues. None of our contemporary critics take such a hard line on medium specificity; for them, the crucial term is “intertextuality”. But whether they are partisans of a modernist medium specificity or a postmodern intertextuality (or intermediality), such critics are all dedicated to the proposition that there can be no hierarchy between textual instances. For the modernists, such rankings are impossible because there is an unbridgeable gap between media; for the postmodernists, because everything exists in a general citational field. Only fidelity discourse seems to require such impossible rankings. As Orr makes clear: “the danger of fidelity criticism, even when it is dealing with the most ‘faithful’ of film adaptations, is that it impoverishes the film’s intertextuality” (72). And if Orr weren’t clear enough, the editors at Wide-Angle chose that passage as a pull quote. Still, like a vampire, fidelity did not die. Let us back up. The joke Ray tells at the expense of his academic critic assumes that while the comparison of film with book has both a technical and an evaluative aspect, nevertheless the surreptitious evaluations of fidelity discourse corrupt even its technical conclusions. Yet it seems odd to claim that fidelity necessarily entails a surreptitious evaluation, even if it has done so in every case. For fidelity to seem a compelling standard, there would necessarily be an antecedent evaluation of the merits of the version the commenter had first encountered. No one would bother to discuss whether a book or film or any other version of a story were faithful unless she already had some allegiance to that story in some form—that would indeed be tiresome. I am saying that fidelity debates provide a way of avoiding questions of quality. Something is faithful or it’s not. At least, whether something is faithful seems an easier question to settle than whether something is better than something very different. Whether and how Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999) is faithful to Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 source novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an easier question to settle than whether the Johnson Wax Building is better than Swan Lake. Indeed, a person who shifts the conversation from a discussion of merits to a discussion of matching demonstrates an anxiety about settling questions of art. In that case, what is unsettling about the adaptation is not so much its relative goodness (in most cases, that would be quickly settled) as its ability to make us question a judgment we made of the prior work by providing a more-or-less systematic set of alternatives to and deviations from the prior work. (Here I mean prior, not “source” or “adapted” work. Whether we experience the adapted text or the adaptation first, we form our judgments about it, and those are the judgments that are under pressure.) Questions of matching or mis-matching address the viewer’s ability to recognise the systematicity of the differences between source and adaptation; questions of judgment speak to the perceptiveness of the viewer in recognising both the systematicity of the individual works and the grounds for her own judgments. Such recognitions are hard-won and evanescent; what was true for adaptation theorists is true for the laymen. III. Induction, Authority, and the Case Study If we see fidelity discourse as an avoidance of judgment, then, the repeated critical injunction against fidelity because it is surreptitiously judgmental is not an antidote to, but a reiteration of, the fundamental move. We may substitute something new for fidelity—sociology, medium specificity, textual openness—but we may not have improved our position. Indeed, one of the least attractive aspects of the campaign against fidelity is an unwillingness to see at all such “layman’s questions” as efforts to take the aesthetic seriously. If Ray shares Bluestone’s desire to end the conversation of judgment, what is more striking about his piece is that it represents an uncharacteristic step backward from Bluestone’s argument on the same issue. Leading into his dialogue excerpts, Bluestone notes that quantitative analyses of films based on books, or of books sold upon the release of a film “tell us nothing about the mutational process, let alone how to judge it” (5). One might say about Bluestone’s interlocutors that they tell us something, although not much, about the mutational process, and something else, although again not much, about how to judge it. They may be mere laymen, but they exist on a continuum with Bluestone’s own work. What distinguishes Bluestone is twofold: a closer attention to the “mutational process,” and a restriction of our judgment to comparisons within a single medium (5). For Ray, again, the problem with comparisons is not that they are inattentive but that they import precisely the evaluative stance Bluestone is attempting to rule out through a belief in medium specificity. Still, both are wary of the ordinary conversation about adaptations because it is improperly judgmental. For them, the passage from technical comparison to evaluative comparison is a slippery one. Better to hold off any consideration of merit, either through the wall of the medium or the archaeology of knowledge. Yet neither Ray nor Bluestone nor any of the other adaptation theorists has recognised the role fidelity discourse plays in the layman’s discussion, a role that is less the surreptitious evaluation of an adaptation than an attempt at an objective justification of the prior evaluation. When Orr offers a backhanded defense of a limited kind of fidelity criticism—“Fidelity to the letter, in contrast to fidelity to the spirit, can after all be verified” (74)—this is an extension, not a repudiation, of the layman’s discourse. Part of the reason that the evaluation of the worth of a work of art or the success of a story is difficult lies in the search for grounds of comparison. What exactly would make this a better book? A better film? A better game? A better story? And part of the reason that adaptation studies, or laymen’s discussions about the relative merits of two versions of a story, are useful is that multiple versions of the same story make it possible to examine aesthetic alternatives. (What would work better?) Adaptations put the options on the table; they suggest particular alternatives, and (despite Ray’s despair) over time they may provide cumulative support for notions of adaptive success and failure at various levels of generality. Adaptation studies efficiently model the need for induction. If comparisons are the first steps toward theorisation, fidelity discussions are the stalking horses for questions of authority, questions that might be (and are) answered sociologically or anthropologically or economically. Why is the first Harry Potter movie too faithful? Because Rowling successfully negotiated with Warner Bros. to get script approval (Pendreigh). In this frame, fidelity questions should be all the things Ray fears they are not: cumulative, heuristic, and, although he does not put it this way, worth the effort of professionalisation. IV. Fidelity without Borders If fidelity studies are the products of a New Critical “paradigm”, they are an important transformation of it. Where the New Critic might demonstrate the systematicity of a particular work of art, the adaptation critic would displace that systematicity to the relationships between works. No wonder that the attribution of fidelity to an adaptation has suggested to everyone since Bluestone that the next move in the argument should be a turn to the modes through which the system imposes itself—what Bluestone calls “the mutational process,” what Andrew calls “sociology.” Pragmatic questions of mode, process, or sociology frequently appear as pacifications of skeptical questions of knowledge and being. This debate is no exception. One skeptic here is Ray, who initially asks “Why had the cinema committed itself almost exclusively to storytelling?” and then rephrases thus, “Why was commercial filmmaking so eager to make feature-length fictional narrative seem the inherent definition of the cinema?” (42). The latter question is modal, but not in the same way the Harry Potter question was. It displaces its concern from the mode of adaptation to the discourse about that mode, and by doing so it makes the question a more pressing one, one that likely has a particular, historical answer. Ray’s answer is that commercial filmmaking turned to realistic storytelling to appeal to a middle-class audience, to hide its operations, and to solidify its self-regulating industrial oligopoly (45). Here, the denigration of the middle-class audience takes the place of the injunction against fidelity discourse. In this view, middle-class moralists are the perfect complement to an industry always looking for a way to reduce its risks and to find stories that are pre-sold. Yet that image of the industry is both partial and underthought. It is partial because the adapted film does not simply hope to find the same audience its source first located—it wants many more and must expect many others. And it is underthought because when a film turns to literature as a way of guaranteeing an audience, it solicits an audience that is in a unique position to judge it. That audience might find the film worse, better, or somehow irrelevant, but those opinions respond to the film’s openness to judgment in the first place. To be sure, realistic or studio-based cinema might have solicited comparisons only with other films (or with reality, or with the possibilities of film), but that is not, it seems, what occurred. Instead, the cinema in its most commercial forms opened itself up to judgment relative to the novel and the theater. It was a desperately bold move that paid off with startling rapidity. Kamilla Elliott spends the great majority of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate in an argument that might liberate the discipline from skepticisim. How can adaptation be impossible and pervasive (134)? As an answer, she finds a productive “tension” in criticism between adherence to the theory that the content of a story cannot be separated from its form (hence cannot be carried from novel to film) and heretical arguments that show how it is that content peels off and finds new forms (134). The “heresies” are modes of adaptation that Hutcheon, Stam, and other postmodernist critics would recognise (ventriloquist, de(re)composing, genetic, etc.). Indeed, for Elliott, these heresies that are “so marginalised in the novel and film debate are central to its dynamics” (183). The move “away from categorical models” toward “critical rhetoric and aesthetic practices” (244) and her attempt to write “beyond fidelity” are both seemingly conventional. But for Elliott, the fidelity debate is misguided not because fidelity asks the impossible but because at bottom critics of fidelity seek to purge cinema of its literariness. Her refusal to do that positions her more firmly outside fidelity discourse than any other adaptation theorist. Instead of a rivalry between novel and film, she suggests we imagine literature and cinema to be “reciprocal looking glasses” (209-12). Such an analogy would “ensure … an endless series of inversions and reversals” (212). Fidelity may be gone, but its “endless” parade of case studies remains, yet not because the skeptical question went unasked. “Is adaptation possible?” may be pacified as we turn to practice, but when it comes time to determine exactly which analogies are fruitful because they are endless and which “have a pernicious tendency to invert and twist endlessly” “further clarification” (Elliott, 244) and “further study” (Elliott, 183) will always be needed. If laymen have persisted in judging adaptations and in raising fidelity questions when those judgments slip away, critics have persisted in their attempts to silence that conversation of judgment. Yet once criticism is freed from fidelity discourse’s judgmental “bad conscience,” it can only offer more of itself, endlessly. Questions of practice, authority, and generality float away from their original and insistent occasions. And when our conversation turns to judgments of adaptations, we will no longer have the criticism we most need, one that could let us know when we have reached the end of someone’s persuadability so we might stop trying. References Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Naremore 28-37. Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Naremore 19-27. ———. “In Defense of Mixed Cinema.” What Is Cinema? Sel. and trans. Hugh Gray. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 53-75. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Fadiman, William. “But Compared to the Original.” Films and Filming 11.5 (1965): 21-3. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Naremore, James. Film Adaptation. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. Orr, Christopher. “The Discourse on Adaptation.” Wide Angle 6.2 (1984): 72-6. Pendreigh, Brian. “Hogwarts ’n’ All.” Iofilm 9 Nov. 2001. 9 Mar. 2007 http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/filmmaking/harry_potter.shtml>. Ray, Robert. “The Field of Literature and Film.” Naremore 38-53. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Naremore 54-78. ———. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. New York: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52.     Citation reference for this article  MLA Style Connor, J.D. "The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php>. APA Style Connor, J. (May 2007) "The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Irby, Decoteau J., Harry Bernard Hall, and Marc L. Hill. "Schooling Teachers, Schooling Ourselves: Insights and Reflections from Teaching K-12 Teachers How to Use Hip-hop to Educate Students." International Journal of Multicultural Education 15, no. 1 (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.18251/ijme.v15i1.527.

Full text

Abstract:

Hip-hop-based education (HHBE) research analyzes how hip-hop culture is used to produce favorable educational outcomes. Despite its richness, the work reveals little about how to prepare practicing K-12 teachers to use HHBE toward the critical ends reflected in extant HHBE literature. In this article, we challenge many tacit assumptions of HHBE research by examining the curricular and pedagogical wants and needs of in-service teachers who are interested in HHBE but who are not familiar with hip-hop's unique history and culture. Through a collaborative self-study with a teacher-educator, we, as Black male hip-hop insiders, reflect on the promises and pitfalls of preparing predominantly White teachers to incorporate hip-hop into their teaching and learning repertoire.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

McDonnell, Margaret. "The Colour of Copyright." M/C Journal 5, no. 3 (2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1965.

Full text

Abstract:

Along with all the other baggage the British brought with them to Port Jackson in 1788 were laws of ownership that were totally foreign to the original inhabitants. The particular law I'll consider here is that of copyright. The result of a few hundred years of evolution, moulded by the common law and acts of Parliament, copyright protects the intellectual property of writers and artists (Saunders). It has three requirements: originality, material form and identifiable author. However, superimposed on the creative practices of the original inhabitants of Australia, copyright has proved a dismal failure. Its inability to continue its evolution means that it does not serve Indigenous Australians, whose creative practices do not fit neatly within its confines. The notions of 'rights' or 'ownership' inherent in current copyright law do not reflect, and are therefore unable to protect, Indigenous intellectual property. The limits of protection are summed up by Janke et al: '[c]ommercial interests are protected … rather than interests pertaining to cultural integrity … [r]ights are valid for a limited period … whereas under Indigenous laws, they exist in perpetuity. Individual notions of ownership are recognised, rather than the Indigenous concept of communal ownership' (Janke 1997). Practical effects of these limitations are the loss of copyright of stories written down or electronically recorded by outsiders, and the absence of special consideration for, or protection of, secret or sacred material (Janke 1997). Mansell notes that Aboriginal intellectual property rights are poorly protected by current laws be they copyright, patent, plant breeders, design laws or trademarks where 'the creative customs and practices of Aborigines' are different to those of whites, who 'emphasise the individual and provide the mechanisms for the commercialisation of an individual's activity. The traditional base of Aboriginal art forms was not created with this in mind' (Mansell 196). Indigenous cultures have their own systems for the protection of intellectual property which are predicated not on the protection of commercial advantage but on the meaning and cultural integrity of the work of art (Janke 1996 15; 1998a 4). Some of these so-called works of art are, in fact, 'law bearers'; these 'Indigenous traditional cultural productions are … legal titles to clan land' (Morris 6). Ignoring this meaning of cultural productions is a little like your bank manager framing your mortgage document or rental agreement for its aesthetic qualities, and evicting you from your house. While copyright law does acknowledge legally-defined entities like corporations or government departments as copyright holders, it is too limited in its definitions to recognise the complex familial relationships and reciprocal responsibilities of Aboriginal society. Under Indigenous laws 'individuals are differentiated in their awareness of elements of the local culture and in the way they make use of those elements depending on such things as their sex, their moiety or skin group, and their initiatory status' (Johnson 10). Given the complex nature of Indigenous attitudes to rights in and ownership of intellectual property, those concerned with questions of fairness in the administration of copyright law must take a new perspective. While copyright law appears, in the main, to have been unable to deal with a system of law which pre-dates it by thousands of years, there have recently been some tentative steps towards a recognition of Indigenous concerns. Golvan, acknowledging that much work needs to be done 'to ensure that the legal system is meaningful to Aboriginal people', sees some aspects of the judgement in the Carpets Case1 which 'show a strong determination to seek to unite Western copyright principles with the need to deal with issues of indigenous cultural harm' (Golvan 10). And, in Foster v Mountford 1976 (discussed below), Justice Muirhead noted that 'revelation of the secrets [contained in the offending book] … may undermine the social and religious stability of [the] hard-pressed community' (quoted in McDonald 24). These examples show some willingness on the part of the courts to take into account matters which fall outside of common law. While there has as yet been very little litigation regarding copyright ownership of written works, there is no reason to assume that this situation will continue. The first case of infringement of Aboriginal copyright to surface in the media occurred in 1966, when David Malangi's painting 'The Hunter' was adapted without permission as part of the design for the new one-dollar note (Johnson 13). Ten years later, the Pitjantjatjara Council was involved in litigation with Dr Mountford, 'an anthropologist who had been given information by the Pitjantjatjara people … in 1940 … about tribal sites and objects, communal legends, secrets, paintings, engravings, drawings and totemic geography' (McDonald 23). Interestingly, this particular case relied not on copyright law but on a breach of confidence as 'the material … was not protected by copyright, being material in which copyright either did not subsist, or in which copyright had expired' (23). This is a good example of the lack of protection afforded by copyright law to intellectual property of religious and spiritual significance.2 At first glance, the implications of the 1992 Mabo land rights case for publishing in Australia today might seem remote. However, some of the implications of this historic case hold the potential for a new approach to intellectual property rights which may actually serve the interests of Indigenous artists and writers. The importance to intellectual property rights of the Mabo decision lies in the fact that 'the Court held that … local law remains in place except to the extent that it may be in conflict with British law, and until it is over-ruled by the colonisers' 3 (McDonald 26). This meant that not only the myth of terra nullius was repudiated, but with it any notion that Australia was 'either a wild and lawless place or a legal blank slate. Indigenous customary law … was thereby given both recognition and validity' (26). Gray goes further than this, and states in relation to native title and Aboriginal art: 'the two in fact are quite inseparable if not exactly the same' (Gray 12). This statement strongly emphasises Morris' concerns expressed above, regarding the diminution of authority of 'cultural productions' when they are perceived as merely artistic objects. Pearson, in discussing Mabo, talks of native title as the 'recognition space' 4 between common law and Aboriginal law (Pearson 154). He points out that Aboriginal law exists, is practised is in fact a 'social reality', and adds that 'it is fictitious to assume that Aboriginal law is extinguished where the common law is unable to recognise that law' 5 (155). Recently the Australian Society of Authors (Heiss) prepared two discussion papers and a checklist for non-Indigenous writers who want to write about Indigenous culture. One of the papers, 'Australian Copyright vs Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property Rights', reiterates the point that the Copyright Act 1968 'as it stands is unsuited to protecting Indigenous culture'. It briefly discusses the desirability of the sharing of copyright between the Indigenous storyteller or informant and their non-Indigenous collaborator an issue I will examine in greater depth in my thesis on cross-cultural editing. A problematic practice, shared copyright deals with 'ownership' in a way that satisfies white or western conceptions but may compromise the Indigenous sense of (Indigenous) communal title to the work. The importance of effective copyright law for Indigenous Australians goes beyond the earning of royalties or the commercial 'ownership' of creative work: it refers to the protection of their cultural heritage (Heiss). One solution suggested by Janke is an amendment to 'the Copyright Act to provide moral rights (rights of attribution, no false attribution and cultural integrity)' (in Heiss). Another possible, though longer term solution, may lie in the way common law itself develops. It has evolved over time, albeit slowly, to suit the needs of the particular environment economic, technological, cultural or other in which it has to operate. As Ginsberg remarks in the context of the introduction of moral rights law to two common law countries, the US and Australia, regarding the gradual adoption of moral rights: 'a Common Law approach to moral rights … slowly builds up to the general principle from gritty examples worked out fact-by-fact. This accretion method is familiar to both our countries' legal approaches' (Ginsberg 34). This same accretion method could be used to change copyright law so that it more adequately protects Indigenous intellectual property. Whatever solution is reached, at present the copyright laws are colour-blind when presented with the complex and alien nature of Indigenous cultural practice. In the interests of reconciliation, natural justice and the integrity of Indigenous culture, reform cannot come too soon. NOTES 1. Milpurrurru v Indofurn Pty Ltd, 1995; an Australian company copied and adapted various Indigenous works of art and had them woven into carpets in Vietnam, and imported into Australia. Permission to use the designs was never sought. An award of almost $200,000 was made to the 8 artists involved, and the offending carpets were withdrawn from sale. By 1996, Indofurn had been wound up and the director declared bankrupt: the artists have not received a cent. (Janke 1998b 9). 2. Fortunately for the Pitjantjatjara elders, the court held that Mountford's book did constitute a breach of confidence. 3. 'The Court held that the rights of Indigenous inhabitants of a colony are the same as the rights of a conquered nation: local law remains in place except to the extent that it may be in conflict with British law, and until it is over-ruled by the colonisers' (McDonald 26). 4. 'Native title is therefore the space between the two systems, where there is recognition. Native title is, for want of a better formulation the recognition space between the common law and the Aboriginal law which now afforded recognition in particular circumstances' (Pearson 154). 5. However, some cases subsequent to Mabo place limitations upon the recognition of Indigenous traditional law. Justice Mason in Coe v Commonwealth of Australia (1993, at 115) stated that 'Mabo … is at odds with the notion … that [Indigenous Australians] are entitled to any rights and interest other than those created or recognised by the law of the Commonwealth, the [relevant] State… and the common law' (McDonald 2627). References Coe v Commonwealth of Australia (1993) 68 ALJR 110 Ginsberg, J. (1992). Moral Rights in a Common Law System. Moral Rights in a Copyright System. P. Anderson and D. Saunders. Brisbane, Qld: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University. Golvan, C. (1996). 'Aboriginal Art and Copyright.' Culture and Policy 7(3): 512. Gray, S. (1996). 'Black Enough? Urban and non-traditional Aboriginal art and proposed legislative protection for Aboriginal art.' Culture and Policy 7(3): 29-44 Heiss, A. (2001). Australian Copyright vs Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property Rights, Australian Society of Authors. < http://www.asauthors.org/resources> Accessed 15.08.01. Janke, T. (1996). 'Protecting Australian indigenous arts and cultural expression.' Culture and Policy 7(3): 1327. Janke, T. (1998a). Editorial. Queensland Community Arts Network News 1: 45. Janke, T. (1998b). Federal Court awards record damages to Aboriginal artists. Queensland Community Arts Network News 1: 89. Janke, T., Frankel, M. & Company, Solicitors (1997). Proposals For The Recognition and Protection of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, AIATSIS for the Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Project. <http://www.icip.lawnet.com.au/> Accessed 25.4.98. Johnson, V. (1996). Copyrites: Aboriginal art in the age of reproductive technologies. Sydney, NSW: NIAAA & Macquarie University. Mansell, M. (1997). Barricading our last frontier Aboriginal cultural and intellectual propery rights. Our land is Our Life: Land rights past, present and future. G. Yunupingu. St Lucia, Qld, UQP: 195209. Milpurrurru v Indofurn Pty Ltd (1995) 30 IPR 209. Morris, C. (1998). The Responsibility of Maintaining the Oldest Continuous Culture in the World. Queensland Community Arts Network News 1: 67. Pearson, N. (1997). The Concept of Native Title at Common Law. Our Land is Our Life: Land rights past, present and future. G. Yunupingu. St Lucia, Qld, UQP: 150162. Saunders, D. (1992). Early Modern Law of Copyright in England: Statutes, courts and book cultures. Authorship and Copyright. D. Saunders. London, Routledge: 3574. Links http://www.icip.lawnet.com.au/ http://www.asauthors.org/resources Citation reference for this article MLA Style McDonnell, Margaret. "The Colour of Copyright" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/copyright.php>. Chicago Style McDonnell, Margaret, "The Colour of Copyright" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/copyright.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style McDonnell, Margaret. (2002) The Colour of Copyright. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/copyright.php> ([your date of access]).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Young, Sherman. "Beyond the Flickering Screen: Re-situating e-books." M/C Journal 11, no. 4 (2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.61.

Full text

Abstract:

The move from analog distribution to online digital delivery is common in the contemporary mediascape. Music is in the midst of an ipod driven paradigm shift (Levy), television and movie delivery is being reconfigured (Johnson), and newspaper and magazines are confronting the reality of the world wide web and what it means for business models and ideas of journalism (Beecher). In the midst of this change, the book publishing industry remains defiant. While embracing digital production technologies, the vast majority of book content is still delivered in material form, printed and shipped the old-fashioned way—despite the efforts of many technology companies over the last decade. Even the latest efforts from corporate giants such as Sony and Amazon (who appear to have solved many of the technical hurdles of electronic reading devices) have had little visible impact. The idea of electronic books, or e-books, remains the domain of geeky early adopters (“Have”). The reasons for this are manifold, but, arguably, a broader uptake of e-books has not occurred because cultural change is much more difficult than technological change and book readers have yet to be persuaded to change their cultural habits. Electronic reading devices have been around for as long as there have been computers with screens, but serious attempts to replicate the portability, readability, and convenience of a printed book have only been with us for a decade or so. The late 1990s saw the release of a number of e-book devices. In quick succession, the likes of the Rocket e-Book, the SoftBook and the Franklin eBookman all failed to catch on. Despite this lack of market penetration, software companies began to explore the possibilities—Microsoft’s Reader software competed with a similar product from Adobe, some publishers became content providers, and a niche market of consumers began reading e-books on personal digital assistants (PDAs). That niche was sufficient for e-reading communities and shopfronts to appear, with a reasonable range of titles becoming available for purchase to feed demand that was very much driven by early adopters. But the e-book market was and remains small. For most people, books are still regarded as printed paper objects, purchased from a bookstore, borrowed from a library, or bought online from companies like Amazon.com. More recently, the introduction of e-ink technologies (EPDs) (DeJean), which allow for screens with far more book-like resolution and contrast, has provided the impetus for a new generation of e-book devices. In combination with an expanded range of titles (and deals with major publishing houses to include current best-sellers), there has been renewed interest in the idea of e-books. Those who have used the current generation of e-ink devices are generally positive about the experience. Except for some sluggishness in “turning” pages, the screens appear crisp, clear and are not as tiring to read as older displays. There are a number of devices that have embraced the new screen technologies (mobileread) but most attention has been paid to three devices in particular—mainly because their manufacturers have tried to create an ecosystem that provides content for their reading devices in much the same way that Apple’s itunes store provides content for ipods. The Sony Portable Reader (Sonystyle) was the first electronic ink device to be produced by a mainstream consumers electronics company. Sony ties the Reader to its Connect store, which allows the purchase of book titles via a computer; titles are then downloaded to the Reader in the same way that an mp3 player is loaded with music. Sony’s most prominent competition in the marketplace is Amazon’s Kindle, which does not require users to have a computer. Instead, its key feature is a constant wireless connection to Amazon’s growing library of Kindle titles. This works in conjunction with US cellphone provider Sprint to allow the purchase of books via wireless downloads wherever the Sprint network exists. The system, which Amazon calls “whispernet,” is invisible to readers and the cost is incorporated into the price of books, so Kindle users never see a bill from Sprint (“Frequently”). Both the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are available only in limited markets; Kindle’s reliance on a cellphone network means that its adoption internationally is dependent on Amazon establishing a relationship with a cellphone provider in each country of release. And because both devices are linked to e-bookstores, territorial rights issues with book publishers (who trade publishing rights for particular global territories in a colonial-era mode of operation that seems to ignore the reality of global information mobility (Thompson 74–77)) contribute to the restricted availability of both the Sony and Amazon products. The other mainstream device is the iRex Iliad, which is not constrained to a particular online bookstore and thus is available internationally. Its bookstore ecosystems are local relationships—with Dymocks in Australia, Borders in the UK, and other booksellers across Europe (iRex). All three devices use EPDs and share similar specifications for the actual reading of e-books. Some might argue that the lack of a search function in the Sony and the ability to write on pages in the Iliad are quite substantive differences, but overall the devices are distinguished by their availability and the accessibility of book titles. Those who have used the devices extensively are generally positive about the experience. Amazon’s Customer Reviews are full of positive comments, and the sense from many commentators is that the systems are a viable replacement for old-fashioned printed books (Marr). Despite the good reviews—which suggest that the technology is actually now good enough to compete with printed books—the e-book devices have failed to catch on. Amazon has been hesitant to state actual sales figures, leaving it to so-called analysts to guess with the most optimistic suggesting that only 30 to 50,000 have sold since launch in late 2007 (Sridharan). By comparison, a mid-list book title (in the US) would expect to sell a similar number of copies. The sales data for the Sony Portable Reader (which has been on the market for nearly two years) and the iRex iliad are also elusive (Slocum), suggesting that they have not meaningfully changed the landscape. Tellingly, despite the new devices, the e-book industry is still tiny. Although it is growing, the latest American data show that the e-book market has wholesale revenues of around $10 million per quarter (or around $40 million per year), which is dwarfed by the $35 billion in revenues regularly earned annually in the US printed book industry ("Book"). It’s clear that despite the technological advances, e-books have yet to cross the chasm from early adopter to mainstream usage (see IPDF). The reason for this is complex; there are issues of marketing and distribution that need to be considered, as well as continuing arguments about screen technologies, appropriate publishing models, and digital rights management. It is beyond the scope of this article to do justice to those issues. Suffice to say, the book industry is affected by the same debates over content that plague other media industries (Vershbow). But, arguably, the key reason for the minimal market impact is straightforward—technological change is relatively easy, but cultural change is much more difficult. The current generation of e-book devices might be technically very close to being a viable replacement for print on paper (and the next generation of devices will no doubt be even better), but there are bigger cultural hurdles to be overcome. For most people, the social practice of reading books (du Gay et al 10) is inextricably tied with printed objects and a print culture that is not yet commonly associated with “technology” (perhaps because books, as machines for reading (Young 160), have become an invisible technology (Norman 246)). E. Annie Proulx’s dismissive suggestion that “nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever” (1994) is commonly echoed when book buyers consider the digital alternative. Those thoughts only scratch the surface of a deeply embedded cultural practice. The centuries since Gutenberg’s printing press and the vast social and cultural changes that followed positioned print culture as the dominant cultural mode until relatively recently (Eisenstein; Ong). The emerging electronic media forms of the twentieth century displaced that dominance with many arguing that the print age was moved aside by first radio and television and now computers and the Internet (McLuhan; Postman). Indeed, there is a subtext in that line of thought, one that situates electronic media forms (particularly screen-based ones) as the antithesis of print and book culture. Current e-book reading devices attempt to minimise the need for cultural change by trying to replicate a print culture within an e-print culture. For the most part, they are designed to appeal to book readers as a replacement for printed books. But it will take more than a perfect electronic facsimile of print on paper to persuade readers to disengage with a print culture that incorporates bookshops, bookclubs, writing in the margins, touching and smelling the pages and covers, admiring the typesetting, showing off their bookshelves, and visibly identifying with their collections. The frequently made technical arguments (about flashing screens and reading in the bath (Randolph)) do not address the broader apprehension about a cultural experience that many readers do not wish to leave behind. It is in that context that booklovers appear particularly resistant to any shift from print to a screen-based format. One only has to engage in a discussion about e-books (or lurk on an online forum where one is happening) to appreciate how deeply embedded print culture is (Hepworth)—book readers have a historical attachment to the printed object and it is this embedded cultural resistance that is the biggest barrier for e-books to overcome. Although e-book devices in no way resemble television, print culture is still deeply suspicious of any screen-based media and arguments are often made that the book as a physical object is critical because “different types of media function differently, and even if the content is similar the form matters quite a lot” (Weber). Of course, many in the newspaper industry would argue that long-standing cultural habits can change very rapidly and the migration of eyeballs from newsprint to the Internet is a cautionary tale (see Auckland). That specific format shift saw cultural change driven by increased convenience and a perception of decreased cost. For those already connected to the Internet, reading newspapers online represented zero marginal cost, and the range of online offerings dwarfed that of the local newsagency. The advantage of immediacy and multimedia elements, and the possibility of immediate feedback, appeared sufficient to drive many away from print towards online newspapers.For a similar shift in the e-book realm, there must be similar incentives for readers. At the moment, the only advantages on offer are weightlessness (which only appeals to frequent travellers) and convenience via constant access to a heavenly library of titles (Young 150). Amazon’s Kindle bookshop can be accessed 24/7 from anywhere there is a Sprint network coverage (Nelson). However, even this advantage is not so clear-cut—there is a meagre range of available electronic titles compared to printed offerings. For example, Amazon claims 130,000 titles are currently available for Kindle and Sony has 50,000 for its Reader, figures that are dwarfed by Amazon’s own printed book range. Importantly, there is little apparent cost advantage to e-books. The price of electronic reading devices is significant, amounting to a few hundred dollars to which must be added the cost of e-books. The actual cost of those titles is also not as attractive as it might be. In an age where much digital content often appears to be free, consumers demand a significant price advantage for purchasing online. Although some e-book titles are priced more affordably than their printed counterparts, the cost of many seems strangely high given the lack of a physical object to print and ship. For example, Amazon Kindle titles might be cheaper than the print version, but the actual difference (after discounting) is not an order of magnitude, but of degree. For example, Randy Pausch’s bestselling The Last Lecture is available for $12.07 as a paperback or $9.99 as a Kindle edition (“Last”). For casual readers, the numbers make no sense—when the price of the reading device is included, the actual cost is prohibitive for those who only buy a few titles a year. At the moment, e-books only make sense for heavy readers for whom the additional cost of the reading device will be amortised over a large number of books in a reasonably short time. (A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that the break-even point for the Kindle was the purchase of 61 books (Arends).) Unfortunately for the e-book industry, not is only is that particular market relatively small, it is the one least likely to shift from the embedded habits of print culture. Arguably, should e-books eventually offer a significant cost benefit for consumers, uptake would be more dramatic. However, in his study of cellphone cultures, Gerard Goggin argues against purely fiscal motivations, suggesting that cultural change is driven by other factors—in his example, new ways of communicating, connecting, and engaging (205–211). The few market segments where electronic books have succeeded are informative. For example, the market for printed encyclopedias has essentially disappeared. Most have reinvented themselves as CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs and are sold for a fraction of the price. Although cost is undoubtedly a factor in their market success, added features such as multimedia, searchability, and immediacy via associated websites are compelling reasons driving the purchase of electronic encyclopedias over the printed versions. The contrast with the aforementioned e-book devices is apparent with encyclopedias moving away from their historical role in print culture. Electronic encyclopedias don’t try to replicate the older print forms. Rather they represent a dramatic shift of book content into an interactive audio-visual domain. They have experimented with new formats and reconfigured content for the new media forms—the publishers in question simply left print culture behind and embraced a newly emerging computer or multimedia culture. This step into another realm of social practices also happened in the academic realm, which is now deeply embedded in computer-based delivery of research and pedagogy. Not only are scholarly journals moving online (Thompson 320–325), but so too are scholarly books. For example, at the Macquarie University Library, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of electronic books in the collection. The library purchased 895 e-books in 2005 and 68,000 in 2007. During the same period, the number of printed books purchased remained relatively stable with about 16,000 bought annually (Macquarie University Library). The reasons for the dramatic increase in e-book purchases are manifold and not primarily driven by cost considerations. Not only does the library have limited space for physical storage, but Macquarie (like most other Universities) emphasises its e-learning environment. In that context, a single e-book allows multiple, geographically dispersed, simultaneous access, which better suits the flexibility demanded of the current generation of students. Significantly, these e-books require no electronic reading device beyond a standard computer with an internet connection. Users simply search for their required reading online and read it via their web browser—the library is operating in a pedagogical culture that assumes that staff and students have ready access to the necessary resources and are happy to read large amounts of text on a screen. Again, gestures towards print culture are minimal, and the e-books in question exist in a completely different distributed electronic environment. Another interesting example is that of mobile phone novels, or “keitai” fiction, popular in Japan. These novels typically consist of a few hundred pages, each of which contains about 500 Japanese characters. They are downloaded to (and read on) cellphones for about ten dollars apiece and can sell in the millions of copies (Katayama). There are many reasons why the keitai novel has achieved such popularity compared to the e-book approaches pursued in the West. The relatively low cost of wireless data in Japan, and the ubiquity of the cellphone are probably factors. But the presence of keitai culture—a set of cultural practices surrounding the mobile phone—suggests that the mobile novel springs not from a print culture, but from somewhere else. Indeed, keitai novels are written (often on the phones themselves) in a manner that lends itself to the constraints of highly portable devices with small screens, and provides new modes of engagement and communication. Their editors attribute the success of keitai novels to how well they fit into the lifestyle of their target demographic, and how they act as community nodes around which readers and writers interact (Hani). Although some will instinctively suggest that long-form narratives are doomed with such an approach, it is worthwhile remembering that, a decade ago, few considered reading long articles using a web browser and the appropriate response to computer-based media was to rewrite material to suit the screen (Nielsen). However, without really noticing the change, the Web became mainstream and users began reading everything on their computers, including much longer pieces of text. Apart from the examples cited, the wider book trade has largely approached e-books by trying to replicate print culture, albeit with an electronic reading device. Until there is a significant cost and convenience benefit for readers, this approach is unlikely to be widely successful. As indicated above, those segments of the market where e-books have succeeded are those whose social practices are driven by different cultural motivations. It may well be that the full-frontal approach attempted to date is doomed to failure, and e-books would achieve more widespread adoption if the book trade took a different approach. The Amazon Kindle has not yet persuaded bookloving readers to abandon print for screen in sufficient numbers to mark a seachange. Indeed, it is unlikely that any device positioned specifically as a book replacement will succeed. Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a mobility culture, as part of the burgeoning range of social activities revolving around a connected, convergent mobile device. Reading should be understood as an activity that doesn’t begin with a particular device, but is done with whatever device is at hand. In much the same way that other media producers make content available for a number of platforms, book publishers should explore the potential of the new mobile devices. Over 45 million smartphones were sold globally in the first three months of 2008 (“Gartner”)—somewhat more than the estimated shipments of e-book reading devices. As well as allowing a range of communications possibilities, these convergent devices are emerging as key elements in the new digital mediascape—one that allows users access to a broad range of media products via a single pocket-sized device. Each of those smartphones makes a perfectly adequate e-book reading device, and it might be useful to pursue a strategy that embeds book reading as one of the key possibilities of this growing mobility culture. The casual gaming market serves as an interesting example. While hardcore gamers cling to their games PCs and consoles, a burgeoning alternative games market has emerged, with a different demographic purchasing less technically challenging games for more informal gaming encounters. This market has slowly shifted to convergent mobile devices, exemplified by Sega’s success in selling 300,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball within 20 days of its release for Apple’s iphone (“Super”). Casual gamers do not necessarily go on to become hardcore games, but they are gamers nonetheless—and today’s casual games (like the aforementioned Super Monkey Ball) are yesterday’s hardcore games of choice. It might be the same for reading. The availability of e-books on mobile platforms may not result in more people embracing longer-form literature. But it will increase the number of people actually reading, and, just as casual gaming has attracted a female demographic (Wallace 8), the instant availability of appropriate reading material might sway some of those men who appear to be reluctant readers (McEwan). Rather than focus on printed books, and book-like reading devices, the industry should re-position e-books as an easily accessible content choice in a digitally converged media environment. This is more a cultural shift than a technological one—for publishers and readers alike. Situating e-books in such a way may alienate a segment of the bookloving community, but such readers are unlikely to respond to anything other than print on paper. Indeed, it may encourage a whole new demographic—unafraid of the flickering screen—to engage with the manifold attractions of “books.” References Arends, Brett. “Can Amazon’s Kindle Save You Money?” The Wall St Journal 24 June 2008. 25 June 2008 ‹http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121431458215899767.html? mod=rss_whats_news_technology>. Auckland, Steve. “The Future of Newspapers.” The Independent 13 Nov. 2008. 24 June 2008 ‹http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article1963543.ece>. Beecher, Eric. “War of Words.” The Monthly, June 2007: 22–26. 25 June 2008 . “Book Industry Trends 2006 Shows Publishers’ Net Revenues at $34.59 Billion for 2005.” Book Industry Study Group. 22 May 2006 ‹http://www.bisg.org/news/press.php?pressid=35>. DeJean, David, “The Future of e-paper: The Kindle is Only the Beginning.” Computerworld 6 June 2008. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.computerworld.com/action/article .do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9091118>. du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. “Frequently Asked Questions about Amazon Kindle.” Amazon.com. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200127480&#whispernet>. “Gartner Says Worldwide Smartphone Sales Grew 29 Percent in First Quarter 2008.” Gartner. 6 June 2008. 20 June 2008 ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=688116>. Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Cultures. London: Routledge, 2006. Hani, Yoko. “Cellphone Bards Make Bestseller Lists.” Japan Times Online Sep. 2007. 20 June 2008 ‹http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070923x4.html>. “Have you Changed your mind on Ebook Readers?” Slashdot. 25 June 2008 ‹http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/08/2317250>. Hepworth, David. “The Future of Reading or the Sinclair C5.” The Word 17 June 2008. 20 June 2008 ‹http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/future-reading-or-sinclair-c5>. IPDF (International Digital Publishing Forum) Industry Statistics. 24 June 2008 ‹http://www.openebook.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm>. iRex Technologies Press. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.irextechnologies.com/about/press>. Johnson, Bobbie. “Vince Cerf, AKA the Godfather of the Net, Predicts the End of TV as We Know It.” The Guardian 27 Aug. 2008. 24 June 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/27/news.google>. Katayama, Lisa. “Big Books Hit Japan’s Tiny Phones.” Wired Jan. 2007. 24 June 2008 ‹http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/01/72329>. “The Last Lecture.” Amazon.com. 24 June 2008 ‹http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401323251/ref=amb_link_3359852_2? pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=right-1&pf_rd_r=07NDSWAK6D4HT181CNXD &pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=385880801&pf_rd_i=549028>.Levy, Steven. The Perfect Thing. London:Ebury Press, 2006. Macquarie University Library Annual Report 2007. 24 June 2008 ‹http://senate.mq.edu.au/ltagenda/0308/library_report%202007.doc>. Marr, Andrew. “Curling Up with a Good EBook.” The Guardian 11 May 2007. 23 May 2007 ‹http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2077278,00.html>. McEwan, Ian. “Hello, Would you Like a Free Book?” The Guardian 20 Sep. 2005. 28 June 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/sep/20/fiction.features11>. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Mobileread. E-book Reader Matrix, Mobileread Wiki. 30 May 2008 ‹http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix>. Nelson, Sara. “Warming to Kindle.” Publishers Weekly 10 Dec. 2007. 31 Jan. 2008 ‹http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6510861.htm.html>. Nielsen, Jakob. “Concise, Scannable and Objective, How to Write for the Web.” 1997. ‹20 June 2008 ‹http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html>. Norman, Don. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998. Ong, Walter. Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1988. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1986. Proulx, E. Annie. “Books on Top.” The New York Times 26 May 1994. 28 June 2008 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/specials/proulx-top.html>. Randolph, Eleanor. “Reading into the Future.” The New York Times 18 June 2008. 19 June 2008 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18wed3.html?>. Slocum, Mac. “The Pitfalls of Publishing’s E-Reader Guessing Game.” O’Reilly TOC. June 2006. 24 June 2008 ‹http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/06/the-pitfalls-of-publishings-er.html>. Sridharan, Vasanth. “Goldman: Amazon Sold up to 50,000 Kindles in Q1.” Silicon Alley Insider 19 May 2008. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/how_many_kindles_sold_last_quarter_>. “Super Monkey Ball iPhone's Super Sales.” Edge OnLine. 24 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.edge-online.com/news/super-monkey-ball-iphones-super-sales>. Thompson, John B. Books in the Digital Age. London: Polity, 2005. Vershbow, Ben. “Self Destructing Books.” if:book. May 2005. 4 Oct. 2006 ‹http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2005/05/selfdestructing_books.html>. Wallace, Margaret, and Brian Robbins. 2006 Casual Games White Paper. IDGA. 24 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.igda.org/casual/IGDA_CasualGames_Whitepaper_2006.pdf>. Weber, Jonathan. “Why Books Resist the Rise of Novel Technologies.” The Times Online 23 May 2006. 25 June 2008 ‹http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article724510.ece> Young, Sherman. The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book. Sydney: UNSW P, 2007.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Zayachkivska, Oksana, and Vassyl Lonchyna. "THE SYNERGY OF THE WORLD AND UKRAINIAN EXPERIENCES." Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Sciences 62, no. 2 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.25040/ntsh2020.02.01.

Full text

Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant economic downturn has brought to the forefront the need for expeditious action to create answers for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of this newest human malady. This crisis has crystalized the prioritization of expenditures of resources for medical research, clinical practice and public health measures in combating this deadly virus. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Coronavirus Resource Center has counted a total of 46,168,459 cases and 1,196,891 deaths worldwide (November 1, 2020). The data for Ukraine is 407,573 cases and 7,515 deaths. It is now 10 months since the recognition of the worldwide involvement of the SARS-COV-2 virus as the etiologic agent of this pandemic. Although progress has been made, there is still a large gap in our efforts to find a cure and create an effective vaccine for the world population. A corollary lesson is the need for life-long learning and the acceptance of change in everyday practice. Harvard and Ukrainian Catholic University Professor of business management Adrian Slywotzky develops a succinct idea in his book «David Conquers: The Discipline of Asymmetric Victory». He states that David’s sling is a modest investment that results in a giant return. Such is our modest investment in this scholarly medical journal: Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Sciences. We rely heavily on the social media mechanism of «word-of mouth» to promote our journal and its offerings of current medical breakthroughs and findings. Our wide range of interest is underscored by the more than 101 countries from whence our readers query our online journal. This is our modest investment on behalf of our readers to gain current information, an example of our asymmetric battle with the giant coronavirus. In this issue (Vol. 59, No.2 [62]) we inaugurate a video supplement of the proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium “SMARTLION2020’ which took place as a virtual meeting on 29 September 2020. O Danyliak and I Stryjska have collated the sessions related to the coronavirus pandemic. [4] The speakers include: 1. Boris Lushniak, Professor and Dean, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, USA: «A short history of pandemics». 2. Serhuy Souchelnytskyi, Professor at the College of Medicine, Quatar University, Doha, Quatar: «Why is COVID-19 so aggressive? Molecular insights with clinical application». 3. Andriy Cherkas, PhD candidate, Scientist, Sanofi, Frankfurt am Main, Germany: «COVID-19 and diabetes - a dangerous combination». 4. Armen Gasparyan, Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Birmingham, UK and Expert Reviewer of SCOPUS journals: «Infodemic and Misinformation in the COVID-19 era». 5. Oksana Souter, PhD, CEO of Swiss Organic Solutions, Zurich, Switzerland: “The systemic evaluations of proximity tracing app SwissCovid.” Next, S Souchelnytsky discusses the effectiveness of coronavirus testing that relies on the identification of the infrastructure of nucleic acids. This deepens our understanding of the importance of the procedure of detecting, amplifying and sequencing the coronavirus genome. [5] Our knowledge of the etiology, pathogenesis, clinical course and treatment regimens of the coronavirus is evolving and ever changing. Yesterday’s knowledge is superseded by today’s investigations and discoveries. In this light we present the latest case studies of the cardiovascular complications of COVID-19 by N Oryshchyn and Y Ivaniv [6]. M Cherkas et al discuss the critical care management of COVID-19 with emphasis on the MATH+algorithm [7]. PS Gaur et al inform us how to obtain valid information and recognize disinformation in medical research publications as a result of the adaptation of a changing paradigm in research [8]. The advice based on the thinking of Joseph Aoun, taken from his book «Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificia Intelligence» Here he proposes a strategy of how to prepare future scientists in the era of artificial intelligence [9]. In today’s medicine, smart machines and deep learning compete with the thinking of highly educated professionals. It is rare to see a modern era physician without instant access to the latest scientific research and sophisticated electronic devices that rely on algorithms of artificial intelligence to produce that information. Without such machine learning, we would not have the great advances in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular, hematologic, oncologic diseases, infertility and many other medical dilemmas. It is critically important to have timely publications that introduce these innovations in medicine to the practitioner. We therefore also present to you the latest information about cardiovascular treatments in Lviv by D Beshley et al [10], and introduce you to the use of robotics in gynecologic surgery by A. Brignoni and O. Mudra [11]. In this era of artificial intelligence and the knowledge that comes to us with lightening speed, we must expect that all research be conducted in an ethical manner. The window to this work is through publications. We summarize a series of webinars held this year by the editorial board of this journal that focused on academic integrity and its reflection through scholarly writing [12]. Their full video is presented too [13]. «The ethical code of researchers» is published as a guide for our scientists on conducting and reporting research in a transparent and ethical fashion [14]. The title page of this publication reflects its contents. The collage “Life, idea, innovation" embodies the interplay of past and present, of history and innovation. At the center, the image of the human heart symbolizes life and self-sacrifice - in all of its aspects. More than a century ago, man devoted himself to science, bequeathing his heart to teach the next generation . The heart pictured is a reflection of the mummified specimen of the human heart found in the Anatomical Museum of the Department of Normal Anatomy, Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University. The history of the creation and development of this museum can be found in a recently published monograph reviewed in this issue by A. Pitukh-Novorolska[15]. The heart on the cover of this journal is the personification of a physician, who lives by the motto "Consumor aliis inserviendo" (Latin: "I am consumed by being nice to others”). How relevant especially now - during the COVID-19 pandemic - when loss of human life is so high. In this crisis, ideas are generated. Many of them are veiled in histograms. They arise not from nothing, but from a scientific basis. It is the sacrifice of scientists that is their source. The latest book by S. Komisarenko reagarding important scientific achievements in biochemistry and immunology leading to the awarding of the Nobel Prize is herewith reviewed by S. Sushelnytsky [16]. Returning to the cover, the number of icons from the heart decreases the further ir goes : some are lost, others scatter and a few create innovation. The final elements of the collage represent the contemporary world. Building on previous sacrifices, ideas and life, innovation is the future. The aortic valve prosthesis for transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) and the image of the coronary arteries as visualized by intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) are among the most recent innovations in cardiology and cardiac surgery. Therefore, they are located next to the heart. Depicting the triad “life, idea, innovation", we invite our readers to enjoy the articles presented in this issue: new ideas for significant innovations. The Editorial Board extents their deep gratitude and thanks to the many colleagues responsible for the the support and advancement of our Journal [17]. We look forward to new ideas and innovations in 2021!

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Dominey-Howes, Dale. "Tsunami Waves of Destruction: The Creation of the “New Australian Catastrophe”." M/C Journal 16, no. 1 (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.594.

Full text

Abstract:

