Journal articles on the topic 'Eagles, fiction'

J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination is invariably abundant in all sorts of peoples, races, and other forms of intelligent life, including those whose prototypes could be encountered in the natural world and which found their way into Tolkien’s fiction with little alteration to their physical properties and only some modification of their often deep-rooted framework of cultural associations in Indo-European lore. This last group includes, amongst others, the Great Eagles of the Misty Mountains, Tolkien’s ‘dangerous machine’, whose two principal affiliations appear to be with, on the one hand, the pre-Christian beliefs of the Germanic peoples (via the so-called beasts of battle) and, on the other, the pneumatological soteriology of the Roman Catholic Church (via the eagle as a creative recasting of the evangelical ‘dove’). The present article is an attempt to demonstrate that these seemingly incompatible ingredients in fact came to be quite seamlessly unified in The Hobbit and, in particular, The Lord of the Rings, providing even more depth to the powerful Christian substratum of Tolkien’s fiction.

From the end of the 17th century, the rich bestiary of the fables offers an ideal field of exploration to test the hypothesis of the topics of sound. Among the many crows, storks, roosters, owls, pigeons, sparrows, eagles, peacocks, nightingales, most of them have a singular, recognisable, imitable voice. All or almost all of them are anthropomorphised, as well as speak and play a major role in fiction. This article seeks to address the following questions based on the fables of La Fontaine, Perrault, Furetière, Fénelon and Mme de Villedieu in addition to Philippe Desprez and Houdar de la Motte: are bird songs always treated according to aesthetic criteria or according to their effects on the audience? Are there any narrative topoi associated with the songs of birds, or even with the songs of certain birds? Or are birds rather character types with a specific song as a characteristic? What is the place of zoological knowledge in these representations?

In the years before 1914 the novels of William Le Queux provided a catalyst for British debates about the economic, military and political failures of the empire and featured plots that embodied fears about new national and imperial rivals. For Le Queux, the capture of London was integral to German military occupation. Representative of the nation’s will to resist, or its inability to withstand attack, the vitality of London was always at issue in his novels. Drawing on contemporary fears about the capital and its decay, this article considers the moral panics about London and Londoners and their relationship to Britain’s martial decline reflected in his stories. Engaging with images of anarchist and foreign terrorism, and drawing on fears of covert espionage rings operating in government circles, this article probes the ways in which Le Queux’s fiction expressed concerns about London as a degenerate metropolis in the process of social and moral collapse.

The article discusses the play by contemporary playwright Yuri Klavdiev "TheYakuza Dogs." Here is a detailed (but not exhaustive) analysis of the cultural codes. According to the author of the study, the languages of animation, cinema, classical and fictional literature, computer games and eastern philosophy form in the play, a specific "dialect" addressed to its teenage reader. The article emphasizes that a reading teenager is different from a child-reader and an adult reader: their receptive capabilities are largely defined by puberty crisis. On the one hand, in fiction a teenager looks for dynamics and heroics, and, on the other hand, they are eager to face the social reality fierce with its innumerable conflicts. In the first case, the teenagers manifest themselves as a child-reader with their interest for action and the struggle between good and evil. In the second case, on the contrary, as an adult, since the ability to see the border that separates the tale from life belongs only to a well-formed reader.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an influential novel in African literature for three reasons. First, it is a novel meant to promote African culture; second, it is a narrative about where things went wrong with Africans; and third, it is a prose text which contributed to Achebe’s worldwide recognition. It contains Achebe’s rejection of the degrading representation of Africans by European writers, and fosters Africa’s traditional values and humanism. The excesses of Igbo customs led the protagonist to flagrant misuse of power. The novel’s scriptural innovations bring fame to Achebe who is considered as the “Asiwaju” (Leader) of African literature, the “founding father of African fiction”, or again the “Eagle on Iroko”.