Introduction The aim of this paper is to examine whether recent catastrophic tsunamis have driven a cultural shift in the awareness of Australians to the danger associated with this natural hazard and whether the media have contributed to the emergence of “tsunami” as a new Australian catastrophe. Prior to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster (2004 IOT), tsunamis as a type of hazard capable of generating widespread catastrophe were not well known by the general public and had barely registered within the wider scientific community. As a university based lecturer who specialises in natural disasters, I always started my public talks or student lectures with an attempt at a detailed description of what a tsunami is. With little high quality visual and media imagery to use, this was not easy. The Australian geologist Ted Bryant was right when he named his 2001 book Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard. That changed on 26 December 2004 when the third largest earthquake ever recorded occurred northwest of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggering the most catastrophic tsunami ever experienced. The 2004 IOT claimed at least 220,000 lives—probably more—injured tens of thousands, destroyed widespread coastal infrastructure and left millions homeless. Beyond the catastrophic impacts, this tsunami was conspicuous because, for the first time, such a devastating tsunami was widely captured on video and other forms of moving and still imagery. This occurred for two reasons. Firstly, the tsunami took place during daylight hours in good weather conditions—factors conducive to capturing high quality visual images. Secondly, many people—both local residents and westerners who were on beachside holidays and at the coast at multiple locations impacted by the tsunami—were able to capture images of the tsunami on their cameras, videos, and smart phones. The extensive media coverage—including horrifying television, video, and still imagery that raced around the globe in the hours and days after the tsunami, filling our television screens, homes, and lives regardless of where we lived—had a dramatic effect. This single event drove a quantum shift in the wider cultural awareness of this type of catastrophe and acted as a catalyst for improved individual and societal understanding of the nature and effects of disaster landscapes. Since this event, there have been several notable tsunamis, including the March 2011 Japan catastrophe. Once again, this event occurred during daylight hours and was widely captured by multiple forms of media. These events have resulted in a cascade of media coverage across television, radio, movie, and documentary channels, in the print media, online, and in the popular press and on social media—very little of which was available prior to 2004. Much of this has been documentary and informative in style, but there have also been numerous television dramas and movies. For example, an episode of the popular American television series CSI Miami entitled Crime Wave (Season 3, Episode 7) featured a tsunami, triggered by a volcanic eruption in the Atlantic and impacting Miami, as the backdrop to a standard crime-filled episode ("CSI," IMDb; Wikipedia). In 2010, Warner Bros Studios released the supernatural drama fantasy film Hereafter directed by Clint Eastwood. In the movie, a television journalist survives a near-death experience during the 2004 IOT in what might be the most dramatic, and probably accurate, cinematic portrayal of a tsunami ("Hereafter," IMDb; Wikipedia). Thus, these creative and entertaining forms of media, influenced by the catastrophic nature of tsunamis, are impetuses for creativity that also contribute to a transformation of cultural knowledge of catastrophe. The transformative potential of creative media, together with national and intergovernmental disaster risk reduction activity such as community education, awareness campaigns, community evacuation planning and drills, may be indirectly inferred from rapid and positive community behavioural responses. By this I mean many people in coastal communities who experience strong earthquakes are starting a process of self-evacuation, even if regional tsunami warning centres have not issued an alert or warning. For example, when people in coastal locations in Samoa felt a large earthquake on 29 September 2009, many self-evacuated to higher ground or sought information and instruction from relevant authorities because they expected a tsunami to occur. When interviewed, survivors stated that the memory of television and media coverage of the 2004 IOT acted as a catalyst for their affirmative behavioural response (Dominey-Howes and Thaman 1). Thus, individual and community cultural understandings of the nature and effects of tsunami catastrophes are incredibly important for shaping resilience and reducing vulnerability. However, this cultural shift is not playing out evenly.Are Australia and Its People at Risk from Tsunamis?Prior to the 2004 IOT, there was little discussion about, research in to, or awareness about tsunamis and Australia. Ted Bryant from the University of Wollongong had controversially proposed that Australia had been affected by tsunamis much bigger than the 2004 IOT six to eight times during the last 10,000 years and that it was only a matter of when, not if, such an event repeated itself (Bryant, "Second Edition"). Whilst his claims had received some media attention, his ideas did not achieve widespread scientific, cultural, or community acceptance. Not-with-standing this, Australia has been affected by more than 60 small tsunamis since European colonisation (Dominey-Howes 239). Indeed, the 2004 IOT and 2006 Java tsunami caused significant flooding of parts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia (Prendergast and Brown 69). However, the affected areas were sparsely populated and experienced very little in the way of damage or loss. Thus they did not cross any sort of critical threshold of “catastrophe” and failed to achieve meaningful community consciousness—they were not agents of cultural transformation.Regardless of the risk faced by Australia’s coastline, Australians travel to, and holiday in, places that experience tsunamis. In fact, 26 Australians were killed during the 2004 IOT (DFAT) and five were killed by the September 2009 South Pacific tsunami (Caldwell et al. 26). What Role Do the Media Play in Preparing for and Responding to Catastrophe?Regardless of the type of hazard/disaster/catastrophe, the key functions the media play include (but are not limited to): pre-event community education, awareness raising, and planning and preparations; during-event preparation and action, including status updates, evacuation warnings and notices, and recommendations for affirmative behaviours; and post-event responses and recovery actions to follow, including where to gain aid and support. Further, the media also play a role in providing a forum for debate and post-event analysis and reflection, as a mechanism to hold decision makers to account. From time to time, the media also provide a platform for examining who, if anyone, might be to blame for losses sustained during catastrophes and can act as a powerful conduit for driving socio-cultural, behavioural, and policy change. Many of these functions are elegantly described and a series of best practices outlined by The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency in a tsunami specific publication freely available online (CDEMA 1). What Has Been the Media Coverage in Australia about Tsunamis and Their Effects on Australians?A manifest contents analysis of media material covering tsunamis over the last decade using the framework of Cox et al. reveals that coverage falls into distinctive and repetitive forms or themes. After tsunamis, I have collected articles (more than 130 to date) published in key Australian national broadsheets (e.g., The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald) and tabloid (e.g., The Telegraph) newspapers and have watched on television and monitored on social media, such as YouTube and Facebook, the types of coverage given to tsunamis either affecting Australia, or Australians domestically and overseas. In all cases, I continued to monitor and collect these stories and accounts for a fixed period of four weeks after each event, commencing on the day of the tsunami. The themes raised in the coverage include: the nature of the event. For example, where, when, why did it occur, how big was it, and what were the effects; what emergency response and recovery actions are being undertaken by the emergency services and how these are being provided; exploration of how the event was made worse or better by poor/good planning and prior knowledge, action or inaction, confusion and misunderstanding; the attribution of blame and responsibility; the good news story—often the discovery and rescue of an “iconic victim/survivor”—usually a child days to weeks later; and follow-up reporting weeks to months later and on anniversaries. This coverage generally focuses on how things are improving and is often juxtaposed with the ongoing suffering of victims. I select the word “victims” purposefully for the media frequently prefer this over the more affirmative “survivor.”The media seldom carry reports of “behind the scenes” disaster preparatory work such as community education programs, the development and installation of warning and monitoring systems, and ongoing training and policy work by response agencies and governments since such stories tend to be less glamorous in terms of the disaster gore factor and less newsworthy (Cox et al. 469; Miles and Morse 365; Ploughman 308).With regard to Australians specifically, the manifest contents analysis reveals that coverage can be described as follows. First, it focuses on those Australians killed and injured. Such coverage provides elements of a biography of the victims, telling their stories, personalising these individuals so we build empathy for their suffering and the suffering of their families. The Australian victims are not unknown strangers—they are named and pictures of their smiling faces are printed or broadcast. Second, the media describe and catalogue the loss and ongoing suffering of the victims (survivors). Third, the media use phrases to describe Australians such as “innocent victims in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This narrative establishes the sense that these “innocents” have been somehow wronged and transgressed and that suffering should not be experienced by them. The fourth theme addresses the difficulties Australians have in accessing Consular support and in acquiring replacement passports in order to return home. It usually goes on to describe how they have difficulty in gaining access to accommodation, clothing, food, and water and any necessary medicines and the challenges associated with booking travel home and the complexities of communicating with family and friends. The last theme focuses on how Australians were often (usually?) not given relevant safety information by “responsible people” or “those in the know” in the place where they were at the time of the tsunami. This establishes a sense that Australians were left out and not considered by the relevant authorities. This narrative pays little attention to the wide scale impact upon and suffering of resident local populations who lack the capacity to escape the landscape of catastrophe.How Does Australian Media Coverage of (Tsunami) Catastrophe Compare with Elsewhere?A review of the available literature suggests media coverage of catastrophes involving domestic citizens is similar globally. For example, Olofsson (557) in an analysis of newspaper articles in Sweden about the 2004 IOT showed that the tsunami was framed as a Swedish disaster heavily focused on Sweden, Swedish victims, and Thailand, and that there was a division between “us” (Swedes) and “them” (others or non-Swedes). Olofsson (557) described two types of “us” and “them.” At the international level Sweden, i.e. “us,” was glorified and contrasted with “inferior” countries such as Thailand, “them.” Olofsson (557) concluded that mediated frames of catastrophe are influenced by stereotypes and nationalistic values.Such nationalistic approaches preface one type of suffering in catastrophe over others and delegitimises the experiences of some survivors. Thus, catastrophes are not evenly experienced. Importantly, Olofsson although not explicitly using the term, explains that the underlying reason for this construction of “them” and “us” is a form of imperialism and colonialism. Sharp refers to “historically rooted power hierarchies between countries and regions of the world” (304)—this is especially so of western news media reporting on catastrophes within and affecting “other” (non-western) countries. Sharp goes much further in relation to western representations and imaginations of the “war on terror” (arguably a global catastrophe) by explicitly noting the near universal western-centric dominance of this representation and the construction of the “west” as good and all “non-west” as not (299). Like it or not, the western media, including elements of the mainstream Australian media, adhere to this imperialistic representation. Studies of tsunami and other catastrophes drawing upon different types of media (still images, video, film, camera, and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and the like) and from different national settings have explored the multiple functions of media. These functions include: providing information, questioning the authorities, and offering a chance for transformative learning. Further, they alleviate pain and suffering, providing new virtual communities of shared experience and hearing that facilitate resilience and recovery from catastrophe. Lastly, they contribute to a cultural transformation of catastrophe—both positive and negative (Hjorth and Kyoung-hwa "The Mourning"; "Good Grief"; McCargo and Hyon-Suk 236; Brown and Minty 9; Lau et al. 675; Morgan and de Goyet 33; Piotrowski and Armstrong 341; Sood et al. 27).Has Extensive Media Coverage Resulted in an Improved Awareness of the Catastrophic Potential of Tsunami for Australians?In playing devil’s advocate, my simple response is NO! This because I have been interviewing Australians about their perceptions and knowledge of tsunamis as a catastrophe, after events have occurred. These events have triggered alerts and warnings by the Australian Tsunami Warning System (ATWS) for selected coastal regions of Australia. Consequently, I have visited coastal suburbs and interviewed people about tsunamis generally and those events specifically. Formal interviews (surveys) and informal conversations have revolved around what people perceived about the hazard, the likely consequences, what they knew about the warning, where they got their information from, how they behaved and why, and so forth. I have undertaken this work after the 2007 Solomon Islands, 2009 New Zealand, 2009 South Pacific, the February 2010 Chile, and March 2011 Japan tsunamis. I have now spoken to more than 800 people. Detailed research results will be presented elsewhere, but of relevance here, I have discovered that, to begin with, Australians have a reasonable and shared cultural knowledge of the potential catastrophic effects that tsunamis can have. They use terms such as “devastating; death; damage; loss; frightening; economic impact; societal loss; horrific; overwhelming and catastrophic.” Secondly, when I ask Australians about their sources of information about tsunamis, they describe the television (80%); Internet (85%); radio (25%); newspaper (35%); and social media including YouTube (65%). This tells me that the media are critical to underpinning knowledge of catastrophe and are a powerful transformative medium for the acquisition of knowledge. Thirdly, when asked about where people get information about live warning messages and alerts, Australians stated the “television (95%); Internet (70%); family and friends (65%).” Fourthly and significantly, when individuals were asked what they thought being caught in a tsunami would be like, responses included “fun (50%); awesome (75%); like in a movie (40%).” Fifthly, when people were asked about what they would do (i.e., their “stated behaviour”) during a real tsunami arriving at the coast, responses included “go down to the beach to swim/surf the tsunami (40%); go to the sea to watch (85%); video the tsunami and sell to the news media people (40%).”An independent and powerful representation of the disjunct between Australians’ knowledge of the catastrophic potential of tsunamis and their “negative” behavioral response can be found in viewing live television news coverage broadcast from Sydney beaches on the morning of Sunday 28 February 2010. The Chilean tsunami had taken more than 14 hours to travel from Chile to the eastern seaboard of Australia and the ATWS had issued an accurate warning and had correctly forecast the arrival time of the tsunami (approximately 08.30 am). The television and radio media had dutifully broadcast the warning issued by the State Emergency Services. The message was simple: “Stay out of the water, evacuate the beaches and move to higher ground.” As the tsunami arrived, those news broadcasts showed volunteer State Emergency Service personnel and Surf Life Saving Australia lifeguards “begging” with literally hundreds (probably thousands up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia) of members of the public to stop swimming in the incoming tsunami and to evacuate the beaches. On that occasion, Australians were lucky and the tsunami was inconsequential. What do these responses mean? Clearly Australians recognise and can describe the consequences of a tsunami. However, they are not associating the catastrophic nature of tsunami with their own lives or experience. They are avoiding or disallowing the reality; they normalise and dramaticise the event. Thus in Australia, to date, a cultural transformation about the catastrophic nature of tsunami has not occurred for reasons that are not entirely clear but are the subject of ongoing study.The Emergence of Tsunami as a “New Australian Catastrophe”?As a natural disaster expert with nearly two decades experience, in my mind tsunami has emerged as a “new Australian catastrophe.” I believe this has occurred for a number of reasons. Firstly, the 2004 IOT was devastating and did impact northwestern Australia, raising the flag on this hitherto, unknown threat. Australia is now known to be vulnerable to the tsunami catastrophe. The media have played a critical role here. Secondly, in the 2004 IOT and other tsunamis since, Australians have died and their deaths have been widely reported in the Australian media. Thirdly, the emergence of various forms of social media has facilitated an explosion in information and material that can be consumed, digested, reimagined, and normalised by Australians hungry for the gore of catastrophe—it feeds our desire for catastrophic death and destruction. Fourthly, catastrophe has been creatively imagined and retold for a story-hungry viewing public. Whether through regular television shows easily consumed from a comfy chair at home, or whilst eating popcorn at a cinema, tsunami catastrophe is being fed to us in a way that reaffirms its naturalness. Juxtaposed against this idea though is that, despite all the graphic imagery of tsunami catastrophe, especially images of dead children in other countries, Australian media do not and culturally cannot, display images of dead Australian children. Such images are widely considered too gruesome but are well known to drive changes in cultural behaviour because of the iconic significance of the child within our society. As such, a cultural shift has not yet occurred and so the potential of catastrophe remains waiting to strike. Fifthly and significantly, given the fact that large numbers of Australians have not died during recent tsunamis means that again, the catastrophic potential of tsunamis is not yet realised and has not resulted in cultural changes to more affirmative behaviour. Lastly, Australians are probably more aware of “regular or common” catastrophes such as floods and bush fires that are normal to the Australian climate system and which are endlessly experienced individually and culturally and covered by the media in all forms. The Australian summer of 2012–13 has again been dominated by floods and fires. If this idea is accepted, the media construct a uniquely Australian imaginary of catastrophe and cultural discourse of disaster. The familiarity with these common climate catastrophes makes us “culturally blind” to the catastrophe that is tsunami.The consequences of a major tsunami affecting Australia some point in the future are likely to be of a scale not yet comprehensible. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). "ABC Net Splash." 20 Mar. 2013 ‹http://splash.abc.net.au/media?id=31077›. Brown, Philip, and Jessica Minty. “Media Coverage and Charitable Giving after the 2004 Tsunami.” Southern Economic Journal 75 (2008): 9–25. Bryant, Edward. Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard. First Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. ———. Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard. Second Edition, Sydney: Springer-Praxis, 2008. Caldwell, Anna, Natalie Gregg, Fiona Hudson, Patrick Lion, Janelle Miles, Bart Sinclair, and John Wright. “Samoa Tsunami Claims Five Aussies as Death Toll Rises.” The Courier Mail 1 Oct. 2009. 20 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/samoa-tsunami-claims-five-aussies-as-death-toll-rises/story-e6freon6-1225781357413›. CDEMA. "The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency. Tsunami SMART Media Web Site." 18 Dec. 2012. 20 Mar. 2013 ‹http://weready.org/tsunami/index.php?Itemid=40&id=40&option=com_content&view=article›. Cox, Robin, Bonita Long, and Megan Jones. “Sequestering of Suffering – Critical Discourse Analysis of Natural Disaster Media Coverage.” Journal of Health Psychology 13 (2008): 469–80. “CSI: Miami (Season 3, Episode 7).” International Movie Database (IMDb). ‹http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0534784/›. 9 Jan. 2013. "CSI: Miami (Season 3)." Wikipedia. ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI:_Miami_(season_3)#Episodes›. 21 Mar. 2013. DFAT. "Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Annual Report 2004–2005." 8 Jan. 2013 ‹http://www.dfat.gov.au/dept/annual_reports/04_05/downloads/2_Outcome2.pdf›. Dominey-Howes, Dale. “Geological and Historical Records of Australian Tsunami.” Marine Geology 239 (2007): 99–123. Dominey-Howes, Dale, and Randy Thaman. “UNESCO-IOC International Tsunami Survey Team Samoa Interim Report of Field Survey 14–21 October 2009.” No. 2. Australian Tsunami Research Centre. University of New South Wales, Sydney. "Hereafter." International Movie Database (IMDb). ‹http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212419/›. 9 Jan. 2013."Hereafter." Wikipedia. ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereafter (film)›. 21 Mar. 2013. Hjorth, Larissa, and Yonnie Kyoung-hwa. “The Mourning After: A Case Study of Social Media in the 3.11 Earthquake Disaster in Japan.” Television and News Media 12 (2011): 552–59. ———, and Yonnie Kyoung-hwa. “Good Grief: The Role of Mobile Social Media in the 3.11 Earthquake Disaster in Japan.” Digital Creativity 22 (2011): 187–99. Lau, Joseph, Mason Lau, and Jean Kim. “Impacts of Media Coverage on the Community Stress Level in Hong Kong after the Tsunami on 26 December 2004.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 60 (2006): 675–82. McCargo, Duncan, and Lee Hyon-Suk. “Japan’s Political Tsunami: What’s Media Got to Do with It?” International Journal of Press-Politics 15 (2010): 236–45. Miles, Brian, and Stephanie Morse. “The Role of News Media in Natural Disaster Risk and Recovery.” Ecological Economics 63 (2007): 365–73. Morgan, Olive, and Charles de Goyet. “Dispelling Disaster Myths about Dead Bodies and Disease: The Role of Scientific Evidence and the Media.” Revista Panamericana de Salud Publica-Pan American Journal of Public Health 18 (2005): 33–6. Olofsson, Anna. “The Indian Ocean Tsunami in Swedish Newspapers: Nationalism after Catastrophe.” Disaster Prevention and Management 20 (2011): 557–69. Piotrowski, Chris, and Terry Armstrong. “Mass Media Preferences in Disaster: A Study of Hurricane Danny.” Social Behavior and Personality 26 (1998): 341–45. Ploughman, Penelope. “The American Print News Media Construction of Five Natural Disasters.” Disasters 19 (1995): 308–26. Prendergast, Amy, and Nick Brown. “Far Field Impact and Coastal Sedimentation Associated with the 2006 Java Tsunami in West Australia: Post-Tsunami Survey at Steep Point, West Australia.” Natural Hazards 60 (2012): 69–79. Sharp, Joanne. “A Subaltern Critical Geopolitics of The War on Terror: Postcolonial Security in Tanzania.” Geoforum 42 (2011): 297–305. Sood, Rahul, Stockdale, Geoffrey, and Everett Rogers. “How the News Media Operate in Natural Disasters.” Journal of Communication 37 (1987): 27–41.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho." M/C Journal 9, no. 5 (2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2657.

Full text

Abstract:

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25.     Citation reference for this article  MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Brennan, Claire. "Australia's Northern Safari." M/C Journal 20, no. 6 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1285.

Full text

Abstract:

IntroductionFilmed during a 1955 family trip from Perth to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Keith Adams’s Northern Safari showed to packed houses across Australia, and in some overseas locations, across three decades. Essentially a home movie, initially accompanied by live commentary and subsequently by a homemade sound track, it tapped into audiences’ sense of Australia’s north as a place of adventure. In the film Adams interacts with the animals of northern Australia (often by killing them), and while by 1971 the violence apparent in the film was attracting criticism in letters to newspapers, the film remained popular through to the mid-1980s, and was later shown on television in Australia and the United States (Cowan 2; Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 261). A DVD is at present available for purchase from the website of the same name (Northern Safari). Adams and his supporters credited the film’s success to the rugged and adventurous landscape of northern Australia (Northeast vii), characterised by dangerous animals, including venomous spiders, sharks and crocodiles (see Adams, “Aussie”; “Crocodile”). The notion of Australia’s north as a place of rugged adventure was not born with Adams’s film, and that film was certainly not the last production to exploit the region and its wildlife as a source of excitement. Rather, Northern Safari belongs to a long list of adventure narratives whose hunting exploits have helped define the north of Australian as a distinct region and contrast it with the temperate south where most Australians make their lives.This article explores the connection between adventure in Australia’s north and the large animals of the region. Adams’s film capitalised on popular interest in natural history, but his film is only one link in a chain of representations of the Australian north as a place of dangerous and charismatic megafauna. While over time interest shifted from being largely concentrated on the presence of buffalo in the Northern Territory to a fascination with the saltwater crocodiles found more widely in northern Australia that interest in dangerous prey animals is significant to Australia’s northern imaginary.The Northern Safari before AdamsNorthern Australia gained a reputation for rugged, masculine adventure long before the arrival there of Adams and his cameras. That reputation was closely associated with the animals of the north, and it is generally the dangerous species that have inspired popular accounts of the region. Linda Thompson has recognised that before the release of the film Crocodile Dundee in 1986 crocodiles “received significant and sensational (although sporadic) media attention across Australia—attention that created associations of danger, mystery, and abnormality” (118). While Thompson went on to argue that in the wake of Crocodile Dundee the saltwater crocodile became a widely recognised symbol of Australia (for both Australians and non-Australians) it is perhaps more pertinent to consider the place of animals in creating a notion of the Australian north.Adams’s extended and international success (he showed his film profitably in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand as well as throughout Australia) suggests that the landscape and wildlife of northern Australia holds a fascination for a wide audience (Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 169-261). Certainly northern Australia, and its wild beasts, had established a reputation for adventure earlier, particularly in the periods following the world wars. Perhaps crocodiles were not the most significant of the north’s charismatic megafauna in the first half of the twentieth century, but their presence was a source of excitement well before the 1980s, and they were not the only animals in the north to attract attention: the Northern Territory’s buffalo had long acted as a drawcard for adventure seekers.Carl Warburton’s popular book Buffaloes was typical in linking Australians’ experiences of war with the Australian north and the pursuit of adventure, generally in the form of dangerous big game. War and hunting have long been linked as both are expressions of masculine valour in physically dangerous circumstances (Brennan “Imperial” 44-46). That link is made very clear in Warbuton’s account when he begins it on the beach at Gallipoli as he and his comrades discuss their plans for the future. After Warburton announces his determination not to return from war to work in a bank, he and a friend determine that they will go to either Brazil or the Northern Territory to seek adventure (2). Back in Sydney, a coin flip determines their “compass was set for the unknown north” (5).As the title of his book suggests, the game pursued by Warburton and his mate were buffaloes, as buffalo hides were fetching high prices when he set out for the north. In his writing Warburton was keen to establish his reputation as an adventurer and his descriptions of the dangers of buffalo hunting used the animals to establish the adventurous credentials of northern Australia. Warburton noted of the buffalo that: “Alone of all wild animals he will attack unprovoked, and in single combat is more than a match for a tiger. It is the pleasant pastime of some Indian princes to stage such combats for the entertainment of their guests” (62-63). Thereby, he linked Arnhem Land to India, a place that had long held a reputation as a site of adventurous hunting for the rulers of the British Empire (Brennan “Africa” 399). Later Warburton reinforced those credentials by noting: “there is no more dangerous animal in the world than a wounded buffalo bull” (126). While buffalo might have provided the headline act, crocodiles also featured in the interwar northern imaginary. Warburton recorded: “I had always determined to have a crack at the crocodiles for the sport of it.” He duly set about sating this desire (222-3).Buffalo had been hunted commercially in the Northern Territory since 1886 and Warburton was not the first to publicise the adventurous hunting available in northern Australia (Clinch 21-23). He had been drawn north after reading “of the exploits of two crack buffalo shooters, Fred Smith and Paddy Cahill” (Warburton 6). Such accounts of buffalo, and also of crocodiles, were common newspaper fodder in the first half of the twentieth century. Even earlier, explorers’ accounts had drawn attention to the animal excitement of northern Australia. For example, John Lort Stokes had noted ‘alligators’ as one of the many interesting animals inhabiting the region (418). Thus, from the nineteenth century Australia’s north had popularly linked together remoteness, adventure, and large animals; it was unsurprising that Warburton in turn acted as inspiration to later adventure-hunters in northern Australia. In 1954 he was mentioned in a newspaper story about two English migrants who had come to Australia to shoot crocodiles on Cape York with “their ambitions fed by the books of men such as Ion Idriess, Carl Warburton, Frank Clune and others” (Gay 15).The Development of Northern ‘Adventure’ TourismNot all who sought adventure in northern Australia were as independent as Adams. Cynthia Nolan’s account of travel through outback Australia in the late 1940s noted the increasing tourist infrastructure available, particularly in her account of Alice Springs (27-28, 45). She also recorded the significance of big game in the lure of the north. At the start of her journey she met a man seeking his fortune crocodile shooting (16), later encountered buffalo shooters (82), and recorded the locals’ hilarity while recounting a visit by a city-based big game hunter who arrived with an elephant gun. According to her informants: “No, he didn’t shoot any buffaloes, but he had his picture taken posing behind every animal that dropped. He’d arrange himself in a crouch, gun at the ready, and take self-exposure shots of himself and trophy” (85-86). Earlier, organised tours of the Northern Territory included buffalo shooter camps in their itineraries (when access was available), making clear the continuing significance of dangerous game to the northern imaginary (Cole, Hell 207). Even as Adams was pursuing his independent path north, tourist infrastructure was bringing the northern Australian safari experience within reach for those with little experience but sufficient funds to secure the provision of equipment, vehicles and expert advice. The Australian Crocodile Shooters’ Club, founded in 1950, predated Northern Safari, but it tapped into the same interest in the potential of northern Australia to offer adventure. It clearly associated that adventure with big game hunting and the club’s success depended on its marketing of the adventurous north to Australia’s urban population (Brennan “Africa” 403-06). Similarly, the safari camps which developed in the Northern Territory, starting with Nourlangie in 1959, promoted the adventure available in Australia’s north to those who sought to visit without necessarily roughing it. The degree of luxury that was on offer initially is questionable, but the notion of Australia’s north as a big game hunting destination supported the development of an Australian safari industry (Berzins 177-80, Brennan “Africa” 407-09). Safari entrepreneur Allan Stewart has eagerly testified to the broad appeal of the safari experience in 1960s Australia, claiming his clientele included accountants, barristers, barmaids, brokers, bankers, salesmen, journalists, actors, students, nursing sisters, doctors, clergymen, soldiers, pilots, yachtsmen, racing drivers, company directors, housewives, precocious children, air hostesses, policemen and jockeys (18).Later Additions to the Imaginary of the Northern SafariAdams’s film was made in 1955, and its subject of adventurous travel and hunting in northern Australia was taken up by a number of books during the 1960s as publishers kept the link between large game and the adventurous north alive. New Zealand author Barry Crump contributed a fictionalised account of his time hunting crocodiles in northern Australia in Gulf, first published in 1964. Crump displayed his trademark humour throughout his book, and made a running joke of the ‘best professional crocodile-shooters’ that he encountered in pubs throughout northern Australia (28-29). Certainly, the possibility of adventure and the chance to make a living as a professional hunter lured men to the north. Among those who came was Australian journalist Keith Willey who in 1966 published an account of his time crocodile hunting. Willey promoted the north as a site of adventure and rugged masculinity. On the very first page of his book he established his credentials by advising that “Hunting crocodiles is a hard trade; hard, dirty and dangerous; but mostly hard” (1). Although Willey’s book reveals that he did not make his fortune crocodile hunting he evidently revelled in its adventurous mystique and his book was sufficiently successful to be republished by Rigby in 1977. The association between the Australian north, the hunting of large animals, and adventure continued to thrive.These 1960s crocodile publications represent a period when crocodile hunting replaced buffalo hunting as a commercial enterprise in northern Australia. In the immediate post-war period crocodile skins increased in value as traditional sources became unreliable, and interest in professional hunting increased. As had been the case with Warburton, the north promised adventure to men unwilling to return to domesticity after their experiences of war (Brennan, “Crocodile” 1). This part of the northern imaginary was directly discussed by another crocodile hunting author. Gunther Bahnemann spent some time crocodile hunting in Australia before moving his operation north to poach crocodiles in Dutch New Guinea. Bahnemann had participated in the Second World War and in his book he was clear about his unwillingness to settle for a humdrum life, instead choosing crocodile hunting for his profession. As he described it: “We risked our lives to make quick money, but not easy money; yet I believe that the allure of adventure was the main motive of our expedition. It seems so now, when I think back to it” (8).In the tradition of Adams, Malcolm Douglas released his documentary film Across the Top in 1968, which was subsequently serialised for television. From around this time, television was becoming an increasingly popular medium and means of reinforcing the connection between the Australian outback and adventure. The animals of northern Australia played a role in setting the region apart from the rest of the continent. The 1970s and 1980s saw a boom in programs that presented the outback, including the north, as a source of interest and national pride. In this period Harry Butler presented In the Wild, while the Leyland brothers (Mike and Mal) created their iconic and highly popular Ask the Leyland Brothers (and similar productions) which ran to over 150 episodes between 1976 and 1980. In the cinema, Alby Mangels’s series of World Safari movies included Australia in his wide-ranging adventures. While these documentaries of outback Australia traded on the same sense of adventure and fascination with Australia’s wildlife that had promoted Northern Safari, the element of big game hunting was muted.That link was reforged in the 1980s and 1990s. Crocodile Dundee was an extremely successful movie and it again placed interactions with charismatic megafauna at the heart of the northern Australian experience (Thompson 124). The success of the film reinvigorated depictions of northern Australia as a place to encounter dangerous beasts. Capitalising on the film’s success Crump’s book was republished as Crocodile Country in 1990, and Tom Cole’s memoirs of his time in northern Australia, including his work buffalo shooting and crocodile hunting, were first published in 1986, 1988, and 1992 (and reprinted multiple times). However, Steve Irwin is probably the best known of northern Australia’s ‘crocodile hunters’, despite his Australia Zoo lying outside the crocodile’s natural range, and despite being a conservationist opposed to killing crocodiles. Irwin’s chosen moniker is ironic, given his often-stated love for the species and his commitment to preserving crocodile lives through relocating (when necessary, to captivity) rather than killing problem animals. He first appeared on Australian television in 1996, and continued to appear regularly until his death in 2006.Tourism Australia used both Hogan and Irwin for promotional purposes. While Thompson argues that at this time the significance of the crocodile was broadened to encompass Australia more generally, the examples of crocodile marketing that she lists relate to the Northern Territory, with a brief mention of Far North Queensland and the crocodile remained a signifier of northern adventure (Thompson 125-27). The depiction of Irwin as a ‘crocodile hunter’ despite his commitment to saving crocodile lives marked a larger shift that had already begun within the safari. While the title ‘safari’ retained its popularity in the late twentieth century it had come to be applied generally to organised adventurous travel with a view to seeing and capturing images of animals, rather than exclusively identifying hunting expeditions.ConclusionThe extraordinary success of Adams’s film was based on a widespread understanding of northern Australia as a type of adventure playground, populated by fascinating dangerous beasts. That imaginary was exploited but not created by Adams. It had been in existence since the nineteenth century, was particularly evident during the buffalo and crocodile hunting bubbles after the world wars, and boomed again with the popularity of the fictional Mick Dundee and the real Steve Irwin, for both of whom interacting with the charismatic megafauna of the north was central to their characters. The excitement surrounding large game still influences visions of northern Australia. At present there is no particularly striking northern bushman media personage, but the large animals of the north still regularly provoke discussion. The north’s safari camps continue to do business, trading on the availability of large game (particularly buffalo, banteng, pigs, and samba) and northern Australia’s crocodiles have established themselves as a significant source of interest among international big game hunters. Australia’s politicians regularly debate the possibility of legalising a limited crocodile safari in Australia, based on the culling of problem animals, and that debate highlights a continuing sense of Australia’s north as a place apart from the more settled, civilised south of the continent.ReferencesAdams, Keith. ’Aussie Bites.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip2/>.———. ‘Crocodile Hunting.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip3/>.———. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000.Bahnemann, Gunther. New Guinea Crocodile Poacher. 2nd ed. London: The Adventurers Club, 1965.Berzins, Baiba. Australia’s Northern Secret: Tourism in the Northern Territory, 1920s to 1980s. Sydney: Baiba Berzins, 2007.Brennan, Claire. "’An Africa on Your Own Front Door Step’: The Development of an Australian Safari.” Journal of Australian Studies 39.3 (2015): 396-410.———. “Crocodile Hunting.” Queensland Historical Atlas (2013): 1-3.———. "Imperial Game: A History of Hunting, Society, Exotic Species and the Environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840-1901." Dissertation. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2005.Clinch, M.A. “Home on the Range: The Role of the Buffalo in the Northern Territory, 1824–1920.” Northern Perspective 11.2 (1988): 16-27.Cole, Tom. Crocodiles and Other Characters. Chippendale, NSW: Sun Australia, 1992.———. Hell West and Crooked. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1990.———. Riding the Wildman Plains: The Letters and Diaries of Tom Cole 1923-1943. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1992.———. Spears & Smoke Signals: Exciting True Tales by a Buffalo & Croc Shooter. Casuarina, NT: Adventure Pub., 1986.Cowan, Adam. Letter. “A Feeling of Disgust.” Canberra Times 12 Mar. 1971: 2.Crocodile Dundee. Dir. Peter Faiman. Paramount Pictures, 1986.Crump, Barry. Gulf. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1964.Gay, Edward. “Adventure. Tally-ho after Cape York Crocodiles.” The World’s News (Sydney), 27 Feb. 1954: 15.Nolan, Cynthia. Outback. London: Methuen & Co, 1962.Northeast, Brian. Preface. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. By Keith Adams. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000. vi-viii.Northern Safari. Dir. Keith Adams. Keith Adams, 1956.Northern Safari. n.d. <http://northernsafari.com/>.Stewart, Allan. The Green Eyes Are Buffaloes. Melbourne: Lansdown, 1969.Stokes, John Lort. Discoveries in Australia: With an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle in the Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits to the Islands in the Arafura Sea. London: T. and W. Boone, 1846.Thompson, Linda. “’You Call That a Knife?’ The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia”. New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies. Eds. Catriona Elder and Keith Moore. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012: 118-134.Warburton, Carl. Buffaloes: Adventure and Discovery in Arnhem Land. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Ltd, 1934.Willey, Keith. Crocodile Hunt. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Shaw, Janice Marion. "The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer." M/C Journal 19, no. 4 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1130.

Full text

Abstract:

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has achieved success as “the new Rain Man” or “the new definitive, popular account of the autistic condition” (Burks-Abbott 294). Integral to its favourable reception is the way it conflates the autistic main character, the fifteen-year-old narrator Christopher Boone, with the savant, or individual who exhibits both neurological problems and giftedness, thereby engaging with the way autism is presented in popular culture. In a variety of contemporary films and television series, autism has been transformed from a disability to a form of giftedness by relating it to abilities associated in contemporary media with a genius, in particular by invoking the metaphor of an autistic mind as a type of computer. As a result, the book engages with the current association of giftedness in mathematics and science with social awkwardness and isolation as constructed in popular culture: in idiomatic terms, the genius “nerd” figure characterised by an uncertain, adolescent approach to social contact (Kendall 353). The disablement of the character is, then, lessened so that the idea of being “special,” continually evoked throughout the text, has a transformative function that is related less to the special needs of those with a disability and more to the common element in adolescent fiction of longing for extraordinary power and control through being a special, gifted individual. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time relates the protagonist, Christopher, to Sherlock Holmes and his methods of detection, specifically through the title being taken from a story by Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” in which the “curious incident” referred to is that the dog did nothing in the night. In the original story, that the dog did not bark or react to an intruder was a clue that the person was known to the animal, so allowing Holmes to solve the crime by a process of deduction. Christopher copies these traditional methods of the classical detective to solve his personal mystery, that of who killed a neighbour’s dog, Wellington. The adoption of this title allows a double irony to emerge. Christopher’s attempts to emulate Holmes in his approach to crime are predicated on his assumption of his likeness to the model of the classical detective as he states, “I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be,” pointing out the similarity of their powers of observation and his ability, like Holmes, to “detach his mind at will” as well as his capacity to find patterns in events (92). Through the novel, these attributes are aligned with his autism, constructing a trope of his disability conferring extraordinary abilities that are predicated on a computer-like detachment and precision in his method of thinking. The accessible narrative of the autistic Christopher gives the reader the impression of being able to understand the perspective of an individual with a spectrum disorder. In this way, the text not only engages with, but contributes to the construction of this disability in current popular culture as merely an extension of giftedness, especially in mathematics, and an associated unwillingness to communicate. Indeed, according to Raoul Eshelman, “one of its most engaging narrative devices is to make us identify with a mentally impaired narrator who is manifestly not interested in identifying either with us or anyone else” (1). The main character’s reference to mathematical and scientific ideas exploits an interest in giftedness already established by popular literature and film, and engages with a transformation effected in popular culture of the genius as autistic, and its corollary of an autistic person as potentially a genius. Such a construction ranges from fictional characters like Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, Charlie and his physicist colleagues in Numb3rs, and Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, to real life characters or representative figures in reality series and feature films such as x + y, The Imitation Game, The Big Short, and the television program Beauty and the Geek. While never referring specifically to autism, all the real or fictional representations contribute to the construction of a stereotype in which behaviours on the autistic spectrum are linked to a talent in mathematics and the sciences. In addition to this, detectives in the classical crime fiction alluded to in the novel typically exhibit traits of superhuman powers of deduction, pattern making, and problem solving that engage with the popular notion of genius in general and mathematics in particular by possessing a mind like a computer. Such detectives from current television series as Saga from The Bridge and Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds exhibit distance, coldness, and lack of social awareness or empathy with others, and this is presented as the basis of their extraordinary ability to discern patterns and solve crime. Spencer Reid, for example, has three PhDs in Science disciplines and Mathematics. Charlie in the television series Numb3rs is also a genius who uses his mathematical abilities to not only find the solution to crime but also explain the maths behind it to his FBI colleagues, and, in conjunction, the audience. But the character with the clearest association to Christopher is, naturally, Sherlock Holmes, both as constructed in Conan Doyle’s original text and the current adaptations and transformations of it. The television series Sherlock and Elementary, as well as the films Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows all invoke a version of Holmes in which his powers of deduction are associated with symptoms to be found in a spectrum disorder.Like Christopher, the classical detective is characterised by being cold, emotionless, distant, socially inept, and isolated, but also keenly observant, analytical, and scientific; one who approaches the crime as a puzzle to be solved (Cawelti 43) with computer-like precision. In what is considered to be the original detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe included a “pseudo-mathematical logic in his literary scenario” (Platten 255). In Conan Doyle’s stories, Holmes, too, adopts a mathematical and scientific approach to construct patterns from clues that he alone can discern, and thereby solve the crime. The depiction of investigators in contemporary media such as Charlie in Numb3rs engages with these origins so that he is objective, dispassionate, and able to relate to real-world problems only through the filter of mathematical formulae. Christopher is presented similarly by engaging with the idea of the detective as implied savant and relying on an ability to discern patterns for successful crime solving.The book links the disabling behaviours of autism with the savant, so that the stereotype of the mystic displaying both disability and giftedness in fiction of earlier ages has been transformed in contemporary literature to a figure with extraordinary powers related both to autism and to the contemporary form of mysticism: innate mathematical ability and computer-style calculation. Allied with what Murray terms the “unknown and ambiguous nature” of autism, it is characterised as “the alien within the human, the mystical within the rational, the ultimate enigma” (25) in a way that is in keeping with the current fascination with the nature of genius and its association with being “special,” a term continually evoked and discussed throughout the book by the main character. The chapters on scientific ideas relate to Christopher’s world view, filtered through a mathematical and analytical approach to life and relationships with other people. Christopher examines beliefs such as the concept of humanity as superior to other animals, and the idea of religion and creationism, that is, the idea of humanity itself as special, with a cold and logical approach. He similarly discusses the idea of the individual person as special, linking this to a metaphor of the human mind being a computer (203, 148). Christopher’s narrow perspective as a result of his autism is not presented as disabling so much as protective, because the metaphorical connection of his viewpoint to a computer provides him with distance. Although initially Christopher fails to realise the significance of events, this allows him to be “switched off” (103) from events that he finds traumatising.The transformative metaphor of an autistic individual thinking like a computer is also invoked through Christopher’s explanation of “why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers” (147). Indeed, both in terms of his tendency to retreat or by “pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting” (178) in times of stress, Christopher metaphorically views himself as a computer. Such a perspective invokes yet another popular cultural reference through the allusion to the human brain as “Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, sitting in his captain’s seat looking at a big screen” (147). But more importantly, the explanation refers to the basic premise of the book, that the text offers access to a condition that is inherently unknowable, but able to be understood by the reader through metaphor, often based on computers or technology as a result of a popular construction of autism that “the condition is the product of a brain in which the hard drive is incorrectly formatted” (Murray 25).Throughout the novel, the notion of “special” is presented as a trope for those with a disability, but as the protagonist, Christopher, points out, everyone is special in some way, so the whole idea of a disability as disabling is problematised throughout the text, while its associations of giftedness are upheld. Christopher’s disability, never actually designated as Asperger’s Syndrome or any type of spectrum disorder, is transformed into a protective mechanism that shields him from problematic social relationships of which he is unaware, but that the less naïve reader can well discern. In this way, rather than a limitation, the main character’s disorder protects him from a harsh reality. Even Christopher’s choice of Holmes as a role model is indicative of his desire to impose an eccentric order on his world, since this engages with a character in popular fiction who is famous not simply for his abilities, but for his eccentricity bordering on a form of autism. His aloof personality and cold logic not only fail to hamper him in his investigations, but these traits actually form the basis of them. The majority of recent adaptations of Conan Doyle’s stories, especially the BBC series Sherlock, depict Holmes with symptoms associated with spectrum disorder such as lack of empathy, difficulty in communication, and limited social skills, and these are clearly shown as contributing to his problem-solving ability. The trope of Christopher as detective also allows a parodic, postmodern comment on the classical detective form, because typically this fiction has a detective that knows more than the reader, and therefore the goal for the reader is to find the solution to the crime before it is revealed by the investigator in the final stages of the text (Rzepka 14). But the narrative works ironically in the novel since the non-autistic reader knows more than a narrator who is hampered by a limited worldview. From the beginning of the book, the narrative as focalised through Christopher’s narrow perspective allows a more profound view of events to be adopted by the reader, who is able to read clues that elude the protagonist. Christopher is well aware of this as he explains his attraction to the murder mystery novel, even though he has earlier stated he does not like novels since his inability to imagine or empathise means he is unable to relate to their fiction. For him, the genre of murder mystery is more akin to the books on maths and science that he finds comprehensible, because, like the classical detective, he views the crime as primarily a puzzle to be solved: as he states, “In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book” (5). But unlike Christopher, Holmes invariably knows more about the crime, can interpret the clues, and find the pattern, before other characters such as Watson, and especially the reader. In contrast, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the reader has more awareness of the probable context and significance of events than Christopher because, like a computer, he can calculate but not imagine. The reader can interpret clues within the plot of the story, such as the synchronous timing of the “death” of Christopher’s mother with the breakdown of the marriage of a neighbour, Mrs Shears. The astute reader is able to connect these events and realise that his mother has not died, but is living in a relationship with the neighbour’s husband. The construction of this pattern is denied Christopher, since he fails to determine their significance due to his limited imagination. Such a failure is related to Simon Baron-Cohen’s Theory of Mind, in which he proposes that autistic individuals have difficulty with social behaviour because they lack the capacity to comprehend that other people have individual mental states, or as Christopher terms it, “when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds” (145). Haddon utilises fictional licence when he allows Christopher to overcome such a limitation by a conscious shift in perspective, despite the specialist teacher within the text claiming that he would “always find this very difficult” (145). Christopher has here altered his view of events through his modelling both on the detective genre and on his affinity with mathematics, since he states, “I don’t find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it” (145). In this way, the main character is shown as transcending symptoms of autism through the power of his giftedness in mathematics to ultimately discern a pattern in human relationships thereby adopting a computational approach to social problems.Haddon similarly explains the perspective of an individual with autism through a metaphor of Christopher’s memory being like a DVD recording. He is able to distance himself from his memories, choosing “Rewind” and then “Fast Forward” (96) to retrieve his recollection of events. This aspect of the precision of his memory relates to his machine-like coldness and lack of empathy for the feelings of others. But it also refers to the stereotype of the nerd figure in popular culture, where the nerd is able to relate more to a computer than to other people, exemplified in Sheldon from the television series The Big Bang Theory. Thus the presentation of Christopher’s autism relates to his giftedness in maths and science more than to areas that relate to his body. In general, descriptions of inappropriate or distressing bodily functions associated with disorders are mainly confined to other students at Christopher’s school. His references to his fellow students, such as Joseph eating his poo and playing in it (129) and his unsympathetic evaluation of Steve as not as clever or interesting as a dog because he “needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick” (6), make a clear distinction between him and the other children, who despite being termed “special needs” are “special” in a different way from Christopher, because, according to him, “All the other children at my school are stupid” (56). While some reference is made to Christopher’s inappropriate behaviour in times of stress, such as punching a fellow student, wetting himself while on the train, and vomiting outside the school, in the main the emphasis is on his giftedness as a result of his autism, as displayed in the many chapters where he explains scientific and mathematical concepts. This is extrapolated into a further mathematical metaphor underlying the book, that he is like one of the prime numbers he finds so fascinating, because prime numbers do not fit neatly into the pattern of the number system, but they are essential and special nevertheless. Moreover, as James Berger suggests, prime numbers can “serve as figures for the autistic subject,” because like autistic individuals “they do not mix; they are singular, indivisible, unfactorable” yet “Mathematics could not exist without these singular entities that [. . .] are only apparent anomalies” (271).Haddon therefore offers a transformation by confounding autism with a computer-like ability to solve mathematical problems, so that the text is, as Haddon concedes, “as much about a gifted boy with behavior problems as it is about anyone on the autism spectrum” (qtd. in Burks-Abbott 291). Indeed, the word “autism” does not even appear in the book, while the terms “genius,” (140) “clever,” (32, 65, 252) and the like are continually being invoked in descriptions of Christopher, even if ironically. More importantly, the reader is constantly being shown his giftedness through the reiteration of his study of A Level Mathematics, and his explanation of scientific concepts. Throughout, Christopher explains aspects of mathematics, astrophysics, and other sciences, referring to such well-known puzzles in popular culture as the Monty Hall problem, as well as more obscure formulae and their proofs. They function to establish Christopher’s intuitive grasp of complex mathematical and scientific principles, as well as providing the reader with insight into both his perspective and the paradoxical nature of an individual who is at once able to solve quadratic equations in his head, yet is incapable of understanding the simple instruction, “Take the tube to Willesden Junction” (211).The presentation of Christopher is that of an individual who displays an extension of the social problems established in popular literature as connected to a talent for mathematics, therefore engaging with a depiction already existing in popular mythology: the isolated and analytical nerd or genius social introvert. Indeed, much of Christopher’s autistic behaviour functions to protect him from unsettling or traumatic information, since he fails to realise the significance of the information he collects or the clues he is given. His disability is therefore presented as not limiting so much as protective, and so the notion of disability is subsumed by the idea of the savant. The book, then, engages with a contemporary representation within popular culture that has transformed spectrum disability into mathematical giftedness, thereby metaphorically associating the autistic mind with the computer. ReferencesBaron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995. Berger, James. “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 271–88. Burks-Abbott, Gyasi. “Mark Haddon’s Popularity and Other Curious Incidents in My Life as an Autistic.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 289–96. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Eshelman, Raoul. “Transcendence and the Aesthetics of Disability: The Case of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology 15.1 (2009). Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London: Random House Children’s Books, 2004. Kendall, Lori. “The Nerd Within: Mass Media and the Negotiation of Identity among Computer-Using Men.” Journal of Men’s Studies 3 (1999): 353–67. Murray, Stuart. “Autism and the Contemporary Sentimental: Fiction and the Narrative Fascination of the Present.” Literature and Medicine 25.1 (2006): 24–46. Platten, David. “Reading Glasses, Guns and Robots: A History of Science in French Crime Fiction.” French Cultural Studies 12 (2001): 253–70. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Franks, Rachel. "Before Alternative Voices: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser." M/C Journal 20, no. 1 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1204.

Full text

Abstract:

IntroductionIn 1802 George Howe (1769-1821), the recently appointed Government Printer, published Australia’s first book. The following year he established Australia’s first newspaper; an enterprise that ran counter to all the environmental factors of the day, including: 1) issues of logistics and a lack of appropriate equipment and basic materials to produce a regularly issued newspaper; 2) issues resulting from the very close supervision of production and the routine censorship by the Governor; and 3) issues associated with the colony’s primary purposes as a military outpost and as a penal settlement, creating conflicts between very different readerships. The Sydney Gazette was, critically for Howe, the only newspaper in the infant city for over two decades. Alternative voices would not enter the field of printed media until the 1820s and 1830s. This article briefly explores the birth of an Australian industry and looks at how a very modest newspaper overcame a range of serious challenges to ignite imaginations and lay a foundation for media empires.Government Printer The first book published in Australia was the New South Wales General Standing Orders and General Orders (1802), authorised by Governor Philip Gidley King for the purposes of providing a convenient, single-volume compilation of all Government Orders, issued in New South Wales, between 1791 and 1802. (As the Australian character has been described as “egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and irreverent” [D. Jones 690], it is fascinating that the nation’s first published book was a set of rules.) Prescribing law, order and regulation for the colony the index reveals the desires of those charged with the colony’s care and development, to contain various types of activities. The rules for convicts were, predictably, many. There were also multiple orders surrounding administration, animal husbandry as well as food stuffs and other stores. Some of the most striking headings in the index relate to crime. For example, in addition to headings pertaining to courts there are also headings for a broad range of offences from: “BAD Characters” to “OFFENSIVE Weapons – Again[s]t concealing” (i-xii). The young colony, still in its teenage years, was, for the short-term, very much working on survival and for the long-term developing ambitious plans for expansion and trade. It was clear though, through this volume, that there was no forgetting the colony of New South Wales was first, and foremost, a penal settlement which also served as a military outpost. Clear, too, was the fact that not all of those who were shipped out to the new colony were prepared to abandon their criminal careers which “did not necessarily stop with transportation” (Foyster 10). Containment and recidivism were matters of constant concern for the colony’s authorities. Colonial priorities could be seen in the fact that, when “Governor Arthur Phillip brought the first convicts (548 males and 188 females) to Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, he also brought a small press for printing orders, rules, and regulations” (Goff 103). The device lay dormant on arrival, a result of more immediate concerns to feed and house all those who made up the First Fleet. It would be several years before the press was pushed into sporadic service by the convict George Hughes for printing miscellaneous items including broadsides and playbills as well as for Government Orders (“Hughes, George” online). It was another convict (another man named George), convicted at the Warwick Assizes on March 1799 (Ferguson vi) then imprisoned and ultimately transported for shoplifting (Robb 15), who would transform the small hand press into an industry. Once under the hand of George Howe, who had served as a printer with several London newspapers including The Times (Sydney Gazette, “Never” 2) – the printing press was put to much more regular use. In these very humble circumstances, Australia’s great media tradition was born. Howe, as the Government Printer, transformed the press from a device dedicated to ephemera as well as various administrative matters into a crucial piece of equipment that produced the new colony’s first newspaper. Logistical Challenges Governor King, in the year following the appearance of the Standing Orders, authorised the publishing of Australia’s first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. The publication history of The Sydney Gazette, in a reflection of some of the challenges faced by the printer, is erratic. First published on a Saturday from 5 March 1803, it quickly changed to a Sunday paper from 10 April 1803. Interestingly, Sunday “was not an approved day for the publication of newspapers, and although some English publishers had been doing so since about 1789, Sunday papers were generally frowned upon” (Robb 58). Yet, as argued by Howe a Sunday print run allowed for the inclusion of “the whole of the Ship News, and other Incidental Matter, for the preceeding week” (Sydney Gazette, “To the Public” 1).The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser Vol. 1, No. 1, 5 March 1803 (Front Page)Call Number DL F8/50, Digital ID a345001, State Library of New South WalesPublished weekly until 1825, then bi-weekly until 1827 before coming out tri-weekly until 20 October 1842 (Holden 14) there were some notable pauses in production. These included one in 1807 (Issue 214, 19 April-Issue 215, 7 June) and one in 1808-1809 (Issue 227, 30 August-Issue 228, 15 May) due to a lack of paper, with the latter pause coinciding with the Rum Rebellion and the end of William Bligh’s term as Governor of New South Wales (see: Karskens 186-88; Mundle 323-37). There was, too, a brief attempt at publishing as a daily from 1 January 1827 which lasted only until 10 February of that year when the title began to appear tri-weekly (Kirkpatrick online; Holden 14). There would be other pauses, including one of two weeks, shortly before the final issue was produced on 20 October 1842. There were many problems that beset The Sydney Gazette with paper shortages being especially challenging. Howe regularly advertised for: “any quantity” of Spanish paper (e.g.: Sydney Gazette, “Wanted to Purchase” 4) and needing to be satisfied “with a variety of size and colour” (P.M. Jones 39). In addition, the procurement of ink was so difficult in the colony, that Howe often resorted to making his own out of “charcoal, gum and shark oil” (P.M. Jones 39).The work itself was physically demanding and papers printed during this period, by hand, required a great deal of effort with approximately “250 sheets per hour … [the maximum] produced by a printer and his assistant” (Robb 8). The printing press itself was inadequate and the subject of occasional repairs (Sydney Gazette, “We Have” 2). Type was also a difficulty. As Gwenda Robb explains, traditionally six sets of an alphabet were supplied to a printer with extras for ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘r’ and ‘t’ as well as ‘s’. Without ample type Howe was required to improvise as can be seen in using a double ‘v’ to create a ‘w’ and an inverted ‘V’ to represent a capital ‘A’ (50, 106). These quirky work arounds, combined with the use of the long-form ‘s’ (‘∫’) for almost a full decade, can make The Sydney Gazette a difficult publication for modern readers to consume. Howe also “carried the financial burden” of the paper, dependent, as were London papers of the late eighteenth century, on advertising (Robb 68, 8). Howe also relied upon subscriptions for survival, with the collection of payments often difficult as seen in some subscribers being two years, or more, in arrears (e.g.: Sydney Gazette, “Sydney Gazette” 1; Ferguson viii; P.M. Jones 38). Governor Lachlan Macquarie granted Howe an annual salary, in 1811, of £60 (Byrnes 557-559) offering some relief, and stability, for the beleaguered printer.Gubernatorial Supervision Governor King wrote to Lord Hobart (then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies), on 9 May 1803: it being desirable that the settlers and inhabitants at large should be benefitted by useful information being dispersed among them, I considered that a weekly publication would greatly facilitate that design, for which purpose I gave permission to an ingenious man, who manages the Government printing press, to collect materials weekly, which, being inspected by an officer, is published in the form of a weekly newspaper, copies of which, as far as they have been published, I have the honor to enclose. (85)In the same letter, King wrote: “to the list of wants I have added a new fount of letters which may be procured for eight or ten pounds, sufficient for our purpose, if approved of” (85). King’s motivations were not purely altruistic. The population of the colony was growing in Sydney Cove and in the outlying districts, thus: “there was an increasing administrative need for information to be disseminated in a more accessible form than the printed handbills of government orders” (Robb 49). There was, however, a need for the administration to maintain control and the words “Published By Authority”, appearing on the paper’s masthead, were a constant reminder to the printer that The Sydney Gazette was “under the censorship of the Secretary to the Governor, who examined all proofs” (Ferguson viii). The high level of supervision, worked in concert with the logistical difficulties described above, ensured the newspaper was a source of great strain and stress. All for the meagre reward of “6d per copy” (Ferguson viii). This does not diminish Howe’s achievement in establishing a newspaper, an accomplishment outlined, with some pride, in an address printed on the first page of the first issue:innumerable as the Obstacles were which threatened to oppose our Undertaking, yet we are happy to affirm that they were not insurmountable, however difficult the task before us.The utility of a PAPER in the COLONY, as it must open a source of solid information, will, we hope, be universally felt and acknowledged. (Sydney Gazette, “Address” 1)Howe carefully kept his word and he “wrote nothing like a signature editorial column, nor did he venture his personal opinions, conscious always of the powers of colonial officials” (Robb 72). An approach to reportage he passed to his eldest son and long-term assistant, Robert (1795-1829), who later claimed The Sydney Gazette “reconciled in one sheet the merits of the London Gazette in upholding the Government and the London Times in defending the people” (Walker 10). The censorship imposed on The Sydney Gazette, by the Governor, was lifted in 1824 (P.M. Jones 40), when the Australian was first published without permission: Governor Thomas Brisbane did not intervene in the new enterprise. The appearance of unauthorised competition allowed Robert Howe to lobby for the removal of all censorship restrictions on The Sydney Gazette, though he was careful to cite “greater dispatch and earlier publication, not greater freedom of expression, as the expected benefit” (Walker 6). The sudden freedom was celebrated, and still appreciated many years after it was given:the Freedom of the Press has now been in existence amongst us on the verge of four years. In October 1824, we addressed a letter to the Colonial Government, fervently entreating that those shackles, under which the Press had long laboured, might be removed. Our prayer was attended to, and the Sydney Gazette, feeling itself suddenly introduced to a new state of existence, demonstrated to the Colonists the capabilities that ever must flow from the spontaneous exertions of Constitutional Liberty. (Sydney Gazette, “Freedom” 2)Early Readerships From the outset, George Howe presented a professional publication. The Sydney Gazette was formatted into three columns with the front page displaying a formal masthead featuring a scene of Sydney and the motto “Thus We Hope to Prosper”. Gwenda Robb argues the woodcut, the first produced in the colony, was carved by John W. Lewin who “had plenty of engraving skills” and had “returned to Sydney [from a voyage to Tahiti] in December 1802” (51) while Roger Butler has suggested that “circumstances point to John Austin who arrived in Sydney in 1800” as being the engraver (91). The printed text was as vital as the visual supports and every effort was made to present full accounts of colonial activities. “As well as shipping and court news, there were agricultural reports, religious homilies, literary extracts and even original poetry written by Howe himself” (Blair 450). These items, of course, sitting alongside key Government communications including General Orders and Proclamations.Howe’s language has been referred to as “florid” (Robb 52), “authoritative and yet filled with deference for all authority, pompous in a stiff, affected eighteenth century fashion” (Green 10) and so “some of Howe’s readers found the Sydney Gazette rather dull” (Blair 450). Regardless of any feelings towards authorial style, circulation – without an alternative – steadily increased with the first print run in 1802 being around 100 copies but by “the early 1820s, the newspaper’s production had grown to 300 or 400 copies” (Blair 450).In a reflection of the increasing sophistication of the Sydney-based reader, George Howe, and Robert Howe, would also publish some significant, stand-alone, texts. These included several firsts: the first natural history book printed in the colony, Birds of New South Wales with their Natural History (1813) by John W. Lewin (praised as a text “printed with an elegant and classical simplicity which makes it the highest typographical achievement of George Howe” [Wantrup 278]); the first collection of poetry published in the colony First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) by Barron Field; the first collection of poetry written by a Australian-born author, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (1826) by Charles Tompson; and the first children’s book A Mother’s Offering to Her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales (1841) by Charlotte Barton. The small concern also published mundane items such as almanacs and receipt books for the Bank of New South Wales (Robb 63, 72). All against the backdrop of printing a newspaper.New Voices The Sydney Gazette was Australia’s first newspaper and, critically for Howe, the only newspaper for over two decades. (A second paper appeared in 1810 but the Derwent Star and Van Diemen’s Land Intelligencer, which only managed twelve issues, presented no threat to The Sydney Gazette.) No genuine, local rival entered the field until 1824, when the Australian was founded by barristers William Charles Wentworth and Robert Wardell. The Monitor debuted in 1826, followed the Sydney Herald in 1831 and the Colonist in 1835 (P.M. Jones 38). It was the second title, the Australian, with a policy that asserted articles to be: “Independent, yet consistent – free, yet not licentious – equally unmoved by favours and by fear” (Walker 6), radically changed the newspaper landscape. The new paper made “a strong point of its independence from government control” triggering a period in which colonial newspapers “became enmeshed with local politics” (Blair 451). This new age of opinion reflected how fast the colony was evolving from an antipodean gaol into a complex society. Also, two papers, without censorship restrictions, without registration, stamp duties or advertisement duties meant, as pointed out by R.B. Walker, that “in point of law the Press in the remote gaol of exile was now freer than in the country of origin” (6). An outcome George Howe could not have predicted as he made the long journey, as a convict, to New South Wales. Of the early competitors, the only one that survives is the Sydney Herald (The Sydney Morning Herald from 1842), which – founded by immigrants Alfred Stephens, Frederick Stokes and William McGarvie – claims the title of Australia’s oldest continuously published newspaper (Isaacs and Kirkpatrick 4-5). That such a small population, with so many pressing issues, factions and political machinations, could support a first newspaper, then competitors, is a testament to the high regard, with which newspaper reportage was held. Another intruder would be The Government Gazette. Containing only orders and notices in the style of the London Gazette (McLeay 1), lacking any news items or private advertisements (Walker 19), it was first issued on 7 March 1832 (and continues, in an online format, today). Of course, Government orders and other notices had news value and newspaper proprietors could bid for exclusive rights to produce these notices until a new Government Printer was appointed in 1841 (Walker 20).Conclusion George Howe, an advocate of “reason and common sense” died in 1821 placing The Sydney Gazette in the hands of his son who “fostered religion” (Byrnes 557-559). Robert Howe, served as editor, experiencing firsthand the perils and stresses of publishing, until he drowned in a boating accident in Sydney Harbour, in 1829 leaving the paper to his widow Ann Howe (Blair 450-51). The newspaper would become increasingly political leading to controversy and financial instability; after more changes in ownership and in editorial responsibility, The Sydney Gazette, after almost four decades of delivering the news – as a sole voice and then as one of several alternative voices – ceased publication in 1842. During a life littered with personal tragedy, George Howe laid the foundation stone for Australia’s media empires. His efforts, in extraordinary circumstances and against all environmental indicators, serve as inspiration to newspapers editors, proprietors and readers across the country. He established the Australian press, an institution that has been described asa profession, an art, a craft, a business, a quasi-public, privately owned institution. It is full of grandeurs and faults, sublimities and pettinesses. It is courageous and timid. It is fallible. It is indispensable to the successful on-going of a free people. (Holden 15)George Howe also created an artefact of great beauty. The attributes of The Sydney Gazette are listed, in a perfunctory manner, in most discussions of the newspaper’s history. The size of the paper. The number of columns. The masthead. The changes seen across 4,503 issues. Yet, consistently overlooked, is how, as an object, the newspaper is an exquisite example of the printed word. There is a physicality to the paper that is in sharp contrast to contemporary examples of broadsides, tabloids and online publications. Concurrently fragile and robust: its translucent sheets and mottled print revealing, starkly, the problems with paper and ink; yet it survives, in several collections, over two centuries since the first issue was produced. The elegant layout, the glow of the paper, the subtle crackling sound as the pages are turned. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser is an astonishing example of innovation and perseverance. It provides essential insights into Australia’s colonial era. It is a metonym for making words matter. AcknowledgementsThe author offers her sincere thanks to Geoff Barker, Simon Dwyer and Peter Kirkpatrick for their comments on an early draft of this paper. The author is also grateful to Bridget Griffen-Foley for engaging in many conversations about Australian newspapers. ReferencesBlair, S.J. “Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser.” A Companion to the Australian Media. Ed. Bridget Griffen-Foley. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014.Butler, Roger. Printed Images in Colonial Australia 1801-1901. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007.Byrnes, J.V. “Howe, George (1769–1821).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography: 1788–1850, A–H. Canberra: Australian National University, 1966. 557-559. Ferguson, J.A. “Introduction.” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser: A Facsimile Reproduction of Volume One, March 5, 1803 to February 26, 1804. Sydney: The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales in Association with Angus & Robertson, 1963. v-x. Foyster, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Newspaper Reporting of Crime and Justice.” Continuity and Change 22.1 (2007): 9-12.Goff, Victoria. “Convicts and Clerics: Their Roles in the Infancy of the Press in Sydney, 1803-1840.” Media History 4.2 (1998): 101-120.Green, H.M. “Australia’s First Newspaper.” Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Apr. 1935: 10.Holden, W. Sprague. Australia Goes to Press. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1961. “Hughes, George (?–?).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography: 1788–1850, A–H. Canberra: Australian National University, 1966. 562. Isaacs, Victor, and Rod Kirkpatrick. Two Hundred Years of Sydney Newspapers. Richmond: Rural Press, 2003. Jones, Dorothy. “Humour and Satire (Australia).” Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. 2nd ed. Eds. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly. London: Routledge, 2005. 690-692.Jones, Phyllis Mander. “Australia’s First Newspaper.” Meanjin 12.1 (1953): 35-46. Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010. King, Philip Gidley. “Letter to Lord Hobart, 9 May 1803.” Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Governors’ Despatches to and from England, Volume IV, 1803-1804. Ed. Frederick Watson. Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1915.Kirkpatrick, Rod. Press Timeline: 1802 – 1850. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2011. 6 Jan. 2017 <https://www.nla.gov.au/content/press-timeline-1802-1850>. McLeay, Alexander. “Government Notice.” The New South Wales Government Gazette 1 (1832): 1. Mundle, R. Bligh: Master Mariner. Sydney: Hachette, 2016.New South Wales General Standing Orders and General Orders: Selected from the General Orders Issued by Former Governors, from the 16th of February, 1791, to the 6th of September, 1800. Also, General Orders Issued by Governor King, from the 28th of September, 1800, to the 30th of September, 1802. Sydney: Government Press, 1802. Robb, Gwenda. George Howe: Australia’s First Publisher. Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2003.Spalding, D.A. Collecting Australian Books: Notes for Beginners. 1981. Mawson: D.A. Spalding, 1982. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. “Address.” 5 Mar. 1803: 1.———. “To the Public.” 2 Apr. 1803: 1.———. “Wanted to Purchase.” 26 June 1803: 4.———. “We Have the Satisfaction to Inform Our Readers.” 3 Nov. 1810: 2. ———. “Sydney Gazette.” 25 Dec. 1819: 1. ———. “The Freedom of the Press.” 29 Feb. 1828: 2.———. “Never Did a More Painful Task Devolve upon a Public Writer.” 3 Feb. 1829: 2. Walker, R.B. The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803-1920. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1976.Wantrup, Johnathan. Australian Rare Books: 1788-1900. Sydney: Hordern House, 1987.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Rocavert, Carla. "Aspiring to the Creative Class: Reality Television and the Role of the Mentor." M/C Journal 19, no. 2 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1086.

Full text

Abstract:

Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. This perhaps gives some insight as to why themes of personal suffering and instability are increasingly evident across formats.On an ethical level, unlike the knowledge transferred through complex television plots, or in coming of age films (as cited above) about the ways tradition is handed down, and the ways true mentors provide altruistic help in human experience; in reality television we take away the knowledge that life, under neoliberalism, is most remarkable when one is handpicked to undertake a televised journey featuring their desire for upward mobility. The value of the mentoring in these cases is directly proportionate to the financial objectives of the creative elite.ReferencesAggarwal, Sirpa. “WWE, A&E Networks, and Simplynew Share Benefits of White-Label Social TV Solutions at the Social TV Summit.” Arktan 25 July 2012. 1 August 2014 <http://arktan.com/wwe-ae-networks-and-simplynew-share-benefits-of-white-label-social-tv-solutions-at-the-social-tv-summit/>. Andrejevic, Mark. “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002): 230–48.Andrejevic, Mark, and Dean Colby. “Racism and Reality TV: The Case of MTV's Road Rules”. How Real Is Reality TV? Essays on Representation and Truth. Ed. David. S. Escoffery. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2006. 195–210. Balasubramanian, Savina, Clare Forstie, and Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott. “Shining Stars, Blind Sides, and 'Real' Realities: Exit Rituals, Eulogy Work, and Allegories in Reality Television.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 44.4 (2015): 417-49. Bissinger, Buz. “Caitlyn Jenner: The Full Story.” Vanity Fair 25 June 2015. 13 April 2016 <http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/caitlyn-jenner-bruce-cover-annie-leibovitz>. Bleasby, Tom. “You Are Literally Watching on TV the Worst Experience of My Life.” Twitter @TomBleasby 12 Oct. 2015.Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. 25th anniversary ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1987 (1962). Booth, William. “Reality Is Only an Illusion, Writers Say: Hollywood Scribes Want a Cut of Not-So-Unscripted Series.” The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2004. 10 April 2016 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53032-2004Aug9.html>.Buzzanell, Patrice, and Suzy D’Enbeau. “Intimate, Ambivalent and Erotic Mentoring: Popular Culture and Mentor–Mentee Relational Processes in Mad Men.” Human Relations 67.6 (2014): 695–714.Byrnes, Holly. “Michelin-Starred Mentor Marco Pierre White Says He’s No MasterChef Villain”. The Daily Telegraph 11 July 2015. 11 April 2016 <http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/michelinstarred-mentor-marco-pierre-white-says-hes-no-masterchef-villain/news-story/88c0f5df8390ddd07c4a67cdf8c9ea66>. “Caitlyn Jenner & Zeam | Beautiful as I Want to Be.” Logo TV 28 Oct. 2015. 8 Jan. 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0mDFzBEYOY>.Creative Economy Report: The Challenge of Assessing the Creative Economy: Towards Informed Policy Making. Geneva: United Nations; UNCTAD, 2008. 5 Jan. 2015 <http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditc20082cer_en.pdf>.Creative Economy Report: A Feasible Development Option. Geneva: United Nations; UNCTAD, 2010. 5 Jan. 2015 <http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf>.Crouch, Michael. “13 Secrets Reality TV Show Producers Won’t Tell You.” Readers Digest 21 Feb. 2016. 15 Mar. 2016 <http://www.rd.com/culture/13-secrets-reality-tv-show-producers-wont-tell-you/>. Cartwright, Martina. “Tantalized by Train Wreck Reality Television.” Psychology Today 31 Jan. 2013. 1 June 2014 <https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/food-thought/201301/tantalized-train-wreck-reality-television>. Day, Elizabeth. “Why Reality TV Works.” The Guardian (UK) 21 Nov. 2010. 14 July 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/nov/21/why-reality-tv-works> Darling-Wolf, Fabienne. “World Citizens ‘a la francaise’: Star Academy and the Negotiation of ‘French Identities’.” The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives. Eds. Marwan M. Kraidy and Katherine Sender. New York: Routledge, 2011. 127-39. Eisinger, Peter. “Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.” Political Science 55 (2003): 82-83. Frere-Jones, Sasha. “Idolatry: Everybody’s a Critic.” New Yorker Magazine 19 May 2008. 10 Jan. 2016 <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/19/idolatry>.Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald D. Marshall. 2nd ed. London: Continuum Publishing Group, 2004 (1975). Gallagher, Brenden. “The 10 Weirdest Reality TV Shows of All Time.” VH1 28 Aug 2015. 10 Jan. 2016 <http://www.vh1.com/news/200027/10-weirdest-reality-tv-shows/>.Greenwood, Carl. “Simon Cowell Returns to X Factor after Signing £25 Million Deal Making Him the Highest Paid Entertainer Ever.” Mirror Online 19 Dec. 2013. 5 Jan 2016 <http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/simon-cowell-returns-x-factor-2935811>.Gamson, Joshua. “Reality Queens.” Contexts (Meditations) 12.2 (2013): 52-54. Good Will Hunting. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Laurence Bender Productions, 1998. Grodin, Jean. “Play, Festival, and Ritual in Gadamer: On the Theme of the Immemorial in His Later Works.” Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. Trans. Ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2001. 43-50. Hamilton, Peter. “The Unreal Rise of Reality Television.” Huffington Post Entertainment 25 Sep. 2013. 5 Jun. 2015 <http://www.documentarytelevision.com/commissioning-process/the-unreal-rise-of-reality-television/ Page>. Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. Hirschorn, Michael. “The Case for Reality TV: What the Snobs Don’t Understand.” The Atlantic May 2007. 16 April 2015 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/the-case-for-reality-tv/305791/>. I Am Cait. Bunim Murray Productions and E! Entertainment. 26 Jul. 2015. The Karate Kid. Directed by John G. Avilsden. Columbia Pictures, 1984. Krätke, Stefan. “‘Creative Cities’ and the Rise of the Dealer Class: A Critique of Richard Florida’s Approach to Urban Theory.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34 (2010): 835-53. Mad Men. Matthew Weiner. Weiner Bros. 19 Jul. 2007. Maslin, Janet. “Good Will Hunting (1997) FILM REVIEW; Logarithms and Biorhythms Test a Young Janitor.” New York Times 5 Dec. 1997.Marche, Stephen. “How Much Do We Owe Simon Cowell?” Esquire.com 11 Jan. 2010. 7 Feb. 2016 <http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6899/simon-cowell-leaving-american-idol-0110/>. Marikar, Sheila. “Bald and Broken: Inside Britney’s Shaved Head.” American Broadcasting Corporation 19 Feb. 2007. 13 Apr. 2016 <http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/Health/story?id=2885048>.Nair, Drishya. “Britney Spears to Join X Factor for $15 Million to Be the Highest Paid Judge Ever? Other Highly Paid Judges in Reality Shows.” International Business Times 12 Apr. 2012. 7 Feb. 2016 <http://www.ibtimes.com/britney-spears-join-x-factor-15-million-be-highest-paid-judge-ever-other-highly-paid-judges-reality>. New York Daily News. “Reality Bites: 'American Idol' Judges, Especially Ellen, Overly Praise Tim Urban for 'Hallelujah'.” New York Daily News 12 Mar. 2010. 11 April 2016 <http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/reality-bites-american-idol-judges-ellen-overly-praise-tim-urban-hallelujah-article-1.176978>. Orbe, Mark. “Representations of Race in Reality TV: Watch and Discuss.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.4 (2008) 345-52. Papacharissi, Zizi, and Andrew L. Mendelson. “Exploratory Study of Reality Appeal: Uses and Gratifications of Reality Shows.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 51.2 (2007): 355-70. Pavia, Lucy. “Kardashian Net Worth: How Much Money Do They All Have Individually?” Instyle.co.uk 4 Dec. 2015. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.instyle.co.uk/celebrity/news/the-kardashian-rich-list-what-are-they-all-worth-individually#XkRy3pjE5mo1sxfG.99>.Pesce, Nicole. “Jenner's Gold! Caitlyn 'Could Be Worth over $500 Million' in Coming Years.” New York Daily News 3 June 2015. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/caitlyn-jenner-richer-kardashians-experts-article-1.2244402>.Peyser, Marc. “AMERICAN IDOL.” Newsweek 13 Dec. 2008. 5 Jan. 2016 <http://europe.newsweek.com/american-idol-82867?rm=eu>.Pinter, Harold. “Art, Truth & Politics". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Lecture. Stockholm: Nobel Media AB, 2014. 13 Apr 2016 <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html>. “Reality Show Fights.” American Broadcasting Corporation 30 Mar. 2011. 24 July 2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8bhnTfxWz8>.“Reality Writer.” WGAW Writer’s Guild of America West, n.d. 25 April 2014 <http://www.wga.org/organizesub.aspx?id=1092>. Runco, Mark A. “Everyone Has Creative Potential.” Creativity: From Potential to Realization. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2004. 21-30. ———. “Creativity.” Annual Review Psychology 55 (2004): 657–87. Rupel, David. “How Reality TV Works.” WGAW Writer’s Guild of America West, n.d. 15 May 2014 <http://www.wga.org/organizesub.aspx?id=1091>.Sender, Katherine. “Real Worlds: Migrating Genres, Travelling Participants, Shifting Theories.” The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives. Eds. Marwan M. Kraidy and Katherine Sender. New York: Routledge, 2011. 1-13. Skeggs, Beverly, and Helen Wood. Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value. New York: Routledge, 2012. Stradal, Ryan. J. “Unscripted Does Not Mean Unwritten.” WGAW Writer’s Guild of America West, n.d. 15 May 2014 <http://www.wga.org/organizesub.aspx?id=1096>. Schroeder E.R. “‘Sexual Racism’ and Reality Television: Privileging the White Male Prerogative on MTV’s The Real World: Philadelphia.” How Real Is Reality TV?: Essays on Representation and Truth. Ed. D.S. Escoffery. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. 180–94. Schuster, Dana. “Dying for Fame: 21 Reality Stars Committed Suicide in a Decade.” New York Post 28 Feb. 2016. 11 April 2016 <http://nypost.com/2016/02/28/dying-for-fame-21-reality-stars-commit-suicide-in-past-decade/>.The X Factor (UK). TV show. ITV 4 Sep. 2004 to present. Thompson, Bronwyn. “FAST TRACK TO THE FINAL 12.” Fox 8 TV, 2015. 11 Apr. 2016 <http://www.fox8.tv/shows/australias-next-top-model/show/news>. Vogler, Chris. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 3rd ed. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007.West, Latoya. “INTERVIEW: Top Model's Tiffany Talks about Being Yelled At by Tyra Banks.” About Entertainment: Reality TV. 20 Feb. 2016. 13 Apr. 2016 <http://realitytv.about.com/od/thelatestinterviews/a/TiffanyChat.htm>. Winant, Gabriel. “Dirty Jobs, Done Dirt Cheap: Working in Reality Television.” New Labor Forum 23.3 (2014): 66-71. Woodward, Gary C. “Is Mentoring Out of Fashion?” The Perfect Response 6 Mar. 2015. 11 Apr. 2016 <https://theperfectresponse.pages.tcnj.edu/2015/03/06/is-mentoring-out-of-fashion/>. Wyatt, Daisy. “I Am Cait: Caitlyn Jenner 'Paid a Record-Breaking $5 Million' for E! Reality TV Show.” Independent 12 June 2015. 5 Feb. 2016 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/caitlyn-jenner-paid-record-5m-to-front-e-reality-tv-show-i-am-cait-10315826.html>. “‘X Factor’ UK 2015 Dark Secrets: ‘Horrific’ & Like ‘Prison’ Says Contestant.” Australia Network News 19 Nov. 2015. 1 Nov. 2015 <http://www.australianetworknews.com/x-factor-uk-2015-dark-secrets-horrific-like-prison-says-contestant/>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Kabir, Nahid. "Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media." M/C Journal 9, no. 4 (2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2642.

Full text

Abstract:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. —John Milton (1608-1674)   Introduction  The publication of 12 cartoons depicting images of Prophet Mohammed [Peace Be Upon Him] first in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, and later reprinted in European media and two New Zealand newspapers, sparked protests around the Muslim world. The Australian newspapers – with the exception of The Courier-Mail, which published one cartoon – refrained from reprinting the cartoons, acknowledging that depictions of the Prophet are regarded as “blasphemous by Muslims”. How is this apparent act of restraint to be assessed? Edward Said, in his book Covering Islam has acknowledged that there have been many Muslim provocations and troubling incidents by Islamic countries such as Iran, Libya, Sudan, and others in the 1980s. However, he contends that the use of the label “Islam” by non-Muslim commentators, either to explain or indiscriminately condemn “Islam”, ends up becoming a form of attack, which in turn provokes more hostility (xv-xvi). This article examines how two Australian newspapers – The Australian and The West Australian – handled the debate on the Prophet Muhammad cartoons and considers whether in the name of “free speech” it ended in “a form of attack” on Australian Muslims. It also considers the media’s treatment of Muslim Australians’ “free speech” on previous occasions.  This article is drawn from the oral testimonies of Muslims of diverse ethnic background. Since 1998, as part of PhD and post-doctoral research on Muslims in Australia, the author conducted 130 face-to-face, in-depth, taped interviews of Muslims, aged 18-90, both male and female. While speaking about their settlement experience, several interviewees made unsolicited remarks about Western/Australian media, all of them making the point that Muslims were being demonised.   Australian Muslims  Many of Australia’s 281,578 Muslims — 1.5 per cent of the total population (Australian Bureau of Statistics) — believe that as a result of media bias, they are vilified in society as “terrorists”, and discriminated in the workplace (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission; Dreher 13; Kabir 266-277). The ABS figures support their claim of discrimination in the workplace; in 1996 the unemployment rate for Muslim Australians was 25 per cent, compared to 9 per cent for the national total. In 2001, it was reduced to 18.5 per cent, compared to 6.8 per cent for the national total, but the ratio of underprivileged positions in the labour market remained almost three times higher than for the wider community. Instead of reflecting on Muslims’ labour market issues or highlighting the social issues confronting Muslims since 9/11, some Australian media, in the name of “free speech”, reinforce negative perceptions of Muslims through images, cartoons and headlines. In 2004, one Muslim informant offered their perceptions of Australian media:   I think the Australian media are quite prejudiced, and they only do show one side of the story, which is quite pro-Bush, pro-Howard, pro-war. Probably the least prejudiced media would be ABC or SBS, but the most pro-Jewish, pro-America, would be Channel Seven, Channel Nine, Channel Ten. They only ever show things from one side of the story.   This article considers the validity of the Muslim interviewee’s perception that Australian media representation is one-sided. On 26 October 2005, under the headline: “Draw a Cartoon about Mohammed and You Must Die”, The Australian warned its readers:   ISLAM is no laughing matter. Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, is being protected by security guards and several cartoonists have gone into hiding after the newspaper published a series of 12 cartoons about the prophet Mohammed. According to Islam, it is blasphemous to make images of the prophet. Muslim fundamentalists have threatened to bomb the paper’s offices and kill the cartoonists (17).   Militant Muslims  The most provocative cartoons appearing in the Danish media are probably those showing a Muhammad-like figure wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse coming out of it, or a queue of smoking suicide bombers on a cloud with an Islamic cleric saying, “Stop stop we have run out of virgins”. Another showed a blindfolded Muslim man with two veiled Muslim women standing behind him. These messages appeared to be concerned with Islam’s repression of women (Jyllands-Posten), and possibly with the American channel CBS airing an interview in August 2001 of a Palestinian Hamas activist, Muhammad Abu Wardeh, who recruited terrorists for suicide bombings in Israel. Abu Wardeh was quoted as saying: “I described to him [the suicide bomber] how God would compensate the martyr for sacrificing his life for his land. If you become a martyr, God will give you 70 virgins, 70 wives and everlasting happiness” (The Guardian).  Perhaps to serve their goals, the militants have re-interpreted the verses of the Holy Quran (Sura 44:51-54; 55:56) where it is said that Muslims who perform good deeds will be blessed by the huris or “pure being” (Ali 1290-1291; 1404). However, since 9/11, it is also clear that the Muslim militant groups such as the Al-Qaeda have become the “new enemy” of the West. They have used religion to justify the terrorist acts and suicide bombings that have impacted on Western interests in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid amongst other places.   But it should be noted that there are Muslim critics, such as Pakistani-born writer, Irshad Manji, Bangladeshi-born writer Taslima Nasreen and Somalian-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who have been constant critics of Muslim men’s oppression of women and have urged reformation. However, their extremist fellow believers threatened them with a death sentence for their “free speech” (Chadwick). The non-Muslim Dutch film director, Theo van Gogh, also a critic of Islam and a supporter of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, advocated a reduction in immigration into Holland, especially by Muslims. Both van Gogh and Hirsi Ali – who co-scripted and co-produced the film Submission – received death threats from Muslim extremists because the film exhibited the verses of the Quran across the chest, stomach and thighs of an almost naked girl, and featured four women in see-through robes showing their breasts, with texts from the Quran daubed on their bodies, talking about the abuse they had suffered under Islam (Anon 25).   Whereas there may be some justification for the claim made in the film, that some Muslim men interpret the Quran to oppress women (Doogue and Kirkwood 220), the writing of the Quranic verses on almost-naked women is surely offensive to all Muslims because the Quran teaches Muslim women to dress modestly (Sura 24: 30-31; Ali 873). On 4 November 2004, The West Australian reported that the Dutch director Theo van Gogh was murdered by a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan Muslim on 2 November 2004 (27). Hirsi Ali, the co-producer of the film was forced to go into hiding after van Gogh’s murder. In the face of a growing clamour from both the Dutch Muslims and the secular communities to silence her, Ayaan Hirsi Ali resigned from the Dutch Parliament in May 2006 and decided to re-settle in Washington (Jardine 2006).  It should be noted that militant Muslims form a tiny but forceful minority of the 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide. The Muslim majority are moderate and peaceful (Doogue and Kirkwood 79-80). Some Muslim scholars argue that there is specific instruction in the Quran for people to apply their knowledge and arrive at whatever interpretation is of greatest benefit to the community. It may be that stricter practitioners would not agree with the moderate interpretation of the Quran and vice versa (Doogue and Kirkwood 232). Therefore, when the Western media makes a mockery of the Muslim religion or their Prophet in the name of “free speech”, or generalises all Muslims for the acts of a few through headlines or cartoons, it impacts on the Muslims residing in the West.   Prophet Muhammad’s Cartoons  With the above-mentioned publication of Prophet Muhammad’s cartoons in Denmark, Islamic critics charged that the cartoons were a deliberate provocation and insult to their religion, designed to incite hatred and polarise people of different faiths. In February 2006, regrettably, violent reactions took place in the Middle East, Europe and in Asia. Danish embassies were attacked and, in some instances, were set on fire. The demonstrators chanted, “With our blood and souls we defend you, O Prophet of God!”. Some replaced the Danish flag with a green one printed with the first pillar of Islam (Kalima): “There is no god but God and Mohammed is the messenger of God”. Some considered the cartoons “an unforgivable insult” that merited punishment by death (The Age).   A debate on “free speech” soon emerged in newspapers throughout the world. On 7 February 2006 the editorial in The West Australian, “World Has Had Enough of Muslim Fanatics”, stated that the newspaper would not publish cartoons of Mohammad that have drawn protests from Muslims around the world. The newspaper acknowledged that depictions of the prophet are regarded as “blasphemous by Muslims” (18). However, the editorial was juxtaposed with another article “Can Liberty Survive a Clash of Cultures?”, with an image of bearded men wearing Muslim head coverings, holding Arabic placards and chanting slogans, implying the violent nature of Islam. And in the letters page of this newspaper, published on the same day, appeared the following headlines (20):   Another Excuse for Muslims to Threaten Us Islam Attacked Cartoon Rage: Greatest Threat to World Peace We’re Living in Dangerous Times Why Treat Embassies with Contempt? Muslim Religion Is Not So Soft Civilised World Is Threatened The West Australian is a state-based newspaper that tends to side with the conservative Liberal party, and is designed to appeal to the “man in the street”. The West Australian did not republish the Prophet Muhammad cartoon, but for 8 days from 7 to 15 February 2006 the letters to the editor and opinion columns consistently criticised Islam and upheld “superior” Western secular values. During this period, the newspaper did publish a few letters that condemned the Danish cartoonist, including the author’s letter, which also condemned the Muslims’ attack on the embassies. But the overall message was that Western secular values were superior to Islamic values. In other words, the newspaper adopted a jingoistic posture and asserted the cultural superiority of mainstream Australians.  The Danish cartoons also sparked a debate on “free speech” in Australia’s leading newspaper, The Australian, which is a national newspaper that also tends to reflect the values of the ruling national government – also the conservative Liberal party. And it followed a similar pattern of debate as The West Australian. On 14 February 2006, The Australian (13) published a reader’s criticism of The Australian for not republishing the cartoons. The author questioned whether the Muslims deserved any tolerance because their Holy Book teaches intolerance. The Koran [Quran] (22:19) says:   Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies.    Perhaps this reader did not find the three cartoons published in The Australian a few days earlier to be ‘offensive’ to the Australian Muslims. In the first, on 6 February 2006, the cartoonist Bill Leak showed that his head was chopped off by some masked people (8), implying that Muslim militants, such as the Hamas, would commit such a brutal act. The Palestinian Hamas group often appear in masks before the media. In this context, it is important to note that Israel is an ally of Australia and the United States, whereas the Hamas is Israel’s enemy whose political ideology goes against Israel’s national interest. On 25 January 2006, the Hamas won a landslide victory in the Palestine elections but Israel refused to recognise this government because Hamas has not abandoned its militant ideology (Page 13). The cartoon, therefore, probably means that the cartoonist or perhaps The Australian has taken sides on behalf of Australia’s ally Israel.  In the second cartoon, on 7 February 2006, Bill Leak sketched an Arab raising his sword over a school boy who was drawing in a classroom. The caption read, “One more line and I’ll chop your hand off!” (12). And in the third, on 10 February 2006, Bill Leak sketched Mr Mohammed’s shadow holding a sword with the caption: “The unacceptable face of fanaticism”. A reporter asked: “And so, Mr Mohammed, what do you have to say about the current crisis?” to which Mr Mohammed replied, “I refuse to be drawn on the subject” (16). The cartoonist also thought that the Danish cartoons should have been republished in the Australian newspapers (Insight).  Cartoons are supposed to reflect the theme of the day. Therefore, Bill Leak’s cartoons were certainly topical. But his cartoons reveal that his or The Australian’s “freedom of expression” has been one-sided, all depicting Islam as representing violence. For example, after the Bali bombing on 21 November 2002, Leak sketched two fully veiled women, one carrying explosives under her veil and asking the other, “Does my bomb look big in this”? The cartoonist’s immediate response to criticism of the cartoon in a television programme was, “inevitably, when you look at a cartoon such as that one, the first thing you’ve got to do is remember that as a daily editorial cartoonist, you’re commenting first and foremost on the events of the day. They’re very ephemeral things”. He added, “It was…drawn about three years ago after a spate of suicide bombing attacks in Israel” (Insight).  Earlier events also suggested that that The Australian resolutely supports Australia’s ally, Israel. On 13-14 November 2004 Bill Leak caricatured the recently deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in The Weekend Australian (18). In the cartoon, God appeared to be displeased with him and would not allow him to enter paradise. Arafat was shown with explosives strapped to his body and threatening God by saying, “A cloud to myself or the whole place goes up….”. On the other hand, on 6 January 2006 the same cartoonist sympathetically portrayed ailing Israeli leader Ariel Sharon as a decent man wearing a black suit, with God willing to accept him (10); and the next day Sharon was portrayed as “a Man of Peace” (12).   Politics and Religion  Thus, the anecdotal evidence so far reveals that in the name of “freedom of expression”, or “free speech” The West Australian and The Australian newspapers have taken sides – either glorifying their “superior” Western culture or taking sides on behalf of its allies. On the other hand, these print media would not tolerate the “free speech” of a Muslim leader who spoke against their ally or another religious group. From the 1980s until recently, some print media, particularly The Australian, have been critical of the Egyptian-born Muslim spiritual leader Imam Taj el din al-Hilali for his “free speech”. In 1988 the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils bestowed the title of Mufti to Imam al- Hilali, and al-Hilali was elevated to a position of national religious leadership.   Al-Hilali became a controversial figure after 1988 when he gave a speech to the Muslim students at Sydney University and accused Jews of trying to control the world through “sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, treason and economic hoarding” (Hewett 7). The Imam started being identified as a “Muslim chief” in the news headlines once he directly criticised American foreign policy during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. The Imam interpreted US intervention in Kuwait as a “political dictatorship” that was exploiting the Gulf crisis because it was seen as a threat to its oil supply (Hewett 7).  After the Bali bombings in 2002, the Howard government distributed information on terrorism through the “Alert and Alarmed” kit as part of its campaign of public awareness. The first casualty of the “Be alert, but not alarmed” campaign was the Imam al-Hilali. On 6 January 2003, police saw a tube of plastic protruding from a passenger door window and suspected that al-Hilali might have been carrying a gun when they pulled him over for traffic infringements. Sheikh al-Hilali was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting police (Morris 1, 4). On 8 January 2003 The Australian reminded its readers “Arrest Adds to Mufti’s Mystery” (9). The same issue of The Australian portrayed the Sheikh being stripped of his clothes by two policemen. The letter page also contained some unsympathetic opinions under the headline: “Mufti Deserved No Special Treatment” (10).   In January 2004, al-Hilali was again brought under the spotlight. The Australian media alleged that al-Hilali praised the suicide bombers at a Mosque in Lebanon and said that the destruction of the World Trade Center was “God’s work against oppressors” (Guillatt 24). Without further investigation, The Australian again reported his alleged inflammatory comments. Under the headline, “Muslim Leader’s Jihad Call”, it condemned al-Hilali and accused him of strongly endorsing “terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, during his visit to Lebanon”. Federal Labor Member of Parliament Michael Danby said, “Hilali’s presence in Australia is a mistake. He and his associates must give authorities an assurance he will not assist future homicide attacks” (Chulov 1, 5). Later investigations by Sydney’s Good Weekend Magazine and SBS Television found that al-Hilali’s speech had been mistranslated (Guillatt 24). However, the selected print media that had been very critical of the Sheikh did not highlight the mistranslation.   On the other hand, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell has been critical of Islam and is also opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war in 2003, but the print media appeared to ignore his “free speech” (Dateline). In November 2004, Dr Pell said that secular liberal democracy was empty and selfish, and Islam was emerging as an alternative world view that attracted the alienated (Zwartz 3). In May 2006, Dr Pell said that he tried to reconcile claims that Islam was a faith of peace with those that suggested the Quran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims but:  In my own reading of the Koran [Quran], I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages (Morris).   Muslim leaders regarded Dr Pell’s anti-Islam statement as “inflammatory” (Morris). However, both the newspapers, The Australian and The West Australian remained uncritical of Dr Pell’s “free speech” against Islam.   Conclusion  Edward Said believed that media images are informed by official definitions of Islam that serve the interests of government and business. The success of the images is not in their accuracy but in the power of the people who produce them, the triumph of which is hardly challenged. “Labels have survived many experiences and have been capable of adapting to new events, information and realities” (9). In this paper the author accepts that, in the Australian context, militant Muslims are the “enemy of the West”. However, they are also the enemy of most moderate Australian Muslims. When some selected media take sides on behalf of the hegemony, or Australia’s “allies”, and offend moderate Australian Muslims, the media’s claim of “free speech” or “freedom of expression” remains highly questionable.  Muslim interviewees in this study have noted a systemic bias in some Australian media, but they are not alone in detecting this bias (see the “Abu Who?” segment of Media Watch on ABC TV, 31 July 2006). To address this concern, Australian Muslim leaders need to play an active role in monitoring the media. This might take the form of a watchdog body within the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. If the media bias is found to be persistent, the AFIC might then recommend legislative intervention or application of existing anti-discrimination policies; alternatively, AFIC could seek sanctions from within the Australian journalistic community. One way or another this practice should be stopped.  References  Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. The Holy Quran: Text, Translation and Commentary. New Revised Ed. Maryland, USA: Amana Corporation, 1989. Anonymous. “Dutch Courage in Aftermath of Film-Maker’s Slaying.” The Weekend Australian 6-7 Nov. 2004. Chadwick, Alex. “The Caged Virgin: A Call for Change in Islam.” 4 June 2006 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5382547>. Chulov, Martin. “Muslim Leader’s Jihad Call.” The Australian 19 Feb. 2004. Dateline. “Cardinal George Pell Interview.” SBS TV 6 April 2005. 7 June 2006 http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/>. Dreher, Tanya. “Targeted”, Experiences of Racism in NSW after September 11, 2001. Sydney: University of Technology, 2005. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Understanding Age-Old Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Insight. “Culture Clash.” SBS TV 7 March 2006. 11 June 2006 http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/archive.php>. Guillatt, Richard. “Moderate or Menace.” Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend 21 Aug. 2004. Hewett, Tony. “Australia Exploiting Crisis: Muslim Chief.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Nov. 1990. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Ismaa – Listen: National Consultations on Eliminating Prejudice against Arab and Muslim Australians. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2004. Jyllands-Posten. 24 Jan. 2006. http://www.di2.nu/files/Muhammad_Cartoons_Jyllands_Posten.html>. Jardine, Lisa. “Liberalism under Pressure.” BBC News 5 June 2006. 12 June 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5042418.stm>. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. Media Watch. “Abu Who?” ABC Television 31 July 2006. http://abc.net.au/mediawatch/>. Morris, Linda. “Imam Facing Charges after Row with Police.” Sydney Morning Herald 7 Jan. 2003. Morris, Linda. “Pell Challenges Islam – O Ye, of Little Tolerant Faith.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 May 2006. Page, Jeremy. “Russia May Sell Arms to Hamas.” The Australian 18 Feb. 2006. Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Vintage, 1981, 1997. Submission. “Film Clip from Short Submission.” Submission. 11 June 2006. http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2655656?htv=12> The Age. “Embassies Torched over Cartoons.” 5 Feb. 2006. http://www.theage.com.au>. The Guardian. “Virgins? What Virgins?” 12 Jan. 2002. 4 June 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/>. Zwartz, Barney. “Islam Could Be New Communism, Pell Tells US Audience.” Sydney Morning Herald 12 Nov. 2004.      Citation reference for this article  MLA Style  Kabir, Nahid. "Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media: Free Speech or Taking Sides." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/1-kabir.php>. APA Style Kabir, N. (Sep. 2006) "Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media: Free Speech or Taking Sides," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/1-kabir.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Ryan, Robin Ann. "Forest as Place in the Album "Canopy": Culturalising Nature or Naturalising Culture?" M/C Journal 19, no. 3 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1096.

Full text

Abstract:

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

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Ralph, Barnaby. "Eye of the Beholden." M/C Journal 8, no. 5 (2005). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2432.

Full text

Abstract:

There is a scene near the beginning of the Mel Brooks movie The History of the World, Part I, in which the ‘first artist’ makes his appearance, completing a cave painting of a hunting scene or some such. Immediately following this, a bearskin-clad man steps forward and urinates on the wall. This individual, we are told (by the disembodied voice of Orson Welles, no less), is the ‘first critic’.     Fair or unfair, this is, in many cases, the popular image of the reviewer. Fans of The Simpsons will doubtless remember ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner?’ a 1999 episode in which Homer Simpson becomes a restaurant critic. At first, he loves everything and can’t believe his good fortune in getting so much free food. Gradually, however, peer pressure from other critics forces him to become increasingly negative, until he finally alienates family and friends and winds up unable to enjoy even the most elaborate meals. The episode ends with him escaping from enraged restaurant owners.    Controversy and negative criticism are, as many reviewers will attest, the keys to getting work read and discussed. The desire of reviewers to push the bounds of propriety as far as possible is frequently in evidence. The most-read ‘events’ article on the partner site to this journal, M/C Reviews is entitled, somewhat provocatively, ‘Cunt Get Enough of The Vagina Monologues’. This is, in every way, a fine review which examines the material well and provides a balanced view of the production, but one cannot help wondering how much of the popularity of this particular piece – the site statistics give 11724 readers as of 4 August, 2005 – depends on the title, the first point of contact for the reader.  Critics themselves are motivated by various factors, not all of which are generally explicitly stated to the reader. Aside from the desire to be read, they may have a vested interest in an event, or in being allowed to continue to attend events, for example, and one is often forced to wonder whether or not a critic might have been harsher should they not care about getting future tickets. There is an illuminating article by Quentin Letts from the New Statesman in which he describes the negative reaction of fellow critics to his actually paying for a ticket, attending and reviewing a play before the ‘official’ review night. They were more concerned with his having upset precedent and the free ticket tradition than with his actual review, and he quotes the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer as stating that he was "wrecking a perfectly good system".   That being said, who are reviewers? For whom do they write and why is their opinion more important than that of the general public? A ‘professional’ reviewer may not necessarily get paid, or may only be paid in event tickets, but their work goes through some sort of formal review process of its own and is subsequently published, generally in a journal, magazine, newspaper or website. Anyone can write a review, but getting it published is harder, and the more respected the publication, the more difficult it is to get into print.   This does not mean that all reviewers are experts on the topic that they discuss, although the admission of this is generally left up to the discretion of the individual writer. Given the diversity of critical opinions, perhaps the only general characteristic that the majority of professional reviewers could be said to share is an ability to express their thoughts clearly and in a readable manner. Reviewers are sometimes highly qualified, but not always, and the opinions of a few can create a sort of cultural oligarchy, which might be considered far from ideal. Should reviews be ingenuous or informed? This very issue is addressed in ironic terms in the 1981 painting The Innocent Eye Test by the American artist Mark Tansey.     Here, we have a cow, the ‘innocent eye’ of the title, examining a painting of cows. Does the cow have a special perspective? Is it an objective audience? Does it recognise the images on the canvas as such at all? The answer to these questions would appear to be awaited with eager anticipation by the gathered watchers, although the futility of their efforts is immediately obvious to the observer of the painting. The chain of perception does not stop here, however. It is merely part of a post-structural signifier play. Consider, for example, the following photograph, which features an observer commenting on his perception of the painting to a group of what one might term ‘secondary’ observers, in turn seen through the lens of the present discussion and further transformed by the experience and reaction of you, the reader (and so on, ad infinitum):    If reviews are themselves reviewed before publication, the reader is the (momentary) endpoint in the aforementioned complex chain of perception. These issues have been discussed recently by Jordan et. al. in a recent issue of Communication Studies in which they argue persuasively that the ideas of the reviewers of reviews impart a type of imprint on what is being written as criticism. The present article has, itself, been through a ‘peer-review’ process and was revised as a result – some new content was added, some taken away, all according to ideas which are not necessarily those of the original author.  Different publications usually offer a different style of review depending on their demographic. Generally speaking, the more specialised the publication, the more specialised the review. Academic journals cater to an informed, highly educated audience who expect a degree of precision, referencing and analysis, which might be lacking in more general newspaper reviews. The latter tend to be short and give a brief overview and opinion, reflecting the essentially ephemeral nature of a daily paper. Magazine reviews are often more substantial in both length and depth of discussion, but are, again, usually aimed at a non-specialist audience, although this can depend on the primary focus of the magazine itself. Professional website reviews tend not to suffer from space constraints, but are limited more by the desire of the reviewer to keep their observations digestible to whoever their ‘ideal reader’ might be. All such media, however, rely on the views of a select (and selected) few.  There are a number of websites that cater for those members of the public who seek a more democratic model. In the case of cinema, the Internet Movie Database allows registered users to rate and review movies. The resulting ratings are averaged to give an overall idea of the popular reaction to the movie, and those who wish to explore further can read the numerous ‘user comments’, or mini-reviews on the site. A similar phenomenon is featured at the online store Amazon, where customers can rate a book, CD or movie and write their own summary. Several other sites offer an averaging of published reviews in major papers, journals, magazines and websites. Rotten Tomatoes offers a statistical summary of the positive or negative opinions cited in such reviews in the form of the ‘tomatometer’, which gives a percentage rating to a given movie. Yahoo! Movies goes one step further and allows users to submit their own reviews, which are then averaged and can be compared to the aggregate media rating. Generally, these are close, although it is interesting to note that a brief scan suggests that Yahoo! users generally rate movies lower than the professional critics.   Does this mean, therefore, that the role of the professional reviewer is becoming less relevant in these days of digital egalitarianism? Certainly, opinions can be disseminated worldwide with greater ease than ever before, but the problem with this is one of quality control. When reading an online review, one often has no way of knowing the motives or, indeed, veracity of the author. On IMDB, for example, users often complain that other reviewers have not even seen the movie in question, which is a criticism that arises only very rarely in the world of professional criticism. It is likely that the division between the professional and the general public will become even more sharply defined with the rise of the internet medium, and that both will have their own audiences. It is significant that none of the aforementioned sites make any attempt to merge the ‘professional’ and ‘open’ content, but keep the boundary between the two clearly defined.  It is probable that critical theorists and reviewers themselves will continue to review the culture of reviewing. As R.P. Hart noted in 1976 (70), “the refusal by any field of inquiry to launch periodic, self-reflective examinations is surely a very special kind of arrogance”. Naturally, the desire to discuss one’s profession and, thus, give it the additional lustre of being considered an academic pursuit is also a motivation. That said, such probing is unlikely to change review culture itself. Harry Haskell’s overview of musical criticism, The Attentive Listener, contains sufficient examples to show that the same primary elements that exist in contemporary arts reviews have been in frequent use since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, for example. We cannot quantify intent meaningfully, and can only discuss the ramifications of individual reviews in the broadest possible terms – perhaps critics are much less significant individually than they would like to believe, especially in a culture of increasingly globalised information exchange. Poor old jesting Pilate – when he asked (rhetorically) “what is truth?”, what would he have thought to be told that it was, arguably, merely a sociological statistical aggregate?  References  Hart, R. P. “Theory-Building and Rhetorical Criticism: An Informal Statement of Opinion”. Central Stales Speech Journal 27 (1976): 70-7. Haskell, Harry. The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. Jordan, John W., Kathryn M. Olson and Stephen R. Goldzwig. “Continuing the Conversation on ‘What Constitutes Publishable Rhetorical Criticism?’: A Response”. Communication Studies 54.3 (2003): 392-402. Letts, Quentin. “Theatre Reviewing: How I Outraged the Drama Critics”. New Statesman (6 Dec. 2004). Sources for Illustrations  “The First Critic”, from History of the World Part I. 1981. 4 Aug. 2005 http://www.ladyofthecake.com/mel/world/hwimages.htm>. “Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner”, from The Simpsons. 1999. 4 Aug. 2005 http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~hc01srp/mult1001/cw2/work.html>. Tansey, Mark. The Innocent Eye-Test. 1981. 4 Aug. 2005 http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/s/images/seeing_tansey.innocent.lg.gif>. Photograph of people viewing Tansey’s painting. 2003. 4 Aug. 2005 http://www2.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/images/newyork2003/Metropolitian%2520Museum-3.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www2.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/ news/new_york_2003.asp&h=195&w=258&sz=12&tbnid=Rqr7aaBrBkIJ: &tbnh=80&tbnw=107&hl=ja&start=3&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dtansey%2Bthe%2Binnocent%2Beye%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Dja%26hs%3D7tD%26lr%3D%26c2coff%3D1%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:ja-JP:official_s%26sa%3DN>.     Citation reference for this article  MLA Style Ralph, Barnaby. "Eye of the Beholden: Reflections on the Role and Perception of the Arts Reviewer." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/09-ralph.php>. APA Style Ralph, B. (Oct. 2005) "Eye of the Beholden: Reflections on the Role and Perception of the Arts Reviewer," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/09-ralph.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Brien, Donna Lee. "Fat in Contemporary Autobiographical Writing and Publishing." M/C Journal 18, no. 3 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.965.

Full text

Abstract:

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. It also aims to support future work in identifying prominent and recurrent (or not) themes, motifs, tropes, and metaphors in memoir and autobiographical texts, and to contribute to the development of a more detailed set of descriptors for discussing and assessing popular autobiographical writing more generally.References Allan, Vicki. “Graphic Tale of Obesity Makes for Heavy Reading.” Sunday Herald 26 Jun. 2005. Alley, Kirstie. How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life: Reluctant Confessions of a Big-Butted Star. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2005.Anderson, Fred. From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. USA: Three Toes Publishing, 2009.Bhide, Monica. “Why You Should Eat Fat.” Salon 25 Sep. 2008.Bradley, Linda Arthur, Nancy Rudd, Andy Reilly, and Tim Freson. “A Review of Men’s Body Image Literature: What We Know, and Need to Know.” International Journal of Costume and Fashion 14.1 (2014): 29–45.Brien, Donna Lee. “Starving, Bingeing and Writing: Memoirs of Eating Disorder as Food Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Courses Special Issue 18 (2013).Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. “Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace.” M/C Journal 10.4 (2007).Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Chester, Molly, and Sandy Schrecengost. Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors. Vancouver: Fair Winds Press, 2014.Cooper, Charlotte. “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field.” Sociology Compass 4.12 (2010): 1020–34.Couser, G. Thomas. “Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation.” Lifewriting 2.2 (2007): 139–56.Critser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. New York: First Mariner Books, 2004. Daykin, Rosie. Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery. New York: Random House, 2015.Delaney, Lisa. Secrets of a Former Fat Girl: How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes – and Find Yourself along the Way. New York: Plume/Penguin, 2008.Drinkwater, Carol. The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in the South of France. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001.Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011.Farrell-Kingsley, Kathy. The Home Creamery: Make Your Own Fresh Dairy Products; Easy Recipes for Butter, Yogurt, Sour Cream, Creme Fraiche, Cream Cheese, Ricotta, and More! North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2008.Gerring, John. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Gill, Jo. “Introduction.” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–10.Gilman, Sander L. Fat Boys: A Slim Book. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.———. Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.Grit Magazine Editors. Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2012.Gwynne, Joel. Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism: The Politics of Pleasure. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.Halloran, Vivian Nun. “Biting Reality: Extreme Eating and the Fascination with the Gustatory Abject.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (2004): 27–42.Hamilton, Gabrielle. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. New York: Random House, 2013.Heart Foundation [Australia]. “To Avoid Trans Fat, Avoid Butter Says Heart Foundation: Media Release.” 27 Sep. 2010.Hill, Louella. Kitchen Creamery: Making Yogurt, Butter & Cheese at Home. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015.Jordan, Pat. “Dysfunction for Dollars.” New York Times 28 July 2002.Joyne, Jennifer. Designated Fat Girl: A Memoir. Guilford, CT: Skirt!, 2010.Katzen, Mollie. The Moosewood Cookbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1974.Klein, Stephanie. Moose: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.Kuffel, Frances. Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self. New York: Broadway, 2004. Lancaster, Jen. Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer. New York: New American Library/Penguin, 2008.Lay, Carol. The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude. New York: Villard Books, 2008.Levy-Navarro, Elena. “I’m the New Me: Compelled Confession in Diet Discourse.” The Journal of Popular Culture 45.2 (2012): 340–56.Library of Congress. Catalogue record 200304857. Linder, Kathryn E. “The Fat Memoir as Autopathography: Self-Representations of Embodied Fatness.” Auto/biography Studies 26.2 (2011): 219–37.Linford, Jenny. The Creamery Kitchen. London: Ryland Peters & Small, 2014.Lorah, Michael C. “Carol Lay on The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude.” Newsarama 26 Dec. 2008. Lupton, Deborah. Fat. Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2013.Manheim, Camryn. Wake Up, I’m Fat! New York: Broadway Books, 2000.Merriam, Sharan B. Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.McBride, Gregg. Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2014.McLagan, Jennifer. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008.Milner, Jude. Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.Mitchell, Allyson. “Big Judy: Fatness, Shame, and the Hybrid Autobiography.” Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, eds. Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 64–77.Moore, Judith. Fat Girl: A True Story. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005. Morris, Sophie. “Fat Is Back: Rediscover the Delights of Lard, Dripping and Suet.” The Independent 12 Mar. 2009. Multiple Sclerosis Society, New York. “Books for a Better Life Awards: 2007 Finalists.” Book Reporter 2006. Okada, Toshio. Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir. Trans. Mizuho Tiyishima. New York: Vertical Inc., 2009.O’Neill, Brendan. “Misery Lit … Read On.” BBC News 17 Apr. 2007. O’Shea, Tim. “Taking Comics with Tim: Carol Lay.” Robot 6 16 Feb. 2009. Peck, Cheryl. Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs. New York: Warner Books, 2004. Phillipov, M.M. “Mastering Obesity: MasterChef Australia and the Resistance to Public Health Nutrition.” Media, Culture and Society 35.4 (2013): 506–15.Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.Rivenbark, Celia. You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011.Rothblum, Esther, and Sondra Solovay, eds. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Smith, Shaun. “Jennifer McLagan on her Controversial Cookbook, Fat.” CBC News 15. Sep. 2008. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.Stearns, Peter N. Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. New York and London: New York University Press, 2002.Story, Carol Ann. “Book Review: ‘Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Women’.” WLS Lifestyles 2007. Teller, Jean. “As American as Mom, Apple Pie & Grit.” Grit History Grit. c. 2006. Thelin, Emily Kaiser. “Aaron Wehner Transforms Ten Speed Press into Cookbook Leader.” SF Gate 7 Oct. 2014. Tomrley, Corianna, and Ann Kaloski Naylor. Fat Studies in the UK. York: Raw Nerve Books, 2009.Ugel, Edward. I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks. New York: Weinstein Books, 2010.Vaserfirer, Lucy. Flavored Butters: How to Make Them, Shape Them, and Use Them as Spreads, Toppings, and Sauces. Boston, MA: Harvard Common Press, 2013.Verschuren, Piet. “Case Study as a Research Strategy: Some Ambiguities and Opportunities.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 6.2 (2003): 121–39.Wann, Marilyn. Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1998.———. Fat!So? n.d. Weitin, Thomas. “Testimony and the Rhetoric of Persuasion.” Modern Language Notes 119.3 (2004): 525–40.Zadoff, Allen. Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007.Zinsser, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Carroll, Richard. "The Trouble with History and Fiction." M/C Journal 14, no. 3 (2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.372.

Full text

Abstract:

Historical fiction, a widely-read genre, continues to engender contradiction and controversy within the fields of literature and historiography. This paper begins with a discussion of the differences and similarities between historical writing and the historical novel, focusing on the way these forms interpret and represent the past. It then examines the dilemma facing historians as they try to come to terms with the modern era and the growing competition from other modes of presenting history. Finally, it considers claims by Australian historians that so-called “fictive history” has been bestowed with historical authority to the detriment of traditional historiography. The Fact/Fiction Dichotomy Hayden White, a leading critic in the field of historiography, claims that the surge in popularity of historical fiction and the novel form in the nineteenth century caused historians to seek recognition of their field as a serious “science” (149). Historians believed that, to be scientific, historical studies had to cut ties with any form of artistic writing or imaginative literature, especially the romantic novel. German historian Leopold von Ranke “anathematized” the historical novel virtually from its first appearance in Scott’s Waverley in 1814. Hayden White argues that Ranke and others after him wrote history as narrative while eschewing the use of imagination and invention that were “exiled into the domain of ‘fiction’ ” (149-150). Early critics in the nineteenth century questioned the value of historical fiction. Famous Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia believed that history was opposite and superior to fiction; he accused the historical novel of degrading history to the level of fiction which, he argued, is lies (cited in de Piérola 152). Alessandro Manzoni, though partially agreeing with Heredia, argued that fiction had value in its “poetic truth” as opposed to the “positive truth” of history (153). He eventually decided that the historical novel fails through the mixing of the incompatible elements of history and fiction, which can lead to deception (ibid). More than a hundred years after Heredia, Georg Lukács, in his much-cited The Historical Novel, first published in 1937, was more concerned with the social aspect of the historical novel and its capacity to portray the lives of its protagonists. This form of writing, through its attention to the detail of minor events, was better at highlighting the social aspects than the greater moments of history. Lukács argues that the historical novel should focus on the “poetic awakening” of those who participated in great historical events rather than the events themselves (42). The reader should be able to experience first-hand “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (ibid). Through historical fiction, the reader is thus able to gain a greater understanding of a specific period and why people acted as they did. In contrast to these early critics, historian and author of three books on history and three novels, Richard Slotkin, argues that the historical novel can recount the past as accurately as history, because it should involve similar research methods and critical interpretation of the data (225). Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk go even further, suggesting that “historical fiction may offer a more plausible representation of the past than those sources typically accepted as more factual” (144). In its search for “poetic truth,” the novel tries to create a sense of what the past was, without necessarily adhering to all the factual details and by eliminating facts not essential to the story (Slotkin 225). For Hayden White, the difference between factual and fictional discourse, is that one is occupied by what is “true” and the other by what is “real” (147). Historical documents may provide a basis for a “true account of the world” in a certain time and place, but they are limited in their capacity to act as a foundation for the exploration of all aspects of “reality.” In White’s words: The rest of the real, after we have said what we can assert to be true about it, would not be everything and anything we could imagine about it. The real would consist of everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be. (ibid) White’s main point is that both history and fiction are interpretative by nature. Historians, for their part, interpret given evidence from a subjective viewpoint; this means that it cannot be unbiased. In the words of Beverley Southgate, “factual history is revealed as subjectively chosen, subjectively interpreted, subjectively constructed and incorporated within a narrative” (45). Both fiction and history are narratives, and “anyone who writes a narrative is fictionalising,” according to Keith Jenkins (cited in Southgate 32). The novelist and historian find meaning through their own interpretation of the known record (Brown) to produce stories that are entertaining and structured. Moreover, historians often reach conflicting conclusions in their translations of the same archival documents, which, in the extreme, can spark a wider dispute such as the so-called history wars, the debate about the representation of the Indigenous peoples in Australian history that has polarised both historians and politicians. The historian’s purpose differs from that of the novelist. Historians examine the historical record in fine detail in an attempt to understand its complexities, and then use digressions and footnotes to explain and lend authority to their findings. The novelist on the other hand, uses their imagination to create personalities and plot and can leave out important details; the novelist achieves authenticity through detailed description of setting, customs, culture, buildings and so on (Brown). Nevertheless, the main task of both history and historical fiction is to represent the past to a reader in the present; this “shared concern with the construction of meaning through narrative” is a major component in the long-lasting, close relationship between fiction and history (Southgate 19). However, unlike history, the historical novel mixes fiction and fact, and is therefore “a hybrid of two genres” (de Piérola 152); this mixture of supposed opposites of fact and fiction creates a dilemma for the theorist, because historical fiction cannot necessarily be read as belonging to either category. Attitudes towards the line drawn between fiction and history are changing as more and more critics and theorists explore the area where the two genres intersect. Historian John Demos argues that with the passing of time, this distinction “seems less a boundary than a borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” (329). While some historians are now willing to investigate the wide area where the two genres overlap, this approach remains a concern for traditionalists. History’s Dilemma Historians face a crisis as they try to come to terms with the postmodern era which has seen unprecedented questioning of the validity of history’s claim to accuracy in recounting the past. In the words of Jenkins et al., “ ‘history’ per se wobbles” as it experiences a period of uncertainty and challenge; the field is “much changed and deeply contested,” as historians seek to understand the meaning of history itself (6). But is postmodernism the cause of the problem? Writing in 1986 Linda Hutcheon, well known for her work on postmodernism, attempted to clarify the term as it is applied in modern times in reference to fiction, where, she states, it is usually taken to mean “metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way self-referential and auto-representational” (301). To eliminate any confusion with regard to concept or terminology, Hutcheon coined the phrase “historiographic metafiction," which includes “the presence of the past” in “historical, social, and ideological” form (302). As examples, she cites contemporary novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The White Hotel, Midnight’s Children and Famous Last Words. Hutcheon explains that all these works “self-consciously focus on the processes of producing and receiving paradoxically fictive historical writing” (ibid). In the Australian context, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish could be added to the list. Like the others, they question how historical sources maintain their status as authentic historical documents in the context of a fictional work (302). However, White argues that the crisis in historical studies is not due to postmodernism but has materialised because historians have failed to live up to their nineteenth century expectations of history being recognised as a science (149). Postmodernists are not against history, White avows; what they do not accept “is a professional historiography” that serves self-seeking governing bodies with its outdated and severely limited approach to objectivity (152). This kind of historiography has denied itself access to aesthetic writing and the imaginary, while it has also cut any links it had “to what was most creative in the real sciences it sought half-heartedly to emulate” (ibid). Furthering White’s argument, historian Robert Rosenstone states that past certitude in the claims of historians to be the sole guardians of historical truth now seem outdated in the light of our accumulated knowledge. The once impregnable position of the historian is no longer tenable because: We know too much about framing images and stories, too much about narrative, too much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of perception, too much about our own cultural imperatives and biases, too much about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page. (Rosenstone 12) While the archive confers credibility on history, it does not confer the right to historians to claim it as the truth (Southgate 6); there are many possible versions of the past, which can be presented to us in any number of ways as history (Jenkins et al. 1). And this is a major challenge for historians as other modes of representing the past cater to public demand in place of traditional approaches. Public interest in history has grown over the last 20 years (Harlan 109). Historical novels fill the shelves of bookstores and libraries, while films, television series and documentaries about the past attract large audiences. In the words of Rosenstone, “people are hungry for the past, as various studies tell us and the responses to certain films, TV series and museums indicate” (17). Rosenstone laments the fact that historians, despite this attraction to the past, have failed to stir public interest in their own writings. While works of history have their strengths, they target a specific, extremely limited audience in an outdated format (17). They have forgotten the fact that, in the words of White, “the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information” (149). This may be true of some historians, but there are many writers of non-fiction, including historians, who use the narrative voice and other fictional techniques in their writings (Ricketson). Matthew Ricketson accuses White of confusing “fiction with literariness,” while other scholars take fiction and narrative to be the same thing. He argues that “the use of a wide range of modes of writing usually associated with fiction are not the sole province of fiction” and that narrative theorists have concentrated their attention on fictional narrative, thereby excluding factual forms of writing (ibid). One of the defining elements of creative non-fiction is its use of literary techniques in writing about factual events and people. At the same time, this does not make it fiction, which by definition, relies on invention (ibid). However, those historians who do write outside the limits of traditional history can attract criticism. Historian Richard Current argues that if writers of history and biography try to be more effective through literary considerations, they sometimes lose their objectivity and authenticity. While it is acceptable to seek to write with clarity and force, it is out of the question to present “occasional scenes in lifelike detail” in the manner of a novelist. Current contends that if only one source is used, this violates “the historiographical requirement of two or more independent and competent witnesses.” This requirement is important because it explains why much of the writing by academic historians is perceived as “dry-as-dust” (Current 87). Modern-day historians are contesting this viewpoint as they analyse the nature and role of their writings, with some turning to historical fiction as an alternative mode of expression. Perhaps one of the more well-known cases in recent times was that of historian Simon Schama, who, in writing Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), was criticised for creating dramatic scenes based on dubious historical sources without informing the reader of his fabrications (Nelson). In this work, Schama questions notions of factual history and the limitations of historians. The title is suggestive in itself, while the afterword to the book is explicit, as “historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation . . . We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot” (320). Another example is Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine, which was considered to be “postmodern” and not acceptable to publishers and agents as the correct way to present history, despite the author’s reassurance that nothing was invented, “it just tells the story a different way” ("Space for the Birds to Fly" 16). Schama is not the only author to draw fire from critics for neglecting to inform the reader of the veracity or not of their writing. Richard Current accused Gore Vidal of getting his facts wrong and of inaccurately portraying Lincoln in his work, Lincoln: A Novel (81). Despite the title, which is a form of disclaimer itself, Current argued that Vidal could have avoided criticism if he had not asserted that his work was authentic history, or had used a disclaimer in a preface to deny any connection between the novel’s characters and known persons (82). Current is concerned about this form of writing, known as “fictional history," which, unlike historical fiction, “pretends to deal with real persons and events but actually reshapes them—and thus rewrites the past” (77). This concern is shared by historians in Australia. Fictive History Historian Mark McKenna, in his essay, Writing the Past, argues that “fictive history” has become a new trend in Australia; he is unhappy with the historical authority bestowed on this form of writing and would like to see history restored to its rightful place. He argues that with the decline of academic history, novelists have taken over the historian’s role and fiction has become history (3). In sympathy with McKenna, author, historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen claims that “novelists have been doing their best to bump historians off the track” (16). McKenna accuses writers W.G. Sebald and David Malouf of supporting “the core myth of historical fiction: the belief that being there is what makes historical understanding possible.” Malouf argues, in a conversation with Helen Daniel in 1996, that: Our only way of grasping our history—and by history I really mean what has happened to us, and what determines what we are now and where we are now—the only way of really coming to terms with that is by people's entering into it in their imagination, not by the world of facts, but by being there. And the only thing really which puts you there in that kind of way is fiction. Poetry may do so, drama may do so, but it's mostly going to be fiction. It's when you have actually been there and become a character again in that world. (3) From this point of view, the historical novel plays an important role in our culture because it allows people to interact with the past in a meaningful way, something factual writing struggles to do. McKenna recognises that history is present in fiction and that history can contain fiction, but they should not be confused. Writers and critics have a responsibility towards their readers and must be clear that fiction is not history and should not be presented as such (10). He takes writer Kate Grenville to task for not respecting this difference. McKenna argues that Grenville has asserted in public that her historical novel The Secret River is history: “If ever there was a case of a novelist wanting her work to be taken seriously as history, it is Grenville” (5). The Secret River tells the story of early settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Grenville’s inspiration for the story emanated from her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life. The main protagonist, William Thornhill (loosely based on Wiseman), is convicted of theft in 1806 and transported to Australia. The novel depicts the poverty and despair in England at the time, and describes life in the new colony where Grenville explores the collision between the colonists and the Aborigines. McKenna knows that Grenville insists elsewhere that her book is not history, but he argues that this conflicts with what she said in interviews and he worries that “with such comments, it is little wonder that many people might begin to read fiction as history” (5). In an article on her website, Grenville refutes McKenna’s arguments, and those of Clendinnen: “Here it is in plain words: I don’t think The Secret River is history…Nor did I ever say that I thought my novel was history.” Furthermore, the acknowledgements in the back of the book state clearly that it is a work of fiction. She accuses the two above-mentioned historians of using quotes that “have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated” ("History and Fiction"). McKenna then goes on to say how shocked he was on hearing Grenville, in an interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National, make her now infamous comments about standing on a stepladder looking down at the history wars, and that he “felt like ringing the ABC and leaping to the defence of historians.” He accuses Grenville of elevating fiction above history as an “interpretive power” (6). Koval asked Grenville where her book stood in regard to the history wars; she answered: Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. . . I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. ("Interview") Grenville claims that she did not use the stepladder image to imply that her work was superior to history, but rather to convey a sense of being outside the battle raging between historians as an uninvolved observer, “an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.” She goes on to argue that McKenna’s only sources in his essay, Writing the Past, are interviews and newspaper articles, which in themselves are fine, but she disagrees with how they have been used “uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence” ("History and Fiction"), much in contrast to the historian’s desire for authenticity in all sources. It appears that the troubles between history and fiction will continue for some time yet as traditional historians are bent on keeping faith with the tenets of their nineteenth century predecessors by defending history from the insurgence of fiction at all costs. While history and historical fiction share a common purpose in presenting the past, the novel deals with what is “real” and can tell the past as accurately or even in a more plausible way than history, which deals with what is “true”. However, the “dry-as-dust” historical approach to writing, and postmodernism’s questioning of historiography’s role in presenting the past, has contributed to a reassessment of the nature of history. Many historians recognise the need for change in the way they present their work, but as they have often doubted the worth of historical fiction, they are wary of the genre and the narrative techniques it employs. Those historians who do make an attempt to write differently have often been criticised by traditionalists. In Australia, historians such as McKenna and Clendinnen are worried by the incursion of historical fiction into their territory and are highly critical of novelists who claim their works are history. The overall picture that emerges is of two fields that are still struggling to clarify a number of core issues concerning the nature of both the historical novel and historiographical writing, and the role they play in portraying the past. References Brown, Joanne. "Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults." ALAN Review 26.1 (1998). 1 March 2010 ‹http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html›. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 2000. Clendinnen, Inga. "The History Question: Who Owns the Past?" Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1-72. Current, Richard. "Fiction as History: A Review Essay." Journal of Southern History 52.1 (1986): 77-90. De Piérola, José. "At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for the Historical Novel in Latin America." Romance Studies 26.2 (2008): 151-62. Demos, John. "Afterword: Notes from, and About, the History/Fiction Borderland." Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 329-35. Den Heyer, Kent, and Alexandra Fidyk. "Configuring Historical Facts through Historical Fiction: Agency, Art-in-Fact, and Imagination as Stepping Stones between Then and Now." Educational Theory 57.2 (2007): 141-57. Flanagan, Richard. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. Sydney: Picador, 2002. Grenville, Kate. “History and Fiction.” 2007. 19 July 2010 ‹http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_River_History%20and%20Fiction›. ———. “Interview with Ramona Koval.” 17 July 2005. 26 July 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm›. ———. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. Harlan, David. “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History.” Manifestos for History. Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jenkins, Keith, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow. Manifestos for History. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Malouf, David. "Interview with Helen Daniel." Australian Humanities Review (Sep. 1996). McKenna, Mark. “Writing the Past: History, Literature & the Public Sphere in Australia.” Australian Financial Review (2005). 13 May 2010 ‹http://www.afraccess.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/search›. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (2007). 5 June 2010 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au›. Ricketson, Matthew. “Not Muddying, Clarifying: Towards Understanding the Boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 14.2 (2010). 6 June 2011 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct10/ricketson.htm›. Rosenstone, Robert A. “Space for the Bird to Fly.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. 11-18. ———. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Schama, Simon. Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations). 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 221-36. Southgate, Beverley C. History Meets Fiction. New York: Longman, Harlow, England, 2009. White, Hayden. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 147-57.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Rizzo, Sergio. "Adaptation and the Art of Survival." M/C Journal 10, no. 2 (2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2623.