The paper considers the works included in the series of military-patriotic books for young people “Our Heroes”. Founded in 1968, this series consists of books by Udmurt writers about fellow Udmurt heroes, the Great Patriotic War veterans. The documentary fiction novellas of the national writer of the republic G. A. Khodyrev “The Eagle: The Tale of Pyotr Babkin” (1969; co-author V. V. Golubev) and “Soldier Spyridon Strelkov” (1976) were among the most prominent books in the series. The aim of the study is to identify the ways of reality reflection in the Udmurt documentary fiction prose for children and adolescents that uses the human experience of war heroes as the material and document as the medium as exemplified in the creative work of Herman Alekseevich Khodyrev (1932-1995). Scientific novelty lies in the following: it is the first time that based on the material of G. A. Khodyrev’s novellas, the role and place of the documentary-factual principle in Udmurt prose for children and adolescents were examined, the features of the aesthetic assimilation of the fact as the most important part of the poetics of a work were determined. The results of the study suggest that in the Udmurt children’s literature of the late 1960s – mid-1980s, documentary fiction works appear in which the image of a real hero is recreated through the use of the authentic facts and human fates of the Great Patriotic War period. G. A. Khodyrev’s novellas published in the series “Our Heroes” are characterised by the fact that the author managed to show the synthesis of universal national heroism and the manifestation of the individual human spirit in war. In his prose, such qualities of the “series” as a clear image of a real young hero’s formation against the background of specific historical events, the appeal to children’s perception through the memories technique, the lyrical descriptions of the nature of the native land, the author’s focus on activating the educational role of literature, the transformation of dry “newspaper” language into vivid, imaginative artistic speech are manifested.

ABSTRAKPara Harimau Yang Menolak Punah(Imanda Dea Sabiella dan Edho Cahya Kusuma, 2013) merupakan judul dokumenter televisi produksi Eagle Institutedengan ciri filmis berupa paduan antara gambar dan tuturan (wawancara). Dokumenter ini merupakan objek material yang menarik untuk diteliti dalam konteks kontinuitas dan perubahan estetika, selama era pasca reformasi dengan zaman Orde Baru sebagai pembanding. Jika pada masa orde baru, kampanye pelestarian lingkungan melalui media dokumenter notabene diproduksi oleh pemerintah melalui estetika sinematik yang bersifat propagandis, maka saat ini dokumenter produksi Eagle Institutejustru menggunakan estetika sinematik yang kritis sebagai konter bagi pemerintah. Fakta dan fiksi (faksi) menjadi istilah yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini sebagai bentuk kontinuitas dan perubahan dokumenter televisi Indonesia. Alasan pemilihan istilah ini adalah dunia fenomenal dalam banyak kasus, seperti yang terlihat dalam dokumenter, seakan berbeda dari "dunia nyata", meskipun dalam kenyataannya rekaman itu berasal dari “dunia nyata/realitas”. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan film kognitif untuk mengamati sejauh mana Faksi beroperasi sebagai media kritik yang secara estetis merangkai dokumenter tersebut. Struktur mental digunakan untuk menjelaskan Faksi melalui petunjuk filmis hingga diperoleh kesimpulan tentang kritik yang ingin disampaikan melalui dokumenter. ABSTRACTPara Harimau Yang Menolak Punah (Imanda Dea Sabiella dan Edho Cahya Kusuma, 2013) is the title of a television documentary produced by Eagle Institute. The documentary has characters that specifically contains of expository shots. This documentary is an interesting material object to be examined in the context of continuity and aesthetic change, during the post-reform era with the New Order era as a comparison. During the new order era, environmental conservation campaigns through documentary media were produced by the government through propagandist cinematic aesthetics. Whereas, the post-reform documentary produced by Eagle Institute actually uses a critical cinematic aesthetic as a counter for the government. Fact and fiction (faction) became the term used in this study as a form of continuity and change of Indonesia documentary. The reason for choosing this term is the phenomenal world in many cases, as seen in the documentary, as though it were different from the "real world", even though in reality it came from "the real world". This study uses a cognitive film approach to observe the extent to which the Faction operates as a criticism medium which aesthetically assembles the documentary. The mental structure is used to explain the Faction through filmic clues to the conclusion of the criticism that the documentary wishes to convey.

AbstractThis article uses a queer lens to examine two short stories by the Iraqi communist, teacher, and prose writer Dhu al-Nun Ayyub (1908–88), “The Eagles’ Anthem” and “How I Found a Guy,” published in his collection Sadiqi (1938). Scholars have avoided analysis of the homoerotic and heterotopic aspects of Ayyub’s writings, even if they mention his depictions of physical attraction between men. Rather than read these fictional texts as sociological studies of sexual sensibilities, the article assumes that they tapped into and reflected psychological and social dynamics in interwar Baghdad. The Ayyub stories, which render homoerotic masculine sexualities as commonplace and a positive aspect of city spaces, are thus distinguished from most Iraqi writings during this period. The stories stage homoeroticism and love between men as democratic critique and affirmation of heterogeneity and vitality in a nationalist, militarist, and heteronormalizing setting that increasingly associated homosexuality with moral dissolution and backwardness.