Full text

Abstract:

To use the overworked metaphor of the movie reviewers, Adaptation (2002)—directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman—is that rare Hollywood flower, a “literary” film that succeeds both with the critics and at the box office. But Kaufman’s literary colleagues, his fellow screenwriters whose opinions are rarely noticed by movie reviewers or the public, express their support in more interesting terms. Robert McKee, the real-life screenwriter and teacher played by Brian Cox in the movie, writes about Kaufman as one of the few to “step out of screenwriting anonymity to gain national recognition as an artist—without becoming a director” (131). And the screenwriter Stephen Schiff (Lolita [Adrian Lyne, 1997], The Deep End of the Ocean [Ulu Grosbard, 1999]) embraces the film as a manifesto, claiming that Kaufman’s work offers “redemption” to him and his fellow screenwriters who are “struggling to adapt to the world’s dismissive view of adaptation.” The comments by Kaufman’s colleagues suggest that new respect for the work of adaptation, and the role of the screenwriter go hand in hand. The director—whom auteur theory, the New Wave, and film schools helped to establish as the primary creative agent behind a film—has long overshadowed the screenwriter, but Kaufman’s acclaim as a screenwriter reflects a new sensibility. This was illustrated by the controversy among Academy Award voters in 2002. They found that year’s nominees, including Adaptation, unsettled the Academy’s traditional distinction between “original screenplay” and “adapted screenplay”, debating whether a nominee for best original screenplay, such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwik, 2002), was more like an adaptation, while Adaptation, a nominee for best adapted screenplay, was more like an original screenplay. The Academy’s confusion on this score is not without precedents; nonetheless, as Rick Lyman of The New York Times reports, it led some to wonder, “in an age of narrative deconstruction and ‘reality television’,” whether the distinction between original and adaptation was still valid. If, as the famed critic Alexandre Astruc claimed, the director should be seen as someone who uses the camera as a pen to “write” the movie, then the screenwriter, in Ben Stoltzfus’s words, is increasingly seen as someone who uses the pen to “shoot” the movie. While this appreciation of the screenwriter as an “adaptor” who directs the movie opens new possibilities within Hollywood filmmaking, it also occurs in a Hollywood where TV shows, video games, and rides at Disneyland are adapted to film as readily as literary works once were. Granted, some stand to gain, but who or what is lost in this new hyper-adaptive environment? While there is much to be said for Kaufman’s movie, I suggest its optimistic account of adaptation—both as an existential principle and cinematic practice—is one-sided. Part of the dramatic impact of the movie’s one word title is the way it shoves the act of adaptation out from the wings and places it front and center in the filmmaking process. An amusing depiction of the screenwriter’s marginalisation occurs at the movie’s beginning, immediately following Charlie’s (Nicholas Cage) opening monologue delivered against a black screen. It is presented as a flashback to the making of Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), the movie for which Kaufman wrote his first screenplay, making him “a name” in Hollywood. Although scripted, the scene is shot with a hand-held video camera and looks as though it is occurring in real time. The central character is John Malkovich in costume as a woman who shouts orders at everyone on the set—deftly illustrating how the star’s power in the new Hollywood enables him or her to become “the director” of the movie. His directions are then followed by ones from the first assistant director and the cinematographer. Meanwhile, Charlie stands silently and awkwardly off to the side, until he is chased away by the first assistant director—not even the director or the cinematographer—who tells him, “You. You’re in the eyeline. Can you please get off the stage?” (Kaufman and Kaufman, 3). There are other references that make the movie’s one-word title evocative. It forces one to think about the biological and literary senses of the word—evolution as a narrative process and narrative as an evolutionary process—lifting the word’s more colloquial meaning of “getting along” to the level of an existential principle. Or, as Laroche (Chris Cooper) explains to Orlean (Meryl Streep), “Adaptation’s a profound process. It means you figure out how to thrive in the world” (Kaufman and Kaufman, 35). But Laroche’s definition of adaptation, which the movie endorses and dramatises, is only half the story. In fact evolutionary science shows that nature’s “losers” vastly outnumber nature’s “winners.” As Peter Bowler expresses it in his historical account of the theory of natural selection, “Evolution becomes a process of trial and error based on massive wastage and the death of vast numbers of unfit creatures”(6). Turning the “profound process” of adaptation into a story about the tiny fraction who “figure out how to thrive in the world” has been done before. It manifested itself in Herbert Spencer’s late-nineteenth-century philosophical “adaptation” of Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection, coining the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” Both the scientist Darwin and the philosopher Spencer, as Bowler points out, would have been horrified at how their work was used to justify the rapacious capitalism and harsh social policies of American industry (301). Nonetheless, although by now largely discredited in the academy, the ideology of social Darwinism persists within the broader culture in various watered-down or subterranean forms. Perhaps in the movie’s violent climax when Laroche is killed by an alligator—a creature that represents one of the more impressive examples of adaptation in the natural world—Kaufman is suggesting the darker side to the story of natural selection in which adaptation is not only a story about the mutable and agile orchid that “figure[s] out how to thrive in the world.” There are no guarantees for the tiny fraction of species that do survive, whether they are as perfectly adapted to their environment as orchids and alligators or, for that matter, individuals like Laroche with his uncanny ability to adapt to whatever life throws at him. But after the movie’s violent eruption, which does away not only with Laroche but also Donald (Nicholas Cage) and in effect Orlean, Charlie emerges as the sole survivor, reassuring the viewer that the story of adaptation is about nature’s winners. The darker side to the story of natural selection is subsumed within the movie’s layers of meta-commentary, which make the violence at the movie’s end an ironic device within Charlie’s personal and artistic evolution—a way for him to maintain a critical distance on the Hollywood conventions he has resisted while simultaneously incorporating them into his art. A cinematically effective montage dramatically represents the process of evolution. However, as with the movie’s one-sided account of adaptation, as a story about those who “figure out how to thrive in the world,” this depiction of evolution is framed, both figuratively and literally, by Charlie’s personal growth—as though the logical and inevitable endpoint of the evolutionary process is the human individual. The montage is instigated by Charlie’s questions to himself, “Why am I here? How did I get here?” and concludes with a close-up on the bawling face of a newborn baby, whom the viewer assumes is Charlie (Kaufman and Kaufman, 3). This assumption is reinforced by the next scene, which begins with a close-up on the face of the adult Charlie who is sweating profusely as he struggles to survive a business luncheon with the attractive studio executive Valerie (Tilda Swinton). Although Orlean’s novel doesn’t provide a feminist reading of Darwin, she does alert her readers to the fact that he was a Victorian man and, as such, his science might reflect the prejudices of his day. In discussing Darwin’s particular fondness for his “‘beloved Orchids’” (47), she recounts his experiments to determine how they release their pollen: “He experimented by poking them with needles, camel-hair brushes, bristles, pencils, and his fingers. He discovered that parts were so sensitive that they released pollen upon the slightest touch, but that ‘moderate degrees of violence’ on the less sensitive parts had no effect ….” (48). In contrast to this humorous view of Darwin as the historically situated man of science, the movie depicts Darwin (Bob Yerkes) as the stereotypical Man of Science. Kaufman does incorporate some of Orlean’s discussion of Darwin’s study of orchids, but the portion he uses advances the screenplay’s sexualisation/romanticisation of Orlean’s relationship with Laroche. At an orchid show, Laroche lectures to Orlean about Darwin’s theory that a particular orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, is pollinated by a moth with a twelve-inch proboscis. When Orlean takes exception to Laroche for telling her that proboscis means “nose,” he chides her, “Hey, let’s not get off the subject. This isn’t a pissing contest” (23). After this scene bristling with phallic imagery—and with his female pupil sufficiently chastised—Laroche proceeds to wax poetic about pollination as a “little dance” (24) between flower and insect. “[The] only barometer you have is your heart …” (24) he tells Orlean, who is clearly impressed by the depth of his soliloquy. On the literary and social level, a one-sided reading of adaptation as a positive process may be more justified, although here too one may question what the movie slights or ignores. What about the human ability to adapt to murderous and dehumanising social systems: slavery, fascism, colonialism, and so on? Or, more immediately, even if one acknowledges the writer’s “maturity,” as T.S. Eliot famously phrased it, in “stealing” from his or her source, what about the element of compromise implicit in the concept of adaptation? Several critics question whether the film’s ending, despite the movie’s self-referential ironies, ultimately reinforces the Hollywood formulas it sets out to critique. But only Stuart Klawans of The Nation connects it to the movie’s optimistic, one-sided view of adaptation. “Still,” he concludes, “I’m disappointed by that crashing final act. I wonder about the environmental pressure that must bear down on today’s filmmakers as they struggle to adapt, even when they’re as prodigious as Charlie Kaufman.” Oddly, for a self-reflexive movie about the creative process, it has little to say about the “environmental pressure” of the studio system and its toll on the artist. There are incisive character sketches of studio types, such as the attractive and painfully earnest executive, Valerie, who hires Charlie to write the screenplay for Orlean’s book, or Charlie’s sophomoric agent, Marty (Ron Livingston), who daydreams about anal sex with the women in his office while talking to his client. And, of course, a central plot line of the movie is the competition, at least as one of them sees it, between Charlie and his twin brother Donald. Charlie, the self-conscious Hollywood screenwriter who is stymied by his success and notions of artistic integrity, suffers defeat after humiliating defeat as Donald, the screenwriting neophyte who will stoop to any cliché or cheap device to advance his screenplay, receives a six-figure contract for his first effort: a formulaic and absurd serial-killer movie, The Three, that their mother admires as a cross between Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Because of the emotional arc of the brothers’ personal relationship, however, any qualms about Donald selling out look churlish at best. When Donald excitedly tells his brother about his good fortune, Charlie responds approvingly, rather than with one of the snide putdowns the viewer has grown to expect from him, signaling not only Charlie’s acceptance of his brother but the new awareness that will enable him to overcome his writer’s block. While there is a good deal of satire directed at the filmmaking process—as distinct from the studio system—it is ultimately a cherishing sort of satire. It certainly doesn’t reach the level of indictment found in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) or Joel and Ethan Cohen’s Barton Fink (1991) for example. But the movie most frequently compared to Adaptation is Frederico Fellini’s masterpiece of auteurist self-reflexivity, 8 ½ (1963). This is high praise indeed, although the enthusiastic endorsements of some film critics do not stop there. Writing for the Observer, Philip French cites such New Wave movies as Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963), Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (1973), and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express (1966). However, in passing, he qualifies the comparison by pointing out that, unlike the French auteurs, “Kaufman and Jonze are concerned with turning someone else’s idea into a piece of commercial cinema.” Some would argue the filmmakers’ ability to playfully adapt Orlean’s artistry to the commercial environment of Hollywood is what saves Adaptation’s meta-commentary from the didactic and elitist seriousness of many of its literary and cinematic precursors (Miller). This is a valid preference, but it slights the “environmental pressure” of the new studio system and how it sets the terms for success and failure. While Fellini and the New Wave auteurs were not entirely free of commercial cinema, they could claim an opposition to it that Kaufman, even if he wanted to, cannot. Film scholar Timothy Corrigan argues that the convergence of the new media, in particular television and film, radically alters the meaning and function of “independent” cinema: a more flexible and varied distribution network has responded to contemporary audiences, who now have the need and the power to pick and choose among the glut of images in contemporary television and film culture. Within this climate and under these conditions, the different, the more peculiar, the controversial enter the marketplace not as an opposition but as a revision and invasion of an audience market defined as too large and diverse by the dominant blockbusters. (25-6) Corrigan’s argument explains the qualitative differences between the sense of adaptation employed by the older auteurs and the new sense of adaptation required by contemporary auteurs fully incorporated within the new studio system and its new distribution technologies. Not everyone is disturbed by this state of affairs. A. O. Scott, writing for the New York Times, notes a similar “two-tier system” in Hollywood—with studios producing lavish “critic- and audience-proof franchise pictures” on the one hand and “art” or “independent” movies on the other—which strikes him as “a pretty good arrangement.” Based on what Adaptation does and does not say about the studio system, one imagines that Kaufman would, ultimately, concur. In contrast, however, a comment by Michel Gondry, the director Kaufman worked with on Human Nature (2001), gives a better indication of the costs incurred by adapting to the current system when he expresses his frustration with the delayed release of the picture by New Line Cinema: ‘First they were, like, “O.K. if Rush Hour 2 [Brett Ratner, 2001] does good business, then we’re in a good position,”’ Mr. Gondry said. ‘You fight to do something original and then you depend on Rush Hour 2 for the success of your movie? It’s like you are the last little thing on the bottom of the scale and you’re looking up watching the planets colliding. It’s been so frustrating.’ (Rochlin) No doubt, when Fellini and Godard thought about doing “something original” they also had considerable obstacles to face. But at least the success of 8 ½ or Le Mepris wasn’t dependent upon the success of films like Rush Hour 2. Given this sort of environmental pressure, as Klawans and Corrigan remind us, we need to keep in mind what might be lost as the present system’s winners adapt to what is generally understood as “a pretty good arrangement.” Another indication of the environmental pressure on artists in Hollywood’s present arrangement comes from Adaptation’s own story of adaptation—not the one told by Kaufman or his movie, but the one found in Susan Orlean’s account of how she and her novel were “adapted” by the filmmakers. Although Orlean is an enthusiastic supporter of the movie, when she first read the screenplay, she thought, “the whole thing ‘seemed completely nuts’” and wondered whether she wanted “that much visibility” (Boxer). She decided to give her consent on the condition they not use her name. This solution, however, wouldn’t work because she didn’t want her book “in a movie with someone else’s name on it” (Boxer). Forced to choose between an uncomfortable visibility and the loss of authorship, she chose the former. Of course, her predicament is not Kaufman’s fault; nonetheless, it is important to stress that the process of adaptation did not enforce a similar “choice” upon him. Her situation, like that of Gondry, indicates that successful adaptation to any system is a story of losing as well as winning. References Astruc, Alexandre. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: Le Camera-Stylo.” Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Ed. Timothy Corrigan. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999, 158-62. Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003. Boxer, Sarah. “New Yorker Writer Turns Gun-Toting Floozy? That’s Showbiz.” The New York Times 9 Dec. 2002, sec. E. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema without Walls. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. Eliot, T.S. “Philip Massinger.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1922. http://www.bartleby.com/> French, Philip. “The Towering Twins.” The Observer 2 Mar. 2003. Guardian Unlimited. 12 Feb. 2007. http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review>. Kaufman, Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Adaptation: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. Klawans, Stuart. “Adeptations.” The Nation 23 Dec. 2002. 12 Febr. 2007. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021223/klawans>. Lyman, Rick. “A Jumble of Categories for Screenwriter Awards.” The New York Times 21 Feb. 2003. McKee, Robert. “Critical Commentary.” Adaptation: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. 131-5. Miller, Laura. “This Is the Way We Live Now.” The New York Times Magazine 17 Nov. 2002. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Rochlin, Margy. “From an Untamed Mind Springs an Ape Man.” The New York Times 7 Apr. 2002. Schiff, Stephen. “All Right, You Try: Adaptation Isn’t Easy.” The New York Times 1 Dec. 2002. Scott, A. O. “As Requested My Thoughts on the Oscars.” The New York Times 9 Feb. 2003. Stoltzfus, Ben. “Shooting with the Pen.” Writing in a Film Age. Ed. Keith Cohen. Niwot, CO: UP of Colorado, 1991. 246-63.     Citation reference for this article  MLA Style Rizzo, Sergio. "Adaptation and the Art of Survival." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>. APA Style Rizzo, S. (May 2007) "Adaptation and the Art of Survival," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Rayman, Jennifer. "The Politics and Practice of Voice: Representing American Sign Language on the Screen in Two Recent Television Crime Dramas." M/C Journal 13, no. 3 (2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.273.

Full text

Abstract:

Introduction In this paper, I examine the practices of representing Deaf ‘voices’’ to hearing audiences in two recent US television crime dramas. More literally I look at how American Sign Language is framed and made visible on the screen through various production decisions. Drawing examples from an episode of CSI: New York that aired in December 2006 and an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent that aired in April 2007, I examine how the practices of filming Deaf people and the use of American Sign Language intersect with the production of a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen. The problem of representing a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen is akin to the problem of representing other minority languages. Film and television producers in the United States have to make choices about whether the majority audience of English speakers will have access to the minority language or not. In the face of this dilemma media producers have taken several approaches: subtitling foreign speech, translating foreign speech through other characters, or leaving the language inaccessible except to those who use it. The additional difficulty with representing national sign languages is that both the language and the recording medium are visual. Sometimes, filmmakers make the choice of leaving some portions of the signed dialogue inaccessible to a non-signing hearing audience. On the one hand this choice could indicate a devaluing of the signed communication, as its specific content is considered irrelevant to the plot. On the other hand it could indicate that Deaf people have a right to be visible on television using their own language without accommodating hearing people. A number of choices made in the filming and editing can subtly undermine positive representations of Deaf ‘voices’ particularly to a Deaf audience. These choices often construct an image of sign languages as objectified, exoticised, disjointed, incomplete, or a code for spoken language. Simple choices such as using simultaneous speaking and signing by Deaf characters, cropping the scene, translating or not translating the dialogue have powerful implications for the ways that Deaf ‘voices’ are becoming more visible in the 21st century. Typical filming and editing conventions effectively silence the Deaf ‘voice.’ Over 20 years ago, in the comprehensive book, Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry (1988), Schuchman’s complaint that the filming and editing techniques of the day often did not attend to preserving the visibility and comprehensibility of sign language eon the screen, still applies today. As editing techniques have evolved over the years, fr om reliance on wide and medium shots to frequent intercutting of close-ups, the tendency to cut sign language off the screen, and out of the comprehensible view of the audience, may have even increased. Recent Portrayals of Deaf People on Television During one television season in the United States between August 2006 and April 2007, 30 episodes of six different serial television programs portrayed signing Deaf characters. Three of these programs had on-going Deaf characters that appeared in a number of episodes throughout the season, while three other programs portrayed Deaf people in a one-off episode with a Deaf theme. Initial air date for the season Program and Season # of Episodes 1 14 Aug. 2006 Weeds, Season 2 5 2 20 Sep. 2006 Jericho, Season 1 13 3 28 Jan. 2007 The L Word, Season 4 9 Table 1. Dramas with Ongoing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Season Initial air date Program, Season, Episode Episode Title 1 13 Dec. 2006 CSI: New York, Season 3, Episode 12 “Silent Night” 2 3 Apr. 2007 Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Season 6, Episode 18 "Silencer" 3 12 Apr. 2007 Scrubs, Season 6, Episode 16 “My Words of Wisdom” Table 2. One-off Episodes with Signing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Seasons Ironically, although the shows with ongoing characters sometimes allow the Deafness of the character to be incidental to the character, it is only the one-off crime dramas that show Deaf people relating with one another as members of a vibrant community and culture based in sign language. Often, in the ongoing series, the characters remain isolated from the Deaf community and their interactions with other Deaf people are sparse or non-existent. For example, out of the 27 episodes with an ongoing Deaf character only two episodes of The L-Word have more than one Deaf character portrayed. In both Weeds and The L-Word the Deaf character is the love interest of one of the hearing characters, while in Jericho, the Deaf character is the sister of one of the main hearing characters. In these episodes though some of realities about Deaf people’s lives are touched on as they relate to the hearing characters, the reality of signing Deaf people’s social lives in the Deaf community is left absent and they are depicted primarily interacting with hearing people. The two episodes, from CSI: New York, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, focus on the controversial theme of cochlear implants in the Deaf community. Though it is true that generally the signing Deaf community in the U.S.A. sees cochlear implants as a threat to their community, there is no record of this controversy ever motivating violent criminal acts or murder as portrayed in these episodes. In the episode of CSI: New York entitled “Silent Night” a conflict between a young Deaf man and Deaf woman who were formerly romantically involved is portrayed. The murdered young woman who comes from a Deaf family does not want her Deaf baby to have a cochlear implant while the killer ex-boyfriend who has a cochlear implant believes that it is the best option for his child. The woman’s Deaf parents are involved in the investigation. The episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, entitled “Silencer,” is also ultimately about a conflict between a Deaf man and a Deaf woman over cochlear implants. In the end, it is revealed that the Deaf woman is exploring the possibility of a cochlear implant. Her boyfriend projecting the past hurt of his hearing sister leaving him behind to go off and live her own life, doesn’t want his girlfriend to leave him once she gains more hearing. So he shoots the cochlear implant surgeon in the hand to prevent him from being able to perform the surgery. Then he accidentally kills him by crushing his voice box to prevent him from screaming. Analyzing Two Crime Dramas In both television dramas, the filmmakers use both sound and video editing techniques to mark the experiential difference between hearing and Deaf characters. In comparing the two dramas two techniques are evident : muting/distorting sounds and extreme close-ups on lips talking or hands signing. Though these techniques may heighten awareness of deaf experience to a non-signing audience they also point to a disabling stereotyping of the experience of being Deaf as lacking — framing their experience as hearing loss rather than Deaf gain (Bauman & Murray; Shakespeare 199). By objectifying sign language through extreme close ups American Sign Language is portrayed as something strange and unusual that separates Deaf signers from hearing speakers. The auditory silences can either jolt the hearing non-signer into awareness of the sensory aspect of sound that is missing or it can jolt them into awareness of the visual world that they often don’t really see. In the opening few scenes of the episodes both CSI: New York and Law and Order: Criminal Intent use sound editing alternately muting or distorting sounds as they cut between a ‘deaf’ auditory perspective and a ‘hearing’ perspective on the action as it unfolds. Even though the sound editing does play a part in the portrayal of Deaf people’s experience as lacking sound, the more important aspects of film production to attend to are the visual aspects where Deaf people are seen authentically signing in their own language. Scene Analysis Methodology In taking a closer look at a scene from each episode we can see exactly how the filming and editing techniques work to create an image of sign language. I have chosen comparable scenes where a Deaf individual is interviewed or interrogated by the police using a sign language interpreter. In each scene it can be assumed that all the communication is happening in both English and ASL through an interpreter, so at all times some signing should be occurring. In transcribing the scenes, I noted each point when the editor spliced different camera shots adjacent to each other. Because of the different visual aesthetics in each program where one relied heavily on continuous panning shots, I also noted where the camera shifted focus from one character to another marking the duration of screen time for each character. This allowed for a better comparison between the two programs. In my transcripts, I included both glosses of the ASL signs visible on the screen as well as the flow of the spoken English on the audio track. This enabled me to count how many separate shifts in character screen time segments contained signing and how much of these contained completely visible signing in medium shots. CSI:NY Witness Interview Scene In the first signing scene, Gina (played by Marlee Matlin) is brought in for an interview with Detective Taylor and a uniformed officer interpreter. The scene opens with a medium shot on Detective Taylor as he asks her, “What do you think woke you up?” The shot cuts to an extreme close up of her face and hands and pans to only the hands as she signs FOOTSTEPS. Then the scene shifts to an over the shoulder medium shot of the interpreter where we can still see her signing VIBRATIONS and it cuts to a close up of her face as she signs ALISON NOISE. Though these signs are cropped, they are still decipherable as they happen near the face. Throughout this sequence the interpreter voices “Footsteps, I felt vibrations. I thought maybe it was Alison.” Next we have a close-up on Detective Taylor’s face as he asks her why her family moved and whether she had family in the area. During his question the camera shifts to a close up reaction of Gina listening and then back to a close up on Taylor’s face, and then to a medium shot of the interpreter translating the last part of the question. Next, while Gina responds the camera quickly cuts from a medium shot to a close-up side view of the hands to a close-up bird’s eye view of the hands to a close up of Gina’s face with most of the signs outside of the frame. See the transcript below: [medium shot] NOT PLAN HAVE MORE CHILDREN,[close-up side view of hands] PREGNANT,[close-up from bird’s eye view] DECIDE RAISE ELIZABETH[close-up Gina’s face signs out of frame] SAFE While this sequence plays out the interpreter voices, “My husband and I weren’t planning on having any more children. When I got pregnant my husband and I decided to raise Elizabeth outside of the city where it’s safe.” The kind of quick cuts between close-ups, medium shots and reaction shots of other characters sets the visual aesthetic for this episode of CSI: NY. In this particular clip, the camera shifts shot angles no less than 50 times in the space of one minute and 34 seconds. Yet there are only 12 conversational turns back and forth between the two characters. This makes for a number of intercut reaction shots, interpreter shots as well as close-ups and other angles on the same character. If only counting shifts in screen time on a particular character, there are still 37 shifts in focus between different characters during the scene. Out of the 22 shots that contain some element of signing — we only see a medium shot with all of the signing space visible 4 times for approximately 2 seconds each. Even though signing is occurring during every communication via the interpreter or Gina, less than half of the shots contain signs and 18 of these are close ups from various angles. The close ups in this clip varied from close-ups on the face, which cut out part of the signs, to close ups on the hands caught in different perspectives from a front, side, top or even table top reflected upside-down view. Some of the other shots were over the back shoulder of Gina catching a rear view of the signs as the camera is aimed in a medium shot of the detective and interpreter. The overall result from a signing perspective is a disjointed jumble of signs leaving the impression of chaos and heightened emotion. In some ways this can be seen as an exoticisation of the signs making them look surreal, drawing attention to the body parts displaying the signs and objectifying them. Such objectification may seem harmless to a non-signing hearing audience or media producer as a mere materializing of the felt amazement at signed communication moving at such a pace. But if we were to propose a hypothetical parallel situation where a Korean character is speaking in her native tongue and we are shown extreme close ups and quick cuts jumping from an image of the lips moving to the tongue tapping the teeth to a side close up of the mouth to an overhead image from the top of the head – this type of portrayal would immediately be felt to be a de-humanization of Korean people and likely labeled racist. In the case of sign language, is it merely thought of as visual artistry? Law & Order: Suspect Interrogation Scene Law & Order: Criminal Intent has a different film aesthetic. The scene selected is an interview with a potential suspect in the murder of a cochlear implant surgeon. The Deaf man, Larry is an activist and playwright. He is sitting at a table with his lawyer across from the male detective, Goren, and the interpreter with the female detective, Eames, standing to the side. Unlike the CSI: NY scene there are no quick cuts between shots. Instead the camera takes longer shots panning around the table. Even when there are cuts to slightly different angles, the camera continues to pan in the same direction as the previous shot giving the illusion that almost the entire scene is one shot. In this 45-second scene, there are only five cuts to different camera angles. However, the act of panning the camera around the room even in a continuous shot serves to break up the scene further as the camera pulls focus zooming in on different characters while it pans. For the purposes of this analysis, in addition to dividing the scene at shifts in camera angles performed through editing, I also divide the scenes at shifts in camera angles focusing on different characters. As the camera moves to focus on a different interlocutor (serving the same purpose as a shift done through editing), this brings the total shifts in camera angles to ten. At several points throughout this Law & Order: CI episode, the cinematographer uses the technique of zooming into an extreme close-up on the hands and then pulling out to see the signer. But in this particular scene all of the visible signed sequences are filmed in medium shots. While this is positive because we can actually see the whole message including hand and face, the act of panning behind the backs of seated characters while Larry is signing blocks some of his message just as much as shifting the edit to a reaction shot would do. Of the ten shots, only one shot does not contain any signing: when Detective Eames reacts to Larry’s demands and incredulously says, “A Deaf cop?” While all of the other shots contain some signing, there are only two signed interchanges that are not interrupted by some sort of body block. Ironically, both of these shots are when the hearing detective is speaking. The first is the opening shot. The camera, in a wide shot on 5 characters, opens on their reflections in the mirrored window located in the interview room. As the camera pulls back into the room, it spins around and pans across Detective Eames’ face to settle on Detective Goran. While Goran begins talking the shot widens out to include the interpreter sitting next to him and catch the signed translation. Goran says, “Larry? There’s a lot of people pointing their finger at you.” With a bit of lag time the interpreter signs: A-LOT PEOPLE THINK YOU GUILTY. Overall Comparison of the Two Scenes For both scenes there were only four segments with unobstructed medium shots of signers in the act of signing. In the case of Law & Order: CI this might be considered a good showing as there were only nine segments in the entire scene and 8 contained signing. Thus potentially yielding 50% visibility of the signs during the entire stream of the conversation (however not all signs were actually fully visible). In the case of CSI: NY, with its higher ratio of segments split by different camera shots, 22 segments contained signing, yielding a ratio of 18% visibility of signs. Though this analysis is limited to only one scene for comparison it does reveal that both episodes prioritize the spoken language stream of information over the sign language stream of information. CSI: New York Law & Order: CI Time duration of the clip 1 min 34 sec 45 sec # shifts in character conversational turns 12 times 10 times # edited camera shots to different angle 50 5 #shifts in screen time of the characters (edited or panned) 37 9 Total # screen time segments with signing 22 8 # medium shot segments with signing fully visible 4 4 # segments containing close ups of signs, cropped off signs or blocked 18 4 Table 3. Count comparison between the two scenes Filmmakers come from a hearing framework of film production where language equals sound on an audio track. Within that framework sound editing is separate from video editing and can provide continuity between disjointed visual shots. But this kind of reliance on sound to provide the linguistic continuity fails when confronted with representing American Sign Language on the screen. The sound stream of translated English words may provide continuity for the hearing audience, but if left to rely on what is available in the visual modality Deaf viewers may have to rely on closed captioning to understand the dialog even when it is portrayed in their own language. Disjointed scenes showing quick cuts between different angles on a signed dialog and flashing between reacting interlocutors leaves the signing audience with a view on a silenced protagonist. Recommendations How can media producers give voice to sign language on the screen? First there needs to be an awareness and concern amongst these same media producers that there is actually value in taking the care required to make sign language visible and accessible to the signing Deaf audience and perhaps raise more awareness among the non-signing hearing audience. It may be entirely possible to maintain a similar visual aesthetic to the programs and still make sign language visible. Hearing producers could learn from Deaf cinema and the techniques being developed there by emerging Deaf film producers (Christie, Durr, and Wilkins). In both examples used above careful planning and choreography of the filming and editing of the scenes would make this possible. With the quick cutting style of frequent close up shots found in CSI: NY, it would be necessary to reduce the number of close ups or make sure they were wide enough to include enough of the signs to maintain intelligibility as with signs that are made near the face. In addition, medium shots of the interpreter or the interpreter and the hearing speaker would have to become the norm in order to make the interpreted spoken language accessible as well. Over the shoulder shots of signers are possible as well, as long as the back of the signer does not obscure understanding of the signs. In order to avoid objectification of sign language, extreme close-ups of the hands should be avoided as it de-humanizes sign languages and reduces language to animalistic hand gestures. In addition, with adopting the visual aesthetic of panning continuous shots such as those found in Law and Order: CI, care would need to be taken not to obstruct the signs while circling behind other participants. Other possibilities remain such as adapting the visual aesthetic of 24 (another United States crime drama) where multiple shots taking place simultaneously are projected onto the screen. In this manner reaction shots and full shots of the signing can both be visible simultaneously. Aside from careful choreography, as suggested in previous work by scholars of Deaf cinema, (Schuchman, Hollywood; Jane Norman qtd. in Hartzell), hearing media producers would need to rely on excellent ASL/Deaf culture informants during all stages of the production; typically, cinematographers, directors and editors likely will not know how to make sure that signs are not obscured. Simultaneous signing and talking by Deaf and hearing characters should be avoided as this method of communication only confirms in the minds of hearing signers that sign language is merely a code for spoken language and not a language in and of itself. Instead, hearing media producers can more creatively rely on interpreters in mixed settings or subtitling when conversations occur between Deaf characters. Subtitling is already a marker for foreign language and may alert non-signing hearing audiences to the fact that sign language is a full language not merely a code for English. Using these kinds of techniques as a matter of policy when filming signing Deaf people will enable the signing voice some of the visibility that the Deaf community desires. Acknowledgements This article is based on work originally presented at the conference “Deaf Studies Today!”, April 2008, at Utah Valley State University in Orem, Utah, USA. I am grateful for feedback that I received from participants at this presentation. An earlier version of this article is published as part of the conference proceedings Deaf Studies Today! Mosaic edited by Brian K. Eldredge, Flavia Fleischer, and Douglas Stringham. References Bauman, H-Dirksen, and Joseph Murray. "Reframing from Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain." Deaf Studies Digital Journal (Fall 2009). < http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/ >. Chaiken, Ilene (writer). The L Word. Television series. Season 4. 2007. Chbosky, S., J. Schaer, and J.E. Steinbert (creators) Jericho. Television series. Season 1 & 2. 2006-2007. Christie, Karen, Patti Durr, and Dorothy M. Wilkins. “CLOSE-UP: Contemporary Deaf Filmmakers.” Deaf Studies Today 2 (2006): 91-104. Hartzell, Adam. “The Deaf Film Festival.” The Film Journal (May 2003) < http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue5/deaf.html >. Kohan, J. (creator), M. Burley (producer). Weeds. Television series. Lawrence, B. (creator), V. Nelli Jr. (director). “My Words of Wisdom.” Scrubs. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 16. 12 Apr. 2007. Lenkov, P. M., and S. Humphrey (writers), A.E. Zulker (story), and R. Bailey (director). “Silent Night.” CSI: New York. Television series episode. Season 3, episode 12. CBS, 13 Dec. 2006. O'Shea, M. (writer), D. White (director), M.R. Thewlis (producer). "Silencer." Law and Order Criminal Intent. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 18. New York: Universal, 3 April 2007. Schuchman, John. S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Entertainment Industry. Urbana & Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. 1988. ———. “The Silent Film Era: Silent Films, NAD Films, and the Deaf Community's Response.” Sign Language Studies 4.3 (2004): 231-238.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. "The Many Transformations of Albert Facey." M/C Journal 19, no. 4 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1132.

Full text

Abstract:

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth” (Semmler) and “extremely powerful description of Gallipoli” (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an “Enduring Classic.” Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey’s “extraordinary memory” and “ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision” (“NBC” 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press’s ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey’s success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey’s manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book’s production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer’s PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey’s life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).A hundred reprints and two million readers on from initial publication, A Fortunate Life continues to rate among the most appreciated Australian books of all time. Commenting on a reader survey in 2012, writer and critic Marieke Hardy enthused, “I really loved it [. . .] I felt like I was seeing a part of my country and my country’s history through a very human voice . . .” (First Tuesday Book Club). Registering a transformed reading, Hardy’s reference to Australian “history” is unproblematically juxtaposed with amused delight in an autobiography that invents and embellishes: not believing “half” of what Facey wrote, she insists he was foremost a yarn spinner. While the work’s status as a witness account has become less authoritative over time, it seems appreciation of the author’s imagination and literary skill has increased (Williamson). A Fortunate Life has been read more commonly as an uncomplicated, first-hand account, such that editor Wendy Jenkins felt it necessary to refute as an “utter mirage” that memoir is “transferred to the page by an act of perfect dictation.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue of life narratives that some “autobiographical claims [. . .] can be verified or discounted by recourse to documentation outside the text. But autobiographical truth is a different matter” (16). With increased access to archives, especially digitised personnel records, historians have asserted that key elements of Facey’s autobiography are incorrect or “fabricated” (Roberts), including his enlistment in 1914 and participation in the Gallipoli Landing on 25 April 1915. We have researched various sources relevant to Facey’s early years and war service, including hard-copy medical and repatriation records released in 2012, and find A Fortunate Life in a range of ways deviates from “documentation outside of the text,” revealing intriguing, layered storytelling. We agree with Smith and Watson that “autobiographical acts” are “anything but simple or transparent” (63). As “symbolic interactions in the world,” they are “culturally and historically specific” and “engaged in an argument about identity” (63). Inevitably, they are also “fractured by the play of meaning” (63). Our approach, therefore, includes textual analysis of Facey’s drafts alongside the published narrative and his medical records. We do not privilege institutional records as impartial but rather interpret them in terms of their hierarchies and organisation of knowledge. This leads us to speculate on alternative readings of A Fortunate Life as an illness narrative that variously resists and subscribes to dominant cultural plots, tropes, and attitudes. Facey set about writing in earnest in the 1970s and generated (at least) three handwritten drafts, along with a typescript based on the third draft. FACP produced its own working copy from the typescript. Our comparison of the drafts offers insights into the production of Facey’s final text and the otherwise “hidden” roles of editors as transformers and enablers (Munro 1). The notion that a working man with basic literacy could produce a highly readable book in part explains Facey’s enduring appeal. His grandson and literary executor, John Rose, observed in early interviews that Facey was a “natural storyteller” who had related details of his life at every opportunity over a period of more than six decades (McLeod). Jenkins points out that Facey belonged to a vivid oral culture within which he “told and retold stories to himself and others,” so that they eventually “rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.” A mystique was thereby established that “time” was Albert Facey’s “first editor” (Jenkins). The publisher expressly aimed to retain Facey’s voice, content, and meaning, though editing included much correcting of grammar and punctuation, eradication of internal inconsistencies and anomalies, and structural reorganisation into six sections and 68 chapters. We find across Facey’s drafts a broadly similar chronology detailing childhood abandonment, life-threatening incidents, youthful resourcefulness, physical prowess, and participation in the Gallipoli Landing. However, there are also shifts and changed details, including varying descriptions of childhood abuse at a place called Cave Rock; the introduction of (incompatible accounts of) interstate boxing tours in drafts two and three which replace shearing activities in Draft One; divergent tales of Facey as a world-standard athlete, league footballer, expert marksman, and powerful swimmer; and changing stories of enlistment and war service (see Murphy and Nile, “Wounded”; “Naked”).Jenkins edited those sections concerned with childhood and youth, while Coffey attended to Facey’s war and post-war life. Drawing on C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, Coffey introduced specificity to the draft’s otherwise vague descriptions of battle and amended errors, such as Facey’s claim to have witnessed Lord Kitchener on the beach at Gallipoli. Importantly, Coffey suggested the now famous title, “A Fortunate Life,” and encouraged the author to alter the ending. When asked to suggest a title, Facey offered “Cave Rock” (Interview)—the site of his violent abuse and humiliation as a boy. Draft One concluded with Facey’s repatriation from the war and marriage in 1916 (106); Draft Two with a brief account of continuing post-war illness and ultimate defeat: “My war injuries caught up with me again” (107). The submitted typescript concludes: “I have often thought that going to War has caused my life to be wasted” (Typescript 206). This ending differs dramatically from the redemptive vision of the published narrative: “I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back” (412).In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that literary markets exist for stories of “narrative wreckage” (196) that are redeemed by reconciliation, resistance, recovery, or rehabilitation, which is precisely the shape of Facey’s published life story and a source of its popularity. Musing on his post-war experiences in A Fortunate Life, Facey focuses on his ability to transform the material world around him: “I liked the challenge of building up a place from nothing and making a success where another fellow had failed” (409). If Facey’s challenge was building up something from nothing, something he could set to work on and improve, his life-writing might reasonably be regarded as a part of this broader project and desire for transformation, so that editorial interventions helped him realise this purpose. Facey’s narrative was produced within a specific zeitgeist, which historian Joy Damousi notes was signalled by publication in 1974 of Bill Gammage’s influential, multiply-reprinted study of front-line soldiers, The Broken Years, which drew on the letters and diaries of a thousand Great War veterans, and also the release in 1981 of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, for which Gammage was the historical advisor. The story of Australia’s war now conceptualised fallen soldiers as “innocent victims” (Damousi 101), while survivors were left to “compose” memories consistent with their sacrifice (Thomson 237–54). Viewing Facey’s drafts reminds us that life narratives are works of imagination, that the past is not fixed and memory is created in the present. Facey’s autobiographical efforts and those of his publisher to improve the work’s intelligibility and relevance together constitute an attempt to “objectify the self—to present it as a knowable object—through a narrative that re-structures [. . .] the self as history and conclusions” (Foster 10). Yet, such histories almost invariably leave “a crucial gap” or “censored chapter.” Dennis Foster argues that conceiving of narration as confession, rather than expression, “allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning” (10); we believe a significant lacuna in Facey’s life writing is intimated by its various transformations.In a defining episode, A Fortunate Life proposes that Facey was taken from Gallipoli on 19 August 1915 due to wounding that day from a shell blast that caused sandbags to fall on him, crush his leg, and hurt him “badly inside,” and a bullet to the shoulder (348). The typescript, however, includes an additional but narratively irreconcilable date of 28 June for the same wounding. The later date, 19 August, was settled on for publication despite the author’s compelling claim for the earlier one: “I had been blown up by a shell and some 7 or 8 sandbags had fallen on top of me, the day was the 28th of June 1915, how I remembered this date, it was the day my brother Roy had been killed by a shell burst.” He adds: “I was very ill for about six weeks after the incident but never reported it to our Battalion doctor because I was afraid he would send me away” (Typescript 205). This account accords with Facey’s first draft and his medical records but is inconsistent with other parts of the typescript that depict an uninjured Facey taking a leading role in fierce fighting throughout July and August. It appears, furthermore, that Facey was not badly wounded at any time. His war service record indicates that he was removed from Gallipoli due to “heart troubles” (Repatriation), which he also claims in his first draft. Facey’s editors did not have ready access to military files in Canberra, while medical files were not released until 2012. There existed, therefore, virtually no opportunity to corroborate the author’s version of events, while the official war history and the records of the State Library of Western Australia, which were consulted, contain no reference to Facey or his war service (Interview). As a consequence, the editors were almost entirely dependent on narrative logic and clarifications by an author whose eyesight and memory had deteriorated to such an extent he was unable to read his amended text. A Fortunate Life depicts men with “nerve sickness” who were not permitted to “stay at the Front because they would be upsetting to the others, especially those who were inclined that way themselves” (350). By cross referencing the draft manuscripts against medical records, we can now perceive that Facey was regarded as one of those nerve cases. According to Facey’s published account, his wounds “baffled” doctors in Egypt and Fremantle (353). His medical records reveal that in September 1915, while hospitalised in Egypt, his “palpitations” were diagnosed as “Tachycardia” triggered by war-induced neuroses that began on 28 June. This suggests that Facey endured seven weeks in the field in this condition, with the implication being that his debility worsened, resulting in his hospitalisation. A diagnosis of “debility,” “nerves,” and “strain” placed Facey in a medical category of “Special Invalids” (Butler 541). Major A.W. Campbell noted in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1916 that the war was creating “many cases of little understood nervous and mental affections, not only where a definite wound has been received, but in many cases where nothing of the sort appears” (323). Enlisted doctors were either physicians or surgeons and sometimes both. None had any experience of trauma on the scale of the First World War. In 1915, Campbell was one of only two Australian doctors with any pre-war experience of “mental diseases” (Lindstrom 30). On staff at the Australian Base Hospital at Heliopolis throughout the Gallipoli campaign, he claimed that at times nerve cases “almost monopolised” the wards under his charge (319). Bearing out Facey’s description, Campbell also reported that affected men “received no sympathy” and, as “carriers of psychic contagion,” were treated as a “source of danger” to themselves and others (323). Credentialed by royal colleges in London and coming under British command, Australian medical teams followed the practice of classifying men presenting “nervous or mental symptoms” as “battle casualties” only if they had also been wounded by “enemy action” (Loughran 106). By contrast, functional disability, with no accompanying physical wounds, was treated as unmanly and a “hysterical” reaction to the pressures of war. Mental debility was something to be feared in the trenches and diagnosis almost invariably invoked charges of predisposition or malingering (Tyquin 148–49). This shifted responsibility (and blame) from the war to the individual. Even as late as the 1950s, medical notes referred to Facey’s condition as being “constitutional” (Repatriation).Facey’s narrative demonstrates awareness of how harshly sufferers were treated. We believe that he defended himself against this with stories of physical injury that his doctors never fully accepted and that he may have experienced conversion disorder, where irreconcilable experience finds somatic expression. His medical diagnosis in 1915 and later life writing establish a causal link with the explosion and his partial burial on 28 June, consistent with opinion at the time that linked concussive blasts with destabilisation of the nervous system (Eager 422). Facey was also badly shaken by exposure to the violence and abjection of war, including hand-to-hand combat and retrieving for burial shattered and often decomposed bodies, and, in particular, by the death of his brother Roy, whose body was blown to pieces on 28 June. (A second brother, Joseph, was killed by multiple bayonet wounds while Facey was convalescing in Egypt.) Such experiences cast a different light on Facey’s observation of men suffering nerves on board the hospital ship: “I have seen men doze off into a light sleep and suddenly jump up shouting, ‘Here they come! Quick! Thousands of them. We’re doomed!’” (350). Facey had escaped the danger of death by explosion or bayonet but at a cost, and the war haunted him for the rest of his days. On disembarkation at Fremantle on 20 November 1915, he was admitted to hospital where he remained on and off for several months. Forty-one other sick and wounded disembarked with him (HMAT). Around one third, experiencing nerve-related illness, had been sent home for rest; while none returned to the war, some of the physically wounded did (War Service Records). During this time, Facey continued to present with “frequent attacks of palpitation and giddiness,” was often “short winded,” and had “heart trouble” (Repatriation). He was discharged from the army in June 1916 but, his drafts suggest, his war never really ended. He began a new life as a wounded Anzac. His dependent and often fractious relationship with the Repatriation Department ended only with his death 66 years later. Historian Marina Larsson persuasively argues that repatriated sick and wounded servicemen from the First World War represented a displaced presence at home. Many led liminal lives of “disenfranchised grief” (80). Stephen Garton observes a distinctive Australian use of repatriation to describe “all policies involved in returning, discharging, pensioning, assisting and training returned men and women, and continuing to assist them throughout their lives” (74). Its primary definition invokes coming home but to repatriate also implies banishment from a place that is not home, so that Facey was in this sense expelled from Gallipoli and, by extension, excluded from the myth of Anzac. Unlike his two brothers, he would not join history as one of the glorious dead; his name would appear on no roll of honour. Return home is not equivalent to restoration of his prior state and identity, for baggage from the other place perpetually weighs. Furthermore, failure to regain health and independence strains hospitality and gratitude for the soldier’s service to King and country. This might be exacerbated where there is no evident or visible injury, creating suspicion of resistance, cowardice, or malingering. Over 26 assessments between 1916 and 1958, when Facey was granted a full war pension, the Repatriation Department observed him as a “neuropathic personality” exhibiting “paroxysmal tachycardia” and “neurocirculatory asthenia.” In 1954, doctors wrote, “We consider the condition is a real handicap and hindrance to his getting employment.” They noted that after “attacks,” Facey had a “busted depressed feeling,” but continued to find “no underlying myocardial disease” (Repatriation) and no validity in Facey’s claims that he had been seriously physically wounded in the war (though A Fortunate Life suggests a happier outcome, where an independent medical panel finally locates the cause of his ongoing illness—rupture of his spleen in the war—which results in an increased war pension). Facey’s condition was, at times, a source of frustration for the doctors and, we suspect, disappointment and shame to him, though this appeared to reduce on both sides when the Repatriation Department began easing proof of disability from the 1950s (Thomson 287), and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1976. This had the effect of shifting public and media scrutiny back onto a system that had until then deprived some “innocent victims of the compensation that was their due” (Garton 249). Such changes anticipated the introduction of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Revisions to the DSM established a “genealogy of trauma” and “panic disorders” (100, 33), so that diagnoses such as “neuropathic personality” (Echterling, Field, and Stewart 192) and “soldier’s heart,” that is, disorders considered “neurotic,” were “retrospectively reinterpreted” as a form of PTSD. However, Alberti points out that, despite such developments, war-related trauma continues to be contested (80). We propose that Albert Facey spent his adult life troubled by a sense of regret and failure because of his removal from Gallipoli and that he attempted to compensate through storytelling, which included his being an original Anzac and seriously wounded in action. By writing, Facey could shore up his rectitude, work ethic, and sense of loyalty to other servicemen, which became necessary, we believe, because repatriation doctors (and probably others) had doubted him. In 1927 and again in 1933, an examining doctor concluded: “The existence of a disability depends entirely on his own unsupported statements” (Repatriation). We argue that Facey’s Gallipoli experiences transformed his life. By his own account, he enlisted for war as a physically robust and supremely athletic young man and returned nine months later to life-long anxiety and ill-health. Publication transformed him into a national sage, earning him, in his final months, the credibility, empathy, and affirmation he had long sought. Exploring different accounts of Facey, in the shape of his drafts and institutional records, gives rise to new interpretations. In this context, we believe it is time for a new edition of A Fortunate Life that recognises it as a complex testimonial narrative and theorises Facey’s deployment of national legends and motifs in relation to his “wounded storytelling” as well as to shifting cultural and medical conceptualisations and treatments of shame and trauma. ReferencesAlberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Butler, A.G. Official History of the Australian Medical Services 1814-1918: Vol I Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1930.Campbell, A.W. “Remarks on Some Neuroses and Psychoses in War.” Medical Journal of Australia 15 April (1916): 319–23.Damousi, Joy. “Why Do We Get So Emotional about Anzac.” What’s Wrong with Anzac. Ed. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. Sydney: UNSWP, 2015. 94–109.Dutton, Geoffrey. “Fremantle Arts Centre Press Publicity.” Australian Book Review May (1981): 16.Eager, R. “War Neuroses Occurring in Cases with a Definitive History of Shell Shock.” British Medical Journal 13 Apr. 1918): 422–25.Echterling, L.G., Thomas A. Field, and Anne L. Stewart. “Evolution of PTSD in the DSM.” Future Directions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Ed. Marilyn P. Safir and Helene S. Wallach. New York: Springer, 2015. 189–212.Facey, A.B. A Fortunate Life. 1981. Ringwood: Penguin, 2005.———. Drafts 1–3. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.———. Transcript. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.First Tuesday Book Club. ABC Splash. 4 Dec. 2012. <http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/1454096/http&>.Foster, Dennis. Confession and Complicity in Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller. London: U of Chicago P, 1995.Fraser, Jane. “CEO Says.” Fremantle Press. 7 July 2015. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/news/3747-ceo-says-9>.Garton, Stephen. The Cost of War: Australians Return. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994.HMAT Aeneas. “Report of Passengers for the Port of Fremantle from Ports Beyond the Commonwealth.” 20 Nov. 1915. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=9870708&S=1>.“Interview with Ray Coffey.” Personal interview. 6 May 2016. Follow-up correspondence. 12 May 2016.Jenkins, Wendy. “Tales from the Backlist: A Fortunate Life Turns 30.” Fremantle Press, 14 April 2011. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/bookclubs/574-tales-from-the-backlist-a-fortunate-life-turns-30>.Keesing, Nancy. ‘An Enduring Classic.’ Australian Book Review (May 1981). FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.King, Noel. “‘I Can’t Go On … I’ll Go On’: Interview with Ray Coffey, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 22 Dec. 2004; 24 May 2006.” Westerly 51 (2006): 31–54.Larsson, Marina. “A Disenfranchised Grief: Post War Death and Memorialisation in Australia after the First World War.” Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009): 79–95.Lindstrom, Richard. “The Australian Experience of Psychological Casualties in War: 1915-1939.” PhD dissertation. Victoria University, Feb. 1997.Loughran, Tracey. “Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories.” Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences 67.1 (2012): 99–119.Lucas, Anne. “Curator’s Notes.” A Fortunate Life. Australian Screen. <http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/a-fortunate-life/notes/>.McLeod, Steve. “My Fortunate Life with Grandad.” Western Magazine Dec. (1983): 8.Munro, Craig. Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing. Brunswick: Scribe, 2015.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “The Naked Anzac: Exposure and Concealment in A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life.” Southerly 75.3 (2015): 219–37.———. “Wounded Storyteller: Revisiting Albert Facey’s Fortunate Life.” Westerly 60.2 (2015): 87–100.“NBC Book Awards.” Australian Book Review Oct. (1981): 1–4.PBL. Prospectus: A Fortunate Life, the Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Bloke. 1–8.Repatriation Records. Albert Facey. National Archives of Australia.Roberts, Chris. “Turkish Machine Guns at the Landing.” Wartime: Official Magazine of the Australian War Memorial 50 (2010). <https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/50/roberts_machinegun/>.Semmler, Clement. “The Way We Were before the Good Life.” Courier Mail 10 Oct. 1981. FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2001. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2010.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. 1994. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2013. Tyquin, Michael. Gallipoli, the Medical War: The Australian Army Services in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915. Kensington: UNSWP, 1993.War Service Records. National Archives of Australia. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/NameSearch/Interface/NameSearchForm.aspx>.Williamson, Geordie. “A Fortunate Life.” Copyright Agency. <http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/a-fortunate-life/>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Brien, Donna Lee. "Powdered, Essence or Brewed?: Making and Cooking with Coffee in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s." M/C Journal 15, no. 2 (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.475.