During the Soviet era, the works of 55 contemporary Iranian authors were translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union. Prefaces and afterwords, usually written by Iran scholars, provided the Soviet reading audience with a paradigm for perceiving the translated novels and short stories. This paper aims to offer an analytical survey of the history of the translation of modern Iranian fiction into Russian and to trace the major trends in the representation of the translated works. The thematic range of translated works correlated with the domestic political agenda and the changes in Soviet-Iranian relations, as well as with the current state of Soviet Iranian Studies. The influence of personal tastes and connections of certain Iran scholars engaged in the process of translation can also be detected. Generally, the translations of contemporary literature of Iran were to demonstrate that Iranian intellectuals were aware of the flaws of their society, and eager to choose the more humanistic values of the socialist countries. Before World War II, the translators were mainly interested in the socio-political aspect of the works. After the war and before the thaw in Soviet-Iranian relations, translators focused mainly on social satire. In the 1960s – early 1980s, many works of the most prominent Iranian writers of the period were translated into Russian. In the early 1980s, these translations were viewed as a means of understanding the reasons for the Iranian upheaval. The novels and short stories of Iranian modernists, as well as other ideologically inappropriate works, remained untranslated.

The article attempts to reconstruct M. Gorky’s unfulfilled plan of the mid-1930s to write a book about the Russian pre-revolutionary village for the literary and artistic series “Kolkhoznik Library,” which was part of the publishing project “History of the Village.” The author deeply analyzes Gorky’s stories “Saddler and Fire,” “Execution,” “Eagle,” “Bull,” published in 1934–1935 in the “Kolkhoznik” magazine, and also the initial fragment of his unfinished story about the Russian village. The material of Gorky’s correspondence with V.Ya. Zazubrin and archival sources on the “History of the Village” (the Archive of A.M. Gorky IWL RAS, Moscow) show the emergence of the idea of a book about the Russian village and the beginning of the writer’s work on its embodiment; the pre-term volume of the collection and its place in the literary and artistic series “Kolkhoznik Library.” The article demonstrates the special importance that Gorky attached to the publishing project “The History of the Village” and within its framework “Kolkhoznik Library,” which is confirmed by the writer’s intention to create a new book of works of fiction specifically for this series.

AbstractRecent studies of the history of Mexican cinema continue to speak of the complex relations between the state and the film industry, and the most frequently analyzed aspects tend to be the same: the reach and forms of censorship, as well as the financial dependence on the state. To broaden this perspective, I propose a classification of cinematic discourses that represent the relations between film characters and state powers. I discuss four basic modes of representation that, determined by historical and economic circumstances, reflect and mediate the attitudes and dispositions of viewers toward the political regime. For each mode, I discuss a sequence in a paradigmatic film, analyzing visual and ideological aspects in relation to the political moment at the time of the film's release. Finally, I argue that, despite the resurgence of the Mexican cinema and a more critical tone in its approach to state institutions, fictional films still rest on indirect and allegorical representations of recent events. This is due to the uncertainty of the prolonged and still-incomplete transition to institutional democracy in Mexico.