Full text

Abstract:

Introduction: From Trifle to Tiramisu Tiramisu is an Italian dessert cake, usually comprising sponge finger biscuits soaked in coffee and liquor, layered with a mixture of egg yolk, mascarpone and cream, and topped with sifted cocoa. Once a gourmet dish, tiramisu, which means “pick me up” in Italian (Volpi), is today very popular in Australia where it is available for purchase not only in restaurants and cafés, but also from fast food chains and supermarkets. Recipes abound in cookery books and magazines and online. It is certainly more widely available and written about in Australia than the once ubiquitous English trifle which, comprising variations on the theme of sherry soaked sponge cake, custard and cream, it closely resembles. It could be asserted that its strong coffee taste has enabled the tiramisu to triumph over the trifle in contemporary Australia, yet coffee is also a recurrent ingredient in cakes and icings in nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian cookbooks. Acknowledging that coffee consumption in Australia doubled during the years of the Second World War and maintained high rates of growth afterwards (Khamis; Adams), this article draws on examples of culinary writing during this period of increasing popularity to investigate the use of coffee in cookery as well as a beverage in these mid-twentieth century decades. In doing so, it engages with a lively scholarly discussion on what has driven this change—whether the American glamour and sophistication associated with coffee, post-war immigration from the Mediterranean and other parts of Europe, or the influence of the media and developments in technology (see, for discussion, Adams; Collins et al.; Khamis; Symons). Coffee in Australian Mid-century Epicurean Writing In Australian epicurean writing in the 1950s and 1960s, freshly brewed coffee is clearly identified as the beverage of choice for those with gourmet tastes. In 1952, The West Australian reported that Johnnie Walker, then president of the Sydney Gourmet Society had “sweated over an ordinary kitchen stove to give 12 Melbourne women a perfect meal” (“A Gourmet” 8). Walker prepared a menu comprising: savoury biscuits; pumpkin soup made with a beef, ham, and veal stock; duck braised with “26 ounces of dry red wine, a bottle and a half of curacao and orange juice;” Spanish fried rice; a “French lettuce salad with the Italian influence of garlic;” and, strawberries with strawberry brandy and whipped cream. He served sherry with the biscuits, red wine with the duck, champagne with the sweet, and coffee to finish. It is, however, the adjectives that matter here—that the sherry and wine were dry, not sweet, and the coffee was percolated and black, not instant and milky. Other examples of epicurean writing suggested that fresh coffee should also be unadulterated. In 1951, American food writer William Wallace Irwin who travelled to, and published in, Australia as “The Garrulous Gourmet,” wrote scathingly of the practice of adding chicory to coffee in France and elsewhere (104). This castigation of the French for their coffee was unusual, with most articles at this time praising Gallic gastronomy. Indicative of this is Nancy Cashmore’s travel article for Adelaide’s Advertiser in 1954. Titled “In Dordogne and Burgundy the Gourmet Will Find … A Gastronomic Paradise,” Cashmore details the purchasing, preparation, presentation, and, of course, consumption of excellent food and wine. Good coffee is an integral part of every meal and every day: “from these parts come exquisite pate de fois, truffles, delicious little cakes, conserved meats, wild mushrooms, walnuts and plums. … The day begins with new bread and coffee … nothing is imported, nothing is stale” (6). Memorable luncheons of “hors-d’oeuvre … a meat course, followed by a salad, cheese and possibly a sweet” (6) always ended with black coffee and sometimes a sugar lump soaked in liqueur. In Australian Wines and Food (AW&F), a quarterly epicurean magazine that was published from 1956 to 1960, coffee was regularly featured as a gourmet kitchen staple alongside wine and cheese. Articles on the history, growing, marketing, blending, roasting, purchase, and brewing of coffee during these years were accompanied with full-page advertisements for Bushell’s vacuum packed pure “roaster fresh” coffee, Robert Timms’s “Royal Special” blend for “coffee connoisseurs,” and the Masterfoods range of “superior” imported and locally produced foodstuffs, which included vacuum packed coffee alongside such items as paprika, bay leaves and canned asparagus. AW&F believed Australia’s growing coffee consumption the result of increased participation in quality dining experiences whether in restaurants, the “scores of colourful coffee shops opening their doors to a new generation” (“Coffee” 39) or at home. With regard to domestic coffee drinking, AW&F reported a revived interest in “the long neglected art of brewing good coffee in the home” (“Coffee” 39). Instructions given range from boiling in a pot to percolating and “expresso” (Bancroft 10; “Coffee” 37-9). Coffee was also mentioned in every issue as the only fitting ending to a fine meal, when port, other fortified wines or liqueurs usually accompanied a small demi-tasse of (strong) black coffee. Coffee was also identified as one of the locally produced speciality foods that were flown into the USA for a consulate dinner: “more than a ton of carefully selected foodstuffs was flown to New York by Qantas in three separate airlifts … beef fillet steaks, kangaroo tails, Sydney rock oysters, King prawns, crayfish tails, tropical fruits and passion fruit, New Guinea coffee, chocolates, muscatels and almonds” (“Australian” 16). It is noteworthy that tea is not profiled in the entire run of the magazine. A decade later, in the second half of the 1960s, the new Australian gourmet magazine Epicurean included a number of similar articles on coffee. In 1966 and 1969, celebrity chef and regular Epicurean columnist Graham Kerr also included an illustrated guide to making coffee in two of the books produced alongside his television series, The Graham Kerr Cookbook (125) and The Graham Kerr Cookbook by the Galloping Gourmet (266-67). These included advice to buy freshly roasted beans at least once a week and to invest in an electric coffee grinder. Kerr uses a glass percolator in each and makes an iced (milk) coffee based on double strength cooled brewed coffee. Entertaining with Margaret Fulton (1971) is the first Margaret Fulton cookery book to include detailed information on making coffee from ground beans at home. In this volume, which was clearly aimed at the gourmet-inclined end of the domestic market, Fulton, then cookery editor for popular magazine Woman’s Day, provides a morning coffee menu and proclaims that “Good hot coffee will never taste so good as it does at this time of the day” (90). With the stress on the “good,” Fulton, like Kerr, advises that beans be purchased and ground as they are needed or that only a small amounts of freshly ground coffee be obtained at one time. For Fulton, quality is clearly linked to price—“buy the best you can afford” (90)—but while advising that “Mocha coffee, which comes from Aden and Mocha, is generally considered the best” (90), she also concedes that consumers will “find by experience” (90) which blends they prefer. She includes detailed information on storage and preparation, noting that there are also “dozens of pieces of coffee making equipment to choose from” (90). Fulton includes instructions on how to make coffee for guests at a wedding breakfast or other large event, gently heating home sewn muslin bags filled with finely ground coffee in urns of barely boiling water (64). Alongside these instructions, Fulton also provides recipes for a sophisticated selection of coffee-flavoured desserts such as an iced coffee soufflé and coffee biscuits and meringues that would be perfect accompaniments to her brewed coffees. Cooking with Coffee A prominent and popular advocate of Continental and Asian cookery in Melbourne in the 1950s, Maria Kozslik Donovan wrote and illustrated five cookery books and had a successful international career as a food writer in the 1960s and 1970s. Maria Kozslik was Hungarian by birth and education and was also educated in the USA before marrying Patrick Donovan, an Australian, and migrating to Sydney with him in 1950. After a brief stay there and in Adelaide, they relocated to Melbourne in 1953 where she ran a cookery school and wrote for prominent daily newspaper The Age, penning hundreds of her weekly “Epicure’s Corner: Continental Recipes with Maria Kozslik” column from 1954 to 1961. Her groundbreaking Continental Cookery in Australia (1955) collects some 140 recipes, many of which would appear in her column—predominantly featuring French, Italian, Viennese, and Hungarian dishes, as well as some from the Middle East and the Balkans—each with an informative paragraph or two regarding European cooking and dining practices that set the recipes in context. Continental Cookery in Australia includes one recipe for Mocha Torte (162), which she translates as Coffee Cream Cake and identifies as “the favourite of the gay and party-loving Viennese … [in] the many cafés and sweet shops of Salzburg and Vienna” (162). In this recipe, a plain sponge is cut into four thin layers and filled and covered with a rich mocha cream custard made from egg yolks, sugar and a good measure of coffee, which, when cooled, is beaten into creamed butter. In her recipe for Mocha Cream, Donovan identifies the type of coffee to be used and its strength, specifying that “strong Mocha” be used, and pleading, “please, no essence!” She also suggests that the cake’s top can be decorated with shavings of the then quite exotic “coffee bean chocolate,” which she notes can be found at “most continental confectioners” (162), but which would have been difficult to obtain outside the main urban centres. Coffee also appears in her Café Frappe, where cooled strong black coffee is poured into iced-filled glasses, and dressed with a touch of sugar and whipped cream (165). For this recipe the only other direction that Donovan gives regarding coffee is to “prepare and cool” strong black coffee (165) but it is obvious—from her eschewing of other convenience foods throughout the volume—that she means freshly brewed ground coffee. In contrast, less adventurous cookery books paint a different picture of coffee use in the home at this time. Thus, the more concise Selected Continental Recipes for the Australian Home (1955) by the Australian-born Zelmear M. Deutsch—who, stating that upon marrying a Viennese husband, she became aware of “the fascinating ways of Continental Cuisine” (back cover)—includes three recipes that include coffee. Deutsch’s Mocha Creams (chocolate truffles with a hint of coffee) (76-77), almond meringues filled with coffee whipped cream (89-90), and Mocha Cream Filling comprising butter beaten with chocolate, vanilla, sugar, and coffee (95), all use “powdered” instant coffee, which is, moreover, used extremely sparingly. Her Almond Coffee Torte, for example, requires only half a teaspoon of powdered coffee to a quarter of a pint (300 mls) of cream, which is also sweetened with vanilla sugar (89-90). In contrast to the examples from Fulton and Donovan above (but in common with many cookbooks before and after) Deutsch uses the term “mocha” to describe a mix of coffee and chocolate, rather than to refer to a fine-quality coffee. The term itself is also used to describe a soft, rich brown color and, therefore, at times, the resulting hue of these dishes. The word itself is of late eighteenth century origin, and comes from the eponymous name of a Red Sea port from where coffee was shipped. While Selected Continental Recipes appears to be Deutsch’s first and only book, Anne Mason was a prolific food, wine and travel writer. Before migrating to England in 1958, she was well known in Australia as the presenter of a live weekly television program, Anne Mason’s Home-Tested Recipes, which aired from 1957. She also wrote a number of popular cookery books and had a long-standing weekly column in The Age. Her ‘Home-Tested Recipes’ feature published recipes contributed by readers, which she selected and tested. A number of these were collected in her Treasury of Australian Cookery, published in London in 1962, and included those influenced by “the country cooking of England […] Continental influence […] and oriental ideas” (11). Mason includes numerous recipes featuring coffee, but (as in Deutsch above) almost all are described as mocha-flavoured and listed as such in the detailed index. In Mason’s book, this mocha taste is, in fact, featured more frequently in sweet dishes than any of the other popular flavours (vanilla, honey, lemon, apple, banana, coconut, or passionfruit) except for chocolate. These mocha recipes include cakes: Chocolate-Mocha Refrigerator cake—plain sponge layered with a coffee-chocolate mousse (134), Mocha Gateau Ring—plain sponge and choux pastry puffs filled with cream or ice cream and thickly iced with mocha icing (136) and Mocha Nut Cake—a coffee and cocoa butter cake filled and iced with mocha icing and almonds (166). There are also recipes for Mocha Meringues—small coffee/cocoa-flavoured meringue rosettes joined together in pairs with whipped cream (168), a dessert Mocha Omelette featuring the addition of instant coffee and sugar to the eggs and which is filled with grated chocolate (181) and Mocha-Crunch Ice Cream—a coffee essence-scented ice cream with chocolate biscuit crumbs (144) that was also featured in an ice cream bombe layered with chocolate-rum and vanilla ice creams (152). Mason’s coffee recipes are also given prominence in the accompanying illustrations. Although the book contains only nine pages in full colour, the Mocha Gateau Ring is featured on both the cover and opposite the title page of the book and the Mocha Nut Cake is given an entire coloured page. The coffee component of Mason’s recipes is almost always sourced from either instant coffee (granules or powdered) or liquid coffee essence, however, while the cake for the Mocha Nut Cake uses instant coffee, its mocha icing and filling calls for “3 dessertspoons [of] hot black coffee” (167). The recipe does not, however, describe if this is made from instant, essence, or ground beans. The two other mocha icings both use instant coffee mixed with cocoa, icing sugar and hot water, while one also includes margarine for softness. The recipe for Mocha Cup (202) in the chapter for Children’s Party Fare (198-203), listed alongside clown-shaped biscuits and directions to decorate cakes with sweets, plastic spaceships and dolls, surprisingly comprises a sophisticated mix of grated dark chocolate melted in a pint of “hot black coffee” lightened with milk, sugar and vanilla essence, and topped with cream. There are no instructions for brewing or otherwise making fresh coffee in the volume. The Australian culinary masterwork of the 1960s, The Margaret Fulton Cookbook, which was published in 1968 and sold out its first (record) print run of 100,000 copies in record time, is still in print, with a revised 2004 edition bringing the number of copies sold to over 1.5 million (Brien). The first edition’s cake section of the book includes a Coffee Sponge sandwich using coffee essence in both the cake and its creamy filling and topping (166) and Iced Coffee Cakes that also use coffee essence in the cupcakes and instant coffee powder in the glacé icing (166). A Hazelnut Swiss Roll is filled with a coffee butter cream called Coffee Creme au Beurre, with instant coffee flavouring an egg custard which is beaten into creamed butter (167)—similar to Koszlik’s Mocha Cream but a little lighter, using milk instead of cream and fewer eggs. Fulton also includes an Austrian Chocolate Cake in her Continental Cakes section that uses “black coffee” in a mocha ganache that is used as a frosting (175), and her sweet hot coffee soufflé calls for “1/2 cup strong coffee” (36). Fulton also features a recipe for Irish Coffee—sweetened hot black coffee with (Irish) whiskey added, and cream floated on top (205). Nowhere is fresh or brewed coffee specified, and on the page dedicated to weights, measures, and oven temperatures, instant coffee powder appears on the list of commonly used ingredients alongside flour, sugar, icing sugar, golden syrup, and butter (242). American Influence While the influence of American habits such as supermarket shopping and fast food on Australian foodways is reported in many venues, recognition of its influence on Australian coffee culture is more muted (see, for exceptions, Khamis; Adams). Yet American modes of making and utilising coffee also influenced the Australian use of coffee, whether drunk as beverage or employed as a flavouring agent. In 1956, the Australian Women’s Weekly published a full colour Wade’s Cornflour advertorial of biscuit recipes under the banner, “Dione Lucas’s Manhattan Mochas: The New Coffee Cookie All America Loves, and Now It’s Here” (56). The use of the American “cookie” instead of the Australian “biscuit” is telling here, the popularity of all things American sure to ensure, the advert suggested, that the Mochas (coffee biscuits topped with chocolate icing) would be so popular as to be “More than a recipe—a craze” (56). This American influence can also been seen in cakes and other baked goods made specifically to serve with coffee, but not necessarily containing it. The recipe for Zulu Boys published in The Argus in 1945, a small chocolate and cinnamon cake with peanuts and cornflakes added, is a good example. Reported to “keep moist for some time,” these were “not too sweet, and are especially useful to serve with a glass of wine or a cup of black coffee” (Vesta Junior 9), the recipe a precursor to many in the 1950s and 1960s. Margaret Fulton includes a Spicy Coffee Cake in The Margaret Fulton Cookbook. This is similar to her Cinnamon Tea Cake in being an easy to mix cake topped with cinnamon sugar, but is more robust in flavour and texture with the addition of whole bran cereal, raisins and spices (163). Her “Morning Coffee” section in Entertaining with Margaret Fulton similarly includes a selection of quite strongly flavoured and substantially textured cakes and biscuits (90-92), while her recipes for Afternoon Tea are lighter and more delicate in taste and appearance (85-89). Concluding Remarks: Integration and Evolution, Not Revolution Trusted Tasmanian writer on all matters domestic, Marjorie Bligh, published six books on cookery, craft, home economics, and gardening, and produced four editions of her much-loved household manual under all three of her married names: Blackwell, Cooper and Bligh (Wood). The second edition of At Home with Marjorie Bligh: A Household Manual (published c.1965-71) provides more evidence of how, rather than jettisoning one form in favour of another, Australian housewives were adept at integrating both ground and other more instant forms of coffee into their culinary repertoires. She thus includes instructions on both how to efficiently clean a coffee percolator (percolating with a detergent and borax solution) (312) as well as how to make coffee essence at home by simmering one cup of ground coffee with three cups of water and one cup of sugar for one hour, straining and bottling (281). She also includes recipes for cakes, icings, and drinks that use both brewed and instant coffee as well as coffee essence. In Entertaining with Margaret Fulton, Fulton similarly allows consumer choice, urging that “If you like your coffee with a strong flavour, choose one to which a little chicory has been added” (90). Bligh’s volume similarly reveals how the path from trifle to tiramisu was meandering and one which added recipes to Australian foodways, rather than deleted them. Her recipe for Coffee Trifle has strong similarities to tiramisu, with sponge cake soaked in strong milk coffee and sherry layered with a rich custard made from butter, sugar, egg yolks, and black coffee, and then decorated with whipped cream, glace cherries, and walnuts (169). This recipe precedes published references to tiramisu as, although the origins of tiramisu are debated (Black), references to the dessert only began to appear in the 1980s, and there is no mention of the dish in such authoritative sources as Elizabeth David’s 1954 Italian Food, which features a number of traditional Italian coffee-based desserts including granita, ice cream and those made with cream cheese and rice. By the 1990s, however, respected Australian chef and food researcher, the late Mietta O’Donnell, wrote that if pizza was “the most travelled of Italian dishes, then tiramisu is the country’s most famous dessert” and, today, Australian home cooks are using the dish as a basis for a series of variations that even include replacing the coffee with fruit juices and other flavouring agents. Long-lived Australian coffee recipes are similarly being re-made in line with current taste and habits, with celebrated chef Neil Perry’s recent Simple Coffee and Cream Sponge Cake comprising a classic cream-filled vanilla sponge topped with an icing made with “strong espresso”. To “glam up” the cake, Perry suggests sprinkling the top with chocolate-covered roasted coffee beans—cycling back to Maria Koszlik’s “coffee bean chocolate” (162) and showing just how resilient good taste can be. Acknowledgements The research for this article was completed while I was the recipient of a Research Fellowship in the Special Collections at the William Angliss Institute (WAI) of TAFE in Melbourne, where I utilised their culinary collections. Thank you to the staff of the WAI Special Collections for their generous assistance, as well as to the Faculty of Arts, Business, Informatics and Education at Central Queensland University for supporting this research. Thank you to Jill Adams for her assistance with this article and for sharing her “Manhattan Mocha” file with me, and also to the peer reviewers for their generous and helpful feedback. All errors are, of course, my own.References “A Gourmet Makes a Perfect Meal.” The West Australian 4 Jul. 1952: 8.Adams, Jill. “Australia’s American Coffee Culture.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (2012): forthcoming. “Australian Wines Served at New York Dinner.” Australian Wines and Food 1.5 (1958): 16. Bancroft, P. A. “Let’s Make Some Coffee.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 4.1 (1960): 10. Black, Jane. “The Trail of Tiramisu.” Washington Post 11 Jul. 2007. 15 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/10/AR2007071000327.html›. Bligh, Marjorie. At Home with Marjorie Bligh: A Household Manual. Devonport: M. Bligh, c.1965-71. 2nd ed. Brien, Donna Lee. “Australian Celebrity Chefs 1950-1980: A Preliminary Study.” Australian Folklore 21 (2006): 201-18. Cashmore, Nancy. “In Dordogne and Burgundy the Gourmet Will Find … A Gastronomic Paradise.” The Advertiser 23 Jan. (1954): 6. “Coffee Beginnings.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 37-39. Collins, Jock, Katherine Gibson, Caroline Alcorso, Stephen Castles, and David Tait. A Shop Full of Dreams: Ethnic Small Business in Australia. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1995. David, Elizabeth. Italian Food. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. 1st pub. UK: Macdonald, 1954, and New York: Knoft, 1954. Donovan, Maria Kozslik. Continental Cookery in Australia. Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1955. Reprint ed. 1956. -----.“Epicure’s Corner: Continental Recipes with Maria Kozslik.” The Age 4 Jun. (1954): 7. Fulton, Margaret. The Margaret Fulton Cookbook. Dee Why West: Paul Hamlyn, 1968. -----. Entertaining with Margaret Fulton. Dee Why West: Paul Hamlyn, 1971. Irwin, William Wallace. The Garrulous Gourmet. Sydney: The Shepherd P, 1951. Khamis, Susie. “It Only Takes a Jiffy to Make: Nestlé, Australia and the Convenience of Instant Coffee.” Food, Culture & Society 12.2 (2009): 217-33. Kerr, Graham. The Graham Kerr Cookbook. Wellington, Auckland, and Sydney: AH & AW Reed, 1966. -----. The Graham Kerr Cookbook by The Galloping Gourmet. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Mason, Anne. A Treasury of Australian Cookery. London: Andre Deutsch, 1962. Mason, Peter. “Anne Mason.” The Guardian 20 Octo.2006. 15 Feb. 2012 Masterfoods. “Masterfoods” [advertising insert]. Australian Wines and Food 2.10 (1959): btwn. 8 & 9.“Masters of Food.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 2.11 (1959/1960): 23. O’Donnell, Mietta. “Tiramisu.” Mietta’s Italian Family Recipe, 14 Aug. 2004. 15 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.miettas.com/food_wine_recipes/recipes/italianrecipes/dessert/tiramisu.html›. Perry, Neil. “Simple Coffee and Cream Sponge Cake.” The Age 12 Mar. 2012. 15 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/cuisine/baking/recipe/simple-coffee-and-cream-sponge-cake-20120312-1utlm.html›. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. Adelaide: Duck Press, 2007. 1st. Pub. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1982. ‘Vesta Junior’. “The Beautiful Fuss of Old Time Baking Days.” The Argus 20 Mar. 1945: 9. Volpi, Anna Maria. “All About Tiramisu.” Anna Maria’s Open Kitchen 20 Aug. 2004. 15 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.annamariavolpi.com/tiramisu.html›. Wade’s Cornflour. “Dione Lucas’ Manhattan Mochas: The New Coffee Cookie All America Loves, and Now It’s Here.” The Australian Women’s Weekly 1 Aug. (1956): 56. Wood, Danielle. Housewife Superstar: The Very Best of Marjorie Bligh. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2011.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Sánchez, Rebecca. "Hart Crane’s Speaking Bodies: New Perspectives on Modernism and Deafness." M/C Journal 13, no. 3 (2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.258.

Full text

Abstract:

I. The early twentieth century may seem, at first glance, a strange place to begin a survey of attitudes towards deafness. At this point, the American Deaf community was just forming, American Sign Language was not yet recognised as a language, and most Americans who did consider deafness thought of it as a disability, an affliction to be pitied. As I will demonstrate, however, modernist writers actually had a great deal of insight into issues central to the experience of many deaf people: physical and visual language. While these writers were not thinking of such language in relation to deafness, their experimentations into the merging of the body and language can offer us fresh perspectives on the potential of manual languages to impact mainstream society today. In the early decades of the twentieth century deafness was becoming visible in new ways, due in large part to the rapid expansion of schools for the deaf. This increased visibility led to increased representation in popular culture. Unfortunately, as Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman point out, these literal portrayals of deafness were predictable and clichéd. According to them, deaf characters in literature functioned almost exclusively “to heighten interest, to represent the plight of the individual in a technocratic society, or simply to express a sense of the absurd” (140). In all of these cases, such characters were presented as pitiable. In the least derogatory accounts, like Isabel Adams’ 1928 Heart of the Woods, characters stoically overcome their “disability,” usually by displaying miraculous proficiency with lip-reading and the ability to assimilate into hearing society. Other texts portray deaf people as grotesques, as in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1919 “God’s fool,” or as the butts of jokes, as in Anatole France’s 1926 The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, a Comedy in Two Acts. Constructed as pathetic and disgusting, deaf characters were used thematically to invoke a sense of revulsion at the unknowable other, at those perceived as languageless and therefore cut off from full access to humanity. Literature was not the only medium in which representations of deaf people were appearing with greater frequency. Early filmmakers also demonstrated a fascination with the idea of deafness. But as John S. Schuchman points out in Hollywood Speaks, as in literature, these portrayals were nearly always one-dimensional. Depicted as mutes, fakers, comically clueless, and deeply unhappy individuals, with few exceptions these characters created a very negative image of deafness. In Siege (1925), for example, a deaf character is driven to suicide by cruel mockery. In The Silent Voice (1915), another deaf character contemplates suicide. In the 1932 version of The Man Who Played God, a deaf character falls into a deep depression, sends away his fiancé, and declares “I am not a man. I am just an empty shell…I am only an animal now” (qtd. in Schuchman 48). Without the solidarity of Deaf culture, community, or pride, these characters become morbidly depressed and alienated; they experience their hearing loss as a subject of shame, and it was this image of deafness that was presented to the public. Despite these unpromising literal references to deafness, however, the early twentieth century does in fact offer intriguing and productive ideas about how we might understand deafness today. In the years separating the beginning of the last century from this one, public perceptions of deafness have undergone a significant shift. Buoyed by developments in American Sign Language research and the political activism of the Deaf President Now movement (1988), Deaf people are increasingly viewed as a linguistic minority with a distinct and valuable cultural identity and history, whose communicative differences have much to teach us about how we all interact with language. Deafness (the capital D signaling the distinction between Deafness as a culture and deafness as an audiological condition) is now understood in many circles as a linguistic difference, rather than as a deficiency. And hearing modernist writers had very interesting things to say about the value of linguistic and communicative difference. Modernists’ interest in communication emerged in large part because the same cultural movement toward linguistic homogenisation that led to the denigration of sign language and the exclusive focus on speech and lip-reading in American deaf education also sought to draw a line around the kinds of language considered acceptable for usage in writing. Many of modernism’s formal innovations developed as responses to the push for conformity that we see evidenced in the thinking behind the Oxford English Dictionary, which was completed between the 1880s and the 1920s—notably the period during which most modernist writers were born and began publishing. The 1858 proposal for the dictionary was, in fact, one of the first instances in which the term “standard language” was used (North 12). A desire to establish “standard language” usage was also the goal of the American Academy of Arts, established in 1916 and dedicated to maintaining the integrity of English. Such projects strove to consolidate American national identity around the standardised use of the English language, thereby eliminating spaces for linguistic and communicative diversity within the national body politic. Within literary circles, many rebelled against both the political and aesthetic underpinnings of this movement by experimenting in increasingly dramatic ways with how written language could represent the fragmentation many associated with modern life. As part of their experimentation, some of these writers attempted to develop the idea of embodied language. While they were ignorant of the actual manual languages used by the deaf, the ways they were thinking outside the box in relation to communication can give us both a new perspective on manual languages and new insights into their relevance to mainstream society today. II. One writer whose poems engaged such themes was the poet Hart Crane. Though he worked during the period we think of as high modernist, publishing major volumes of verse in 1926 and 1930, his work challenges our definitions of modernist poetry. Unlike the sparse language and cynicism of his contemporaries, Crane’s poems were decadent and lush. As Eliza New has noted, “Hart Crane is the American poet of Awe” (184); his work reflected his belief in the power of the written word to change the world. Crane viewed poets as inheritors of an ecstatic tradition of prophesy, to which he hoped his own poems would contribute. It is because of this overflowing of sentiment that Crane frequently found both himself and his work mocked. He was accused of overreaching and falling short of his goals, of being nothing more than what Edward Brunner termed a “splendid failure” in the title of his 1985 book. Critics and ordinary readers alike were frustrated with Crane’s arcane language and convoluted syntax, as well as the fact that each word, each image, in his poems was packed with multiple meanings that made the works impossible to summarise. Far from constituting a failure, however, this tangled web of language was Crane’s way of experimenting with a new form of communication, one that would allow him to access the transformative power of poetry. What makes Crane instructive for our purposes is that he repeatedly linked this new conception of language with embodiment. Driven in part by his sense of feeling, as a gay man, a cultural outsider, he attempted to find at the intersection of words and bodies a new site for both personal and cultural expression, one in which he could play a central role. In “General Aim and Theories,” Crane explains his desire to imagine a new kind of language in response to the conditions of modernity. “It is a terrific problem that faces the poet today—a world that is so in transition from a decayed culture toward a reorganization of human evaluations that there are few common terms, general denominators of speech that are solid enough or that ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction” (218). Later in the same essay, Crane stresses that these new common terms could not be expressed in conventional ways, but would need to constitute “a new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate” (221). For Crane, such words were “impossible to enunciate” because they were not actually spoken through the mouth, but rather expressed in other ways through the body. In “Voyages,” a six-part poem that appeared in his first book, The White Building, Crane explores the potential of these embodied words. Drawing in the influence of Walt Whitman, the work is an extended meditation on the intersection of languages, bodies, and love. The poem was inspired by his relationship with the merchant seaman Emil Oppfer. In it, embodied language appears as a privileged site of connection between individuals and the world. The first section of “Voyages,” which Crane had originally titled “Poster,” predated the composition of the rest of the poem by several years. It opens with a scene on a beach, “bright striped urchins” (I. 2) playing in the sand with their dog, “flay[ing] each other with sand” (I. 2). The speaker observes them on the border between land and sea. He attempts to communicate to them his sense of the sea’s danger, but is unsuccessful. And in answer to their treble interjectionsThe sun beats lightning on the waves,The waves fold thunder on the sand;And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,Fondle your shells and sticks, bleachedBy time and the elements; but there is a lineYou must not cross nor ever trust beyond itSpry cordage of your bodies to caressesToo lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.The bottom of the sea is cruel. (I. 6-16) The speaker’s warning is incomprehensible to the children, not because they cannot literally hear him, but because he is unable to present his previous experience with the sea in a way that makes sense to the them. As Evelyn J. Hintz notes, “the child’s mode of communication is alogical and nonsyntactical—‘treble interjections.’ To tell them one would have to speak their language” (323). In the first section of the poem, the speaker is unable to do this, unable to get beyond linear verbal speech or to conceive of alternative modes of conveying his message. This frustrated communication in the first section gives rise to the need for the remaining five, as the poet explores what such alternatives might look like. In sections II through VI, the language becomes more difficult to follow as Crane breaks away from linearity in an attempt to present his newly conceived language on the page. The shift is apparent in the stanza immediately following the first section. –And yet this great wink of eternity,Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,Samite sheeted and processioned whereHer undinal vast belly moonward bendsLaughing the wrapt inflections of our love; (II. 1-5). It is not only that Crane’s diction has become more difficult and archaic, which it has, but also that he creates words that exist between two known meanings. “Wrapt,” for example, both visually and aurally calls to mind ‘wrapped’ as well as ‘rapt.’ “Leewardings” points both toward ships and something positioned away from the wind. What it means to be unrestrained or “unfettered” in this position, Crane leaves unclear. Throughout the remainder of the poem, he repeatedly employs these counterintuitive word pairings. Words are often connected not through logic, but through a kind of intuitive leap. As Brian Reed describes it, “the verse can…be said to progress ‘madly…logically,’ satisfying a reader’s intuition, perhaps, but rarely satisfying her or his rage for order” (115). The lines move according to what Crane called a “logic of metaphor” (General 63). Like his curving syntax, which draws the reader into the beautiful melody before pulling back, withholding definitive meaning like the sea’s waves lapping and teasing, Crane’s metaphoric associations endlessly defer definitive meaning. In “Voyages,” Crane associates this proliferation of meaning and lack of linear progression with physicality, with a language more corporeal and visceral that transcends the restrictions of everyday speech. In a letter to Waldo Frank describing the romantic relationship that inspired the poem, Crane declared “I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility” (O 186). Throughout “Voyages,” Crane highlights such words made flesh. The sea with whom the speaker seeks to communicate is embodied, given “eyes and lips” (III.12), a “vast belly” (II. 4-5), “shoulders” (II. 16), and “veins” (II. 15). What’s more, it is precisely through the body that communication occurs. “Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, / Complete the dark confessions her veins spell” (II. 14-15, emphasis mine), the poet entreats. He describes the sea’s “Portending eyes and lips” IV. 12), her “dialogue with eyes” (VI. 23), and declares that “In signature of the incarnate word / The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling / Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown” (IV. 17-19, emphasis mine). It is only through this wordless communication that the kind of sublime meaning Crane seeks can be transmitted. For him, this “imaged Word” (VI.29) permits access to knowledge that conventional language obscures, knowledge that can only be transmitted through manual connection, as the speaker asks the sea to “Permit me voyage, love, into your hands…” (III.19). Crane saw the proliferation of meanings that he believed accompanied such embodied language as a response against the movement toward a standardisation of language that threatened to edit out modes of communication and identities that did not fit within its confines. As Thomas Yingling notes, “meaning, such as it occurs in Crane, is a process of indeterminacy, is constituted precisely in the abrupt disfigurements and dislocations, in the sudden clarities and semantic possibilities” (30). It was in large part these “semantic possibilities,” these indeterminate and multiple meanings that refused to line up, which led critics to characterise Crane’s work as a “poetics of failure” (Riddel). As later research into sign languages has revealed, however, far from representing a failure of poetic vision, Crane was actually incredibly forward thinking in associating embodied languages with a non-linear construction. Conventional spoken and written languages, those Crane was attempting to complicate, are necessarily linear. Letters and sounds must proceed one after another in order for an utterance to make sense. Manual languages, however, are not bound by this linearity. As Margalit Fox explained nearly a century later in Talking Hands, Because the human visual system is better than the auditory system at processing simultaneous information, a language in the visual mode can exploit this potential and encode its signals simultaneously. This is exactly what all signed languages do. Whereas words are linear strings, signs are compact bundles of data, in which multiple unites of code—handshapes, location and movement—are conveyed in virtually the same moment. (101) Such accounts of actual embodied languages help to explain the frustrating density that attends Crane’s words. Morphologically rich physical languages like the kind Crane was trying to imagine possess the ability for an increased layering of meaning. While limited by the page on which he writes, Crane attempted to create this layered affect through convoluted syntax and deliberately difficult vocabulary which led readers away from both a sense of fixed meaning and from normative standards usually applied to written words. Understanding this rebellion against standardisation is key to the turn in “Voyages.” It is when the speaker figures the sea’s language in conventional terms, when he returns to the more straightforward communication that failed in the first section, that the spell is broken. “What words / Can strangle this deaf moonlight?” (V. 8-9), he asks, and is almost instantly answered when the sea’s language switches for the first time into dialogue. Rather than the passionate and revelatory interaction it had been before, the language becomes banal, an imitation of tired words exchanged by lovers throughout history: “‘There’s // Nothing like this in the world,’ you say” (V. 13-14). “ ‘—And never to quite understand!’” (V. 18). There is “Nothing so flagless as this piracy” (V.20), this loss of meaningful communication, and the speaker bemoans the “Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved / And changed…” (V. 12-13). With the reversion to conventional language comes the loss of any intimate knowledge of both the sea and the lover. The speaker’s projection of verbal speech onto the sea causes it to “Draw in your head… / Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; / Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know” (V. 22-24). The imposition of normative language marks the end of the speaker’s experiment with new communicative modes. III. As he demonstrates by situating it in opposition to the enforced standardisation of language, for Crane embodied language—with its non-linear syntax and layered meanings—represented the future in terms of linguistic development. He saw such non-normative languages as having the potential to drastically change the ways human relationality was structured, specifically by creating a new level of intimacy through a merging of the semantic and the physical. In this way, he offers us productive new ways to think about the potential of manual languages, or any other non-normative means of human expression, to fundamentally impact society by challenging our assumptions about how we all relate to one another through language. When asked to define deafness, most people’s first response is to think of levels of hearing loss, of deficiency, or disability. By contrast, Crane’s approach presents a more constructive understanding of what communicative difference can mean. His poem provides an intense mediation on the possibilities of communication through the body, one that subsequent research into signed languages allows us to push even further. Crane believed that communicative diversity was necessary to move language into the next century. From this perspective, embodied language becomes not “merely” the concern of a “disabled” minority but, rather, integral to our understanding of language itself. References Batson, Trent, and Eugene Bergman, eds. Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. 3rd ed. Washington DC: Gallaudet UP, 1985. Brunner, Edward J. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1985. Crane, Hart. “Voyages.” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane: The Centennial Edition. New York: Liveright, 2001. ———. “General Aims and Theories.” Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Ed. Langdon Hammer. New York: The Library of America, 2006. 160-164. ———. O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Eds. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997. Fox, Margalit. Talking Hands. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Hinz, Evelyn J. “Hart Crane’s ‘Voyages’ Reconsidered.” Contemporary Literature 13.3 (1972): 315-333. New, Elisa. “Hand of Fire: Crane.” The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 182-263. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Reed, Brian M. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2006. Riddel, Joseph. “Hart Crane’s Poetics of Failure.” ELH 33.4 (1966): 473-496. Schuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Yingling, Thomas. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Brien, Donna Lee. "Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1956–1960." M/C Journal 19, no. 5 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1145.

Full text

Abstract:

IntroductionFood Studies is a relatively recent area of research enquiry in Australia and Magazine Studies is even newer (Le Masurier and Johinke), with the consequence that Australian culinary magazines are only just beginning to be investigated. Moreover, although many major libraries have not thought such popular magazines worthy of sustained collection (Fox and Sornil), considering these publications is important. As de Certeau argues, it can be of considerable consequence to identify and analyse everyday practices (such as producing and reading popular magazines) that seem so minor and insignificant as to be unworthy of notice, as these practices have the ability to affect our lives. It is important in this case as these publications were part of the post-war gastronomic environment in Australia in which national tastes in domestic cookery became radically internationalised (Santich). To further investigate Australian magazines, as well as suggesting how these cosmopolitan eating habits became more widely embraced, this article will survey the various ways in which the idea of “abroad” is expressed in one Australian culinary serial from the post-war period, Australian Wines & Food Quarterly magazine, which was published from 1956 to 1960. The methodological approach taken is an historically-informed content analysis (Krippendorff) of relevant material from these magazines combined with germane media data (Hodder). All issues in the serial’s print run have been considered.Australian Post-War Culinary PublishingTo date, studies of 1950s writing in Australia have largely focused on literary and popular fiction (Johnson-Wood; Webby) and literary criticism (Bird; Dixon; Lee). There have been far fewer studies of non-fiction writing of any kind, although some serial publications from this time have attracted some attention (Bell; Lindesay; Ross; Sheridan; Warner-Smith; White; White). In line with studies internationally, groundbreaking work in Australian food history has focused on cookbooks, and includes work by Supski, who notes that despite the fact that buying cookbooks was “regarded as a luxury in the 1950s” (87), such publications were an important information source in terms of “developing, consolidating and extending foodmaking knowledge” at that time (85).It is widely believed that changes to Australian foodways were brought about by significant post-war immigration and the recipes and dishes these immigrants shared with neighbours, friends, and work colleagues and more widely afield when they opened cafes and restaurants (Newton; Newton; Manfredi). Although these immigrants did bring new culinary flavours and habits with them, the overarching rhetoric guiding population policy at this time was assimilation, with migrants expected to abandon their culture, language, and habits in favour of the dominant British-influenced ways of living (Postiglione). While migrants often did retain their foodways (Risson), the relationship between such food habits and the increasingly cosmopolitan Australian food culture is much more complex than the dominant cultural narrative would have us believe. It has been pointed out, for example, that while the haute cuisine of countries such as France, Italy, and Germany was much admired in Australia and emulated in expensive dining (Brien and Vincent), migrants’ own preference for their own dishes instead of Anglo-Australian choices, was not understood (Postiglione). Duruz has added how individual diets are eclectic, “multi-layered and hybrid” (377), incorporating foods from both that person’s own background with others available for a range of reasons including availability, cost, taste, and fashion. In such an environment, popular culinary publishing, in terms of cookbooks, specialist magazines, and recipe and other food-related columns in general magazines and newspapers, can be posited to be another element contributing to this change.Australian Wines & Food QuarterlyAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly (AWFQ) is, as yet, a completely unexamined publication, and there appears to be only three complete sets of this magazine held in public collections. It is important to note that, at the time it was launched in the mid-1950s, food writing played a much less significant part in Australian popular publishing than it does today, with far fewer cookbooks released than today, and women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers containing only small recipe sections. In this environment, a new specialist culinary magazine could be seen to be timely, an audacious gamble, or both.All issues of this magazine were produced and printed in, and distributed from, Melbourne, Australia. Although no sales or distribution figures are available, production was obviously a struggle, with only 15 issues published before the magazine folded at the end of 1960. The title of the magazine changed over this time, and issue release dates are erratic, as is the method in which volumes and issues are numbered. Although the number of pages varied from 32 up to 52, and then less once again, across the magazine’s life, the price was steadily reduced, ending up at less than half the original cover price. All issues were produced and edited by Donald Wallace, who also wrote much of the content, with contributions from family members, including his wife, Mollie Wallace, to write, illustrate, and produce photographs for the magazine.When considering the content of the magazine, most is quite familiar in culinary serials today, although AWFQ’s approach was radically innovative in Australia at this time when cookbooks, women’s magazines, and newspaper cookery sections focused on recipes, many of which were of cakes, biscuits, and other sweet baking (Bannerman). AWFQ not only featured many discursive essays and savory meals, it also featured much wine writing and review-style content as well as information about restaurant dining in each issue.Wine-Related ContentWine is certainly the most prominent of the content areas, with most issues of the magazine containing more wine-related content than any other. Moreover, in the early issues, most of the food content is about preparing dishes and/or meals that could be consumed alongside wines, although the proportion of food content increases as the magazine is published. This wine-related content takes a clearly international perspective on this topic. While many articles and advertisements, for example, narrate the long history of Australian wine growing—which goes back to early 19th century—these articles argue that Australia's vineyards and wineries measure up to international, and especially French, examples. In one such example, the author states that: “from the earliest times Australia’s wines have matched up to world standard” (“Wine” 25). This contest can be situated in Australia, where a leading restaurant (Caprice in Sydney) could be seen to not only “match up to” but also, indeed to, “challenge world standards” by serving Australian wines instead of imports (“Sydney” 33). So good, indeed, are Australian wines that when foreigners are surprised by their quality, this becomes newsworthy. This is evidenced in the following excerpt: “Nearly every English businessman who has come out to Australia in the last ten years … has diverted from his main discussion to comment on the high quality of Australian wine” (Seppelt, 3). In a similar nationalist vein, many articles feature overseas experts’ praise of Australian wines. Thus, visiting Italian violinist Giaconda de Vita shows a “keen appreciation of Australian wines” (“Violinist” 30), British actor Robert Speaight finds Grange Hermitage “an ideal wine” (“High Praise” 13), and the Swedish ambassador becomes their advocate (Ludbrook, “Advocate”).This competition could also be located overseas including when Australian wines are served at prestigious overseas events such as a dinner for members of the Overseas Press Club in New York (Australian Wines); sold from Seppelt’s new London cellars (Melbourne), or the equally new Australian Wine Centre in Soho (Australia Will); or, featured in exhibitions and promotions such as the Lausanne Trade Fair (Australia is Guest;“Wines at Lausanne), or the International Wine Fair in Yugoslavia (Australia Wins).Australia’s first Wine Festival was held in Melbourne in 1959 (Seppelt, “Wine Week”), the joint focus of which was the entertainment and instruction of the some 15,000 to 20,000 attendees who were expected. At its centre was a series of free wine tastings aiming to promote Australian wines to the “professional people of the community, as well as the general public and the housewife” (“Melbourne” 8), although admission had to be recommended by a wine retailer. These tastings were intended to build up the prestige of Australian wine when compared to international examples: “It is the high quality of our wines that we are proud of. That is the story to pass on—that Australian wine, at its best, is at least as good as any in the world and better than most” (“Melbourne” 8).There is also a focus on promoting wine drinking as a quotidian habit enjoyed abroad: “We have come a long way in less than twenty years […] An enormous number of husbands and wives look forward to a glass of sherry when the husband arrives home from work and before dinner, and a surprising number of ordinary people drink table wine quite un-selfconsciously” (Seppelt, “Advance” 3). However, despite an acknowledged increase in wine appreciation and drinking, there is also acknowledgement that this there was still some way to go in this aim as, for example, in the statement: “There is no reason why the enjoyment of table wines should not become an Australian custom” (Seppelt, “Advance” 4).The authority of European experts and European habits is drawn upon throughout the publication whether in philosophically-inflected treatises on wine drinking as a core part of civilised behaviour, or practically-focused articles about wine handling and serving (Keown; Seabrook; “Your Own”). Interestingly, a number of Australian experts are also quoted as stressing that these are guidelines, not strict rules: Crosby, for instance, states: “There is no ‘right wine.’ The wine to drink is the one you like, when and how you like it” (19), while the then-manager of Lindemans Wines is similarly reassuring in his guide to entertaining, stating that “strict adherence to the rules is not invariably wise” (Mackay 3). Tingey openly acknowledges that while the international-style of regularly drinking wine had “given more dignity and sophistication to the Australian way of life” (35), it should not be shrouded in snobbery.Food-Related ContentThe magazine’s cookery articles all feature international dishes, and certain foreign foods, recipes, and ways of eating and dining are clearly identified as “gourmet”. Cheese is certainly the most frequently mentioned “gourmet” food in the magazine, and is featured in every issue. These articles can be grouped into the following categories: understanding cheese (how it is made and the different varieties enjoyed internationally), how to consume cheese (in relation to other food and specific wines, and in which particular parts of a meal, again drawing on international practices), and cooking with cheese (mostly in what can be identified as “foreign” recipes).Some of this content is produced by Kraft Foods, a major advertiser in the magazine, and these articles and recipes generally focus on urging people to eat more, and varied international kinds of cheese, beyond the ubiquitous Australian cheddar. In terms of advertorials, both Kraft cheeses (as well as other advertisers) are mentioned by brand in recipes, while the companies are also profiled in adjacent articles. In the fourth issue, for instance, a full-page, infomercial-style advertisement, noting the different varieties of Kraft cheese and how to serve them, is published in the midst of a feature on cooking with various cheeses (“Cooking with Cheese”). This includes recipes for Swiss Cheese fondue and two pasta recipes: spaghetti and spicy tomato sauce, and a so-called Italian spaghetti with anchovies.Kraft’s company history states that in 1950, it was the first business in Australia to manufacture and market rindless cheese. Through these AWFQ advertisements and recipes, Kraft aggressively marketed this innovation, as well as its other new products as they were launched: mayonnaise, cheddar cheese portions, and Cracker Barrel Cheese in 1954; Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the first cream cheese to be produced commercially in Australia, in 1956; and, Coon Cheese in 1957. Not all Kraft products were seen, however, as “gourmet” enough for such a magazine. Kraft’s release of sliced Swiss Cheese in 1957, and processed cheese slices in 1959, for instance, both passed unremarked in either the magazine’s advertorial or recipes.An article by the Australian Dairy Produce Board urging consumers to “Be adventurous with Cheese” presented general consumer information including the “origin, characteristics and mode of serving” cheese accompanied by a recipe for a rich and exotic-sounding “Wine French Dressing with Blue Cheese” (Kennedy 18). This was followed in the next issue by an article discussing both now familiar and not-so familiar European cheese varieties: “Monterey, Tambo, Feta, Carraway, Samsoe, Taffel, Swiss, Edam, Mozzarella, Pecorino-Romano, Red Malling, Cacio Cavallo, Blue-Vein, Roman, Parmigiano, Kasseri, Ricotta and Pepato” (“Australia’s Natural” 23). Recipes for cheese fondues recur through the magazine, sometimes even multiple times in the same issue (see, for instance, “Cooking With Cheese”; “Cooking With Wine”; Pain). In comparison, butter, although used in many AWFQ’s recipes, was such a common local ingredient at this time that it was only granted one article over the entire run of the magazine, and this was largely about the much more unusual European-style unsalted butter (“An Expert”).Other international recipes that were repeated often include those for pasta (always spaghetti) as well as mayonnaise made with olive oil. Recurring sweets and desserts include sorbets and zabaglione from Italy, and flambéd crepes suzettes from France. While tabletop cooking is the epitome of sophistication and described as an international technique, baked Alaska (ice cream nestled on liquor-soaked cake, and baked in a meringue shell), hailing from America, is the most featured recipe in the magazine. Asian-inspired cuisine was rarely represented and even curry—long an Anglo-Australian staple—was mentioned only once in the magazine, in an article reprinted from the South African The National Hotelier, and which included a recipe alongside discussion of blending spices (“Curry”).Coffee was regularly featured in both articles and advertisements as a staple of the international gourmet kitchen (see, for example, Bancroft). Articles on the history, growing, marketing, blending, roasting, purchase, percolating and brewing, and serving of coffee were common during the magazine’s run, and are accompanied with advertisements for Bushell’s, Robert Timms’s and Masterfoods’s coffee ranges. AWFQ believed Australia’s growing coffee consumption was the result of increased participation in quality internationally-influenced dining experiences, whether in restaurants, the “scores of colourful coffee shops opening their doors to a new generation” (“Coffee” 39), or at home (Adams). Tea, traditionally the Australian hot drink of choice, is not mentioned once in the magazine (Brien).International Gourmet InnovationsAlso featured in the magazine are innovations in the Australian food world: new places to eat; new ways to cook, including a series of sometimes quite unusual appliances; and new ways to shop, with a profile of the first American-style supermarkets to open in Australia in this period. These are all seen as overseas innovations, but highly suited to Australia. The laws then controlling the service of alcohol are also much discussed, with many calls to relax the licensing laws which were seen as inhibiting civilised dining and drinking practices. The terms this was often couched in—most commonly in relation to the Olympic Games (held in Melbourne in 1956), but also in relation to tourism in general—are that these restrictive regulations were an embarrassment for Melbourne when considered in relation to international practices (see, for example, Ludbrook, “Present”). This was at a time when the nightly hotel closing time of 6.00 pm (and the performance of the notorious “six o’clock swill” in terms of drinking behaviour) was only repealed in Victoria in 1966 (Luckins).Embracing scientific approaches in the kitchen was largely seen to be an American habit. The promotion of the use of electricity in the kitchen, and the adoption of new electric appliances (Gas and Fuel; Gilbert “Striving”), was described not only as a “revolution that is being wrought in our homes”, but one that allowed increased levels of personal expression and fulfillment, in “increas[ing] the time and resources available to the housewife for the expression of her own personality in the management of her home” (Gilbert, “The Woman’s”). This mirrors the marketing of these modes of cooking and appliances in other media at this time, including in newspapers, radio, and other magazines. This included features on freezing food, however AWFQ introduced an international angle, by suggesting that recipe bases could be pre-prepared, frozen, and then defrosted to use in a range of international cookery (“Fresh”; “How to”; Kelvinator Australia). The then-new marvel of television—another American innovation—is also mentioned in the magazine ("Changing concepts"), although other nationalities are also invoked. The history of the French guild the Confrerie de la Chaine des Roitisseurs in 1248 is, for instance, used to promote an electric spit roaster that was part of a state-of-the-art gas stove (“Always”), and there are also advertisements for such appliances as the Gaggia expresso machine (“Lets”) which draw on both Italian historical antecedence and modern science.Supermarket and other forms of self-service shopping are identified as American-modern, with Australia’s first shopping mall lauded as the epitome of utopian progressiveness in terms of consumer practice. Judged to mark “a new era in Australian retailing” (“Regional” 12), the opening of Chadstone Regional Shopping Centre in suburban Melbourne on 4 October 1960, with its 83 tenants including “giant” supermarket Dickens, and free parking for 2,500 cars, was not only “one of the most up to date in the world” but “big even by American standards” (“Regional” 12, italics added), and was hailed as a step in Australia “catching up” with the United States in terms of mall shopping (“Regional” 12). This shopping centre featured international-styled dining options including Bistro Shiraz, an outdoor terrace restaurant that planned to operate as a bistro-snack bar by day and full-scale restaurant at night, and which was said to offer diners a “Persian flavor” (“Bistro”).ConclusionAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly was the first of a small number of culinary-focused Australian publications in the 1950s and 1960s which assisted in introducing a generation of readers to information about what were then seen as foreign foods and beverages only to be accessed and consumed abroad as well as a range of innovative international ideas regarding cookery and dining. For this reason, it can be posited that the magazine, although modest in the claims it made, marked a revolutionary moment in Australian culinary publishing. As yet, only slight traces can be found of its editor and publisher, Donald Wallace. The influence of AWFQ is, however, clearly evident in the two longer-lived magazines that were launched in the decade after AWFQ folded: Australian Gourmet Magazine and The Epicurean. Although these serials had a wider reach, an analysis of the 15 issues of AWFQ adds to an understanding of how ideas of foods, beverages, and culinary ideas and trends, imported from abroad were presented to an Australian readership in the 1950s, and contributed to how national foodways were beginning to change during that decade.ReferencesAdams, Jillian. “Australia’s American Coffee Culture.” Australian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 23–36.“Always to Roast on a Turning Spit.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 17.“An Expert on Butter.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 11.“Australia Is Guest Nation at Lausanne.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 18–19.“Australia’s Natural Cheeses.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 23.“Australia Will Be There.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 14.“Australian Wines Served at New York Dinner.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 16.“Australia Wins Six Gold Medals.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 3.Bancroft, P.A. “Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 10. Bannerman, Colin. Seed Cake and Honey Prawns: Fashion and Fad in Australian Food. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008.Bell, Johnny. “Putting Dad in the Picture: Fatherhood in the Popular Women’s Magazines of 1950s Australia.” Women's History Review 22.6 (2013): 904–929.Bird, Delys, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee. Eds. Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950-2000. Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 2001.“Bistro at Chadstone.” The Magazine of Good Living 4.3 (1960): 3.Brien, Donna Lee. “Powdered, Essence or Brewed? Making and Cooking with Coffee in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.” M/C Journal 15.2 (2012). 20 July 2016 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/475>.Brien, Donna Lee, and Alison Vincent. “Oh, for a French Wife? Australian Women and Culinary Francophilia in Post-War Australia.” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 22 (2016): 78–90.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.“Changing Concepts of Cooking.” Australian Wines & Food 2.11 (1958/1959): 18-19.“Coffee Beginnings.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 37–39.“Cooking with Cheese.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 25–28.“Cooking with Wine.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 24–30.Crosby, R.D. “Wine Etiquette.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 19–21.“Curry and How to Make It.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.2 (1957): 32.Duruz, Jean. “Rewriting the Village: Geographies of Food and Belonging in Clovelly, Australia.” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 373–388.Fox, Edward A., and Ohm Sornil. “Digital Libraries.” Encyclopedia of Computer Science. 4th ed. Eds. Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly, and David Hemmendinger. London: Nature Publishing Group, 2000. 576–581.“Fresh Frozen Food.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.8 (1959): 8.Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria. “Wine Makes the Recipe: Gas Makes the Dish.” Advertisement. Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 34.Gilbert, V.J. “Striving for Perfection.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 6.———. “The Woman’s Workshop.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wines & Food 4.2 (1960): 22.“High Praise for Penfolds Claret.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 13.Hodder, Ian. The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 1994.“How to Cook Frozen Meats.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.8 (1959): 19, 26.Johnson-Woods, Toni. Pulp: A Collector’s Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2004.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Kennedy, H.E. “Be Adventurous with Cheese.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 3.12 (1960): 18–19.Keown, K.C. “Some Notes on Wine.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 32–33.Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.“Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wines and Food 4.2: 23.Lindesay, Vance. The Way We Were: Australian Popular Magazines 1856–1969. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1983.Luckins, Tanja. “Pigs, Hogs and Aussie Blokes: The Emergence of the Term “Six O’clock Swill.”’ History Australia 4.1 (2007): 8.1–8.17.Ludbrook, Jack. “Advocate for Australian Wines.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 3–4.Ludbrook, Jack. “Present Mixed Licensing Laws Harm Tourist Trade.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 14, 31.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Mackay, Colin. “Entertaining with Wine.” Australian Wines &Foods Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 3–5.Le Masurier, Megan, and Rebecca Johinke. “Magazine Studies: Pedagogy and Practice in a Nascent Field.” TEXT Special Issue 25 (2014). 20 July 2016 <http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue25/LeMasurier&Johinke.pdf>.“Melbourne Stages Australia’s First Wine Festival.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.10 (1959): 8–9.Newton, John, and Stefano Manfredi. “Gottolengo to Bonegilla: From an Italian Childhood to an Australian Restaurant.” Convivium 2.1 (1994): 62–63.Newton, John. Wogfood: An Oral History with Recipes. Sydney: Random House, 1996.Pain, John Bowen. “Cooking with Wine.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 39–48.Postiglione, Nadia.“‘It Was Just Horrible’: The Food Experience of Immigrants in 1950s Australia.” History Australia 7.1 (2010): 09.1–09.16.“Regional Shopping Centre.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 12–13.Risson, Toni. Aphrodite and the Mixed Grill: Greek Cafés in Twentieth-Century Australia. Ipswich, Qld.: T. Risson, 2007.Ross, Laurie. “Fantasy Worlds: The Depiction of Women and the Mating Game in Men’s Magazines in the 1950s.” Journal of Australian Studies 22.56 (1998): 116–124.Santich, Barbara. Bold Palates: Australia’s Gastronomic Heritage. Kent Town: Wakefield P, 2012.Seabrook, Douglas. “Stocking Your Cellar.” Australian Wines & Foods Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 19–20.Seppelt, John. “Advance Australian Wine.” Australian Wines & Foods Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 3–4.Seppelt, R.L. “Wine Week: 1959.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.10 (1959): 3.Sheridan, Susan, Barbara Baird, Kate Borrett, and Lyndall Ryan. (2002) Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years. Sydney: UNSW P, 2002.Supski, Sian. “'We Still Mourn That Book’: Cookbooks, Recipes and Foodmaking Knowledge in 1950s Australia.” Journal of Australian Studies 28 (2005): 85–94.“Sydney Restaurant Challenges World Standards.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 33.Tingey, Peter. “Wineman Rode a Hobby Horse.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 35.“Violinist Loves Bach—and Birds.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 3.12 (1960): 30.Wallace, Donald. Ed. Australian Wines & Food Quarterly. Magazine. Melbourne: 1956–1960.Warner-Smith, Penny. “Travel, Young Women and ‘The Weekly’, 1959–1968.” Annals of Leisure Research 3.1 (2000): 33–46.Webby, Elizabeth. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.White, Richard. “The Importance of Being Man.” Australian Popular Culture. Eds. Peter Spearritt and David Walker. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979. 145–169.White, Richard. “The Retreat from Adventure: Popular Travel Writing in the 1950s.” Australian Historical Studies 109 (1997): 101–103.“Wine: The Drink for the Home.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 2.10 (1959): 24–25.“Wines at the Lausanne Trade Fair.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 15.“Your Own Wine Cellar” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.2 (1957): 19–20.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Chisari, Maria. "Testing Citizenship, Regulating History: The Fatal Impact." M/C Journal 14, no. 6 (2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.409.