Актуальность изучения влияния идей Карлоса Кастанеды на творчество Виктора Пелевина определяется тем, что проблема художественной условности становится одной из привлекающих внимание исследователей. Вторичная условность в творчестве Пелевина рассматривается в рамках обновления нереалистических художественных приемов. Проблема вторичной условности характеризуется новым подходом использования эзотерического в современных постмодернистских романах, в том числе и через концепции Кастанеды, чем продиктована своевременность обращения к данной теме. В частности, обновление художественной условности с помощью концепций Кастанеды находит отражение в романе Пелевина «Тайные виды на гору Фудзи». Цель данной статьи — изучение романа «Тайные виды на гору Фудзи» в контексте воздействия идей Кастанеды. Предмет исследования — специфика реализации в данном произведении воззрений Кастанеды в контексте вторичной реальности. В статье анализируется художественное воплощение таких концепций Кастанеды, как «сталкинг», «эманация Орла» (как часть буддийского учения о дхьянах). Исследуется отражение концепций «сталкинга», «бога Орла», «дарования и пожирания осознания» в качестве художественно преображенной основы мистического феминизма. Рассмотрена кастанедовская «сновидческая действительность» как художественная модель отдельной реальности, в которой обитает божество Пелевина. Сделан вывод о том, что концепция «дарования и отбора осознания» в произведении Пелевина подверглась преобразованию определенного характера. Также нами установлено, что с помощью эзотерических идей Кастанеды Пелевин высмеивает принцип гендерного превосходства как ведущую черту феминистического движения. The exploration of the influence of Carlos Castanedaʼs works on Viktor Pelevinʼs works is relevant, for the issue of conventionality is of great research interest. The implausibility of Pelevinʼs works is viewed through the prism of artistic methods that are used by modern writers to create an unlikely universe. The issue of secondary artistic convention is characterized by a new approach to the use of esoteric elements in postmodern novels, including novels by Carlos Castaneda, which accounts for the relevance of the research. Castanedaʼs influence on artistic conventionality can be seen in Pelevinʼs novel “Secret Views of Mount Fuji”. The aim of the article is to investigate the novel “Secret Views of Mount Fuji” through the prism of Castanedaʼs artistic influence. The object of the research is the implementation of Castanedaʼs views in the context of a secondary reality. The article analyzes the artistic embodiment of such concepts of Castanedaʼs fictional universe as “stalkers”, ”Eagle emanation” (as an element of Buddhist philosophy of dhyanas), “bestowing awareness”, and “devouring” in magical feminism fiction. Pelevinʼs deity lives in Castanedaʼs art-of-dreaming universe. The author concludes that Castanedaʼs ideas of en-dowing one with awareness and depriving one of awareness undergo some transformation in Pelevinʼs works. The author underlines that Pelevin uses Castanedaʼs esoteric ideas to ridicule gender superiority as a leading feature of feminism.

The Symbolist novella Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) by Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949) is the first work of fiction in Western literature to be entirely written as an interior monologue. Yet it took more than thirty years for Dujardin’s innovation to be recognized thanks to James Joyce acknowledging Les Lauriers as an important formal influence for Ulysses (1922). Subsequently, Dujardin claimed in the essay “Le monologue intérieur” (1931) that his goal had been to transpose Wagnerian procedures into writing. Since then, scholars have either denied or confirmed the novel’s Wagnerian inspiration. The latter interpretation has become the consensus in scholarship. However, in their efforts to connect Les Lauriers with Wagner, previous studies have neglected the constant presence of French musical theater references in the novel, presumably because their presence represents a form of paradox for a devout Wagnerite like Dujardin. This article is the first to analyze them. It also ties these references together with Symbolism’s interest in metafiction, that is to say, in fiction that reflects on its own existence as fiction. I argue that Dujardin was eager to follow the model of the Wagnerian novel proposed by his friend Teodor de Wyzewa in the Revue wagnérienne, that of setting on paper the poet’s entire existence by depicting his/her every emotion, sensation, and thought. In his discovery of the difficulty involved in performing such a task, Dujardin switched his focus to what his mentor Mallarmé called a “Type”: a depersonalized character, who is supposed to stand in as a representative of France’s youth. Hence, the protagonist of Les Lauriers sont coupés being an average character, with musical tastes that are illustrative of his time. Thus, the numerous musical references peppering Les Lauriers are not connected to the elitist world of Wagnerism in the 1880s, but rather to what were then beloved favorites like François-Marie Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (1825), or Edmond Audran’s La Mascotte (1880). But there is an added twist, as Dujardin did not let go of Wagner’s influence entirely and used Audran’s operetta as a springboard with which to experiment with Wagnerian leitmotifs in literature. Ultimately, I show that the musical references in Les Lauriers are systematically divorced from real-life performance in order to become strictly mental creations that highlight just how isolated and self-absorbed the protagonist—and, by extension, the author himself in the act of creation—really is.

Since the education explosion in mid-nineteenth century England, when astute publishers began to capitalise upon a newly created and burgeoning market, Australia has always featured prominently in fiction aimed at children and adolescents. Those British children who initially made up the bulk of the reading audience for books set in Australia were eager to read episodic stories set in exciting countries far from home, and an Australian setting offered a glamorous backdrop for tales of high adventure. Moreover, it appears that while the nineteenth-century British reading public perceived Australia as an exotic place, then Queensland was quintessentially so. A disproportionate number of early tales about life in Australia is set in this colony, most often in the outback regions, but also in the vicinity of the coastal tropics. Nineteenth-century Queensland was viewed by the British, as well as by many Australians, as a remote outpost of Great Britain; it was commonly thought of as the least urbanised, the least “civilised”, the least industrialised and perhaps the most remote of all the regions of Australia. It was widely seen as an area of great and diverse (if also mysterious and desolate) natural beauty, of rural innocence as yet unpolluted by dark, satanic mills (even Brisbane was a sleepy, sprawling country town in picturesque contrast to the bustling southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne). Children's novelists capitalised on the mystique of Queensland, archetypal frontier colony, by creating a cluster of tales showing what it was like to be a Queensland kid.

This is my first attempt at approaching the notion of agency as a practice though the mode of dancing and writing; deconstructing and reconstructing what I know experientially and what I am trying to comprehend theoretically. I am looking for a way of releasing bodily capacities from the jurisdiction of the mind, whose cartesian definition I don't attempt to deny, as most people I have the chance to work with and teach exhibit in one way or another proof of the fact they’ve embodied the concept. All the while, I am considering philosophical texts, anatomical texts, and (science) fiction; I am taking into account my bodily experience, I am dancing and I am writing, I am teaching, conversing, occasionally making progress, occasionally falling back to the embrace of old habits, making unnecessary assumptions, and failing. Repetition is a part of the study. Minimal difference is a part of the study. Changing perspective is a part of the study. My strategy includes not trying to fix but approach with care and attention every step I am taking; every achievement, every set-back; every question and every answer. I assume my learning curve to be cyclical, as I continue to practice in public, always vulnerable but eager to engage in an exchange.

This study aims to create a “portrait” of the cedar as a central dendro-image of the Siberian text and the image of Altai in particular. The research materials are scholarly works on ethnography and folklore studies, Russian and Russian-language fiction of the nineteenth — twenty first centuries about Siberia. The author mostly refers to texts from the five-volume anthology The Image of Altai in Russian Literature of the 19th–20th Centuries (2012). The sources are considered in the context of the geo-poetic approach and ethno-dendrology. The analysis makes it possible to single out a combination of elements of the “tree” generic concept specific to the image of the cedar, which has not previously been the subject of systematic consideration. The real and cultural qualities of the cedar as a coniferous, evergreen, powerful, fruit-bearing, “male” tree determine its sacralisation in Siberian pagan and Russian Christian cultures. The Russian name for the Siberian cedar pine, “кедр”, which dates to the Middle Ages, establishes a correspondence between Siberia and Palestine, North and South, reflects the process of mythologisation of the conquered space in the categories of paradise / locus of the Passion. The main mythological and mythopoetic “cedar” motifs are associated with ideas about the World Tree, the Tree of Life, the family tree, the tree of poetry, etc. The symbolisation of the cedar as a sign and model of a person, a people, homeland, Altai, and Siberia remains unchanged. The cedar is accompanied by images of an animal (bear, sable), bird (eagle), and mountains. The semantic counterpart of the Siberian cedar in Russian culture is the oak, which is the main tree in the European part of Russia. Starting in the twentieth century, the practice of industrial logging leads to the emergence of new, environmental issues.