Full text

Abstract:

Introduction In October 2007, the federal Coalition government legislated that all eligible migrants and refugees who want to become Australian citizens must sit and pass the newly designed Australian citizenship test. Prime Minister John Howard stated that by studying the essential knowledge on Australian culture, history and values that his government had defined in official citizenship test resources, migrants seeking the conferral of Australian citizenship would become "integrated" into the broader, "mainstream" community and attain a sense of belonging as new Australian citizens (qtd. in "Howard Defends Citizenship Test"). In this paper, I conduct a genealogical analysis of Becoming an Australian Citizen, the resource booklet that contains all of the information needed to prepare for the test. Focusing specifically on the section in the booklet entitled A Story of Australia which details Australian history and framing my research through a Foucauldian perspective on governmentality that focuses on the interrelationship with truth, power and knowledge in the production of subjectivities, I suggest that the inclusion of the subject of history in the test was constituted as a new order of knowledge that aimed to shape new citizens' understanding of what constituted the "correct" version of Australian identity. History was hence promoted as a form of knowledge that relied on objectivity in order to excavate the truths of Australia's past. These truths, it was claimed, had shaped the very values that the Australian people lived by and that now prospective citizens were expected to embrace. My objective is to problematise this claim that the discipline of history consists of objective truths and to move beyond recent debates in politics and historiography known as the history wars. I suggest that history instead should be viewed as a "curative science" (Foucault 90), that is, a transformative form of knowledge that focuses on the discontinuities as well as the continuities in Australia's past and which has the potential to "delimit truths" (Weeks) and thus heal the fatal impact of an official history dominated by notions of progress and achievements. This kind of cultural research not only has the capacity to influence policy-making in the field of civic education for migrant citizens, but it also has the potential to broaden understanding of Australia's past by drawing on alternative stories of Australia including the ruptures and counter stories that come together to form the multiplicity that is Australian identity. Values Eclipsing History The test was introduced at a time when the impact of globalisation was shifting conceptions of the conferral of citizenship in many Western nations from a notion of new citizens gaining legal and political rights to a concept through which becoming a naturalized citizen meant adopting a nation's particular way of life and embracing a set of core national values (Allison; Grattan; Johnson). In Australia, these values were defined as a set of principles based around liberal-democratic notions of freedom, equality, the rule of law and tolerance and promoted as "central to Australia remaining a stable, prosperous and peaceful community" (DIC 5). The Howard government believed that social cohesion was threatened by the differences emanating from recent arrivals, particularly non-Christian and non-white arrivals who did not share Australian values. These threats were contextualized through such incidents as asylum seekers allegedly throwing children overboard, the Cronulla Beach riots in 2005 and terrorist attacks close to home in Bali. Adopting Australian values was promoted as the solution to this crisis of difference. In this way, the Australian values promoted through the Australian citizenship test were allotted "a reforming role" whilst migrants and their differences were targeted as "objects of reform" (Bennett 105). Reform would be achieved by prospective citizens engaging freely in the ethical conduct of self-study of the history and values contained in the citizenship resource booklet. With some notable exceptions (see e.g. Lake and Tavan), inclusion of historical content in the test received less public scrutiny than Australian values. This is despite the fact that 37 per cent of the booklet's content was dedicated to Australian history compared to only 7 per cent dedicated to Australian values. This is also remarkable since previously, media and scholarly attention over the preceding two decades had agonised over how British colonisation and indigenous dispossession were to be represented in Australian public institutions. Popularly known as the history wars, these debates now seemed irrelevant for regulating the conduct of new citizens. The Year of the Apology: The End of the History Wars? There was also a burgeoning feeling among the broader community that a truce was in sight in the history wars (cf. Riley; Throsby). This view was supported by the outcome of the November 2007 federal election when the Howard government was defeated after eleven years in office. John Howard had been a key player in the history wars, intervening in decisions as wide ranging as the management of national museums and the preparation of high school history curricula. In his final year as prime minister, Howard became involved with overseeing what historical content was to be included in Becoming an Australian Citizen (cf. Andrews; Hirst). This had a lasting impact as even after Howard's electoral defeat, the Australian citizenship test and its accompanying resource booklet still remained in use for another two years as the essential guide that was to inform test candidates on how to be model Australian citizens. Whilst Howard's test was retained Kevin Rudd made the official Apology to the Stolen Generation as one of his first acts as prime minister in February 2008. His electoral victory was heralded as the coming of "a new intellectual culture" with "deep thinking and balanced analysis" (Nile). The Apology was also celebrated in both media and academic circles as the beginning of the process of reconciliation for both relations with indigenous and non-indigenous Australians as well as "reconciling" the controversies in history that had plagued Howard's prime ministership. In popular culture, too, the end of the history wars seemed imminent. In film, the Apology was celebrated with the release of Australia in November of that same year. Luhrmann's film became a box office hit that was later taken up by Tourism Australia to promote the nation as a desirable destination for international tourists. Langton praised it as an "eccentrically postmodern account of a recent frontier" that "has leaped over the ruins of the 'history wars' and given Australians a new past" and concluded that the film presented "an alternative history from the one John Howard and his followers constructed" (12). Similar appraisals had been made of the Australian citizenship test as the author of the historical content in the resource booklet, John Hirst, revealed that the final version of A Story of Australia "was not John Howard's and was organised contrary to his declared preference for narrative" (35). Hirst is a conservative historian who was employed by the Howard government to write "the official history of Australia" (28) for migrants and who had previously worked on other projects initiated by the Howard government, including the high school history curriculum review known as the History Summit in 2006. In an article entitled Australia: The Official History and published in The Monthly of that very same year as the Apology, Hirst divulged how in writing A Story of Australia for the citizenship resource booklet, his aim was to be "fair-minded and balanced" (31). He claimed to do this by detailing what he understood as the "two sides" in Australia's historical and political controversies relating to "Aboriginal affairs" (31), known more commonly as the history wars. Hirst's resolve was to "report the position of the two sides" (31), choosing to briefly focus on the views of historian Henry Reynolds and the political scientist Robert Manne on the one side, as well as presenting the conservative views of journalists Keith Windshuttle and Andrew Bolt on the other side (31-32). Hirst was undoubtedly referring to the two sides in the history wars that are characterised by on the one hand, commentators who believe that the brutal impact of British colonisation on indigenous peoples should be acknowledged whilst those on the other who believe that Australians should focus on celebrating their nation's relatively "peaceful past". Popularly characterised as the black armband view against the white blindfold view of Australian history, this definition does not capture the complexities, ruptures and messiness of Australia's contested past or of the debates that surround it. Hirst's categorisation, is rather problematic; while Windshuttle and Bolt's association is somewhat understandable considering their shared support in denying the existence of the Stolen Generation and massacres of indigenous communities, the association of Reynolds with Manne is certainly contestable and can be viewed as a simplistic grouping together of the "bleeding hearts" in discourses surrounding Australian history. As with the film Australia, Hirst wanted to be "the recorder of myth and memory and not simply the critical historian" (32). Unlike the film Australia, Hirst remained committed to a particular view of the discipline of history that was committed to notions of objectivity and authenticity, stating that he "was not writing this history to embody (his) own views" (31) but rather, his purpose was to introduce to new citizens what he thought captured "what Australians of today knew and valued and celebrated in their history" (32). The textual analysis that follows will illustrate that despite the declaration of a "balanced" view of Australian history being produced for migrant consumption and the call for a truce in the history wars, A Story of Australia still reflected the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative that was not concerned with recognising any side of history that dealt with the fatal impact of colonialism in stories of Australia. Disrupting the Two Sides of History The success of Australia was built on lands taken from Aboriginal people after European settlement in 1788 (DIC 32). [...]The Aboriginal people were not without friends […]. Governor Macquarie (1810-1821) took a special interest in them, running a school for their children and offering them land for farming. But very few Aboriginal people were willing to move into European society; they were not very interested in what the Europeans had to offer. (DIC 32) Despite its author's protestations against a narrative format, A Story of Australia is written as a thematic narrative that is mainly concerned with describing a nation's trajectory towards progress. It includes the usual primary school project heroes of European explorers and settlers, all of them men: Captain James Cook, Arthur Phillip and Lachlan Macquarie (17-18). It privileges a British heritage and ignores the multicultural make-up of the Australian population. In this Australian story, the convict settlers are an important factor in nation building as they found "new opportunities in this strange colony" (18) and "the ordinary soldier, the digger is a national hero" (21). Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, are described in the past tense as part of pre-history having "hunter-gatherer traditions" (32), whose culture exists today only in spectacle and who have only themselves to blame for their marginalisation by refusing the help of the white settlers. Most notable in this particular version of history are the absent stories and absent characters; there is little mention of the achievements of women and nation-building is presented as an exclusively masculine enterprise. There is also scarce mention of the contribution of migrants. Also absent is any mention of the colonisation of the Australian continent that dispossessed its Indigenous peoples. For instance, the implementation of the assimilation policy that required the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families is not even named as the Stolen Generation in the resource booklet, and the fight for native land rights encapsulated in the historic Mabo decision of 1992 is referred to as merely a "separatist policy" (33). In this way, it cannot be claimed that this is a balanced portrayal of Australia's past even by Hirst's own standards for it is difficult to locate the side represented by Reynolds and Manne. Once again, comparisons with the film Australia are useful. Although praised for raising "many thorny issues" relating to "national legitimacy and Aboriginal sovereignty" (Konishi and Nugent), Ashenden concludes that the film is "a mix of muttering, avoidance of touchy topics, and sporadic outbursts". Hogan also argues that the film Australia is "an exercise in national wish fulfillment, staged as a high budget, unabashedly commercial and sporadically ironic spectacle" that "offers symbolic absolution for the violence of colonialism" (63). Additionally, Hirst's description of a "successful" nation being built on the "uncultivated" indigenous lands suggests that colonisation was necessary and unavoidable if Australia was to progress into a civilised nation. Both Hirst's A Story of Australia and his Australia: The Official History share more than just the audacious appropriation of a proper noun with the film Australia as these cultural texts grant prominence to the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative of Australian history while playing down the unpalatable episodes, making any prospective citizen who does not accept these "balanced" versions of historical truths as deviant and unworthy of becoming an Australian citizen. Our Australian Story: Reconciling the Fatal Impact The Australian citizenship test and its accompanying booklet, Becoming an Australian Citizen were replaced in October 2009 with a revised test and a new booklet entitled, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. The Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee deemed the 2007 original test to be "flawed, intimidating to some and discriminatory" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 3). It replaced mandatory knowledge of Australian values with that of the Citizenship Pledge and determined that the subject of Australian history, although "nice-to-know" was not essential for assessing the suitability of the conferral of Australian citizenship. History content is now included in the new booklet in the non-testable section under the more inclusive title of Our Australian Story. This particular version of history now names the Stolen Generation, includes references to Australia's multicultural make up and even recognises some of the fatal effects of British colonisation. The Apology features prominently over three long paragraphs (71) and Indigenous dispossession is now described under the title of Fatal Impact as follows: The early governors were told not to harm the Aboriginal people, but the British settlers moved onto Aboriginal land and many Aboriginal people were killed. Settlers were usually not punished for committing these crimes. (58) So does this change in tone in the official history in the resource booklet for prospective citizens "prove" that the history wars are over? This more conciliatory version of Australia's past is still not the "real proof" that the history wars are over for despite broadening its categories of what constitutes as historical truth, these truths still privilege an exclusive white perspective. For example, in the new resource booklet, detail on the Stolen Generation is included as a relevant historical event in relation to what the office of Prime Minister, the Bringing Them Home Report and the Official Apology have achieved for Indigenous Australians and for the national identity, stating that "the Sorry speech was an important step forward for all Australians" (71). Perhaps then, we need to discard this way of thinking that frames the past as an ethical struggle between right and wrong and a moral battle between victors and losers. If we cease thinking of our nation's history as a battleground between celebrators and mourners and stop framing our national identity in terms of achievers and those who were not interested in building the nation, then we recognise that these "war" discourses are only the products of "games of truth" invented by governments, expert historians and their institutions. In this way, official texts can produce the possibility for a range of players from new directions to participate in what content can be included as historical truths in Australian stories and what is possible in productions of official Australian identities. The Australian Citizenship Review Committee understood this potential impact as it has recommended "the government commit to reviewing the content of the book at regular intervals given the evolving nature of Australian society" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 25). In disrupting the self-evident notion of a balanced history of facts with its evocation of an equal society and by exposing how governmental institutions have used these texts as instruments of social governance (cf. Bennett), we can come to understand that there are other ways of being Australian and alternative perspectives on Australian history. The production of official histories can work towards producing a "curative science" that heals the fatal impact of the past. The impact of this kind of cultural research should be directed towards the discourse of history wars. In this way, history becomes not a battlefield but "a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes" (Foucault 90) which has the capacity to transform Australian society into a society inclusive of all indigenous, non-indigenous and migrant citizens and which can work towards reconciliation of the nation's history, and perhaps, even of its people. References Allison, Lyn. "Citizenship Test Is the New Aussie Cringe." The Drum. ABC News. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-09-28/citizenship-test-is-the-new-aussie-cringe/683634›. Andrews, Kevin. "Citizenship Test Resource Released." MediaNet Press Release Wire 26 Aug. 2007: 1. Ashenden, Dean. "Luhrmann, Us, and Them." Inside Story 18 Dec. 2008. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/luhrmann-us-and-them/›. Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee. Moving Forward... Improving Pathways to Citizenship. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Australian Government. Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. Belconnen: National Communications Branch of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2009.Bennett, Tony. Culture: A Reformer's Science. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998. DIC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). Becoming an Australian Citizen: Citizenship. Your Commitment to Australia. Canberra, 2007.Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76-100. Grattan, Michelle. "Accept Australian Values or Get Out." The Age 25 Aug. 2005: 1. Hirst, John. "Australia: The Official History." The Monthly 6 Feb. 2008: 28-35. "Howard Defends Citizenship Test." The Age 11 Dec. 2006. Howard, John. "A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006 - Address to the National Press Club, 25 January." PM's News Room: Speeches. Canberra: Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Johnson, Carol. "John Howard's 'Values' and Australian Identity." Australian Journal of Political Science 42.2 (2007): 195-209. Konishi, Shino, and Maria Nugent. "Reviewing Indigenous History in Baz Luhrmann's Australia." Inside Story 4 Dec. 2009. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/reviewing-indigenous-history-in-baz-luhrmanns-australia/›. Lake, Marilyn. "Wasn't This a Government Obsessed with Historical 'Truth'?" The Age 29 Oct. 2007: 13. Langton, Marcia. "Faraway Downs Fantasy Resonates Close to Home." Sunday Age 23 November 2008: 12. Nile, Richard. "End of the Culture Wars." Richard Nile Blog. The Australian 28 Nov. 2007. Riley, Mark. "Sorry, But the PM Says the Culture Wars Are Over." Sydney Morning Herald 10 Sep. 2003: 1. Tavan, Gwenda. "Testing Times: The Problem of 'History' in the Howard Government's Australian Citizenship Test." Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Neumann, Klaus and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: ANU E P, 2009. Throsby, David. "A Truce in the Culture Wars." Sydney Morning Herald 26 Apr. 2008: 32. Weeks, Jeffrey. "Foucault for Historians." History Workshop 14 (Autumn 1982): 106-19.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Franks, Rachel. "A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction." M/C Journal 17, no. 1 (2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.770.

Full text

Abstract:

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. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Flowers, Arhlene Ann. "Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?" M/C Journal 13, no. 5 (2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.278.

Full text

Abstract:

Swine semantics erupted into a linguistic battle between the two U.S. presidential candidates in the 2008 campaign over a lesser-known colloquialism “lipstick on a pig” reference in a speech by then Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. This resulted in the Republicans sparring with the Democrats over the identification of the “swine” in question, claiming “sexism” and demanding an apology on behalf of then Governor Sarah Palin, the first female Republican vice presidential candidate. The Republican Party, fearful of being criticised for its own sexist and racist views (Kuhn par. 1), seized the opportunity to attack the Democrats with a proactive media campaign that made the lipstick comment a lead story in the media during a critical time less than two months before the election, derailing more serious campaign issues and focusing attention on Palin, who had just made her national political debut and whose level of experience was widely debated. Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg conducted a meme-tracking study for analysing news-cycle phrases in approximately 90 million stories from 1.6 million online sites spanning mainstream news to blogs during the final three months of the U.S. presidential election (1). They discovered that “lipstick on a pig” was “stickier” than other phrases and received “unexpectedly high popularity” (4). A simple Google search of “lipstick on a pig” resulted in 244,000 results, with more than half originating in 2008. Obama’s “Lipstick on a Pig” Reference During the final rounds of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s words at a widely televised campaign stop in Lebanon, Virginia, on 9 September, sparked a linguistic debate between the two major American political parties 56 days before Election Day. Obama attempted to debunk McCain’s strategy about change in the following statement:John McCain says he’s about change, too. [...] And so I guess his whole angle is, watch out, George Bush. Except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics [...] That’s not change. That’s just calling some—the same thing, something different. But you know [...] you can put [...] lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig (“Obama’s Take”).A reporter from The New York Times commented that it was clear to the audience that Obama’s “lipstick” phrase was a direct reference to McCain’s policies (Zeleny par. 5). Known as a well-educated, articulate speaker, perhaps one considered too professorial for mainstream America, Obama attempted to inject more folksy language and humour into his dialogue with the public. However, the Republicans interpreted the metaphor quite differently. Republicans Claim “Sexism” from a “Male Chauvinist Pig” The Republican contender John McCain and his entourage immediately took offence, claiming that the “pig” in question was a sexist comment referring to Palin, who was introduced on 29 August as the first female vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket (“VP Pick”). A Republican National Committee spokeswoman quickly told the media, “Sarah Palin’s maverick record of reform doesn’t need any ‘dressing up,’ but the Obama campaign’s condescending commentary deserves some dressing down” (Chozick par. 8). McCain’s camp formed the Palin Truth Squad with 54 Republican women, primarily lawyers and politicians, on the same day as the metaphor was used, to counter negative media and Internet commentary about Palin (Harper A13). Almost immediately after Obama’s “lipstick” comment, McCain’s camp conducted a conference call with journalists and former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift, a Republican and chair of the Palin Truth Squad, who stated the lipstick comment referred to Palin, “the only one of the four—the presidential and vice presidential candidates—who wears lipstick” (Kornblut and Shear par. 12). Another member of the Squad, Thelma Drake, then a Republican Representative from Virginia, said that “it’s hard for Barack Obama to paint himself as the agent of change if he harbors the same mindset that Palin and millions of women just like her, have been fighting against their whole lives” (Applegate par. 8). Swift and others also claimed Obama was referring to Palin since she had herself used a lipstick metaphor during her Republican National Convention speech, 3 Sepember: “I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick” (“Palin’s Speech” par. 26). The Republicans also created an anti-Obama Web ad with the theme, “Ready to Lead? No. Ready to Smear? Yes,“ (Weisman and Slevin A01) with a compilation of video clips of Palin’s “lipstick” joke, followed by the latter part of Obama's “lipstick” speech, and CBS News anchorwoman, Katie Couric, talking about “sexism” in politics, that latter of which referred to an older clip referring to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the White House. Both clips on Obama and Couric were taken out of context. CBS retaliated and released a statement that the network “does not endorse any candidate” and that “any use of CBS personnel in political advertising that suggests the contrary is misleading” (Silva par. 8). YouTube pulled the Republican Web ads stating that the cause was “due to a copyright claim” (Silva par. 7). Another porcine phrase became linked to Obama—“male chauvinist pig”—an expression that evolved as an outgrowth of the feminist movement in the 1960s and first appeared with the third word, “pig,” in the media in 1970 (Mansbridge and Flaster 261). BlogHer, a blog for women, posted “Liberal Chauvinist Pigs,” on the same day as Obama's speech, asking: “Does the expression male chauvinist pig come to mind?” (Leary par. 5) Other conservative blogs also reflected on this question, painting Obama as a male chauvinist pig, and chastising both the liberal media and the Democrats for questioning Palin’s credentials as a viable vice presidential candidate. Obama “Sexist Pig Gear” protest tee-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers were sold online by Zazzle.com. Democratic Response to “Controversy” During a campaign stop in Norfolk, Virginia, the day after his “lipstick” comment, Obama called the Republican backlash the “latest made-up controversy by the John McCain campaign” and appealed for a return to more serious topics with “enough” of “foolish diversions” (“Obama Hits”). He stated that the Republicans “seize on an innocent remark, try to take it out of context, throw up an outrageous ad, because they know it’s catnip for the news media” (“Obama Hits”). Obama also referred to the situation as the “silly season of politics” in media interviews (James par. 8). Obama’s spokespeople rallied claiming that McCain played the “gender card about the use of a common analogy” (Kornblut and Shear par. 6). An Obama campaign spokesman distributed to the media copies of articles from a Chicago Tribune story in 2007 in which McCain applied the lipstick analogy about the healthcare strategy of Hillary Clinton, a previous female Democratic presidential contender (Chozick 11). Another Obama spokeswoman said that the porcine expression “was older than my grandfather’s grandfather,” (Zimmer par. 1) which also inspired the media and linguists to further investigate this claim. Evolution of “Lipstick on a Pig” This particular colloquial use of a “pig” evolved from a long history of porcine expressions in American politics. American political discourse has been rich with cultural references to porcine idioms with negative connotations. Pork barrels were common 19th-century household items used to store salt pork, and some plantation owners doled out the large barrels as rewards to slaves who then had to compete with each other to grab a portion (Maxey 693). In post-Civil War America, “pork barrel” became a political term for legislative bills “loaded with special projects for Members of Congress to distribute to their constituents back home as an act of largesse, courtesy of the federal taxpayer” (“Pork Barrel Legislation”). Today, “pork barrel” is widely used in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and other countries (“Definition Pork Barrel”) to refer to “government projects or appropriations yielding rich patronage benefits” (“Pork Barrel”). Conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh coined the term, “porkulus,” as another expression for “pork barrel” by merging the words “pork and “stimulus,” while discussing President Obama’s economic stimulus package in January 2009 (Kuntz par. 1). Ben Zimmer, an American lexicologist, explained that “many porcine proverbs describe vain attempts at converting something from ugly to pretty, or from useless to useful” (par. 2). Zimmer and other writers investigated the heritage of “lipstick on a pig” over the past 500 years from “you can't make a silk purse from a sow’s ear,” “a hog in armour is still a hog,” and “a hog in a silk waistcoat is still a hog.” Zimmer connected the dots between the words “lipstick,” a 19th-century invention, and “pig” to a Los Angeles Times editor in 1926 who wrote: “Most of us know as much of history as a pig does of lipsticks” (par. 3). American Politicians Who Have Smeared “Lipstick on a Pig” Which American politicians had used “lipstick on a pig” before Obama? Both Democrats and Republicans have coloured their speech with this colloquialism to refer to specific issues, not specific people. In 2008, Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential hopeful John Edwards, used the porcine expression about McCain’s healthcare proposals at a Democratic campaign event and House Minority Leader John Boehner, a Republican, about weak Republican fundraising efforts during the same month (Covington and Curry par. 7-8). McCain ironically used the term twice to criticise Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposals as “lipstick on a pig,” while they were both campaigning in 2007 (Covington and Curry par. 6). His statement received limited attention at the time. During a telephone interview in 2007, Obama also had used the pig analogy when referring to an “impossible assignment” George W. Bush gave to General Petraeus, who was then serving as the Multinational Forces Iraq Commander (Tapper par. 15). In 2004, Republican Vice President Richard Cheney applied a regional slant: “As we like to say in Wyoming, you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig, but at the end of the day it's still a pig,” about the national defence record of John Kerry, then a Democratic presidential nominee (Covington and Curry par. 4). A few months earlier that year, John Edwards, Democratic vice presidential candidate, scolded the Bush administration for putting “lipstick on a pig” on “lackluster job-creation numbers” (Covington and Curry par. 3). Representative Charles Rangel, a Democrat, identified the “pig” as a tax bill the same year (Siegel par. 15-16). In 1992, the late Governor of Texas, Ann Richards, a Democrat, who was known for colourful phrases, gave the pig a name when she said: “You can put lipstick on a hog and call it Monique, but it is still a pig,” referring to the Republican administration for deploying warships to protect oil tankers in the Middle East, effectively subsidizing foreign oil (Zimmer par. 4). A year earlier, when she introduced her first budget for Texas, she said: “This is not another one of those deals where you put lipstick on a hog and call it a princess” (Zimmer par. 4). The earliest reputed recorded use of an American politician using the phrase was Texas Democrat Jim Hightower, who applied it to depict the reorganisation of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet in 1986 (Macintyre 16). Time magazine reporters (Covington and Curry par. 2) and Zimmer (par. 3) claimed that a San Francisco radio personality, Ron Lyons, was one of the earliest quoted in print with “lipstick on a pig” about renovation plans for a local park in November 1985 in the Washington Post. Author of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, Grant Barrett, uncovered a 1980 article from a small Washington state newspaper as the earliest written record with an article that stated: “You can clean up a pig, put a ribbon on it’s [sic] tail, spray it with perfume, but it is still a pig” (Guzman par. 7). A book on communication also adopted the pig metaphor in its title in 2006, Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game, by Torie Clarke, who previously served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Donald Rumsfield during the early years of the G.W. Bush Administration. Media Commentary According to The New York Times (Leibovich and Barrett), “lipstick on a pig” was one of the most popular political buzzwords and phrases of 2008, along with others directly referring to Palin, “Caribou Barbie” and “Hockey Mom,” as well as “Maverick,” a popular term used by both McCain and Palin. Many journalists played on the metaphor to express disdain for negative political campaigns. A Wall Street Journal article asked: “What's the difference between a more hopeful kind of politics and old-fashioned attacks? Lipstick” (Chozick par. 1). International media also covered the Obama-McCain lipstick wars. The Economist, for example, wrote that the “descent of American politics into pig wrestling has dismayed America’s best friends abroad” (“Endless Culture War” par. 6). Bloggers claimed that Obama’s “lipstick” speech was influenced by copy and imagery from two leading American cartoonists. The Free Republic, self-acclaimed to be “the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism” (Freerepublic.com), claimed that Obama plagiarized almost verbatim the language leading into the “pig” comment from a Tom Toles cartoon that ran in the Washington Post on 5 Sepember (see fig. 1).Fig. 1. Toles, Tom. Cartoon. Washington Post. 5 Sep. 2008. 30 July 2010 Another cartoon by R. J. Matson appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch (see fig. 2) four days before Obama’s speech that depicted Palin not just as a pig wearing lipstick, but as one using pork barrel funding. The cartoon’s caption provides an interpretation of Palin's lipstick analogy: “Question: What’s the Difference Between a Hockey Mom Reformer and a Business-As-Usual Pork Barrel-Spending Politician? Answer: Lipstick.” Newsbusters.org blogger stated: “It’s not too far-fetched to say Team Obama is cribbing his stump speech laugh lines from the liberal funnies” (Shepherd par. 3). Fig 2. Matson, R. J. Cartoon. St. Louis Post Dispatch. 5 Sep. 2008. 30 July 2010 . A porcine American character known for heavy makeup and a starring role as one of the Muppets created by puppeteer Jim Henson in the 1970s, Miss Piggy still remains an American icon. She commented on the situation during an interview on the set of “Today,” an American television program. When the interviewer asked, “Were you surprised by all the hubbub this election season over your lipstick practices?,” Miss Piggy’s response was “Moi will not dignify that with a response” (Raphael par. 6-7). Concluding Comments The 2008 U.S. presidential election presented new players in the arena: the first African-American in a leading party and the first female Republican. During a major election, words used by candidates are widely scrutinised and, in this case, the “lipstick on a pig” phrase was misconstrued by the opposing party, known for conservative values, that latched onto the opportunity to level a charge of sexism against the more liberal party. Vocabulary about gender, like language about race, can become a “minefield” (Givhan M01). With today’s 24/7 news cycle and the blogosphere, the perceived significance of a political comment, whether innocent or not, is magnified through repeated analysis and commentary. The meme-tracking study by Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg observed that 2.5 hours was the typical time lag between stories originating in mainstream media and reaching the blogosphere (8); whereas only 3.5 percent of the stories began in blogs and later permeated into traditional media (9). An English author of the history of clichés and language, Julia Cresswell, stated that the “lipstick” term “seems to be another candidate for clichéhood” (61). Although usage of clichés can prove to cause complications as in the case of Obama’s lipstick reference, Obama was able to diffuse the Republican backlash quickly and make a plea to return to serious issues affecting voters. David Greenberg analysed Obama’s presidential win and explained: And although other factors, especially the tanking economy, obviously contributed more directly to his November victory, it would be a mistake to overlook the importance of his skill at mastering the politics of negative attacks. When Obama went negative against others, he carefully singled out aspects of his opponents’ characters that, he argued, American politics itself had to transcend; he associated his foes with the worst of the old politics and himself with the best of the new. When others fired at him, in contrast, he was almost always able to turn the criticisms back upon them—through feigned outrage, among other tactics—as perpetuating those selfsame blights on our politics (70). References Applegate, Aaron. “Rep. Drake Criticizes Obama for ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Remark.” Virginia Pilot 10 Sep. 2008. 28 Jul. 2010. Chozick, Amy. “Obama Puts Different Twist on Lipstick.” Wall Street Journal 9 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010. Covington, Marti, and Maya Curry. “A Brief History of: ‘Putting Lipstick on a Pig.’” Time 11 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. Cresswell, Julia. “Let’s Hear it for the Cliché.” British Journalism Review 19.57 (2008): 57-61. “Endless Culture War.” The Economist 4 Oct. 2008: ABI/INFORM Global, ProQuest. 30 Jul. 2010. “Definition Pork Barrel.” Webster’s Online Dictionary. 30 Jul. 2010. freerepublic.com. “Welcome to Free Republic.” Free Republic 2009. 30 Jul. 2010. Givhan, Robin. “On the Subject of Race, Words Get in the Way.” Washington Post 20 Jan. 2008: M01. Greenberg, David. “Accentuating the Negative.” Dissent 56.2 (2009): 70-75. Guzman, Monica. “‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Finds Origin in Tiny State Newspaper.” Seattlepi.com 10 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. Harper, Jennifer. “Obama Comment Offends GOP Women; ‘Palin Truth Squad’ Sent Out to Counter ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Remark.” Washington Times 10 Sep. 2008: A13. Huston, Warner Todd. “Did Obama Steal His Lip Stick on a Pig From a Political Cartoon?” Newsbusters.org 10 Sep. 2008. 15 Jul. 2010 . James, Frank. “Barack Obama on David Letterman.” Chicago Tribune 11 Sep. 2008. 15 Jul. 2010 http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/09/barack_obama_on_david_letterma.html>. Kornblut, Anne E., and Michael D. Shear. “McCain Camp Sees an Insult in a Saying.” Washington Post 10 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010 AR2008090903531.html>. Kuhn, David P. “GOP Fears Charges of Racism, Sexism.” Politico.com 23 Feb. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010. Kuntz, Tom. “Porkulus.” NYTimes.com 8 Feb. 2009. 30 Jul. 2010. Leary, Anne. “Liberal Chauvinist Pigs.” BlogHer 9 Sep. 2008. 2 Oct. 2010. Leibovich, Mark, and Grant Barrett. “The Buzzwords of 2008.” New York Times 21 Dec. 2008. 29 Jul. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/ref/weekinreview/buzzwords2008.html>. Leskovec, Jure, Lars Backstrom, and Jon Kleinberg. “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle.” ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Paris, 28 Jun. 2009. 30 Jul. 2010 . Macintyre, Ben. “US Politics is Littered with Dawgs, Crawdaddys and Pigs in Lipstick.” The Times [London] 27 Sep. 2008: 16. Mansbridge, Jane, and Katherine Flaster. “Male Chauvinist, Feminist, Sexist, and Sexual Harassment: Different Trajectories in Feminist Linguistic Innovation.” American Speech 80.3 (Fall 2005): 256-279. Maxey, Chester Collins. “A Little History of Pork.” National Municipal Review, Volume VIII. Concord: Rumford Press, 1919. Google Books. 30 Jul. 2010. “Obama Hits Back Against McCain Campaign.” MSNBC 10 Sep. 2008. Televised Speech. 18 May 2010. “Obama’s Take on McCain's Version of Change.” CNN 9 Sep. 2009. YouTube.com. 17 May 2010. “Palin’s Speech at the Republican National Convention.” New York Times 3 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. “Pork Barrel.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary 2010. 30 Jul. 2010. “Pork Barrel Legislation.” C-SPAN Congressional Glossary. c-span.org. 17 May 2010. Raphael, Rina. “Miss Piggy: Obama Should Make Poodle First Pet” Today 13 Nov. 2008. MSNBC.com. 29 Jul. 2010. Shepherd, Ken. “Palin Shown As Lipsticked Pig in Cartoon Days Before Obama Remark.” NewsBusters.org 11 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010 . Siegel, Robert. “Putting Lipstick on a Pig.” National Public Radio 10 Sep. 2008. 16 Jul. 2010. Silva, Mark. “Katie Couric's 'Lipstick' Rescue: CBS.” Chicago Tribune 11 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010. Tapper, Jack. “A Piggish Debate: Power, Pop, and Probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper.” ABC News 9 Sep. 2008. 29 Jul. 2010. “VP Pick Palin Makes Appeal to Women Voters.” NBC News, msnbc.com, and Associated Press 28 Aug. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010. Weisman, Jonathan, and Peter Slevin. “McCain Camp Hits Obama on More Than One Front.” Washington Post 11 Sep. 2008: A04. Zeleny, Jeff. “Feeling a Challenge, Obama Sharpens His Silver Tongue.” New York Times 10 Sep. 2008. 27 Jul. 2010. Zimmer, Ben. “Who First Put ‘Lipstick on a Pig’?” The Slate 10 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Geoghegan, Hilary. "“If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place”: Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology." M/C Journal 12, no. 2 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.140.

Full text

Abstract:

Introduction: Technology EnthusiasmEnthusiasts are people who have a passion, keenness, dedication or zeal for a particular activity or hobby. Today, there are enthusiasts for almost everything, from genealogy, costume dramas, and country houses, to metal detectors, coin collecting, and archaeology. But to be described as an enthusiast is not necessarily a compliment. Historically, the term “enthusiasm” was first used in England in the early seventeenth century to describe “religious or prophetic frenzy among the ancient Greeks” (Hanks, n.p.). This frenzy was ascribed to being possessed by spirits sent not only by God but also the devil. During this period, those who disobeyed the powers that be or claimed to have a message from God were considered to be enthusiasts (McLoughlin).Enthusiasm retained its religious connotations throughout the eighteenth century and was also used at this time to describe “the tendency within the population to be swept by crazes” (Mee 31). However, as part of the “rehabilitation of enthusiasm,” the emerging middle-classes adopted the word to characterise the intensity of Romantic poetry. The language of enthusiasm was then used to describe the “literary ideas of affect” and “a private feeling of religious warmth” (Mee 2 and 34). While the notion of enthusiasm was embraced here in a more optimistic sense, attempts to disassociate enthusiasm from crowd-inciting fanaticism were largely unsuccessful. As such enthusiasm has never quite managed to shake off its pejorative connotations.The 'enthusiasm' discussed in this paper is essentially a personal passion for technology. It forms part of a longer tradition of historical preservation in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world. From preserved railways to Victorian pumping stations, people have long been fascinated by the history of technology and engineering; manifesting their enthusiasm through their nostalgic longings and emotional attachment to its enduring material culture. Moreover, enthusiasts have been central to the collection, conservation, and preservation of this particular material record. Technology enthusiasm in this instance is about having a passion for the history and material record of technological development, specifically here industrial archaeology. Despite being a pastime much participated in, technology enthusiasm is relatively under-explored within the academic literature. For the most part, scholarship has tended to focus on the intended users, formal spaces, and official narratives of science and technology (Adas, Latour, Mellström, Oldenziel). In recent years attempts have been made to remedy this imbalance, with researchers from across the social sciences examining the position of hobbyists, tinkerers and amateurs in scientific and technical culture (Ellis and Waterton, Haring, Saarikoski, Takahashi). Work from historians of technology has focussed on the computer enthusiast; for example, Saarikoski’s work on the Finnish personal computer hobby:The definition of the computer enthusiast varies historically. Personal interest, pleasure and entertainment are the most significant factors defining computing as a hobby. Despite this, the hobby may also lead to acquiring useful knowledge, skills or experience of information technology. Most often the activity takes place outside working hours but can still have links to the development of professional expertise or the pursuit of studies. In many cases it takes place in the home environment. On the other hand, it is characteristically social, and the importance of friends, clubs and other communities is greatly emphasised.In common with a number of other studies relating to technical hobbies, for example Takahashi who argues tinkerers were behind the advent of the radio and television receiver, Saarikoski’s work focuses on the role these users played in shaping the technology in question. The enthusiasts encountered in this paper are important here not for their role in shaping the technology, but keeping technological heritage alive. As historian of technology Haring reminds us, “there exist alternative ways of using and relating to technology” (18). Furthermore, the sociological literature on audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst, Ang), fans (Hills, Jenkins, Lewis, Sandvoss) and subcultures (Hall, Hebdige, Schouten and McAlexander) has also been extended in order to account for the enthusiast. In Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Audiences, the authors locate ‘the enthusiast’ and ‘the fan’ at opposing ends of a continuum of consumption defined by questions of specialisation of interest, social organisation of interest and material productivity. Fans are described as:skilled or competent in different modes of production and consumption; active in their interactions with texts and in their production of new texts; and communal in that they construct different communities based on their links to the programmes they like. (127 emphasis in original) Based on this definition, Abercrombie and Longhurst argue that fans and enthusiasts differ in three ways: (1) enthusiasts’ activities are not based around media images and stars in the way that fans’ activities are; (2) enthusiasts can be hypothesized to be relatively light media users, particularly perhaps broadcast media, though they may be heavy users of the specialist publications which are directed towards the enthusiasm itself; (3) the enthusiasm would appear to be rather more organised than the fan activity. (132) What is striking about this attempt to differentiate between the fan and the enthusiast is that it is based on supposition rather than the actual experience and observation of enthusiasm. It is here that the ethnographic account of enthusiasm presented in this paper and elsewhere, for example works by Dannefer on vintage car culture, Moorhouse on American hot-rodding and Fuller on modified-car culture in Australia, can shed light on the subject. My own ethnographic study of groups with a passion for telecommunications heritage, early British computers and industrial archaeology takes the discussion of “technology enthusiasm” further still. Through in-depth interviews, observation and textual analysis, I have examined in detail the formation of enthusiast societies and their membership, the importance of the material record to enthusiasts (particularly at home) and the enthusiastic practices of collecting and hoarding, as well as the figure of the technology enthusiast in the public space of the museum, namely the Science Museum in London (Geoghegan). In this paper, I explore the culture of enthusiasm for the industrial past through the example of the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society (GLIAS). Focusing on industrial sites around London, GLIAS meet five or six times a year for field visits, walks and a treasure hunt. The committee maintain a website and produce a quarterly newsletter. The title of my paper, “If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place,” comes from an interview I conducted with the co-founder and present chairman of GLIAS. He was telling me about his fascination with the materials of industrialisation. In fact, he said even concrete is sexy. Some call it a hobby; others call it a disease. But enthusiasm for industrial archaeology is, as several respondents have themselves identified, “as insidious in its side effects as any debilitating germ. It dictates your lifestyle, organises your activity and decides who your friends are” (Frow and Frow 177, Gillespie et al.). Through the figure of the industrial archaeology enthusiast, I discuss in this paper what it means to be enthusiastic. I begin by reflecting on the development of this specialist subject area. I go on to detail the formation of the Society in the late 1960s, before exploring the Society’s fieldwork methods and some of the other activities they now engage in. I raise questions of enthusiast and professional knowledge and practice, as well as consider the future of this particular enthusiasm.Defining Industrial ArchaeologyThe practice of 'industrial archaeology' is much contested. For a long time, enthusiasts and professional archaeologists have debated the meaning and use of the term (Palmer). On the one hand, there are those interested in the history, preservation, and recording of industrial sites. For example the grandfather figures of the subject, namely Kenneth Hudson and Angus Buchanan, who both published widely in the 1960s and 1970s in order to encourage publics to get involved in recording. Many members of GLIAS refer to the books of Hudson Industrial Archaeology: an Introduction and Buchanan Industrial Archaeology in Britain with their fine descriptions and photographs as integral to their early interest in the subject. On the other hand, there are those within the academic discipline of archaeology who consider the study of remains produced by the Industrial Revolution as too modern. Moreover, they find the activities of those calling themselves industrial archaeologists as lacking sufficient attention to the understanding of past human activity to justify the name. As a result, the definition of 'industrial archaeology' is problematic for both enthusiasts and professionals. Even the early advocates of professional industrial archaeology felt uneasy about the subject’s methods and practices. In 1973, Philip Riden (described by one GLIAS member as the angry young man of industrial archaeology), the then president of the Oxford University Archaeology Society, wrote a damning article in Antiquity, calling for the subject to “shed the amateur train drivers and others who are not part of archaeology” (215-216). He decried the “appallingly low standard of some of the work done under the name of ‘industrial archaeology’” (211). He felt that if enthusiasts did not attempt to maintain high technical standards, publish their work in journals or back up their fieldwork with documentary investigation or join their county archaeological societies then there was no value in the efforts of these amateurs. During this period, enthusiasts, academics, and professionals were divided. What was wrong with doing something for the pleasure it provides the participant?Although relations today between the so-called amateur (enthusiast) and professional archaeologies are less potent, some prejudice remains. Describing them as “barrow boys”, some enthusiasts suggest that what was once their much-loved pastime has been “hijacked” by professional archaeologists who, according to one respondent,are desperate to find subjects to get degrees in. So the whole thing has been hijacked by academia as it were. Traditional professional archaeologists in London at least are running head on into things that we have been doing for decades and they still don’t appreciate that this is what we do. A lot of assessments are handed out to professional archaeology teams who don’t necessarily have any knowledge of industrial archaeology. (James, GLIAS committee member)James went on to reveal that GLIAS receives numerous enquiries from professional archaeologists, developers and town planners asking what they know about particular sites across the city. Although the Society has compiled a detailed database covering some areas of London, it is by no means comprehensive. In addition, many active members often record and monitor sites in London for their own personal enjoyment. This leaves many questioning the need to publish their results for the gain of third parties. Canadian sociologist Stebbins discusses this situation in his research on “serious leisure”. He has worked extensively with amateur archaeologists in order to understand their approach to their leisure activity. He argues that amateurs are “neither dabblers who approach the activity with little commitment or seriousness, nor professionals who make a living from that activity” (55). Rather they pursue their chosen leisure activity to professional standards. A point echoed by Fine in his study of the cultures of mushrooming. But this is to get ahead of myself. How did GLIAS begin?GLIAS: The GroupThe 1960s have been described by respondents as a frantic period of “running around like headless chickens.” Enthusiasts of London’s industrial archaeology were witnessing incredible changes to the city’s industrial landscape. Individuals and groups like the Thames Basin Archaeology Observers Group were recording what they could. Dashing around London taking photos to capture London’s industrial legacy before it was lost forever. However the final straw for many, in London at least, was the proposed and subsequent demolition of the “Euston Arch”. The Doric portico at Euston Station was completed in 1838 and stood as a symbol to the glory of railway travel. Despite strong protests from amenity societies, this Victorian symbol of progress was finally pulled down by British Railways in 1962 in order to make way for what enthusiasts have called a “monstrous concrete box”.In response to these changes, GLIAS was founded in 1968 by two engineers and a locomotive driver over afternoon tea in a suburban living room in Woodford, North-East London. They held their first meeting one Sunday afternoon in December at the Science Museum in London and attracted over 130 people. Firing the imagination of potential members with an exhibition of photographs of the industrial landscape taken by Eric de Maré, GLIAS’s first meeting was a success. Bringing together like-minded people who are motivated and enthusiastic about the subject, GLIAS currently has over 600 members in the London area and beyond. This makes it the largest industrial archaeology society in the UK and perhaps Europe. Drawing some of its membership from a series of evening classes hosted by various members of the Society’s committee, GLIAS initially had a quasi-academic approach. Although some preferred the hands-on practical element and were more, as has been described by one respondent, “your free-range enthusiast”. The society has an active committee, produces a newsletter and journal, as well as runs regular events for members. However the Society is not simply about the study of London’s industrial heritage, over time the interest in industrial archaeology has developed for some members into long-term friendships. Sociability is central to organised leisure activities. It underpins and supports the performance of enthusiasm in groups and societies. For Fine, sociability does not always equal friendship, but it is the state from which people might become friends. Some GLIAS members have taken this one step further: there have even been a couple of marriages. Although not the subject of my paper, technical culture is heavily gendered. Industrial archaeology is a rare exception attracting a mixture of male and female participants, usually retired husband and wife teams.Doing Industrial Archaeology: GLIAS’s Method and PracticeIn what has been described as GLIAS’s heyday, namely the 1970s to early 1980s, fieldwork was fundamental to the Society’s activities. The Society’s approach to fieldwork during this period was much the same as the one described by champion of industrial archaeology Arthur Raistrick in 1973:photographing, measuring, describing, and so far as possible documenting buildings, engines, machinery, lines of communication, still or recently in use, providing a satisfactory record for the future before the object may become obsolete or be demolished. (13)In the early years of GLIAS and thanks to the committed efforts of two active Society members, recording parties were organised for extended lunch hours and weekends. The majority of this early fieldwork took place at the St Katherine Docks. The Docks were constructed in the 1820s by Thomas Telford. They became home to the world’s greatest concentration of portable wealth. Here GLIAS members learnt and employed practical (also professional) skills, such as measuring, triangulations and use of a “dumpy level”. For many members this was an incredibly exciting time. It was a chance to gain hands-on experience of industrial archaeology. Having been left derelict for many years, the Docks have since been redeveloped as part of the Docklands regeneration project.At this time the Society was also compiling data for what has become known to members as “The GLIAS Book”. The book was to have separate chapters on the various industrial histories of London with contributions from Society members about specific sites. Sadly the book’s editor died and the project lost impetus. Several years ago, the committee managed to digitise the data collected for the book and began to compile a database. However, the GLIAS database has been beset by problems. Firstly, there are often questions of consistency and coherence. There is a standard datasheet for recording industrial buildings – the Index Record for Industrial Sites. However, the quality of each record is different because of the experience level of the different authors. Some authors are automatically identified as good or expert record keepers. Secondly, getting access to the database in order to upload the information has proved difficult. As one of the respondents put it: “like all computer babies [the creator of the database], is finding it hard to give birth” (Sally, GLIAS member). As we have learnt enthusiasm is integral to movements such as industrial archaeology – public historian Raphael Samuel described them as the “invisible hands” of historical enquiry. Yet, it is this very enthusiasm that has the potential to jeopardise projects such as the GLIAS book. Although active in their recording practices, the GLIAS book saga reflects one of the challenges encountered by enthusiast groups and societies. In common with other researchers studying amenity societies, such as Ellis and Waterton’s work with amateur naturalists, unlike the world of work where people are paid to complete a task and are therefore meant to have a singular sense of purpose, the activities of an enthusiast group like GLIAS rely on the goodwill of their members to volunteer their time, energy and expertise. When this is lost for whatever reason, there is no requirement for any other member to take up that position. As such, levels of commitment vary between enthusiasts and can lead to the aforementioned difficulties, such as disputes between group members, the occasional miscommunication of ideas and an over-enthusiasm for some parts of the task in hand. On top of this, GLIAS and societies like it are confronted with changing health and safety policies and tightened security surrounding industrial sites. This has made the practical side of industrial archaeology increasingly difficult. As GLIAS member Bob explains:For me to go on site now I have to wear site boots and borrow a hard hat and a high visibility jacket. Now we used to do incredibly dangerous things in the seventies and nobody batted an eyelid. You know we were exploring derelict buildings, which you are virtually not allowed in now because the floor might give way. Again the world has changed a lot there. GLIAS: TodayGLIAS members continue to record sites across London. Some members are currently surveying the site chosen as the location of the Olympic Games in London in 2012 – the Lower Lea Valley. They describe their activities at this site as “rescue archaeology”. GLIAS members are working against the clock and some important structures have already been demolished. They only have time to complete a quick flash survey. Armed with the information they collated in previous years, GLIAS is currently in discussions with the developer to orchestrate a detailed recording of the site. It is important to note here that GLIAS members are less interested in campaigning for the preservation of a site or building, they appreciate that sites must change. Instead they want to ensure that large swathes of industrial London are not lost without a trace. Some members regard this as their public duty.Restricted by health and safety mandates and access disputes, GLIAS has had to adapt. The majority of practical recording sessions have given way to guided walks in the summer and public lectures in the winter. Some respondents have identified a difference between those members who call themselves “industrial archaeologists” and those who are just “ordinary members” of GLIAS. The walks are for those with a general interest, not serious members, and the talks are public lectures. Some audience researchers have used Bourdieu’s metaphor of “capital” to describe the experience, knowledge and skill required to be a fan, clubber or enthusiast. For Hills, fan status is built up through the demonstration of cultural capital: “where fans share a common interest while also competing over fan knowledge, access to the object of fandom, and status” (46). A clear membership hierarchy can be seen within GLIAS based on levels of experience, knowledge and practical skill.With a membership of over 600 and rising annually, the Society’s future is secure at present. However some of the more serious members, although retaining their membership, are pursuing their enthusiasm elsewhere: through break-away recording groups in London; active membership of other groups and societies, for example the national Association for Industrial Archaeology; as well as heading off to North Wales in the summer for practical, hands-on industrial archaeology in Snowdonia’s slate quarries – described in the Ffestiniog Railway Journal as the “annual convention of slate nutters.” ConclusionsGLIAS has changed since its foundation in the late 1960s. Its operation has been complicated by questions of health and safety, site access, an ageing membership, and the constant changes to London’s industrial archaeology. Previously rejected by professional industrial archaeology as “limited in skill and resources” (Riden), enthusiasts are now approached by professional archaeologists, developers, planners and even museums that are interested in engaging in knowledge exchange programmes. As a recent report from the British think-tank Demos has argued, enthusiasts or pro-ams – “amateurs who work to professional standards” (Leadbeater and Miller 12) – are integral to future innovation and creativity; for example computer pro-ams developed an operating system to rival Microsoft Windows. As such the specialist knowledge, skill and practice of these communities is of increasing interest to policymakers, practitioners, and business. So, the subject once described as “the ugly offspring of two parents that shouldn’t have been allowed to breed” (Hudson), the so-called “amateur” industrial archaeology offers enthusiasts and professionals alike alternative ways of knowing, seeing and being in the recent and contemporary past.Through the case study of GLIAS, I have described what it means to be enthusiastic about industrial archaeology. I have introduced a culture of collective and individual participation and friendship based on a mutual interest in and emotional attachment to industrial sites. As we have learnt in this paper, enthusiasm is about fun, pleasure and joy. The enthusiastic culture presented here advances themes such as passion in relation to less obvious communities of knowing, skilled practices, material artefacts and spaces of knowledge. Moreover, this paper has been about the affective narratives that are sometimes missing from academic accounts; overlooked for fear of sniggers at the back of a conference hall. Laughter and humour are a large part of what enthusiasm is. Enthusiastic cultures then are about the pleasure and joy experienced in doing things. Enthusiasm is clearly a potent force for active participation. I will leave the last word to GLIAS member John:One meaning of enthusiasm is as a form of possession, madness. Obsession perhaps rather than possession, which I think is entirely true. It is a pejorative term probably. The railway enthusiast. But an awful lot of energy goes into what they do and achieve. Enthusiasm to my mind is an essential ingredient. If you are not a person who can muster enthusiasm, it is very difficult, I think, to get anything out of it. On the basis of the more you put in the more you get out. In terms of what has happened with industrial archaeology in this country, I think, enthusiasm is a very important aspect of it. The movement needs people who can transmit that enthusiasm. ReferencesAbercrombie, N., and B. Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 1998.Adas, M. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.Ang, I. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge, 1991.Bourdieu, P. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.Buchanan, R.A. Industrial Archaeology in Britain. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972.Dannefer, D. “Rationality and Passion in Private Experience: Modern Consciousness and the Social World of Old-Car Collectors.” Social Problems 27 (1980): 392–412.Dannefer, D. “Neither Socialization nor Recruitment: The Avocational Careers of Old-Car Enthusiasts.” Social Forces 60 (1981): 395–413.Ellis, R., and C. Waterton. “Caught between the Cartographic and the Ethnographic Imagination: The Whereabouts of Amateurs, Professionals, and Nature in Knowing Biodiversity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005): 673–693.Fine, G.A. “Mobilizing Fun: Provisioning Resources in Leisure Worlds.” Sociology of Sport Journal 6 (1989): 319–334.Fine, G.A. Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. Champaign, Ill.: U of Illinois P, 2003.Frow, E., and R. Frow. “Travels with a Caravan.” History Workshop Journal 2 (1976): 177–182Fuller, G. Modified: Cars, Culture, and Event Mechanics. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2007.Geoghegan, H. The Culture of Enthusiasm: Technology, Collecting and Museums. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London, 2008.Gillespie, D.L., A. Leffler, and E. Lerner. “‘If It Weren’t for My Hobby, I’d Have a Life’: Dog Sports, Serious Leisure, and Boundary Negotiations.” Leisure Studies 21 (2002): 285–304.Hall, S., and T. Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Sub-Cultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976.Hanks, P. “Enthusiasm and Condescension.” Euralex ’98 Proceedings. 1998. 18 Jul. 2005 ‹http://www.patrickhanks.com/papers/enthusiasm.pdf›.Haring, K. “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance.” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 734–761.Haring, K. Ham Radio’s Technical Culture. London: MIT Press, 2007.Hebdige, D. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.Hills, M. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002.Hudson, K. Industrial Archaeology London: John Baker, 1963.Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.Latour, B. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. London: Harvard UP, 1996.Leadbeater, C., and P. Miller. The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society. London: Demos, 2004.Lewis, L.A., ed. The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992.McLoughlin, W.G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977. London: U of Chicago P, 1977.Mee, J. Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.Mellström, U. “Patriarchal Machines and Masculine Embodiment.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 27 (2002): 460–478.Moorhouse, H.F. Driving Ambitions: A Social Analysis of American Hot Rod Enthusiasm. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991.Oldenziel, R. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America 1870-1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1999.Palmer, M. “‘We Have Not Factory Bell’: Domestic Textile Workers in the Nineteenth Century.” The Local Historian 34 (2004): 198–213.Raistrick, A. Industrial Archaeology. London: Granada, 1973.Riden, P. “Post-Post-Medieval Archaeology.” Antiquity XLVII (1973): 210-216.Rix, M. “Industrial Archaeology: Progress Report 1962.” The Amateur Historian 5 (1962): 56–60.Rix, M. Industrial Archaeology. London: The Historical Association, 1967.Saarikoski, P. The Lure of the Machine: The Personal Computer Interest in Finland from the 1970s to the Mid-1990s. Unpublished PhD Thesis, 2004. ‹http://users.utu.fi/petsaari/lure.pdf›.Samuel, R. Theatres of Memory London: Verso, 1994.Sandvoss, C. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption Cambridge: Polity, 2005.Schouten, J.W., and J. McAlexander. “Subcultures of Consumption: An Ethnography of the New Bikers.” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (1995) 43–61.Stebbins, R.A. Amateurs: On the Margin between Work and Leisure. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979.Stebbins, R.A. Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992.Takahashi, Y. “A Network of Tinkerers: The Advent of the Radio and Television Receiver Industry in Japan.” Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 460–484.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Starrs, Bruno. "Publish and Graduate?: Earning a PhD by Published Papers in Australia." M/C Journal 11, no. 4 (2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.37.