_ When asked to describe Quaise Energy, Chief Financial Officer Kevin Bonebrake said, “At its simplest, we will manufacture steam.” Their goal is to produce steam that is hot enough to power an electric generator built to run on fossil fuel. They plan to do that by injecting water down 10–20 km to where the rock temperature is 400 to 500°C. The motivation for drilling wells into extremely hard basement rock is to make geothermal electric power affordable by producing steam that could be used to repower older plants connected to power grids serving major markets. In the past, geothermal power has been little used because there are few places in the world with the right combination of the hot rock, water, and permeability required to deliver high‑quality steam. Hot, dry rock is commonly available, but producing the supercritical steam needed requires drilling to depths of 10 to 20 km, depending on the temperature gradient in that part of the US. At that depth, the driller will be faced with rocks such as granite and basalt. The rock is capable of both producing superheated steam and destroying the microchips and seals required for directional drilling. Quaise plans to drill ultradeep holes by generating high‑powered microwaves at the drilling site. The microwaves will be transmitted downhole to make hole by melting and vaporizing the basement rock. The only downhole equipment is a long tube to guide the waves to their target. It is one of those ideas where the first reaction most people have is “that sounds like science fiction,” which speaks to both the problem and the proposed solution. “You have to think differently to deal with that type of temperature,” said Henry Phan, vice president of engineering at Quaise, whose job is to turn this invention into engineering reality. Where It’s Hot The high barriers to drilling wells 10 to 20 km deep (33,000 to 66,000 ft) beg the question, isn’t there an alternative? A simpler, faster, and cheaper option would be to use proven drilling methods to reach not‑so‑deep levels where the steam produced is not as hot. Phan described it as “colder, lower‑pressure, wetter steam.” That sort of geothermal energy can be useful for purposes such as providing heat for desalination or energy for central cooling systems, according to an analysis of Oman’s efforts to tap the energy of hot‑water zones beneath oil fields. These zones were not hot enough to generate electric power. There is talk of using steam from zones that are not as deep, but Quaise’s analysis concluded that the large investment required to build power plants capable of using that steam for electric generation would make the output uneconomically costly. Quaise argues that finding a way to drill extreme wells is worth the cost and technical risks that come with new technology and drilling into little‑known formations because it would save the cost of building a power plant. Its goal is to supply older fossil‑fueled plants whose owners would be eager to convert to geothermal steam because of the staggering cost of complying with environmental regulations.

Focusing on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s critically acclaimed Purple Hibiscus (2003), this article argues that subversion, an aggressive performance that aimed at overthrowing and displacing patriarchal institutions which initially impact on the choices and activities of the oppressed, is the hallmark of the fictional figures’ responses to oppression. The essay contends that such forceful reactions to repression expand our understanding of twenty-first century Nigerian female-authored narratives. This argument I contrast with earlier critical readings, observing that while critics are eager to expose and endorse a female presence in the text, the readings often undermine its revolutionary suggestions. Through a radical feminist approach, my analysis of the novel highlights the heroines in order to demonstrate subversive behaviours in their drive to establish female agency, and notes such defiance to be necessary considering their repressive milieu. In doing so, I conclude with the notion that dissidence is a remarkable feature of the novel, and that the radical feminist paradigm is useful in widening awareness to this groundbreaking tenor.

The Swedish writer Per Olof Sundman (1922-1992) wrote mostly short stories and novels, but also reportages. The paper deals with two reportages from the Lofoten islands, Människor vid hav (1966, “People by the sea”) and Lofoten, sommar (1973, “Lofoten, summer”) The choice of the Lofoten islands as a subject is related to a fascination Sundman felt towards northern and arctic regions, a fascination he also expressed in a number of fictional narratives and in the documentary novel Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd (1967. English title: The Flight of the Eagle) A question that arises almost immediately is whether that fascination affects the way the reporter works and how it affects it. How does Sundman look at the Lofoten? What does he take notice of and tell us about? What kind of image does he give? And how does he understand his own role, his function as an investigator in an environment which is neither his own nor his postulated readers’ usual environment? Another question deals with the relationship between the reportages from the Lofoten and the author’s other works. Are the reportages easy to recognize as Sundmanian texts, can Sundman’s “signature” be traced in them? It appears that “People by the sea” and “Lofoten, summer” are not merely informative texts. They also to a rather high degree suggest an atmosphere, using among other things inherited representations and judgements to that purpose. Those reportages turn out to be strongly literary texts, in the traditional meaning of the word.

Always keen on the spectators’ freedom of interpretation, André Bazin’s film theory not only asks the famous question “What is cinema?,” but it also explores what is a human. By underlining the importance of personalist ethics, Angela Dalle Vacche is the first film specialist to identify Bazin’s “anti-anthropocentric” ambition of the cinema in favor of a more compassionate society. Influenced by the personalist philosophy of his mentor, Emmanuel Mounier, Bazin argued that the cinema is a mind-machine that interrogates its audiences on how humankind can engage in an egalitarian fashion towards other humans. According to Bazin, cinema’s ethical interrogation places human spirituality or empathy on top of creativity and logic. Notwithstanding Bazin’s emphasis on ethics, his film theory is rich with metaphors from art and science. The French film critic’s metaphorical writing lyrically frames encounters between literary texts and filmmaking styles, while it illuminates the analogy between the élan vital of biology and cinema’s lifelike ontology. A brilliant analyst of many kinds of films from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, ranging from fiction to documentary, from animation to the avant-garde, Bazin felt that the abstractions of editing were as important as the camera’s fluidity of motion. Furthermore, he disliked films based on a thesis or on an a priori stance that would rule out the risks and surprises of life in motion. Neither a mystic nor an animist, Bazin was a dissident Catholic and a cultural activist without membership of a specific political party. Eager to dialogue with all kinds of communities, Bazin always disliked institutionalized religions based on dogmas.