Full text

Abstract:

Refereed publications (also known as peer-reviewed) are the currency of academia, yet many PhD theses in Australia result in only one or two such papers. Typically, a doctoral thesis requires the candidate to present (and pass) a public Confirmation Seminar, around nine to twelve months into candidacy, in which a panel of the candidate’s supervisors and invited experts adjudicate upon whether the work is likely to continue and ultimately succeed in the goal of a coherent and original contribution to knowledge. A Final Seminar, also public and sometimes involving the traditional viva voce or oral defence of the thesis, is presented two or three months before approval is given to send the 80,000 to 100,000 word tome off for external examination. And that soul-destroying or elation-releasing examiner’s verdict can be many months in the delivery: a limbo-like period during which the candidate’s status as a student is ended and her or his receipt of any scholarship or funding guerdon is terminated with perfunctory speed. This is the only time most students spend seriously writing up their research for publication although, naturally, many are more involved in job hunting as they pin their hopes on passing the thesis examination.There is, however, a slightly more palatable alternative to this nail-biting process of the traditional PhD, and that is the PhD by Published Papers (also known as PhD by Publications or PhD by Published Works). The form of my own soon-to-be-submitted thesis, it permits the submission for examination of a collection of papers that have been refereed and accepted (or are in the process of being refereed) for publication in academic journals or books. Apart from the obvious benefits in getting published early in one’s (hopefully) burgeoning academic career, it also takes away a lot of the stress come final submission time. After all, I try to assure myself, the thesis examiners can’t really discredit the process of double-blind, peer-review the bulk of the thesis has already undergone: their job is to examine how well I’ve unified the papers into a cohesive thesis … right? But perhaps they should at least be wary, because, unfortunately, the requirements for this kind of PhD vary considerably from institution to institution and there have been some cases where the submitted work is of questionable quality compared to that produced by graduates from more demanding universities. Hence, this paper argues that in my subject area of interest—film and television studies—there is a huge range in the set requirements for doctorates, from universities that award the degree to film artists for prior published work that has undergone little or no academic scrutiny and has involved little or no on-campus participation to at least three Australian universities that require candidates be enrolled for a minimum period of full-time study and only submit scholarly work generated and published (or submitted for publication) during candidature. I would also suggest that uncertainty about where a graduate’s work rests on this continuum risks confusing a hard-won PhD by Published Papers with the sometimes risible honorary doctorate. Let’s begin by dredging the depths of those murky, quasi-academic waters to examine the occasionally less-than-salubrious honorary doctorate. The conferring of this degree is generally a recognition of an individual’s body of (usually published) work but is often conferred for contributions to knowledge or society in general that are not even remotely academic. The honorary doctorate does not usually carry with it the right to use the title “Dr” (although many self-aggrandising recipients in the non-academic world flout this unwritten code of conduct, and, indeed, Monash University’s Monash Magazine had no hesitation in describing its 2008 recipient, musician, screenwriter, and art-school-dropout Nick Cave, as “Dr Cave” (O’Loughlin)). Some shady universities even offer such degrees for sale or ‘donation’ and thus do great damage to that institution’s credibility as well as to the credibility of the degree itself. Such overseas “diploma mills”—including Ashwood University, Belford University, Glendale University and Suffield University—are identified by their advertising of “Life Experience Degrees,” for which a curriculum vitae outlining the prospective graduand’s oeuvre is accepted on face value as long as their credit cards are not rejected. An aspiring screen auteur simply specifies film and television as their major and before you can shout “Cut!” there’s a degree in the mail. Most of these pseudo-universities are not based in Australia but are perfectly happy to confer their ‘titles’ to any well-heeled, vanity-driven Australians capable of completing the online form. Nevertheless, many academics fear a similarly disreputable marketplace might develop here, and Norfolk Island-based Greenwich University presents a particularly illuminating example. Previously empowered by an Act of Parliament consented to by Senator Ian Macdonald, the then Minister for Territories, this “university” had the legal right to confer honorary degrees from 1998. The Act was eventually overridden by legislation passed in 2002, after a concerted effort by the Australian Universities Quality Agency Ltd. and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee to force the accreditation requirements of the Australian Qualifications Framework upon the institution in question, thus preventing it from making degrees available for purchase over the Internet. Greenwich University did not seek re-approval and soon relocated to its original home of Hawaii (Brown). But even real universities flounder in similarly muddy waters when, unsolicited, they make dubious decisions to grant degrees to individuals they hold in high esteem. Although meaning well by not courting pecuniary gain, they nevertheless invite criticism over their choice of recipient for their honoris causa, despite the decision usually only being reached after a process of debate and discussion by university committees. Often people are rewarded, it seems, as much for their fame as for their achievements or publications. One such example of a celebrity who has had his onscreen renown recognised by an honorary doctorate is film and television actor/comedian Billy Connolly who was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of Glasgow in 2006, prompting Stuart Jeffries to complain that “something has gone terribly wrong in British academia” (Jeffries). Eileen McNamara also bemoans the levels to which some institutions will sink to in search of media attention and exposure, when she writes of St Andrews University in Scotland conferring an honorary doctorate to film actor and producer, Michael Douglas: “What was designed to acknowledge intellectual achievement has devolved into a publicity grab with universities competing for celebrity honorees” (McNamara). Fame as an actor (and the list gets even weirder when the scope of enquiry is widened beyond the field of film and television), seems to be an achievement worth recognising with an honorary doctorate, according to some universities, and this kind of discredit is best avoided by Australian institutions of higher learning if they are to maintain credibility. Certainly, universities down under would do well to follow elsewhere than in the footprints of Long Island University’s Southampton College. Perhaps the height of academic prostitution of parchments for the attention of mass media occurred when in 1996 this US school bestowed an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters upon that mop-like puppet of film and television fame known as the “muppet,” Kermit the Frog. Indeed, this polystyrene and cloth creation with an anonymous hand operating its mouth had its acceptance speech duly published (see “Kermit’s Acceptance Speech”) and the Long Island University’s Southampton College received much valuable press. After all, any publicity is good publicity. Or perhaps this furry frog’s honorary degree was a cynical stunt meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the practice? In 1986 a similar example, much closer to my own home, occurred when in anticipation and condemnation of the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Prince Philip by Monash University in Melbourne, the “Members of the Monash Association of Students had earlier given a 21-month-old Chihuahua an honorary science degree” (Jeffries), effectively suggesting that the honorary doctorate is, in fact, a dog of a degree. On a more serious note, there have been honorary doctorates conferred upon far more worthy recipients in the field of film and television by some Australian universities. Indigenous film-maker Tracey Moffatt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Griffith University in November of 2004. Moffatt was a graduate of the Griffith University’s film school and had an excellent body of work including the films Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) and beDevil (1993). Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Williamson was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by The University of Queensland in December of 2004. His work had previously picked up four Australian Film Institute awards for best screenplay. An Honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts was given to film director Fred Schepisi AO by The University of Melbourne in May of 2006. His films had also been earlier recognised with Australian Film Institute awards as well as the Golden Globe Best Miniseries or Television Movie award for Empire Falls in 2006. Director George Miller was crowned with an Honorary Doctorate in Film from the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School in April 2007, although he already had a medical doctor’s testamur on his wall. In May of this year, filmmaker George Gittoes, a fine arts dropout from The University of Sydney, received an honorary doctorate by The University of New South Wales. His documentaries, Soundtrack to War (2005) and Rampage (2006), screened at the Sydney and Berlin film festivals, and he has been employed by the Australian Government as an official war artist. Interestingly, the high quality screen work recognised by these Australian universities may have earned the recipients ‘real’ PhDs had they sought the qualification. Many of these film artists could have just as easily submitted their work for the degree of PhD by Published Papers at several universities that accept prior work in lieu of an original exegesis, and where a film is equated with a book or journal article. But such universities still invite comparisons of their PhDs by Published Papers with honorary doctorates due to rather too-easy-to-meet criteria. The privately funded Bond University, for example, recommends a minimum full-time enrolment of just three months and certainly seems more lax in its regulations than other Antipodean institution: a healthy curriculum vitae and payment of the prescribed fee (currently AUD$24,500 per annum) are the only requirements. Restricting my enquiries once again to the field of my own research, film and television, I note that Dr. Ingo Petzke achieved his 2004 PhD by Published Works based upon films produced in Germany well before enrolling at Bond, contextualized within a discussion of the history of avant-garde film-making in that country. Might not a cynic enquire as to how this PhD significantly differs from an honorary doctorate? Although Petzke undoubtedly paid his fees and met all of Bond’s requirements for his thesis entitled Slow Motion: Thirty Years in Film, one cannot criticise that cynic for wondering if Petzke’s films are indeed equivalent to a collection of refereed papers. It should be noted that Bond is not alone when it comes to awarding candidates the PhD by Published Papers for work published or screened in the distant past. Although yet to grant it in the area of film or television, Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) is an institution that distinctly specifies its PhD by Publications is to be awarded for “research which has been carried out prior to admission to candidature” (8). Similarly, the Griffith Law School states: “The PhD (by publications) is awarded to established researchers who have an international reputation based on already published works” (1). It appears that Bond is no solitary voice in the academic wilderness, for SUT and the Griffith Law School also apparently consider the usual milestones of Confirmation and Final Seminars to be unnecessary if the so-called candidate is already well published. Like Bond, Griffith University (GU) is prepared to consider a collection of films to be equivalent to a number of refereed papers. Dr Ian Lang’s 2002 PhD (by Publication) thesis entitled Conditional Truths: Remapping Paths To Documentary ‘Independence’ contains not refereed, scholarly articles but the following videos: Wheels Across the Himalaya (1981); Yallambee, People of Hope (1986); This Is What I Call Living (1988); The Art of Place: Hanoi Brisbane Art Exchange (1995); and Millennium Shift: The Search for New World Art (1997). While this is a most impressive body of work, and is well unified by appropriate discussion within the thesis, the cynic who raised eyebrows at Petzke’s thesis might also be questioning this thesis: Dr Lang’s videos all preceded enrolment at GU and none have been refereed or acknowledged with major prizes. Certainly, the act of releasing a film for distribution has much in common with book publishing, but should these videos be considered to be on a par with academic papers published in, say, the prestigious and demanding journal Screen? While recognition at awards ceremonies might arguably correlate with peer review there is still the question as to how scholarly a film actually is. Of course, documentary films such as those in Lang’s thesis can be shown to be addressing gaps in the literature, as is the expectation of any research paper, but the onus remains on the author/film-maker to demonstrate this via a detailed contextual review and a well-written, erudite argument that unifies the works into a cohesive thesis. This Lang has done, to the extent that suspicious cynic might wonder why he chose not to present his work for a standard PhD award. Another issue unaddressed by most institutions is the possibility that the publications have been self-refereed or refereed by the candidate’s editorial colleagues in a case wherein the papers appear in a book the candidate has edited or co-edited. Dr Gillian Swanson’s 2004 GU thesis Towards a Cultural History of Private Life: Sexual Character, Consuming Practices and Cultural Knowledge, which addresses amongst many other cultural artefacts the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962), has nine publications: five of which come from two books she co-edited, Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two, (Gledhill and Swanson 1996) and Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives (Crisp et al 2000). While few would dispute the quality of Swanson’s work, the persistent cynic might wonder if these five papers really qualify as refereed publications. The tacit understanding of a refereed publication is that it is blind reviewed i.e. the contributor’s name is removed from the document. Such a system is used to prevent bias and favouritism but this level of anonymity might be absent when the contributor to a book is also one of the book’s editors. Of course, Dr Swanson probably took great care to distance herself from the refereeing process undertaken by her co-editors, but without an inbuilt check, allegations of cronyism from unfriendly cynics may well result. A related factor in making comparisons of different university’s PhDs by Published Papers is the requirements different universities have about the standard of the journal the paper is published in. It used to be a simple matter in Australia: the government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) held a Register of Refereed Journals. If your benefactor in disseminating your work was on the list, your publications were of near-unquestionable quality. Not any more: DEST will no longer accept nominations for listing on the Register and will not undertake to rule on whether a particular journal article meets the HERDC [Higher Education Research Data Collection] requirements for inclusion in publication counts. HEPs [Higher Education Providers] have always had the discretion to determine if a publication produced in a journal meets the requirements for inclusion in the HERDC regardless of whether or not the journal was included on the Register of Refereed Journals. As stated in the HERDC specifications, the Register is not an exhaustive list of all journals which satisfy the peer-review requirements (DEST). The last listing for the DEST Register of Refereed Journals was the 3rd of February 2006, making way for a new tiered list of academic journals, which is currently under review in the Australian tertiary education sector (see discussion of this development in the Redden and Mitchell articles in this issue). In the interim, some university faculties created their own rankings of journals, but not the Faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where I am studying for my PhD by Published Papers. Although QUT does not have a list of ranked journals for a candidate to submit papers to, it is otherwise quite strict in its requirements. The QUT University Regulations state, “Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (QUT PhD regulation 14.1.2). Thus there is the requirement at QUT that apart from the usual introduction, methodology and literature review, an argument must be made as to how the papers present a sustained research project via “an overarching discussion of the main features linking the publications” (14.2.12). It is also therein stated that it should be an “account of research progress linking the research papers” (4.2.6). In other words, a unifying essay must make an argument for consideration of the sometimes diversely published papers as a cohesive body of work, undertaken in a deliberate journey of research. In my own case, an aural auteur analysis of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer, I argue that my published papers (eight in total) represent a journey from genre analysis (one paper) to standard auteur analysis (three papers) to an argument that sound should be considered in auteur analysis (one paper) to the major innovation of the thesis, aural auteur analysis (three papers). It should also be noted that unlike Bond, GU or SUT, the QUT regulations for the standard PhD still apply: a Confirmation Seminar, Final Seminar and a minimum two years of full-time enrolment (with a minimum of three months residency in Brisbane) are all compulsory. Such milestones and sine qua non ensure the candidate’s academic progress and intellectual development such that she or he is able to confidently engage in meaningful quodlibets regarding the thesis’s topic. Another interesting and significant feature of the QUT guidelines for this type of degree is the edict that papers submitted must be “published, accepted or submitted during the period of candidature” (14.1.1). Similarly, the University of Canberra (UC) states “The articles or other published material must be prepared during the period of candidature” (10). Likewise, Edith Cowan University (ECU) will confer its PhD by Publications to those candidates whose thesis consists of “only papers published in refereed scholarly media during the period of enrolment” (2). In other words, one cannot simply front up to ECU, QUT, or UC with a résumé of articles or films published over a lifetime of writing or film-making and ask for a PhD by Published Papers. Publications of the candidate prepared prior to commencement of candidature are simply not acceptable at these institutions and such PhDs by Published Papers from QUT, UC and ECU are entirely different to those offered by Bond, GU and SUT. Furthermore, without a requirement for a substantial period of enrolment and residency, recipients of PhDs by Published Papers from Bond, GU, or SUT are unlikely to have participated significantly in the research environment of their relevant faculty and peers. Such newly minted doctors may be as unfamiliar with the campus and its research activities as the recipient of an honorary doctorate usually is, as he or she poses for the media’s cameras en route to the glamorous awards ceremony. Much of my argument in this paper is built upon the assumption that the process of refereeing a paper (or for that matter, a film) guarantees a high level of academic rigour, but I confess that this premise is patently naïve, if not actually flawed. Refereeing can result in the rejection of new ideas that conflict with the established opinions of the referees. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be impeded and the lack of referee’s accountability is a potential problem, too. It can also be no less nail-biting a process than the examination of a finished thesis, given that some journals take over a year to complete the refereeing process, and some journal’s editorial committees have recognised this shortcoming. Despite being a mainstay of its editorial approach since 1869, the prestigious science journal, Nature, which only publishes about 7% of its submissions, has led the way with regard to varying the procedure of refereeing, implementing in 2006 a four-month trial period of ‘Open Peer Review’. Their website states, Authors could choose to have their submissions posted on a preprint server for open comments, in parallel with the conventional peer review process. Anyone in the field could then post comments, provided they were prepared to identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process was closed and the editors made their decision about publication with the help of all reports and comments (Campbell). Unfortunately, the experiment was unpopular with both authors and online peer reviewers. What the Nature experiment does demonstrate, however, is that the traditional process of blind refereeing is not yet perfected and can possibly evolve into something less problematic in the future. Until then, refereeing continues to be the best system there is for applying structured academic scrutiny to submitted papers. With the reforms of the higher education sector, including forced mergers of universities and colleges of advanced education and the re-introduction of university fees (carried out under the aegis of John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991), and the subsequent rationing of monies according to research dividends (calculated according to numbers of research degree conferrals and publications), there has been a veritable explosion in the number of institutions offering PhDs in Australia. But the general public may not always be capable of differentiating between legitimately accredited programs and diploma mills, given that the requirements for the first differ substantially. From relatively easily obtainable PhDs by Published Papers at Bond, GU and SUT to more rigorous requirements at ECU, QUT and UC, there is undoubtedly a huge range in the demands of degrees that recognise a candidate’s published body of work. The cynical reader may assume that with this paper I am simply trying to shore up my own forthcoming graduation with a PhD by Published papers from potential criticisms that it is on par with a ‘purchased’ doctorate. Perhaps they are right, for this is a new degree in QUT’s Creative Industries faculty and has only been awarded to one other candidate (Dr Marcus Foth for his 2006 thesis entitled Towards a Design Methodology to Support Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Apartment Buildings). But I believe QUT is setting a benchmark, along with ECU and UC, to which other universities should aspire. In conclusion, I believe further efforts should be undertaken to heighten the differences in status between PhDs by Published Papers generated during enrolment, PhDs by Published Papers generated before enrolment and honorary doctorates awarded for non-academic published work. Failure to do so courts cynical comparison of all PhD by Published Papers with unearnt doctorates bought from Internet shysters. References Brown, George. “Protecting Australia’s Higher Education System: A Proactive Versus Reactive Approach in Review (1999–2004).” Proceedings of the Australian Universities Quality Forum 2004. Australian Universities Quality Agency, 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.auqa.edu.au/auqf/2004/program/papers/Brown.pdf>. Campbell, Philip. “Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate.” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. December 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/> Crisp, Jane, Kay Ferres, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives. London: Routledge, 2000. Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). “Closed—Register of Refereed Journals.” Higher Education Research Data Collection, 2008. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/online_forms_services/ higher_education_research_data_ collection.htm>. Edith Cowan University. “Policy Content.” Postgraduate Research: Thesis by Publication, 2003. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.ecu.edu.au/GPPS/policies_db/tmp/ac063.pdf>. Gledhill, Christine, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Griffith Law School, Griffith University. Handbook for Research Higher Degree Students. 24 March 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/slrc/pdf/rhdhandbook.pdf>. Jeffries, Stuart. “I’m a celebrity, get me an honorary degree!” The Guardian 6 July 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1813525,00.html>. Kermit the Frog. “Kermit’s Commencement Address at Southampton Graduate Campus.” Long Island University News 19 May 1996. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.southampton.liu.edu/news/commence/1996/kermit.htm>. McNamara, Eileen. “Honorary senselessness.” The Boston Globe 7 May 2006. ‹http://www. boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/05/07/honorary_senselessness/>. O’Loughlin, Shaunnagh. “Doctor Cave.” Monash Magazine 21 (May 2008). 13 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/monmag/issue21-2008/alumni/cave.html>. Queensland University of Technology. “Presentation of PhD Theses by Published Papers.” Queensland University of Technology Doctor of Philosophy Regulations (IF49). 12 Oct. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation %20of%20PhD%20Theses>. Swinburne University of Technology. Research Higher Degrees and Policies. 14 Nov. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.swinburne.edu.au/corporate/registrar/ppd/docs/RHDpolicy& procedure.pdf>. University of Canberra. Higher Degrees by Research: Policy and Procedures (The Gold Book). 7.3.3.27 (a). 15 Nov. 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.canberra.edu.au/research/attachments/ goldbook/Pt207_AB20approved3220arp07.pdf>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Allmark, Panizza. "Photography after the Incidents." M/C Journal 10, no. 6 (2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2719.

Full text

Abstract:

This article will look at the use of personal photographs that attempt to convey a sense of social activism as a reaction against global terrorism. Moreover, I argue that the photographs uploaded to the site “We’re Not Afraid”, which began after the London bombings in 2005, presents a forum to promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defence against the anxiety of terror. What is compelling are the ways in which the Website promotes, seemingly, everyday modalities through what may be deemed as the domestic snapshot. Nevertheless, the aura from the context of these images operates to arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence. It promotes photography’s spectacular power. To begin it is worthwhile considering the ways in which the spectacle of terrorism is mediated. For example, the bombs activated on the London Underground and at Tavistock Square on the 7th of July 2005 marked the day that London became a victim of ‘global’ terrorism, re-instilling the fear projected by the media to be alarmed and to be suspicious. In the shadow of the terrorist events of September 11, as well as the Madrid Bombings in 2004, the incidents once again drew attention to the point that in the Western world ‘we’ again can be under attack. Furthermore, the news media plays a vital role in mediating the reality and the spectacle of terrorist attacks in the display of visual ‘proof’. After the London bombings of 7 July 2005, the BBC Website encouraged photo submissions of the incidents, under the heading “London Explosions: Your Photos”, thus promoting citizen journalism. Within six hours the BBC site received more that 1000 photographs. According to Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s World Service and Global News division, “people were participating in our coverage in way we had never seen before” (13). Other news Websites, such as Reuters and MSNBC also set up a similar call and display of the incidents. The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the trauma of terrorism in which they became active participants in the reportage. Leading British newspapers further evoked the sensational terror of the incidents through the captioning of horrific images of destruction. It contextualised them within the realm of fascination and fear with headlines such as “London’s Day of Terror” from the Guardian, “Terror Comes to London” from the Independent and “Al-Qa’eda Brings Terror to the Heart of London” from the Daily Telegraph (“What the Papers Say”). Roland Barthes notes that “even from the perspective of a purely immanent analysis, the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text – title, caption or article – accompanying every press photograph” (16). He suggested that, with the rise to prominence of ‘the press photograph’ as a mode of visual communication, the traditional relationship between image and text was inverted: “it is not the image which comes to elucidate or ‘realize’ the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image” (25). Frederic Jameson raises a very important point in regards to the role the media plays in terror. He suggests that the Western media is not only affected by a permanent condition of amnesia, but that this has become its primary ‘informational function’ (20). Hence, terror images are constantly repeated for their affect. “When combined with the media, terrorism’s reality-making power is astounding: its capacity to blend the media’s sensational stories, old mythical stereotypes, and a burning sense of moral wrath” (Zulaika and Douglass ix). Susan Sontag, in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, also discusses the assault of images (116). She argues that “the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human” (40). Furthermore, globalisation has profoundly changed the rhetoric of terrorism in which the uses of photographs for political means are ubiquitous. Sontag argues that “it seems as if there is a greater quantity of such news than before” (116). Nevertheless, she stresses, “it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad” (116). Rather, than the focus on images of despair, the “We’re Not Afraid” Website provides a reaction against visual assaults. The images suggest a turning away from the iconography of terror and suffering to a focus on everyday western middle-class modalities. The images on the site consist of domestic ritual photographic practices, such as family snapshots. The images were disseminated following what has been referred to as the ‘incidents’ by the British press of the attacks on 7 July on the London transport system. Significantly, rather than being described as an event, such as the September 11 terrorist assaults were, the term ‘incidents’ suggests that everyday modalities, the everyday ways of being, may not be affected despite the terror of the attacks. It is, perhaps, a very British approach to the idea of ‘moving on’ despite adversity, which the Website advocates. The Website invites the general public to upload personal photographs captioned with the phrase “We’re not afraid” to “show that terrorists would not change the way people lived their lives” (Clarke).The Website began on 7 July 2005 and during the first week the site received, at times, up to 15 images a minute from across the world (Nikkah). Notably, within days of the Website’s launch it received over 3500 images and 11 million hits (Clarke).The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the incidents. These images seem to support Susan Sontag’s argument from On Photography, in which she argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The images present a social activism for the predominantly white middle-class online participants and, as such, is subversive in its move away from the contextualised sensational images of violence that abound in the mainstream press. According to the site’s creator, London Web designer, Alfie Dennen “the idea for this site came from a picture of one of the bombed trains sent from a mobile phone to Dennen’s own weblog. Someone else added the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’ alongside the image” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). Hence, in Dennen’s Weblog the terror and trauma of the train images of the London underground, that were circulated in the main stream press, have been recontextualised by the caption to present defiance and survival. The images uploaded onto the Website range from personal snapshots to manipulated photographs which all bear the declaration: ‘We are not afraid’. Currently, there are 770 galleries with 24 images per gallery amounting to around 18500 images that have been sent to the site. The photographs provide a crack in the projected reality of terrorism and the iconography of suffering as espoused by the mainstream media. The Website claims: We’re not afraid is an outlet for the global community to speak out against the acts of terror that have struck London, Madrid, New York, Baghdad, Basra, Tikrit, Gaza, Tel-Aviv, Afghanistan, Bali, and against the atrocities occurring in cities around the world each and every day. It is a worldwide action for people not willing to be cowed by terrorism and fear mongering. It suggests that: The historical response to these types of attacks has been a show of deadly force; we believe that there is a better way. We refuse to respond to aggression and hatred in kind. Instead, we who are not afraid will continue to live our lives the best way we know how. We will work, we will play, we will laugh, we will live. We will not waste one moment, nor sacrifice one bit of our freedom, because of fear. We are not afraid. (“we’re not afraid.com: Citizens for a secure world, united against terror.”) The images evoke the social memory of our era of global terrorism. Arguably, the events since September 11 have placed the individual in a protection mode. The photographs represent, as Sontag espouses, a tool against the anxiety of our time. This is a turn away from the visual iconography of despair. As such, rather than images of suffering they are images of survival, or life carrying on as usual. Or, more precisely, the images represent depictions of everyday western middle-class existence. The images range from family snaps, touristic photographs, pictures of the London underground and some manipulated images all containing the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’. Dennen “said the site had become a symbol for people to show solidarity with London and say they will not be cowed by the bombings” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). The photographs also serve as a form of protection of western middle-class values and lifestyle that may be threatened by terrorist acts. Of consideration is that “personal photographs not only bind us to our own pasts – they bind us to the pasts of the social groups to which we belong” (Gye 280). The images on the site may be described as a “revocation of social power through visibility” and as such photography is considered a “performance of power” (Frosh 46). Barthes asserts that “formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (25). The images loaded onto the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ assumes notions of resilience and defiance which can be closely linked to Anglo-American cultural memory and imagination. Significantly, efforts to influence ‘heart and minds’ through support of touring exhibitions were common in the earlier days of the Cold War. Sontag argues that “photographic collections can be used to substitute a world” (162). The images exalted a universal humanism, similarly to the images on the “We’re Not Afraid” site. Many exhibits were supported throughout the 1950s, often under the auspices of the USIA (United States Information Agency). A famous example is the photography exhibit ‘The Family of Man’ which travelled to 28 countries between 1955-59 and was seen by 9 million people (Kennedy 316). It contained 503 images, 273 photographers from 68 nations “it posited humanity as a universal ideal and human empathy as a compensatory response to the threat of nuclear annihilation” (Kennedy 322). Significantly, Liam Kennedy asserts that, the Cold War rhetoric surrounding the exhibition blurred the boundaries between art, information and propaganda. The exhibition has been critiqued ideologically as an imperialist project, most notably by Allan Sekula in which he states “the worldliness of photography is the outcome, not of any immanent universality of meaning, but of a project of global domination” (96). In more recent times an exhibition, backed by the US State Department titled ‘After September 11: Images from Ground Zero’, by photojournalist/art photographer Joel Meyorowitz travelled to more than 60 countries and assisted in shaping and maintaining a public memory of the attacks of the World Trade Centre and its aftermath (Kennedy 315). Similar, to ‘The Family of Man’, it adds an epic quality to the images. As Kennedy points out that: To be sure this latter exhibit has been more overtly designed as propaganda, yet it also carries the cachet of ‘culture’ (most obviously, via the signature of a renowned photographer) and is intended to transmit a universal message that transcends the politics of difference. (Kennedy 323) The Website “We’re Not Afraid’ maintains the public memory of terrorism, without the horror of suffering. With a ‘universal message’ similar to the aforementioned exhibitions, it attempts to transcends the politics of difference by addressing the ‘we’ as the ‘everyday’ citizen. It serves as a gallery space and similarly evokes western romantic universal ideals conveyed in the exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, whilst its aesthetic forms avoid the stylististically captured scenes of ‘After September 11’. As stated earlier, the site had over 11 million hits in the first few weeks; as such the sheer number of viewers exceeds that of any formal photographic exhibition. Moreover, unlike these highly constructed art exhibitions from leading professional photographers, the Website significantly presents a democratic form of participation in which the ‘personal is political’. It is the citizen journalist. It is the ‘everyday’ person, as evidenced in the predominant snapshot aesthetics and the ordinariness in the images that are employed. Kris Cohen, in his analysis of photoblogging suggests that this aesthetic emphasises the importance in “photoblogging of not thinking too much, of the role that instinct plays in the making of photographs and the photoblog” (890). As discussed, previously, the overwhelming response and contributions to the Website within days of its launch seems to suggest this. The submission of photographs suggests a visceral response to the incidents from the ‘people’ in the celebration of the ‘everyday’ and the mundane. It also should be noted that “there are now well over a million documented blogs and photoblogs in the world”, with most appearing since 2003 (Cohen 886). As Cohen suggests “their newfound popularity has provoked a gentle storm of press, along with a significant number of utopic scenarios in which blogs feature as the next emancipatory mass media product”(886). The world-wide press coverage for the “We’re Not Afraid’ site is one key example that promotes this “utopian vision of transfigured citizens and in Benedict Anderson’s well used term an ‘imagined community” (Goggin xx). Nevertheless, the defiant captioning of the images also returns us historically to the social memory of the London Blitz 1940-41 in which the theme of a transfigured community was employed and in which the London underground and shelters became a signifier for the momentum of “We’re Not Afraid’. Barthes explained in Mythologies about the “the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (11). What I want to argue is that the mythology surrounding the London bombings articulated in the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ is determined by 20th Century history of the media and the cultural imaginary surrounding predominantly British values*.** *The British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, asserted that “qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.” (“Blair Defines British Values”). These values are suggested in the types of photographs uploaded onto the activist Website, as such notions of the British Empire are evoked. Moreover, in his address following the incident, “Blair harkened back to the ‘Blitz spirit’ that saw Londoners through the dark days of Nazi bombing during World War II — and, by association, to Winston Churchill, the wartime leader whose determined, moving speeches helped steel the national resolve” (“Blair Delivers”). In his Churchillian cadence he paid “tribute to the stoicism and resilience of the people of London who have responded in a way typical of them”. He said Britain would show “by our spirit and dignity” that “our values will long outlast” the terrorists. He further declared that “the purpose of terrorism is just that. It is to terrorize people and we will not be terrorized” (“Blair Delivers”). The mythology of the Blitz and “the interpretive context at the time (and for some years thereafter) can be summarized by the phrase ‘the People’s War’—a populist patriotism that combined criticism of the past with expectations of social change and inclusive messages of shared heritage and values” (Field 31). The image conveyed is of a renewed sense of community. The language of triumph against adversity and the endurance of ordinary citizens are also evoked in the popular press of the London incidents. The Times announced: Revulsion and resolve: Despite the shock, horror and outrage, the calm shown in London was exemplary. Ordinary life may be inconvenienced by the spectre of terror, yet terrorism will not force free societies to abandon their fundamental features. An attack was inevitable. The casualties were dreadful. The terrorists have only strengthened the resolve of Britain and its people. (“What the Papers Say”) Similarly the Daily Express headline was “We Britons Will Never Be Defeated” (“What the Papers Say”). The declaration of “We’re not afraid” alongside images on the Website follows on from this trajectory. The BBC reported that the Website “‘We’re not afraid’ gives Londoners a voice” (“Not Afraid Website Overwhelmed”). The BBC has also made a documentary concerning the mission and the somewhat utopian principles presented. Similarly discussion of the site has been evoked in other Weblogs that overwhelmingly praise it and very rarely question its role. One example is from a discussion of “We’re Not Afraid” on another activist site titled “World Changing: Change Your Thinking”. The contributor states: Well, I live in the UK and I am afraid. I’m also scared that sites like We’re Not Afraid encourage an unhealthy solidarity of superiority, nationalism and xenophobia – perpetuating a “we’re good” and “they’re evil” mentality that avoids the big picture questions of how we got here. Posted by: John Norris at July 8, 2005 03:45 AM Notably, this statement also reiterates the previous argument on cultural diplomacy presented by theorists in regards to the exhibitions of ‘The Family of Man’ and ‘After September 11’ in which the images are viewed as propaganda, promoting western cultural values. This is also supported by the mood of commentary in the British press since the London bombings, in which it is argued that “Britain and the British way of life are under threat, the implication being that the threat is so serious that it may ultimately destroy the nation and its values” (King). The significance of the Website is that it represents a somewhat democratic medium in its call for engagement and self-expression. Furthermore, the emancipatory photography of self and space, presented in the “We’re Not Afraid” site, echoes Blair’s declaration of “we will not be terrorized”. However, it follows similar politically conservative themes that were evoked in the Blitz, such as community, family and social stability, with tacit reference to social fragmentation and multi-ethnicity (Field 41-42). In general, as befitted the theme of “a People’s War,” the Blitz imagery was positive and sympathetic in the way it promoted the endurance of the ordinary citizen. Geoffrey Field suggests “it offered an implicit rejoinder to the earlier furor—focusing especially on brave, caring mothers who made efforts to retain some semblance of family under the most difficult circumstances and fathers who turned up for work no matter how heavy the bombing had been the night before” (24). Images on the Website consist of snapshots of babies, families, pets, sporting groups, people on holiday and at celebrations. It represents a, somewhat, global perspective of middle-class values. The snapshot aesthetic presents, what Liz Kotz refers to as, the “aesthetics of intimacy”. It is a certain kind of photographic work which is quasi-documentary and consists of “colour images of individuals, families, or groupings, presented in an apparently intimate, unposed manner, shot in an off-kilter, snapshot style, often a bit grainy, unfocused, off-colour” (204). These are the types of images that provide the visual gratification of solidarity amongst its contributors and viewers, as it seemingly appears more ‘real’. Yet, Kotz asserts that these type of photographs also involve a structure of power relations “that cannot be easily evaded by the spontaneous performance before the lens” (210). For example, Sarah Boxer importantly points out that “We’re Not Afraid”, set up to show solidarity with London, seems to be turning into a place where the haves of the world can show that they’re not afraid of the have-nots” (1). She argues that “there’s a brutish flaunting of wealth and leisure” (1). The iconography in the images of “We’re not Afraid” certainly promotes a ‘memorialisation’ of the middle-class sphere. The site draws attention to the values of the global neoliberal order in which capital accumulation is paramount. It, nevertheless, also attempts to challenge “the true victory of terrorism”, which Jean Baudrillard circumspectly remarks is in “the regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free movement etc… that the Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world”. Self-confidence is conveyed in the images. Moreover, with the subjects welcoming gaze to the camera there may be a sense of narcissism in publicising what could be considered mundane. However, visibility is power. For example, one of the contributors, Maryland USA resident Darcy Nair, said “she felt a sense of helplessness in the days after 9/11. Posting on the We’re Not Afraid may be a small act, but it does give people like her a sense that they’re doing something” (cited in Weir). Nair states that: It seems that it is the only good answer from someone like me who’s not in the government or military…There are so many other people who are joining in. When bunches of individuals get together – it does make me feel hopeful – there are so many other people who feel the same way. (cited in Weir) Participation in the Website conveys a power which consists of defiantly celebrating western middle-class aesthetics in the form of personal photography. As such, the personal becomes political and the private becomes public. The site offers an opportunity for a shared experience and a sense of community that perhaps is needed in the era of global terrorism. It could be seen as a celebration of survival (Weir). The Website seems inspirational with its defiant message. Moreover, it also has postings from various parts of the world that convey a message of triumph in the ‘everyday’. The site also presents the ubiquitous use of photography in a western cultural tradition in which idealised constructions are manifested in ‘Kodak’ moments and in which the domestic space and leisure times are immortalised and become, significantly, the arena of activism. As previously discussed Sontag argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The Website offers the sense of a global connection. It promotes itself as “citizens for a secure world, united against terror”. It attempts to provide a universal solidarity, which appears uplifting. It is a defence against anxiety in which, in the act of using personal photographs, it becomes part of the collective memory and assists in easing the frustration of not being able to do anything. As Sontag argues “often something looks, or is felt to look ‘better’ in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things” (81). Rather than focus on the tragic victim of traditional photojournalism, in which the camera is directed towards the other, the site promotes the sharing and triumph of personal moments. In the spotlight are ‘everyday’ modalities from ‘everyday people’ attempting to confront the rhetoric of terrorism. In their welcoming gaze to the camera the photographic subjects challenge the notion of the sensational image, the spectacle that is on show is that of middle-class modalities and a performance of collective power. Note Themes from this article have been presented at the 2005 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference in Sydney, Australia and at the 2006 Association for Cultural Studies Crossroads Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. References Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977 [1961]. 15-31. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993 [1972]. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Trans. Rachel Bloul. La Monde 2 (2001). http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism.html>. “Blair Defines British Values.” BBC News 28 Mar. 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/693591.stm>. “Blair Delivers a Classically British Rallying Cry.” Associated Press 7 July 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8502984/>. Boxter, Sarah. “On the Web, Fearlessness Meets Frivolousness.” The York Times 12 July 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/arts/design/12boxe.html?ex= 1278820800&en=e3b207245991aea8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>. Clarke, R. “Web Site Shows Defiance to Bombers: Thousands Send Images to Say ‘We Are Not Afraid.’” CNN International 12 July 2005. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/11/london.website/>. “CJ Bombings in London.” MSNBC TV Citizen Journalist. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8499792/>. Cohen, Kris R. “What Does the Photoblog Want?” Media, Culture & Society 27.6 (2005): 883-901. Dennen, Alfie. “We’renotafraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United Against Terror.” http://www.werenotafraid.com/>. Field, Geoffrey. “Nights Underground in Darkest London: The Blitz, 1940–1941.” International Labor and Working-Class History 62 (2002): 11-49. Frosh, Paul. “The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.” Social Semiotics 11.1 (2001): 43-59. Gye, Lisa. “Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.2 (2007): 279-288. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. New York: Verso, 1998. 1-20. Kennedy, Liam. “Remembering September 11: Photography as Cultural Diplomacy.” International Affairs 79.2 (2003): 315-326. King, Anthony. “What Does It Mean to Be British?” Telegraph 27 May 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/27/ nbrit27.xml>. Kotz, Liz. “The Aesthetics of Intimacy.” In D. Bright (ed.), The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. London: Routledge, 1998. 204-215. “London Explosions: Your Photos.” BBC News 8 July 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm>. Nikkhah, Roya. “We’restillnotafraid.com.” Telegraph co.uk 23 July 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/24/ nseven224.xml>. “‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed.” BBC News 12 July 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/london/4674425.stm>. Norris, John. “We’re Not Afraid”. World Changing: Change Your Thinking. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003069.html>. “Reuters: You Witness News.” http://www.reuters.com/youwitness>. Sambrook, Richard. “Citizen Journalism and the BBC.” Nieman Reports (Winter 2005): 13-16. Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photographs.” In Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973-1983. Halifax Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College Press, 1984. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. Sontag. Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977. Weir, William. “The Global Community Support and Sends a Defiant Message to Terrorists.” Hartford Courant 14 July 2005. http://www.uchc.edu/ocomm/newsarchive/news05/jul05/notafraid.html>. We’renot afraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United against Terror. http://www.werenotafraid.com>. “What the Papers Say.” Media Guardian 8 July 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jul/08/pressandpublishing.terrorism1>. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 1996.     Citation reference for this article  MLA Style Allmark, Panizza. "Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/06-allmark.php>. APA Style Allmark, P. (Apr. 2008) "Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/06-allmark.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Peoples, Sharon Margaret. "Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum." M/C Journal 18, no. 4 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1013.

Full text

Abstract:

IntroductionIn March 2015, I visited the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (established 1967) in the “cherry capital of Australia”, the town of Young, New South Wales, in preparation for a student excursion. Like other Australian folk museums, this museum focuses on the ordinary and the everyday of rural life, and is heavily reliant on local history, local historians, volunteers, and donated objects for the collection. It may not sound as though the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (LFFM) holds much potential for a fashion curator, as fashion exhibitions have become high points of innovation in exhibition design. It is quite a jolt to return to old style folk museums, when travelling shows such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011 – V&A Museum 2015) or The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier (V&A Museum 2011 – NGV 2014) are popping up around the globe. The contrast stimulated this author to think on the role and the power of curators. This paper will show that the potential for fashion as a vehicle for demonstrating ideas other than through rubrics of design or history has been growing. We all wear dress. We express identity, politics, status, age, gender, social values, and mental state through the way we dress each and every day. These key issues are also explored in many museum exhibitions.Small museums often have an abundance of clothing. For them, it is a case of not only managing and caring for growing collections but also curating objects in a way that communicates regional and often national identity, as well as narrating stories in meaningful ways to audiences. This paper argues that the way in which dress is curated can greatly enhance temporary and permanent exhibitions. Fashion curation is on the rise (Riegels Melchior). This paper looks at why this is so, the potential for this specialisation in curation, the research required, and the sensitivity needed in communicating ideas in exhibitions. It also suggests how fashion curation skills may facilitate an increasing demand.Caring for the AudienceThe paper draws on a case study of how Chinese people at the LFFM are portrayed. The Chinese came to the Young district during the 1860s gold rush. While many people often think the Chinese were sojourners (Rolls), that is, they found gold and returned to China, many actually settled in regional Australia (McGowan; Couchman; Frost). At Young there were riots against the Chinese miners, and this narrative is illustrated at the museum.In examining the LFFM, this paper points to the importance of caring for the audience as well as objects, knowing and acknowledging the current and potential audiences. Caring for how the objects are received and perceived is vital to the work of curators. At this museum, the stereotypic portrayal of Chinese people, through a “coolie” hat, a fan, and two dolls dressed in costume, reminds us of the increased professionalisation of the museum sector in the last 20 years. It also reminds us of the need for good communication through both the objects and texts. Audiences have become more sophisticated, and their expectations have increased. Displays and accompanying texts that do not reflect in depth research, knowledge, and sensitivities can result in viewers losing interest quickly. Not long into my visit I began thinking of the potential reaction by the Chinese graduate students. In a tripartite model called the “museum experience”, Falk and Dierking argue that the social context, personal context, and physical context affect the visitor’s experience (5). The social context of who we visit with influences enjoyment. Placing myself in the students’ shoes sharpened reactions to some of the displays. Curators need to be mindful of a wide range of audiences. The excursion was to be not so much a history learning activity, but a way for students to develop a personal interest in museology and to learn the role museums can play in society in general, as well as in small communities. In this case the personal context was also a professional context. What message would they get?Communication in MuseumsStudies by Falk et al. indicate that museum visitors only view an exhibition for 30 minutes before “museum fatigue” sets in (249–257). The physicality of being in a museum can affect the museum experience. Hence, many institutions responded to these studies by placing the key information and objects in the introductory areas of an exhibition, before the visitor gets bored. As Stephen Bitgood argues, this can become self-fulfilling, as the reaction by the exhibition designers can then be to place all the most interesting material early in the path of the audience, leaving the remainder as mundane displays (196). Bitgood argues there is no museum fatigue. He suggests that there are other things at play which curators need to heed, such as giving visitors choice and opportunities for interaction, and avoiding overloading the audience with information and designing poorly laid-out exhibitions that have no breaks or resting points. All these factors contribute to viewers becoming both mentally and physically tired. Rather than placing the onus on the visitor, he contends there are controllable factors the museum can attend to. One of his recommendations is to be provocative in communication. Stimulating exhibitions are more likely to engage the visitor, minimising boredom and tiredness (197). Xerxes Mazda recommends treating an exhibition like a good story, with a beginning, a dark moment, a climax, and an ending. The LFFM certainly has those elements, but they are not translated into curation that gives a compelling narration that holds the visitors’ attention. Object labels give only rudimentary information, such as: “Wooden Horse collar/very rare/donated by Mr Allan Gordon.” Without accompanying context and engaging language, many visitors could find it difficult to relate to, and actively reflect on, the social narrative that the museum’s objects could reflect.Text plays an important role in museums, particularly this museum. Communication skills of the label writers are vital to enhancing the museum visit. Louise Ravelli, in writing on museum texts, states that “communication needs to be more explicit and more reflexive—to bring implicit assumptions to the surface” (3). This is particularly so for the LFFM. Posing questions and using an active voice can provoke the viewer. The power of text can be seen in one particular museum object. In the first gallery is a banner that contains blatant racist text. Bringing racism to the surface through reflexive labelling can be powerful. So for this museum communication needs to be sensitive and informative, as well as pragmatic. It is not just a case of being reminded that Australia has a long history of racism towards non-Anglo Saxon migrants. A sensitive approach in label-writing could ask visitors to reflect on Australia’s long and continued history of racism and relate it to the contemporary migration debate, thereby connecting the present day to dark historical events. A question such as, “How does Australia deal with racism towards migrants today?” brings issues to the surface. Or, more provocatively, “How would I deal with such racism?” takes the issue to a personal level, rather than using language to distance the issue of racism to a national issue. Museums are more than repositories of objects. Even a small underfunded museum can have great impact on the viewer through the language they use to make meaning of their display. The Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner at the LFFMThe “destination” object of the museum in Young is the Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner. Those with a keen interest in Australian history and politics come to view this large sheet of canvas that elicits part of the narrative of the Lambing Flat Riots, which are claimed to be germane to the White Australia Policy (one of the very first pieces of legislation after the Federation of Australia was The Immigration Restriction Act 1901).On 30 June 1861 a violent anti-Chinese riot occurred on the goldfields of Lambing Flat (now known as Young). It was the culmination of eight months of growing conflict between European and Chinese miners. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Europeans lived and worked in these goldfields, with little government authority overseeing the mining regulations. Earlier, in November 1860, a group of disgruntled European miners marched behind a German brass band, chasing off 500 Chinese from the field and destroying their tents. Tensions rose and fell until the following June, when the large banner was painted and paraded to gather up supporters: “…two of their leaders carrying in advance a magnificent flag, on which was written in gold letters – NO CHINESE! ROLL UP! ROLL UP! ...” (qtd. in Coates 40). Terrified, over 1,270 Chinese took refuge 20 kilometres away on James Roberts’s property, “Currawong”. The National Museum of Australia commissioned an animation of the event, The Harvest of Endurance. It may seem obvious, but the animators indicated the difference between the Chinese and the Europeans through dress, regardless that the Chinese wore western dress on the goldfields once the clothing they brought with them wore out (McGregor and McGregor 32). Nonetheless, Chinese expressions of masculinity differed. Their pigtails, their shoes, and their hats were used as shorthand in cartoons of the day to express the anxiety felt by many European settlers. A more active demonstration was reported in The Argus: “ … one man … returned with eight pigtails attached to a flag, glorifying in the work that had been done” (6). We can only imagine this trophy and the de-masculinisation it caused.The 1,200 x 1,200 mm banner now lays flat in a purpose-built display unit. Viewers can see that it was not a hastily constructed work. The careful drafting of original pencil marks can be seen around the circus styled font: red and blue, with the now yellow shadowing. The banner was tied with red and green ribbon of which small remnants remain attached.The McCarthy family had held the banner for 100 years, from the riots until it was loaned to the Royal Australian Historical Society in November 1961. It was given to the LFFM when it opened six years later. The banner is given key positioning in the museum, indicating its importance to the community and its place in the region’s memory. Just whose memory is narrated becomes apparent in the displays. The voice of the Chinese is missing.Memory and Museums Museums are interested in memory. When visitors come to museums, the work they do is to claim, discover, and sometimes rekindle memory (Smith; Crane; Williams)—-and even to reshape memory (Davidson). Fashion constantly plays with memory: styles, themes, textiles, and colours are repeated and recycled. “Cutting and pasting” presents a new context from one season to the next. What better avenue to arouse memory in museums than fashion curation? This paper argues that fashion exhibitions fit within the museum as a “theatre of memory”, where social memory, commemoration, heritage, myth, fantasy, and desire are played out (Samuels). In the past, institutions and fashion curators often had to construct academic frameworks of “history” or “design” in order to legitimise fashion exhibitions as a serious pursuit. Exhibitions such as Fashion and Politics (New York 2009), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (Oslo 2014) and Fashion as Social Energy (Milan 2015) show that fashion can explore deeper social concerns and political issues.The Rise of Fashion CuratorsThe fashion curator is a relative newcomer. What would become the modern fashion curator made inroads into museums through ethnographic and anthropological collections early in the 20th century. Fashion as “history” soon followed into history and social museums. Until the 1990s, the fashion curator in a museum was seen as, and closely associated with, the fashion historian or craft curator. It could be said that James Laver (1899–1975) or Stella Mary Newton (1901–2001) were the earliest modern fashion curators in museums. They were also fashion historians. However, the role of fashion curator as we now know it came into its own right in the 1970s. Nadia Buick asserts that the first fashion exhibition, Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton, was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by the famous fashion photographer Cecil Beaton. He was not a museum employee, a trained curator, or even a historian (15). The museum did not even collect contemporary fashion—it was a new idea put forward by Beaton. He amassed hundreds of pieces of fashion items from his friends of elite society to complement his work.Radical changes in museums since the 1970s have been driven by social change, new expectations and new technologies. Political and economic pressures have forced museum professionals to shift their attention from their collections towards their visitors. There has been not only a growing number of diverse museums but also a wider range of exhibitions, fashion exhibitions included. However, as museums and the exhibitions they mount have become more socially inclusive, this has been somewhat slow to filter through to the fashion exhibitions. I assert that the shift in fashion exhibitions came as an outcome of new writing on fashion as a social and political entity through Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion. This book has had an influence, beyond academic fashion theorists, on the way in which fashion exhibitions are curated. Since 1997, Judith Clark has curated landmark exhibitions, such as Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back (Antwerp 2004), which examine the idea of what fashion is rather than documenting fashion’s historical evolution. Dress is recognised as a vehicle for complex issues. It is even used to communicate a city’s cultural capital and its metropolitan modernity as “fashion capitals” (Breward and Gilbert). Hence the reluctant but growing willingness for dress to be used in museums to critically interrogate, beyond the celebratory designer retrospectives. Fashion CurationFashion curators need to be “brilliant scavengers” (Peoples). Curators such as Clark pick over what others consider as remains—the neglected, the dissonant—bringing to the fore what is forgotten, where items retrieved from all kinds of spheres are used to fashion exhibitions that reflect the complex mix of the tangible and intangible that is present in fashion. Allowing the brilliant scavengers to pick over the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life can make for exciting exhibitions. Clothing of the everyday can be used to narrate complex stories. We only need think of the black layette worn by Baby Azaria Chamberlain—or the shoe left on the tarmac at Darwin Airport, having fallen off the foot of Mrs Petrov, wife of the Russian diplomat, as she was forced onto a plane. The ordinary remnants of the Chinese miners do not appear to have been kept. Often, objects can be transformed by subsequent significant events.Museums can be sites of transformation for its audiences. Since the late 1980s, through the concept of the New Museum (Vergo), fashion as an exhibition theme has been used to draw in wider museum audiences and to increase visitor numbers. The clothing of Vivienne Westwood, (34 Years in Fashion 2005, NGA) Kylie Minogue (Kylie: An Exhibition 2004–2005, Powerhouse Museum), or Princess Grace (Princess Grace: Style Icon 2012, Bendigo Art Gallery) drew in the crowds, quantifying the relevance of museums to funding bodies. As Marie Riegels Melchior notes, fashion is fashionable in museums. What is interesting is that the New Museum’s refrain of social inclusion (Sandell) has yet to be wholly embraced by art museums. There is tension between the fashion and museum worlds: a “collision of the fashion and art worlds” (Batersby). Exhibitions of elite designer clothing worn by celebrities have been seen as very commercial operations, tainting the intellectual and academic reputations of cultural institutions. What does fashion curation have to do with the banner mentioned previously? It would be miraculous for authentic clothing worn by Chinese miners to surface now. In revising the history of Lambing Flat, fashion curators need to employ methodologies of absence. As Clynk and Peoples have shown, by examining archives, newspaper advertisements, merchants’ account books, and other material that incidentally describes the business of clothing, absence can become present. While the later technology of photography often shows “Sunday best” fashions, it also illustrates the ordinary and everyday dress of Chinese men carrying out business transactions (MacGowan; Couchman). The images of these men bring to mind the question: were these the children of men, or indeed the men themselves, who had their pigtails violently cut off years earlier? The banner was also used to show that there are quite detailed accounts of events from local and national newspapers of the day. These are accessible online. Accounts of the Chinese experience may have been written up in Chinese newspapers of the day. Access to these would be limited, if they still exist. Historian Karen Schamberger reminds us of the truism: “history is written by the victors” in her observations of a re-enactment of the riots at the Lambing Flat Festival in 2014. The Chinese actors did not have speaking parts. She notes: The brutal actions of the European miners were not explained which made it easier for audience members to distance themselves from [the Chinese] and be comforted by the actions of a ‘white hero’ James Roberts who… sheltered the Chinese miners at the end of the re-enactment. (9)Elsewhere, just out of town at the Chinese Tribute Garden (created in 1996), there is evidence of presence. Plaques indicating donors to the garden carry names such as Judy Chan, Mrs King Chou, and Mr and Mrs King Lam. The musically illustrious five siblings of the Wong family, who live near Young, were photographed in the Discover Central NSW tourist newspaper in 2015 as a drawcard for the Lambing Flat Festival. There is “endurance”, as the title of NMA animation scroll highlights. Conclusion Absence can be turned around to indicate presence. The “presence of absence” (Meyer and Woodthorpe) can be a powerful tool. Seeing is the pre-eminent sense used in museums, and objects are given priority; there are ways of representing evidence and narratives, and describing relationships, other than fashion presence. This is why I argue that dress has an important role to play in museums. Dress is so specific to time and location. It marks specific occasions, particularly at times of social transitions: christening gowns, bar mitzvah shawls, graduation gowns, wedding dresses, funerary shrouds. Dress can also demonstrate the physicality of a specific body: in the extreme, jeans show the physicality of presence when the body is removed. The fashion displays in the museum tell part of the region’s history, but the distraction of the poor display of the dressed mannequins in the LFFM gets in the way of a “good story”.While rioting against the Chinese miners may cause shame and embarrassment, in Australia we need to accept that this was not an isolated event. More formal, less violent, and regulated mechanisms of entry to Australia were put in place, and continue to this day. It may be that a fashion curator, a brilliant scavenger, may unpick the prey for viewers, placing and spacing objects and the visitor, designing in a way to enchant or horrify the audience, and keeping interest alive throughout the exhibition, allowing spaces for thinking and memories. Drawing in those who have not been the audience, working on the absence through participatory modes of activities, can be powerful for a community. Fashion curators—working with the body, stimulating ethical and conscious behaviours, and constructing dialogues—can undoubtedly act as a vehicle for dynamism, for both the museum and its audiences. As the number of museums grow, so should the number of fashion curators.ReferencesArgus. 10 July 1861. 20 June 2015 ‹http://trove.nla.gov.au/›.Batersby, Selena. “Icons of Fashion.” 2014. 6 June 2015 ‹http://adelaidereview.com.au/features/icons-of-fashion/›.Bitgood, Stephen. “When Is 'Museum Fatigue' Not Fatigue?” Curator: The Museum Journal 2009. 12 Apr. 2015 ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2009.tb00344.x/abstract›. Breward, Christopher, and David Gilbert, eds. Fashion’s World Cities. Oxford: Berg Publications, 2006.Buick, Nadia. “Up Close and Personal: Art and Fashion in the Museum.” Art Monthly Australia Aug. (2011): 242.Clynk, J., and S. Peoples. “All Out in the Wash.” Developing Dress History: New Directions in Method and Practice. Eds. Annabella Pollen and Charlotte Nicklas C. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming Sep. 2015. Couchman, Sophia. “Making the ‘Last Chinaman’: Photography and Chinese as a ‘Vanishing’ People in Australia’s Rural Local Histories.” Australian Historical Studies 42.1 (2011): 78–91.Coates, Ian. “The Lambing Flat Riots.” Gold and Civilisation. Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, 2011.Clark, Judith. Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back. London: V&A Publications, 2006.Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion. Oxon: Routledge, 1994.Crane, Susan. “The Distortion of Memory.” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 44–63.Davidson, Patricia. “Museums and the Shaping of Memory.” Heritage Museum and Galleries: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Gerard Corsane. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.Discover Central NSW. Milthorpe: BMCW, Mar. 2015.Dethridge, Anna. Fashion as Social Energy Milan: Connecting Cultures, 2005.Falk, John, and Lyn Dierking. The Museum Experience. Washington: Whaleback Books, 1992.———, John Koran, Lyn Dierking, and Lewis Dreblow. “Predicting Visitor Behaviour.” Curator: The Museum Journal 28.4 (1985): 249–57.Fashion and Politics. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.fitnyc.edu/5103.asp›.Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.tereza-kuldova.com/#!Fashion-India-Spectacular-Capitalism-Exhibition/cd23/85BBF50C-6CB9-4EE5-94BC-DAFDE56ADA96›.Frost, Warwick. “Making an Edgier Interpretation of the Gold Rushes: Contrasting Perspectives from Australia and New Zealand.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11.3 (2005): 235-250.Mansel, Philip. Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costumes from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.Mazda, Xerxes. “Exhibitions and the Power of Narrative.” Museums Australia National Conference. Sydney, Australia. 23 May 2015. Opening speech.McGowan, Barry. Tracking the Dragon: A History of the Chinese in the Riverina. Wagga Wagga: Museum of the Riverina, 2010.Meyer, Morgan, and Kate Woodthorpe. “The Material Presence of Absence: A Dialogue between Museums and Cemeteries.” Sociological Research Online (2008). 6 July 2015 ‹http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/1.html›.National Museum of Australia. “Harvest of Endurance.” 20 July 2015 ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/collection_interactives/endurance_scroll/harvest_of_endurance_html_version/home›. Peoples, Sharon. “Cinderella and the Brilliant Scavengers.” Paper presented at the Fashion Tales 2015 Conference, Milan, June 2015. Ravelli, Louise. Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Riegels Melchior, Marie. “Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums.” Paper presented at Exploring Critical Issues, Mansfield College, Oxford, 22–25 Sep. 2011. Rolls, Eric. Sojourners: The Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992.Samuels, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 2012.Sandell, Richard. “Social Inclusion, the Museum and the Dynamics of Sectorial Change.” Museum and Society 1.1 (2003): 45–62.Schamberger, Karen. “An Inconvenient Myth—the Lambing Flat Riots and Birth of a Nation.” Paper presented at Foundational Histories Australian Historical Conference, University of Sydney, 6–10 July 2015. Smith, Laurajane. The Users of Heritage. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Vergo, Peter. New Museology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. "Coffee Culture in Dublin: A Brief History." M/C Journal 15, no. 2 (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.456.

Full text

Abstract:

IntroductionIn the year 2000, a group of likeminded individuals got together and convened the first annual World Barista Championship in Monte Carlo. With twelve competitors from around the globe, each competitor was judged by seven judges: one head judge who oversaw the process, two technical judges who assessed technical skills, and four sensory judges who evaluated the taste and appearance of the espresso drinks. Competitors had fifteen minutes to serve four espresso coffees, four cappuccino coffees, and four “signature” drinks that they had devised using one shot of espresso and other ingredients of their choice, but no alcohol. The competitors were also assessed on their overall barista skills, their creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure and impress the judges with their knowledge of coffee. This competition has grown to the extent that eleven years later, in 2011, 54 countries held national barista championships with the winner from each country competing for the highly coveted position of World Barista Champion. That year, Alejandro Mendez from El Salvador became the first world champion from a coffee producing nation. Champion baristas are more likely to come from coffee consuming countries than they are from coffee producing countries as countries that produce coffee seldom have a culture of espresso coffee consumption. While Ireland is not a coffee-producing nation, the Irish are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world (Mac Con Iomaire, “Ireland”). Despite this, in 2008, Stephen Morrissey from Ireland overcame 50 other national champions to become the 2008 World Barista Champion (see, http://vimeo.com/2254130). Another Irish national champion, Colin Harmon, came fourth in this competition in both 2009 and 2010. This paper discusses the history and development of coffee and coffee houses in Dublin from the 17th century, charting how coffee culture in Dublin appeared, evolved, and stagnated before re-emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, with a remarkable win in the World Barista Championships. The historical links between coffeehouses and media—ranging from print media to electronic and social media—are discussed. In this, the coffee house acts as an informal public gathering space, what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” neither work nor home. These “third places” provide anchors for community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction (Oldenburg). This paper will also show how competition from other “third places” such as clubs, hotels, restaurants, and bars have affected the vibrancy of coffee houses. Early Coffee Houses The first coffee house was established in Constantinople in 1554 (Tannahill 252; Huetz de Lemps 387). The first English coffee houses opened in Oxford in 1650 and in London in 1652. Coffee houses multiplied thereafter but, in 1676, when some London coffee houses became hotbeds for political protest, the city prosecutor decided to close them. The ban was soon lifted and between 1680 and 1730 Londoners discovered the pleasure of drinking coffee (Huetz de Lemps 388), although these coffee houses sold a number of hot drinks including tea and chocolate as well as coffee.The first French coffee houses opened in Marseille in 1671 and in Paris the following year. Coffee houses proliferated during the 18th century: by 1720 there were 380 public cafés in Paris and by the end of the century there were 600 (Huetz de Lemps 387). Café Procope opened in Paris in 1674 and, in the 18th century, became a literary salon with regular patrons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet (Huetz de Lemps 387; Pitte 472). In England, coffee houses developed into exclusive clubs such as Crockford’s and the Reform, whilst elsewhere in Europe they evolved into what we identify as cafés, similar to the tea shops that would open in England in the late 19th century (Tannahill 252-53). Tea quickly displaced coffee in popularity in British coffee houses (Taylor 142). Pettigrew suggests two reasons why Great Britain became a tea-drinking nation while most of the rest of Europe took to coffee (48). The first was the power of the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, which controlled the world’s biggest tea monopoly and promoted the beverage enthusiastically. The second was the difficulty England had in securing coffee from the Levant while at war with France at the end of the seventeenth century and again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Tea also became the dominant beverage in Ireland and over a period of time became the staple beverage of the whole country. In 1835, Samuel Bewley and his son Charles dared to break the monopoly of The East India Company by importing over 2,000 chests of tea directly from Canton, China, to Ireland. His family would later become synonymous with the importation of coffee and with opening cafés in Ireland (see, Farmar for full history of the Bewley's and their activities). Ireland remains the highest per-capita consumer of tea in the world. Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change (Kennedy, Politicks; Pincus). The notion that these new non-alcoholic drinks were responsible for the Enlightenment because people could now gather socially without getting drunk is rejected by Wheaton as frivolous, since there had always been alternatives to strong drink, and European civilisation had achieved much in the previous centuries (91). She comments additionally that cafés, as gathering places for dissenters, took over the role that taverns had long played. Pennell and Vickery support this argument adding that by offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafés were part of the rise of the modern restaurant. It is believed that, by 1700, the commercial provision of food and drink constituted the second largest occupational sector in London. Travellers’ accounts are full of descriptions of London taverns, pie shops, coffee, bun and chop houses, breakfast huts, and food hawkers (Pennell; Vickery). Dublin Coffee Houses and Later incarnations The earliest reference to coffee houses in Dublin is to the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Public dining or drinking establishments listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory include taverns, eating houses, chop houses, coffee houses, and one chocolate house in Fownes Court run by Peter Bardin (Hardiman and Kennedy 157). During the second half of the 17th century, Dublin’s merchant classes transferred allegiance from taverns to the newly fashionable coffee houses as places to conduct business. By 1698, the fashion had spread to country towns with coffee houses found in Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, and Galway, and slightly later in Belfast and Waterford in the 18th century. Maxwell lists some of Dublin’s leading coffee houses and taverns, noting their clientele: There were Lucas’s Coffee House, on Cork Hill (the scene of many duels), frequented by fashionable young men; the Phoenix, in Werburgh Street, where political dinners were held; Dick’s Coffee House, in Skinner’s Row, much patronized by literary men, for it was over a bookseller’s; the Eagle, in Eustace Street, where meetings of the Volunteers were held; the Old Sot’s Hole, near Essex Bridge, famous for its beefsteaks and ale; the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, which was demolished at the same time as Lucas’s to make room for the Royal Exchange; and many others. (76) Many of the early taverns were situated around the Winetavern Street, Cook Street, and Fishamble Street area. (see Fig. 1) Taverns, and later coffee houses, became meeting places for gentlemen and centres for debate and the exchange of ideas. In 1706, Francis Dickson published the Flying Post newspaper at the Four Courts coffee house in Winetavern Street. The Bear Tavern (1725) and the Black Lyon (1735), where a Masonic Lodge assembled every Wednesday, were also located on this street (Gilbert v.1 160). Dick’s Coffee house was established in the late 17th century by bookseller and newspaper proprietor Richard Pue, and remained open until 1780 when the building was demolished. In 1740, Dick’s customers were described thus: Ye citizens, gentlemen, lawyers and squires,who summer and winter surround our great fires,ye quidnuncs! who frequently come into Pue’s,To live upon politicks, coffee, and news. (Gilbert v.1 174) There has long been an association between coffeehouses and publishing books, pamphlets and particularly newspapers. Other Dublin publishers and newspapermen who owned coffee houses included Richard Norris and Thomas Bacon. Until the 1850s, newspapers were burdened with a number of taxes: on the newsprint, a stamp duty, and on each advertisement. By 1865, these taxes had virtually disappeared, resulting in the appearance of 30 new newspapers in Ireland, 24 of them in Dublin. Most people read from copies which were available free of charge in taverns, clubs, and coffee houses (MacGiolla Phadraig). Coffee houses also kept copies of international newspapers. On 4 May 1706, Francis Dickson notes in the Dublin Intelligence that he held the Paris and London Gazettes, Leyden Gazette and Slip, the Paris and Hague Lettres à la Main, Daily Courant, Post-man, Flying Post, Post-script and Manuscripts in his coffeehouse in Winetavern Street (Kennedy, “Dublin”). Henry Berry’s analysis of shop signs in Dublin identifies 24 different coffee houses in Dublin, with the main clusters in Essex Street near the Custom’s House (Cocoa Tree, Bacon’s, Dempster’s, Dublin, Merchant’s, Norris’s, and Walsh’s) Cork Hill (Lucas’s, St Lawrence’s, and Solyman’s) Skinners’ Row (Bow’s’, Darby’s, and Dick’s) Christ Church Yard (Four Courts, and London) College Green (Jack’s, and Parliament) and Crampton Court (Exchange, and Little Dublin). (see Figure 1, below, for these clusters and the locations of other Dublin coffee houses.) The earliest to be referenced is the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85), with Solyman’s (1691), Bow’s (1692), and Patt’s on High Street (1699), all mentioned in print before the 18th century. The name of one, the Cocoa Tree, suggests that chocolate was also served in this coffee house. More evidence of the variety of beverages sold in coffee houses comes from Gilbert who notes that in 1730, one Dublin poet wrote of George Carterwright’s wife at The Custom House Coffee House on Essex Street: Her coffee’s fresh and fresh her tea,Sweet her cream, ptizan, and whea,her drams, of ev’ry sort, we findboth good and pleasant, in their kind. (v. 2 161) Figure 1: Map of Dublin indicating Coffee House clusters 1 = Sackville St.; 2 = Winetavern St.; 3 = Essex St.; 4 = Cork Hill; 5 = Skinner's Row; 6 = College Green.; 7 = Christ Church Yard; 8 = Crampton Court.; 9 = Cook St.; 10 = High St.; 11 = Eustace St.; 12 = Werburgh St.; 13 = Fishamble St.; 14 = Westmorland St.; 15 = South Great George's St.; 16 = Grafton St.; 17 = Kildare St.; 18 = Dame St.; 19 = Anglesea Row; 20 = Foster Place; 21 = Poolbeg St.; 22 = Fleet St.; 23 = Burgh Quay.A = Cafe de Paris, Lincoln Place; B = Red Bank Restaurant, D'Olier St.; C = Morrison's Hotel, Nassau St.; D = Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green; E = Jury's Hotel, Dame St. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable. Dublin anticipated London in club fashions with members of the Kildare Street Club (1782) and the Sackville Street Club (1794) owning the premises of their clubhouse, thus dispensing with the proprietor. The first London club to be owned by the members seems to be Arthur’s, founded in 1811 (McDowell 4) and this practice became widespread throughout the 19th century in both London and Dublin. The origin of one of Dublin’s most famous clubs, Daly’s Club, was a chocolate house opened by Patrick Daly in c.1762–65 in premises at 2–3 Dame Street (Brooke). It prospered sufficiently to commission its own granite-faced building on College Green between Anglesea Street and Foster Place which opened in 1789 (Liddy 51). Daly’s Club, “where half the land of Ireland has changed hands”, was renowned for the gambling that took place there (Montgomery 39). Daly’s sumptuous palace catered very well (and discreetly) for honourable Members of Parliament and rich “bucks” alike (Craig 222). The changing political and social landscape following the Act of Union led to Daly’s slow demise and its eventual closure in 1823 (Liddy 51). Coincidentally, the first Starbucks in Ireland opened in 2005 in the same location. Once gentlemen’s clubs had designated buildings where members could eat, drink, socialise, and stay overnight, taverns and coffee houses faced competition from the best Dublin hotels which also had coffee rooms “in which gentlemen could read papers, write letters, take coffee and wine in the evening—an exiguous substitute for a club” (McDowell 17). There were at least 15 establishments in Dublin city claiming to be hotels by 1789 (Corr 1) and their numbers grew in the 19th century, an expansion which was particularly influenced by the growth of railways. By 1790, Dublin’s public houses (“pubs”) outnumbered its coffee houses with Dublin boasting 1,300 (Rooney 132). Names like the Goose and Gridiron, Harp and Crown, Horseshoe and Magpie, and Hen and Chickens—fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland—hung on decorative signs for those who could not read. Throughout the 20th century, the public house provided the dominant “third place” in Irish society, and the drink of choice for itd predominantly male customers was a frothy pint of Guinness. Newspapers were available in public houses and many newspapermen had their own favourite hostelries such as Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street; The Pearl, and The Palace on Fleet Street; and The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay. Any coffee served in these establishments prior to the arrival of the new coffee culture in the 21st century was, however, of the powdered instant variety. Hotels / Restaurants with Coffee Rooms From the mid-19th century, the public dining landscape of Dublin changed in line with London and other large cities in the United Kingdom. Restaurants did appear gradually in the United Kingdom and research suggests that one possible reason for this growth from the 1860s onwards was the Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences Act (1860). The object of this act was to “reunite the business of eating and drinking”, thereby encouraging public sobriety (Mac Con Iomaire, “Emergence” v.2 95). Advertisements for Dublin restaurants appeared in The Irish Times from the 1860s. Thom’s Directory includes listings for Dining Rooms from the 1870s and Refreshment Rooms are listed from the 1880s. This pattern continued until 1909, when Thom’s Directory first includes a listing for “Restaurants and Tea Rooms”. Some of the establishments that advertised separate coffee rooms include Dublin’s first French restaurant, the Café de Paris, The Red Bank Restaurant, Morrison’s Hotel, Shelbourne Hotel, and Jury’s Hotel (see Fig. 1). The pattern of separate ladies’ coffee rooms emerged in Dublin and London during the latter half of the 19th century and mixed sex dining only became popular around the last decade of the 19th century, partly infuenced by Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (Mac Con Iomaire, “Public Dining”). Irish Cafés: From Bewley’s to Starbucks A number of cafés appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Robert Roberts and Bewley’s, both of which were owned by Quaker families. Ernest Bewley took over the running of the Bewley’s importation business in the 1890s and opened a number of Oriental Cafés; South Great Georges Street (1894), Westmoreland Street (1896), and what became the landmark Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street (1927). Drawing influence from the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna, oriental tearooms, and Egyptian architecture (inspired by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamen’s Tomb), the Grafton Street business brought a touch of the exotic into the newly formed Irish Free State. Bewley’s cafés became the haunt of many of Ireland’s leading literary figures, including Samuel Becket, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce who mentioned the café in his book, Dubliners. A full history of Bewley’s is available (Farmar). It is important to note, however, that pots of tea were sold in equal measure to mugs of coffee in Bewley’s. The cafés changed over time from waitress- to self-service and a failure to adapt to changing fashions led to the business being sold, with only the flagship café in Grafton Street remaining open in a revised capacity. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a new wave of coffee house culture swept Ireland. This was based around speciality coffee beverages such as espressos, cappuccinos, lattés, macchiatos, and frappuccinnos. This new phenomenon coincided with the unprecedented growth in the Irish economy, during which Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger” (Murphy 3). One aspect of this period was a building boom and a subsequent growth in apartment living in the Dublin city centre. The American sitcom Friends and its fictional coffee house, “Central Perk,” may also have helped popularise the use of coffee houses as “third spaces” (Oldenberg) among young apartment dwellers in Dublin. This was also the era of the “dotcom boom” when many young entrepreneurs, software designers, webmasters, and stock market investors were using coffee houses as meeting places for business and also as ad hoc office spaces. This trend is very similar to the situation in the 17th and early 18th centuries where coffeehouses became known as sites for business dealings. Various theories explaining the growth of the new café culture have circulated, with reasons ranging from a growth in Eastern European migrants, anti-smoking legislation, returning sophisticated Irish emigrants, and increased affluence (Fenton). Dublin pubs, facing competition from the new coffee culture, began installing espresso coffee machines made by companies such as Gaggia to attract customers more interested in a good latté than a lager and it is within this context that Irish baristas gained such success in the World Barista competition. In 2001 the Georges Street branch of Bewley’s was taken over by a chain called Café, Bar, Deli specialising in serving good food at reasonable prices. Many ex-Bewley’s staff members subsequently opened their own businesses, roasting coffee and running cafés. Irish-owned coffee chains such as Java Republic, Insomnia, and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars continued to thrive despite the competition from coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Café. Indeed, so successful was the handmade Irish sandwich and coffee business that, before the economic downturn affected its business, Irish franchise O’Brien’s operated in over 18 countries. The Café, Bar, Deli group had also begun to franchise its operations in 2008 when it too became a victim of the global economic downturn. With the growth of the Internet, many newspapers have experienced falling sales of their printed format and rising uptake of their electronic versions. Most Dublin coffee houses today provide wireless Internet connections so their customers can read not only the local newspapers online, but also others from all over the globe, similar to Francis Dickenson’s coffee house in Winetavern Street in the early 18th century. Dublin has become Europe’s Silicon Valley, housing the European headquarters for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. There are currently plans to provide free wireless connectivity throughout Dublin’s city centre in order to promote e-commerce, however, some coffee houses shut off the wireless Internet in their establishments at certain times of the week in order to promote more social interaction to ensure that these “third places” remain “great good places” at the heart of the community (Oldenburg). Conclusion Ireland is not a country that is normally associated with a coffee culture but coffee houses have been part of the fabric of that country since they emerged in Dublin in the 17th century. These Dublin coffee houses prospered in the 18th century, and survived strong competition from clubs and hotels in the 19th century, and from restaurant and public houses into the 20th century. In 2008, when Stephen Morrissey won the coveted title of World Barista Champion, Ireland’s place as a coffee consuming country was re-established. The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a birth of a new espresso coffee culture, which shows no signs of weakening despite Ireland’s economic travails. References Berry, Henry F. “House and Shop Signs in Dublin in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 40.2 (1910): 81–98. Brooke, Raymond Frederick. Daly’s Club and the Kildare Street Club, Dublin. Dublin, 1930. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma Publications, 1987. Craig, Maurice. Dublin 1660-1860. Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1980. Farmar, Tony. The Legendary, Lofty, Clattering Café. Dublin: A&A Farmar, 1988. Fenton, Ben. “Cafe Culture taking over in Dublin.” The Telegraph 2 Oct. 2006. 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1530308/cafe-culture-taking-over-in-Dublin.html›. Gilbert, John T. A History of the City of Dublin (3 vols.). Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Girouard, Mark. Victorian Pubs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1984. Hardiman, Nodlaig P., and Máire Kennedy. A Directory of Dublin for the Year 1738 Compiled from the Most Authentic of Sources. Dublin: Dublin Corporation Public Libraries, 2000. Huetz de Lemps, Alain. “Colonial Beverages and Consumption of Sugar.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 383–93. Kennedy, Máire. “Dublin Coffee Houses.” Ask About Ireland, 2011. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/pages-in-history/dublin-coffee-houses›. ----- “‘Politicks, Coffee and News’: The Dublin Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century.” Dublin Historical Record LVIII.1 (2005): 76–85. Liddy, Pat. Temple Bar—Dublin: An Illustrated History. Dublin: Temple Bar Properties, 1992. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Emergence, Development, and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History.” Ph.D. thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, 2009. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. ----- “Ireland.” Food Cultures of the World Encylopedia. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2010. ----- “Public Dining in Dublin: The History and Evolution of Gastronomy and Commercial Dining 1700-1900.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 24. Special Issue: The History of the Commercial Hospitality Industry from Classical Antiquity to the 19th Century (2012): forthcoming. MacGiolla Phadraig, Brian. “Dublin: One Hundred Years Ago.” Dublin Historical Record 23.2/3 (1969): 56–71. Maxwell, Constantia. Dublin under the Georges 1714–1830. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. McDowell, R. B. Land & Learning: Two Irish Clubs. Dublin: The Lilliput P, 1993. Montgomery, K. L. “Old Dublin Clubs and Coffee-Houses.” New Ireland Review VI (1896): 39–44. Murphy, Antoine E. “The ‘Celtic Tiger’—An Analysis of Ireland’s Economic Growth Performance.” EUI Working Papers, 2000 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/WP-Texts/00_16.pdf›. Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About The “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001. Pennell, Sarah. “‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef’: Victualling and Eating out in Early Modern London.” Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 228–59. Pettigrew, Jane. A Social History of Tea. London: National Trust Enterprises, 2001. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67.4 (1995): 807–34. Pitte, Jean-Robert. “The Rise of the Restaurant.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 471–80. Rooney, Brendan, ed. A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006. Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. St Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1975. Taylor, Laurence. “Coffee: The Bottomless Cup.” The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Eds. W. Arens and Susan P. Montague. Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred Publishing, 1976. 14–48. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth P, 1983. Williams, Anne. “Historical Attitudes to Women Eating in Restaurants.” Public Eating: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991. Ed. Harlan Walker. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1992. 311–14. World Barista, Championship. “History–World Barista Championship”. 2012. 02 Apr. 2012 ‹http://worldbaristachampionship.com2012›.AcknowledgementA warm thank you to Dr. Kevin Griffin for producing the map of Dublin for this article.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Parnell, Claire, Andrea Anne Trinidad, and Jodi McAlister. "Hello, Ever After." M/C Journal 24, no. 3 (2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2769.

Full text

Abstract:

On 12 March 2020, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced a lockdown of Manila to stop the spread of COVID-19. The cities, provinces, and islands of the Philippines remained under various levels of community quarantine for the remainder of the year. Under the strictest lockdown measures, known as Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), no one aged below 21 or over 60 years was allowed out, a curfew was implemented between 10pm and 5am, and only one person per household, carrying a quarantine pass, was allowed to go out for essential items (Bainbridge & Vimonsuknopparat; Ratcliffe & Fonbuena). The policing of these measures was strict, with a heavy reliance on police and military to enforce health protocols (Hapal). In early April, Duterte warned that violators of the lockdown who caused trouble could be shot (Reuters). Criticisms concerning the dissemination of information about the pandemic were exacerbated when on 5 May, 2020, Filipinos lost an important source of news and entertainment as the country’s largest media network ABS-CBN was shut down after the government denied the renewal of its broadcast franchise (Gutierrez; “ABS-CBN”; “Independent Broadcaster”). The handling of the pandemic by the Duterte government has been characterised by inaction, scapegoating, and framed as a war on an existential threat (Hapal). This has led to feelings of frustration, anger, and despair that has impacted and been incorporated into the artistic expression of some Filipino creatives (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). As they did in the rest of the world, social media platforms became a vital source of entertainment for many facing these harsh lockdown measures in the Philippines in 2020. Viral forms included the sharing of videos of recipes for whipped Dalgona coffee and ube-pandesal on TikTok, binge-watching KDramas like Crash Landing on You on Netflix, playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch, and watching Thailand’s Boys’ Love genre web series 2Gether: The Series on YouTube. Around the world, many arts and cultural organisations turned to online platforms to continue their events during the COVID-19 pandemic. #RomanceClass, a Filipino community of authors, artists, and actors who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines, also turned to these platforms to hold their community’s live literature events. This article analyses this shift by #RomanceClass. It contends that, due to their nature as an independent, born-digital literary organisation, they were able to adapt swiftly and effectively to online-only events in response to the harshness of the Filipino lockdown, creating new forms of artistic innovation by adopting the aesthetics of Zoom into their creative practice (for example, name tags and gallery camera view). This aesthetic swiftly became familiar to people all over the world in 2020, and adopting digital platforms encodes within it the possibility for a global audience. However, while #RomanceClass are and have been open to a global audience, and their creative innovations during the pandemic have clearly been informed by transcultural online trends, this article argues that their adoption of digital platforms and creative innovations represented a continuation of their existing ethos, producing material explicitly intended for a Filipino audience, and more specifically, their existing community, prioritising community connection over any more expansive marketing efforts (McAlister et al.). The Live Literature of #RomanceClass The term #RomanceClass refers to a biblio-community of authors, readers, artists, and actors, all involved in the production and consumption of English-language romance novels in the Philippines. #RomanceClass began online in 2013 via a free writing class run predominantly on Facebook by author Mina V. Esguerra (for more on this, see McAlister et al.). As the community has developed, in-person events have become a major part of the community’s activities. However, as a born-digital social formation, #RomanceClass has always existed, to some extent, online. Their comfort in digital spaces was key to their ability to pivot swiftly to the circumstances in the Philippines during the lockdowns in 2020. One of the most distinctive practices of #RomanceClass is their live reading events. Prior to 2020, community members would gather in April for April Feels Day, and in October for Feels Fest for events where local actors would read curated passages from community-authored romance novels, and audiences’ verbal and physical responses became part of the performance. The live readings represent a distinctive form of live literature – that is, events where literature is the dominant art form presented or performed (Wiles), a field which encompasses phenomena like storytelling festivals, author readings, and literary festivals (Dane; Harvey; Weber; Wilson). In October 2019, we interviewed several #RomanceClass community members and attended one of these live reading events, Feels Fest, where we observed that the nature of the event very clearly reflected the way the community functions: they are “highly professionalised, but also tightly bound on an affective level, regularly describing [themselves] as a found family” (McAlister et al. 404). Attendance at live readings is capped (50 people, for the event we attended). The events are thus less about audience-building than they are community-sustaining, something which they do by providing community comforts. In particular, this includes kilig, a Filipino term referring to a kind of affective romantic excitement, usually demonstrated by the audience members in reaction to the actors’ readings. While the in-person component is very important to the live reading events, they have always spanned online and offline contexts – the events are usually live-tweeted by participants, and the readings are recorded and posted to YouTube by an official community videographer, with the explicit acknowledgment that if you attended the event, you are more than welcome to relive it as many times as you want. (Readings which contain a high degree of sexual content are not searchable on YouTube so as not to cause any harm to the actors, but the links are made privately available to attendees.) However, the lockdown measures implemented in the Philippines in 2020 meant that only the online context was available to the community – and so, like so many other arts communities around the world, they were forced to adapt. We tend to think of platforms like Zoom as encoded with the potential to allow people into a space who might not have been able to access it before. However, in their transition to an online-only context, #RomanceClass clearly sought to prioritise the community-sustaining practices of their existing events rather than trying in any major way to court new, potentially global, audiences. This prioritisation of community, rather than marketing, provided a space for #RomanceClass authors to engage cathartically with their experiences of lockdown in the Philippines (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). Embracing the Zoom Aesthetic: #RomanceClass in 2020 #RomanceClass’s first online event in 2020 was April Feels Day 2020, which occurred not long after lockdown began in the Philippines. Its production reflects the quick transition to an online-only co-presence space. It featured six books recently published by community authors. For each, the author introduced the book, and then an actor read an excerpt – a different approach to that hitherto taken in live events, where two actors, playing the roles of the romantic protagonists, would perform the readings together. Like the in-person live readings, April Feels Day 2020 was a synchronous event with a digital afterlife. It was streamed via Twitch, and participants could log on to watch and join the real-time conversations occurring in the chat. Those who did not sign up for a Twitch account could still watch the stream and post about the event on Twitter under the hashtag #AprilFeelsDay2020. After the event, videos featuring each book were posted to YouTube, as they had been for previous in-person live reading events, allowing participants to relive the experience if they so desired, and for authors to use as workshopping tools to allow them to hear how their prose and characters’ voices sounded (something which several authors reported doing with recordings of live readings in our interviews with them in 2019). April Feels Day 2020 represented a speedy pivot to working and socialising from home by the #RomanceClass community, something enabled by the existing digital architecture they had built up around their pre-pandemic live reading events, and their willingness to experiment with platforms like Twitch. However, it also represented a learning experience, a place to begin to think about how they might adapt creatively to the circumstances provoked by the global pandemic. They innovated in several ways. For instance, they adopted mukbang – a South Korean internet phenomenon which has become popular worldwide, wherein a host consumes a large amount of food while interacting with their audience in an online audiovisual broadcast – in their Mukbang Nights videos, where a few members of #RomanceClass would eat food and discuss their books (Anjani et al.). Food is a beloved part of both #RomanceClass events and books (“there’s lots of food, always. At some point someone always describes what the characters are eating. No exceptions”, author Carla de Guzman told us when we interviewed her in 2019), and so their adoption of mukbang shows the ways in which their 2020 digital events sought to recreate established forms of communal cohesion in a virtual co-presence space. An even more pointed example of this is their Hello, Ever After web series, which drew on the growing popularity of born-digital web series in Southeast Asia and other virtual performances around the globe. Hello, Ever After was both a natural extension of and significantly differed from #RomanceClass in-person live events. Usually, April Feels Day and October Feels Fest feature actors reading and performing passages from already published community books. By contrast, Hello, Ever After featured original short scripts written by community authors. These scripts took established characters from these authors’ novels and served as epilogues, where viewers could see how these characters and their romances fared during the pandemic. Like in-person live reading events – and unlike the digital April Feels Day 2020 – it featured two actors playing virtually side-by-side, reinforcing that one of the key pleasures derived from the reading events is the kilig produced through the interaction between the actors playing against each other (something we also observed in our 2019 fieldwork: the community has developed hashtags to refer specifically to the live reading performance interactions of some of their actors, such as #gahoates, in reference to actors Gio Gahol and Rachel Coates). The scenes are purposefully written as video chats, which allows not only for the fact that the actors were unable to physically interact with each other because of the lockdowns, but also tapped into the Zoom communication aesthetic that commandeered many people’s personal and professional communications during COVID-19 restrictions. Although the web series used a different video conferencing technology, community member Tania Arpa, who directed the web series episodes, adapted the nameplate feature that displayed the characters’ names to more closely align with the Zoom format, demonstrating #RomanceClass’s close attentiveness to developments in the global media environment. Zoom and other virtual co-presence platforms became essentially universal in 2020. One of their affordances was that people could virtually attend events from anywhere in the world, which encodes in it the possibility of reaching a broader, more global audience base. However, #RomanceClass maintained their high sensitivity to the local Filipino context through Hello, Ever After. By setting episodes during the Philippines’ lockdown, emphasised by the video chat mise en scène, Hello, Ever After captures the nuances of the sociopolitical and sometimes mundane aspects of the local pandemic response. Moreover, the series features characters known to and beloved by the community, as the episodes function as epilogues to #RomanceClass books, taking place in what An Goris calls the “post-HEA” [happily ever after] space. #RomanceClass books are available digitally – and have a readership – outside the Philippines, and so the Hello, Ever After web series is theoretically a text that can be enjoyed by many. However, the community was not necessarily seeking to broaden their audience base through Hello, Ever After; it was community-sustaining, rather than community-expanding. It built on the extant repository of community knowledge and affect by using characters that #RomanceClass members know intimately and have emotional connections to, who are not as familiar and legible to those outside the community, intended for an audience with a level of genre knowledge (McAlister et al.; Fletcher et al.). While the pandemic experience these characters were going through was global, as the almost universal familiarity with the Zoom aesthetic shows, Hello, Ever After was highly attentive to the local context. Almost all the episodes featured “Easter eggs” and dialogues that pointed to local situations that only members of the targeted Filipino audience would understand and be familiar with, echoing the pandemic challenges of the country’s present reality. Episodes featured recurrent themes like dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response and misaligned priorities, anger towards politicians exacerbating the impact of the pandemic with poor health and transportation policies, and recognition of voluntary service and aid rendered by private individuals. For example, the first episode, Make Good Days, an epilogue to Mina V. Esguerra’s novel What Kind of Day, focusses on the challenges “essential worker” hero Ben (played by Raphael Robes) faces as a local politician’s speechwriter, who has been tasked to draft a memorial speech for his boss to deliver in honour of an acquaintance who has succumbed to COVID-19. He has developed a “3:00 habit” of a Zoom call with his partner Naya (Rachel Coates), mirroring the “3:00 habit” or “3:00 Prayer to the Divine Mercy” many Catholic Filipino devotees pray and recite daily at that specific hour, a habit reinforced through schools, churches, and media, where entertainment shows allow time for the prayer to be televised. Ben and Naya’s conversation in this particular 3:00 call dwells on what they think Filipino citizens deserve, especially from local government officials who repeatedly fail them (Baizas; Torres). They also discuss the impact that the pandemic has had on Naya’s work life. She runs a tourism and travel business – which is the way that the two characters met in What Kind of Day – which she has been forced to close because of the pandemic. Naya grieves not just for the dream job she has had to give up, but also sympathises with the enormous number of Filipinos who suddenly became unemployed because of the economy closing down (Tirona). Hello, Ever After draws together the political realities of living in the Philippines during the pandemic with the personal, by showing the effects of these realities on characters like Ben and Naya, who are well-known to the #RomanceClass community. #RomanceClass books encompass a wide variety of protagonists, and so the episodes of Hello, Ever After were able to explore how the lives of health workers, actors, single parents, students, scientists, office workers, development workers, CEOs and more could be impacted by the pandemic and the lockdowns in the Philippines. They also allowed the authors to express some of their personal frustrations with living through quarantine, something they admit fueled some parts of the scripts (“Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After”). #RomanceClass novels like What Kind of Day all end happily, with the romantic protagonists together (in contrast to a lot of other Filipino media, which ends unhappily – for more on this, see McAlister et al.). Make Good Days and the other episodes of Hello, Ever After reflect the grim realities of pandemic life in the Philippines; however, they do not undercut this happy ending, and instead seek to reinforce it. Through Hello, Ever After, the community literally seeks to “make good days” for themselves by creating opportunities to access the familiar comfort and warmth of kilig scenes. Kilig refers to a kind of affective romantic emotion that usually has a physical manifestation (Trinidad, “Shipping”; “Kilig”). It does not have an equivalent word or phrase in English, but can be used as a noun to denote a thrilling state of excitement or as an adjective to describe moments or scenes that evoke this feeling. Creating and becoming immersed in kilig is central to #RomanceClass texts and events: authors attempt to produce kilig through their writing, and actors attempt to provoke it during live reading performances (something which, as mentioned above, was probably made more difficult in the one-actor live readings of the fully online Aprils Feels Day 2020, as much of the kilig is generated by the interactions between the actors). Kilig scenes are plentiful in Hello, Ever After. For instance, in Make Good Days, Naya asks Ben to name a thing he hated before the pandemic that he now misses. He replies that he misses being stuck in traffic with her – that he still hates traffic, but he misses spending that time with her. Escapism was a high priority for many people and communities creating art during the 2020 lockdowns. Given this, it is interesting that #RomanceClass chose to create kilig in their web series by leaning into the temporal moment and creating material specifically revolving around the lockdown in the Philippines, showing couples like Ben and Naya supporting each other and sharing their pandemic-caused burdens. Hello, Ever After both reflected the harsh reality in which the community found themselves but also gave them something to cling to in the hardest days of lockdown, showing that kilig could be found even in the toughest of circumstances when both characters and community members found themselves separated. Conclusion As a community which began in a digital space, #RomanceClass was well-positioned to pivot to an online-only environment during the pandemic, even though in-person events had become such a distinctive part of their community outputs. They experimented and innovated significantly in 2020, producing a range of digital outputs, including the Hello, Ever After web series. On the surface, this does not seem especially unusual: many arts organisations innovated digitally during the pandemic. What was particularly notable about #RomanceClass’s digital outputs, however, was that they were not designed to be marketing tools. They were not actively courting a new audience; rather, outputs like Hello, Ever After were designed to be community-sustaining, providing the existing audience comfort, familiarity, and kilig in a situation (local and global) that was not in any way comfortable or familiar. We Will Be Okay is the title of the second Hello, Ever After video, an epilogue to Celestine Trinidad’s Ghost of a Feeling: a neat summary of the message the episodes offered to the #RomanceClass audience through these revisitings of beloved characters and relationships. As we have discussed elsewhere, #RomanceClass is a professionalised community, but their affective ties are very strong (McAlister et al.). Their digital outputs during the pandemic showed this, and demonstrated again the way their community bonds are reinforced through their repeated re-engagement with their texts, just as their pre-pandemic forms of live literature did. There was kilig to be found in revisiting well-known couples, even in depressing circumstances. As the community engage together with these new epilogues and share their affective reactions, their social ties are reinforced – even when they are forced to be separated. References “ABS-CBN: Philippines’ Biggest Broadcaster Forced Off Air.” BBC, 5 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52548703>. Anjani, Laurensia, et al. “Why Do People Watch Others Eat Food? An Empirical Study on the Motivations and Practices of Mukbang Viewers.” Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 2020. DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376567. Bainbridge, Amy, and Supattra Vimonsuknopparat. “This Is What Life Is Like in the Philippines amid One of the World’s Toughest Coronavirus Lockdowns.” ABC News, 29 Apr. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-29/philippines-social-volcano-threatening-to-erupt-amid-covid-19/12193188>. Baizas, Gaby. “‘Law Is Law Unless Friends Kayo’: Netizens Slam Gov’t Double Standards.” Rappler, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.rappler.com/nation/netizens-reaction-law-is-law-double-standards-government-ecq-guidelines>. “Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After.” Facilitated by Mina V. Esguerra. RomanceClass, 7 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-9FuCSX08M>. Dane, Alexandra. “Cultural Capital as Performance: Tote Bags and Contemporary Literary Festivals.” Mémoires du Livre 11.2 (2020). <http://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/memoires/2020-v11-n2-memoires05373/1070270ar.pdf>. Esguerra, Mina V. What Kind of Day. Self-published, 2018. ———. “Reflecting on Hello, Ever After.” Mina V. Esguerra, 23 April 2021. 17 May 2021 <http://minavesguerra.com/news/reflecting-on-hello-ever-after/>. Fletcher, Lisa, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins. “Genre Worlds and Popular Fiction: The Case of Twenty-First Century Australian Romance.” Journal of Popular Culture 51.4 (2018): 997-1015. Goris, An. “Happily Ever After… and After: Serialisation and the Popular Romance Novel.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 12.1 (2013). 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2013/goris.htm>. Gutierrez, Jason. “Philippine Congress Officially Shuts Down Leading Broadcaster.” New York Times, 10 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/asia/philippines-congress-media-duterte-abs-cbn.html>. Hapal, Karl. “The Philippines’ COVID-19 Response: Securitising the Pandemic and Disciplining the Pasaway.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (2021). <http://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261>. Harvey, Hannah. “On the Edge of the Storytelling World: The Festival Circuit and the Fringe.” Storytelling, Self, Society 4.2 (2008): 134-151. “Independent Broadcaster ABS-CBN Shut Down by Philippines Government in ‘Crushing Blow’ to Press Freedom.” ABC News, 6 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-06/philippines-news-outlet-closure-abs-cbn-duterte/12218416>. “Make Good Days.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 26 June 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqpij-S7DU&t=5s>. McAlister, Jodi, Claire Parnell, and Andrea Anne Trinidad. “#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family.” Publishing Research Quarterly 36 (2020): 403-417. Ratcliffe, Rebecca, and Carmela Fonbuena. “Millions in Manila Back in Lockdown as Duterte Loses Control of Coronavirus Spread.” The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/04/millions-in-manila-philippines-back-in-lockdown-as-duterte-loses-control-of-coronavirus-spread>. Reuters. “‘Shoot Them Dead’ – Philippine Leader Says Won’t Tolerate Lockdown Violators.” CNBC, 2 April 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/philippines-duterte-threatens-to-shoot-lockdown-violators.html>. Tirona, Ana Olivia A. “Unemployment Rate Hits Record High in 2020.” Business World, 9 Mar. 2021. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bworldonline.com/unemployment-rate-hits-record-high-in-2020/>. Torres, Thets. “5 Times the Government Disobeyed and Ignored Their Own Laws.” NoliSoli, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://nolisoli.ph/80192/ph-government-disobeyed-and-ignored-their-own-laws-ttorres-20200513/>. Trinidad, Andrea Anne. “‘Kilig to the Bones!’: Kilig as the Backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience.” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2020. ———. “‘Shipping’ Larry Stylinson: What Makes Pairing Appealing Boys Romantic?” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2018. Trinidad, Celestine. Ghost of a Feeling. Self-published, 2018. Weber, Millicent. Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. Cham: Palgrave, 2018. “We Will Be Okay.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 3 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2SamGU3Tk>. Wiles, Ellen. “Live Literature and Cultural Value: Explorations in Experiential Literary Ethnography.” PhD thesis. University of Stirling, 2019. Wilson, Michael. Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2005.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Harrison, Karey. "Building Resilient Communities." M/C Journal 16, no. 5 (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.716.

Full text

Abstract:

This paper will compare the metaphoric structuring of the ecological concept of resilience—with its roots in Holling's 1973 paper; with psychological concepts of resilience which followed from research—such as Werner, Bierman, and French and Garmezy and Streitman) published in the early 1970s. This metaphoric analysis will expose the difference between complex adaptive systems models of resilience in ecology and studies related to resilience in relation to climate change; compared with the individualism of linear equilibrium models of resilience which have dominated discussions of resilience in psychology and economics. By examining the ontological commitments of these competing metaphors, I will show that the individualistic concept of resilience which dominates psychological discussions of resilience is incompatible with the ontological commitments of ecological concepts of resilience. Because the ontological commitments of the concepts of ecological resilience on the one hand, and psychological resilience on the other, are so at odds with one another, it is important to be clear which concept of resilience is being evaluated for its adequacy as a concept. Having clearly distinguished these competing metaphors and their ontological commitments, this paper will show that it is the complex adaptive systems model of resilience from ecology, not the individualist concept of psychological resilience, that has been utilised by both the academic discussions of adaptation to climate change, and the operationalisation of the concept of resilience by social movements like the permaculture, ecovillage, and Transition Towns movements. Ontological Metaphors My analysis of ontological metaphors draws on insights from Kuhn's (114) account of gestalt perception in scientific paradigm shifts; the centrality of the role of concrete analogies in scientific reasoning (Masterman 77); and the theorisation of ontological metaphors in cognitive linguistics (Gärdenfors). Figure 1: Object Ontological commitments reflect the shared beliefs within a community about the sorts of things that exist. Our beliefs about what exists are shaped by our sensory and motor interactions with objects in the physical world. Physical objects have boundaries and surfaces that separate the object from not-the-object. Objects have insides and outsides, and can be described in terms of more-or-less fixed and stable “objective” properties. A prototypical example of an “object” is a “container”, like the example shown in Figure 1. Ontological metaphors allow us to conceive of “things” which are not objects as if they were objects by picking “out parts of our experience and treat them as [if they were] discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind” (Lakoff and Johnson 25). We use ontological metaphors when we imagine a boundary around a collection of things, such as the members of a team or trees in a forest, and conceive of them as being in a container (Langacker 191–97). We can then think of “things” like a team or forest as if they were a single entity. We can also understand processes and activities as if they were things with boundaries. Whether or not we characterise some aspect of our experience as a noun (a bounded entity) or as a verb (a process that occurs over time) is not determined by the nature of things in themselves, but by our understanding and interpretation of our experience (Langacker 233). In this paper I employ a technique that involves examining the details of “concrete images” from the source domains for metaphors employed in the social sciences to expose for analysis their ontological commitments (Harrison, “Politics” 215; Harrison, “Economics” 7). By examining the ontological metaphors that structure the resilience literature I will show how different conceptions of resilience reflect different beliefs and commitments about the sorts of “things” there are in the world, and hence how we can study and understand these “things.” Engineering Metaphors In his discussion of engineering resilience, Holling (“Engineering Vs. Ecological” 33) argues that this conception is the “foundation for economic theory”, and defined in terms of “resistance to disturbance and the speed of return to the equilibrium” or steady state of the system. Whereas Holling takes his original example of the use of the engineering concept of resilience from economics, Pendall, Foster, & Cowell (72), and Martin-Breen and Anderies (6) identify it as the concept of resilience that dominates the field of psychology. They take the stress loading of bridges to be the engineering source for the metaphor. Figure 2: Pogo stick animation (Source: Blacklemon 67, CC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pogoanim.gif). In order to understand this metaphor, we need to examine the characteristics of the source domain for the metaphor. A bridge can be “under tension, compression or both forces at the same time [and] experiences what engineers define as stress” (Matthews 3). In order to resist these forces, bridges need to be constructed of material which “behave much like a spring” that “strains elastically (deforms temporarily and returns to its original shape after a load has been removed) under a given stress” (Gordon 52; cited in Matthews). The pogostick shown in Figure 2 illustrates how a spring returns to its original size and configuration once the load or stress is removed. WGBH Educational Foundation provides links to simple diagrams that illustrate the different stresses the three main designs of bridges are subject to, and if you compare Computers & Engineering's with Gibbs and Bourne's harmonic spring animation you can see how both a bridge under live load and the pogostick in Figure 2 oscillate just like an harmonic spring. Subject to the elastic limits of the material, the deformation of a spring is proportional to the stress or load applied. According to the “modern theory of elasticity [...] it [is] possible to deduce the relation between strain and stress for complex objects in terms of intrinsic properties of the materials it is made of” (“Hooke’s Law”). When psychological resilience is characterised in terms of “properties of individuals [that] are identified in isolation” (Martin-Breen and Anderies 12); and in terms of “behaviours and attributes [of individuals] that allow people to get along with one another and to succeed socially” (Pendall, Foster, and Cowell 72), they are reflecting this engineering focus on the properties of materials. Martin-Breen and Anderies (42) argue that “the Engineering Resilience framework” has been informed by ontological metaphors which treat “an ecosystem, person, city, government, bridge, [or] society” as if it were an object—“a unified whole”. Because this concept of resilience treats individuals as “objects,” it leads researchers to look for the properties or characteristics of the “materials” which individuals are “made of”, which are either elastic and allow them to “bounce” or “spring” back after stress; or are fragile and brittle and break under load. Similarly, the Designers Institute (DINZ), in its conference on “Our brittle society,” shows it is following the engineering resilience approach when it conceives of a city or society as an object which is made of materials which are either “strong and flexible” or “brittle and fragile”. While Holling characterises economic theory in terms of this engineering metaphor, it is in fact chemistry and the kinetic theory of gases that provides the source domain for the ontological metaphor which structures both static and dynamic equilibrium models within neo-classical economics (Smith and Foley; Mirowski). However, while springs are usually made out of metals, they can be made out of any “material [that] has the required combination of rigidity and elasticity,” such as plastic, and even wood (in a bow) (“Spring (device)”). Gas under pressure turns out to behave the same as other springs or elastic materials do under load. Because both the economic metaphor based on equilibrium theory of gases and the engineering analysis of bridges under load can both be subsumed under spring theory, we can treat both the economic (gas) metaphor and the engineering (bridge) metaphor as minor variations of a single overarching (spring) metaphor. Complex Systems Metaphors Holling (“Resilience & Stability” 13–15) critiques equilibrium models, arguing that non-deterministic, complex, non-equilibrium and multi-equilibrium ecological systems do not satisfy the conditions for application of equilibrium models. Holling argues that unlike the single equilibrium modelled by engineering resilience, complex adaptive systems (CAS) may have multi or no equilibrium states, and be non-linear and non-deterministic. Walker and Salt follow Holling by calling for recognition of the “dynamic complexity of the real world” (8), and that “these [real world] systems are complex adaptive systems” (11). Martin-Breen and Anderies (7) identify the key difference between “systems” and “complex adaptive systems” resilience as adaptive capacity, which like Walker and Salt (xiii), they define as the capacity to maintain function, even if system structures change or fail. The “engineering” concept of resilience focuses on the (elastic) properties of materials and uses language associated with elastic springs. This “spring” metaphor emphasises the property of individual components. In contrast, ecological concepts of resilience examine interactions between elements, and the state of the system in a multi-dimensional phase space. This systems approach shows that the complex behaviour of a system depends at least as much on the relationships between elements. These relationships can lead to “emergent” properties which cannot be reduced to the properties of the parts of the system. To explain these relationships and connections, ecologists and climate scientists use language and images associated with landscapes such as 2-D cross-sections and 3-D topology (Holling, “Resilience & Stability” 20; Pendall, Foster, and Cowell 74). Figure 3 is based on an image used by Walker, Holling, Carpenter and Kinzig (fig. 1b) to represent possible states of ecological systems. The “basins” in the image rely on our understanding of gravitational forces operating in a 3-D space to model “equilibrium” states in which the system, like the “ball” in the “basin”, will tend to settle. Figure 3: (based on Langston; in Walker et al. fig. 1b) – Tipping Point Bifurcation Wasdell (“Feedback” fig. 4) adapted this image to represent possible climate states and explain the concept of “tipping points” in complex systems. I have added the red balls (a, b, and c to replace the one black ball (b) in the original which represented the state of the system), the red lines which indicate the path of the ball/system, and the black x-y axis, in order to discuss the image. Wasdell (“Feedback Dynamics” slide 22) takes the left basin to represents “the variable, near-equilibrium, but contained dynamics of the [current] glacial/interglacial period”. As a result of rising GHG levels, the climate system absorbs more energy (mostly as heat). This energy can force the system into a different, hotter, state, less amenable to life as we know it. This is shown in Figure 3 by the system (represented as the red ball a) rising up the left basin (point b). From the perspective of the gravitational representation in Figure 3, the extra energy in the basin operates like the rotation in a Gravitron amusement ride, where centrifugal force pushes riders up the sides of the ride. If there is enough energy added to the climate system it could rise up and jump over the ridge/tipping point separating the current climate state into the “hot earth” basin shown on the right. Once the system falls into the right basin, it may be stuck near point c, and due to reinforcing feedbacks have difficulty escaping this new “equilibrium” state. Figure 4 represents a 2-D cross-section of the 3-D landscape shown in Figure 3. This cross-section shows how rising temperature and greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in a multi-equilibrium climate topology can lead to the climate crossing a tipping point and shifting from state a to state c. Figure 4: Topographic cross-section of possible climate states (derived from Wasdell, “Feedback” 26 CC). As Holling (“Resilience & Stability”) warns, a less “desirable” state, such as population collapse or extinction, may be more “resilient”, in the engineering sense, than a more desirable state. Wasdell (“Feedback Dynamics” slide 22) warns that the climate forcing as a result of human induced GHG emissions is in fact pushing the system “far away from equilibrium, passed the tipping point, and into the hot-earth scenario”. In previous episodes of extreme radiative forcing in the past, this “disturbance has then been amplified by powerful feedback dynamics not active in the near-equilibrium state [… and] have typically resulted in the loss of about 90% of life on earth.” An essential element of system dynamics is the existence of (delayed) reinforcing and balancing causal feedback loops, such as the ones illustrated in Figure 5. Figure 5: Pre/Predator model (Bellinger CC-BY-SA) In the case of Figure 5, the feedback loops illustrate the relationship between rabbit population increasing, then foxes feeding on the rabbits, keeping the rabbit population within the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Fox predation prevents rabbit over-population and consequent starvation of rabbits. The reciprocal interaction of the elements of a system leads to unpredictable nonlinearity in “even seemingly simple systems” (“System Dynamics”). The climate system is subject to both positive and negative feedback loops. If the area of ice cover increases, more heat is reflected back into space, creating a positive feedback loop, reinforcing cooling. Whereas, as the arctic ice melts, as it is doing at present (Barber), heat previously reflected back into space is absorbed by now exposed water, increasing the rate of warming. Where negative feedback (system damping) dominates, the cup-shaped equilibrium is stable and system behaviour returns to base when subject to disturbance. [...]The impact of extreme events, however, indicates limits to the stable equilibrium. At one point cooling feedback loops overwhelmed the homeostasis, precipitating the "snowball earth" effect. […] Massive release of CO2 as a result of major volcanic activity […] set off positive feedback loops, precipitating runaway global warming and eliminating most life forms at the end of the Permian period. (Wasdell, “Topological”) Martin-Breen and Anderies (53–54), following Walker and Salt, identify four key factors for systems (ecological) resilience in nonlinear, non-deterministic (complex adaptive) systems: regulatory (balancing) feedback mechanisms, where increase in one element is kept in check by another element; modularity, where failure in one part of the system will not cascade into total systems failure; functional redundancy, where more than one element performs every essential function; and, self-organising capacity, rather than central control ensures the system continues without the need for “leadership”. Transition Towns as a Resilience Movement The Transition Town (TT) movement draws on systems modelling of both climate change and of Limits to Growth (Meadows et al.). TT takes seriously Limits to Growth modelling that showed that without constraints in population and consumption the world faces systems collapse by the middle of this century. It recommends community action to build as much capacity as possible to “maintain existence of function”—Holling's (“Engineering vs. Ecological” 33) definition of ecological resilience—in the face of failing economic, political and environmental systems. The Transition Network provides a template for communities to follow to “rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions”. Rob Hopkins, the movements founder, explicitly identifies ecological resilience as its central concept (Transition Handbook 6). The idea for the movement grew out of a project by (2nd year students) completed for Hopkins at the Kinsale Further Education College. According to Hopkins (“Kinsale”), this project was inspired by Holmgren’s Permaculture principles and Heinberg's book on adapting to life after peak oil. Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is a design system for creating agricultural systems modelled on the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems (Mollison ix; Holmgren xix). Permaculture draws its scientific foundations from systems ecology (Holmgren xxv). Following CAS theory, Mollison (33) defines stability as “self-regulation”, rather than “climax” or a single equilibrium state, and recommends “diversity of beneficial functional connections” (32) rather than diversity of isolated elements. Permaculture understands resilience in the ecological, rather than the engineering sense. The Transition Handbook (17) “explores the issues of peak oil and climate change, and how when looked at together, we need to be focusing on the rebuilding of resilience as well as cutting carbon emissions. It argues that the focus of our lives will become increasingly local and small scale as we come to terms with the real implications of the energy crisis we are heading into.” The Transition Towns movement incorporate each of the four systems resilience factors, listed at the end of the previous section, into its template for building resilient communities (Hopkins, Transition Handbook 55–6). Many of its recommendations build “modularity” and “self-organising”, such as encouraging communities to build “local food systems, [and] local investment models”. Hopkins argues that in a “more localised system” feedback loops are tighter, and the “results of our actions are more obvious”. TT training exercises include awareness raising for sensitivity to networks of (actual or potential) ecological, social and economic relationships (Hopkins, Transition Handbook 60–1). TT promotes diversity of local production and economic activities in order to increase “diversity of functions” and “diversity of responses to challenges.” Heinberg (8) wrote the forward to the 2008 edition of the Transition Handbook, after speaking at a TotnesTransition Town meeting. Heinberg is now a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute (PCI), which was established in 2003 to “provide […] the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated economic, energy, environmental, and equity crises that define the 21st century [… in] a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies that thrive within ecological bounds” (PCI, “About”), of the sort envisioned by the Limits to Growth model discussed in the previous section. Given the overlapping goals of PCI and Transition Towns, it is not surprising that Rob Hopkins is now a Fellow of PCI and regular contributor to Resilience, and there are close ties between the two organisations. Resilience, which until 2012 was published as the Energy Bulletin, is run by the Post Carbon Institute (PCI). Like Transition Towns, Resilience aims to build “community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these. […] It has [its] roots in systems theory” (PCI, “About Resilience”). Resilience.org says it follows the interpretation of Resilience Alliance (RA) Program Director Brian Walker and science writer David Salt's (xiii) ecological definition of resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.“ Conclusion This paper has analysed the ontological metaphors structuring competing conceptions of resilience. The engineering resilience metaphor dominates in psychological resilience research, but is not adequate for understanding resilience in complex adaptive systems. Ecological resilience, on the other hand, dominates in environmental and climate change research, and is the model of resilience that has been incorporated into the global permaculture and Transition Towns movements. References 2nd year students. Kinsale 2021: An Energy Descent Action Plan. Kinsale, Cork, Ireland: Kinsale Further Education College, 2005. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/KinsaleEnergyDescentActionPlan.pdf>. Barber, Elizabeth. “Arctic Ice Continues to Thin, and Thin, European Satellite Reveals.” Christian Science Monitor 11 Sep. 2013. 25 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2013/0911/Arctic-ice-continues-to-thin-and-thin-European-satellite-reveals>. Bellinger, Gene. “Prey/Predator Model.” SystemsWiki 23 Nov. 2009. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://systemswiki.org/index.php?title=Prey/Predator_Model>. Blacklemon67. "Pogo Animation." Wikipedia 2007. 24 Sep. 2013 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pogoanim.gif>. Computers & Engineering. Bridge Trucks Animated Stress Plot 1. 2003. GIF file. SAP2000 Bridge Design. ‹http://www.comp-engineering.com/announce/bridge/demo/truck_1.gif>. DINZ. “Resilience Engineering: 'Our Brittle Society' - The Sustainability Society - May 18th 2012.” The Designers Institute. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.dinz.org.nz/Events/2012/May/47965>. Gärdenfors, Peter. “Cognitive Semantics and Image Schemas with Embodied Forces.” Embodiment in Cognition and Culture. Ed. John Michael Krois et al. John Benjamins Publishing, 2007. 57–76. 8 Nov. 2012 ‹http://oddelki.ff.uni-mb.si/filozofija/files/Festschrift/Dunjas_festschrift/gardenfors.pdf>. Garmezy, N, and S Streitman. “Children at Risk: The Search for the Antecedents of Schizophrenia. Part I. Conceptual Models and Research Methods.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 8 (1974): 14–90. NCBI PubMed 14 Aug. 2013 ‹http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/8/14.full.pdf>. Gibbs, Keith, and John Bourne. “The Helical Spring.” Schoolphysics 2013. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/animations/Helical_spring_shm/index.html>. Gordon, James Edward. Structures: Or, Why Things Don’t Fall Down. London: Plenum Press, 1978. Harrison, Karey. “Image Schemas and Political Ontology.” Communication, Cognition and Media: Political and Economic Discourse. Ed. Augusto Soares da Silva et al. Portugal: Aletheia, forthcoming. ———. “Ontological Commitments of Ethics and Economics.” Economic Thought 2.1 (2013): 1–19. 23 Apr. 2013 ‹http://et.worldeconomicsassociation.org/article/view/64>. Heinberg, Richard. Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-carbon World. New Society Publishers, 2004. Holling, Crawford Stanley. “Engineering Resilience versus Ecological Resilience.” Engineering within Ecological Constraints. Ed. Peter Schulze. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996. 31–44. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4919&page=31>. ———. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4.1 (1973): 1–23. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://webarchive.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/RP-73-003.pdf>. Holmgren, David. Permaculture: Principles & Pathways beyond Sustainability. Holmgren Design Services, 2002. Hopkins, Rob. “Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (2005).” Transition Culture: an Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent. n.d. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://transitionculture.org/essential-info/pdf-downloads/kinsale-energy-descent-action-plan-2005/>. ———. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. Green Books, 2008. Print. ———. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. Free edit version. ‹http://www.appropedia.org/Category:The_Transition_Handbook: Appropedia.org> 2010. 16 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/CSC2600/transition-handbook.pdf>. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1962. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980. Langacker, Ronald W. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites. Vol. 1. Stanford University Press, 1987. Langston, Art. “Tipping Point” or Bifurcation Between Two Attractor Basins. 2004. 25 Sep. 2013. ‹http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/figure1.html>. Martin-Breen, Patrick, and J. Marty Anderies. Resilience: A Literature Review. Rockefeller Foundation, 2011. 8 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/resilience-literature-review>. Masterman, Margaret. “The Nature of a Paradigm.” Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Eds. Imre Lakatos & Alan Musgrave. Cambridge University Press, 1970. 59–89. Matthews, Theresa. “The Physics of Bridges.” Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. 2013. 14 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/2001/5/01.05.08.x.html>. Meadows, Donella H. et al. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Universe Books, 1972. Mirowski, Philip. “From Mandelbrot to Chaos in Economic Theory.” Southern Economic Journal 57.2 (1990): 289–307. Mollison, Bill. Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. Tagari Publications, 1988. PCI. “About.” Post Carbon Institute. 16 July 2012. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.postcarbon.org/about/>. ———. “About Resilience.org.” Resilience 16 July 2012. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.resilience.org/about>. Pendall, Rolf, Kathryn A. Foster, and Margaret Cowell. “Resilience and Regions: Building Understanding of the Metaphor.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3.1 (2010): 71–84. 4 Aug. 2013 ‹http://cjres.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/1/71>. RA. “About RA.” Resilience Alliance 2013. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/about_ra>. Smith, Eric, and Duncan K. Foley. “Classical Thermodynamics and Economic General Equilibrium Theory.” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 32.1 (2008): 7–65. Transition Network. “About Transition Network.” Transition Network. 2012. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.transitionnetwork.org/about>. Walker, B. H., and David Salt. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Island Press, 2006. Walker, Brian et al. “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–Ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 9.2 (2004): 5. Wasdell, David. “A Topological Approach.” The Feedback Crisis in Climate Change: The Meridian Report. n.d. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.meridian.org.uk/Resources/Global%20Dynamics/Feedback%20Crisis/frameset1.htm?p=3>. ———. “Beyond the Tipping Point: Positive Feedback and the Acceleration of Climate Change.” The Foundation for the Future, Humanity 3000 Workshop. Seattle, 2006. ‹http://www.meridian.org.uk/_PDFs/BeyondTippingPoint.pdf>. ———. “Feedback Dynamics and the Acceleration of Climate Change.” Winterthur, 2008. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.crisis-forum.org.uk/events/Workshop1/Workshop1_presentations/wasdellpictures/wasdell_clubofrome.php>. Werner, Emmy E., Jessie M. Bierman, and Fern E. French. The Children of Kauai: A Longitudinal Study from the Prenatal Period to Age Ten. University of Hawaii Press, 1971.WGBH. “Bridge Basics.” Building Big. 2001. 14 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/bridge/basics.html>. Wikipedia contributors. “Gravitron.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia 20 Sep. 2013. 25 Sep. 2013 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitron>. ———. “Hooke’s Law.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia 8 Aug. 2013. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooke%27s_law>. ———. “Spring (device).” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia 9 Aug. 2013. 24 Sep. 2013 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_(device)>. ———. “System Dynamics.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia 9 Aug. 2013. 13 Aug. 2013 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Marshall, P. David. "Seriality and Persona." M/C Journal 17, no. 3 (2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.802.

Full text

Abstract:

No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. London: Routledge, 2004 (1979). 29-35.Dawkins, Marcia Alesan. “Close to the Edge: Representational Tactics of Eminem.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.3 (2010): 463-85.De Kosnik, Abigail. “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling.” How to Watch Television. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 355-63.Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Journal of Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial.” Screening the Past 11 (2011). 20 May 2014.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1973.Hagedorn, Roger “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.” Wide Angle 10. 4 (1988): 4-12.Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.Heinrich, Nathalie. “Personne, Personnage, Personalité: L'acteur a L'ère De Sa Reproductibilité Technique.” Personne/Personnage. Eds. Thierry Lenain and Aline Wiame. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2011. 77-101.Jauss, Hans Robert, and Paul De Man. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Brighton: Harvester, 1982.Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.Jung, C. G., et al. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.Kracauer, Siegfried. “Remarks on the Actor.” Movie Acting, the Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1960). 19-27.Leonard Nimoy & Pharrell Williams: Star Trek & Creating Spock. Ep. 12. Reserve Channel. December 2013. Lenain, Thierry, and Aline Wiame (eds.). Personne/Personnage. Librairie Philosophiques J. VRIN, 2011.Lotz, Amanda D. “House: Narrative Complexity.” How to Watch TV. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 22-29.Marshall, P. David. “The Cate Blanchett Persona and the Allure of the Oscar.” The Conversation (2014). 4 April 2014.Marshall, P. David “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-70.Marshall, P. David. “Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-71.Marshall, P. David. “The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media.” Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 35-48.Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. 2nd Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.Mayer, R. “Image Power: Seriality, Iconicity and the Mask of Fu Manchu.” Screen 53.4 (2012): 398-417.Nayar, Pramod K. Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society, and Celebrity Culture. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2009.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Not Spock. Milbrae, California: Celestial Arts, 1975.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Spock. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995.Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.Stanislavski, Constantin. Creating a Role. New York: Routledge, 1989 (1961).Thompson, John O. “Screen Acting and the Commutation Test.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1978). 37-48.Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.Vineberg, Steve. Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style. New York; Toronto: Schirmer Books, 1991.Wills, Garry. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.Wojcik, Pamela Robertson. “Typecasting.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004. 169-89.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

We offer discounts on all premium plans for authors whose works are included in thematic literature selections. Contact us to get a unique promo code!