The Russo-Japanese war (1905-1904) had a great impact on the Estonian society as it instigated the discontent in the society that in the end lead to the turbulent events of the Russian revolution in 1905 and pursue of political independence that was achieved in 1918. It also changed the content of the Estonian printed media as these two years escalated a Japanese boom that was never seen before or after: almost in every single newspaper issue there were articles written about Japan (war news, foreign news, opinion stories, fiction, travelogues, etc). As a new genre, newspapers started to publish the letters of the soldiers who were sent to the battlefield in the Far East. On the whole about 10.000 Estonian men were mobilized that was a considerable proportion of the nation of 1 million and the Estonians back at home were eager to know every piece of information how their men are doing in the distant warfare. Consequently the war created a genre in newspapers that was providing war news without the mediation of foreign languages or journalists. In the context of the research of the Estonian printed media history, the soldiers’ letters have not been researched as a type of journalistic genre in the newspapers. The aim of the current paper is to study how did the Estonian soldiers construct in their letters the Japanese as an enemy and which topics and comparisons did they use while writing about the war. The thematic analysis was used as a research method to study the letters published in three main Estonian newspapers from spring 1904 up to spring 1905. Main topics in the letters have been divided into directly war related issues or descriptions of the surrounding environment. In both categories the positive or negative images of Japanese have been analysed.

The purpose of the article is to study the formation and development of the French festivefolk culture in historical retrospect, to determine its cultural and value components. Themethodology of work is based on the historical and system-structural principles of research. Thepurpose and objectives of the publication led to the use of such research methods: analysis andsynthesis, which enabled to identify and analyze the main historical stages of the formation anddevelopment of the French festive folk culture. The system-structural method allowed to reveal thecultural and value components of the subject of research. Scientific novelty consists in the study ofthe theoretical understanding of the historical retrospective of the formation of the French festivefolk culture, the discovery and justification of its cultural and value components. Conclusions. Thestudy made it possible to state that the whole history of revolutionary holidays can be understood asa vivid illustration of such blindness: a holiday, which wishes to be free and spontaneous, becomesobnoxious with caution and coercion; it continually distributes people to the caste. On the chosenand despicable, although on the eve of the eager to merge altogether; it turns a parody and ends ina void. The maniacal obsession of the revolutionary epoch of holidays is a history of deepfrustration. In such conditions, holidays can only exacerbate false praises of the world and heartunity and understanding. And so do decorative functions. Holidays become colorful facades,fictions, ghosts, whose purpose - to conceal the oppressive reality. Murdering irony of events:precisely this definition of the eighteenth century gave the French folk holidays.Key words: festive folk culture, folk speech, festive ceremony, festive ritual, festive behavior,festive conjuncture

The work of Per Olov Enquist, one of the most important contemporary Swedish authors, is known far beyond Sweden’s and Europe’s borders, and thus even received in North America. A great many of his fictional documentary works and dramatic plays, the biographies of poets such Hans Christian Andersen, Selma Lagerlöf, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg, as well as the bestselling novels Lewis Journey, The Royal Physician’s Visit and The Book about Blanche and Marie, have secured a firm position for this Norrland author in the canon of world literature. The continuous transgression of the borders between historical facts and their fictionalization builds the basic characteristic of Enquist’s literature. For Enquist, the goal of writing is to sound out the “innermost space of human existence.” He is eager to explore those secrets and ambiguities that underlie certain historical events or individual life stories. How is individual life determined? And how do individuals find their place in the world? In several of his works, the author uses the metaphor of drawing topographical maps to illustrate the search for one’s own identity as an attempt to position oneself in the world. Starting from his memory of lying on the kitchen floor as a young boy and drawing maps of his native village Hjoggböle, the area around Bureå, the Västerbotten and Norrland region as well as of his native country Sweden, Enquist reveals to his readers what it is that he considers literature to be: the compression of real signs into a fictional space which resembles reality, but, at the same time, moves beyond the boundaries of reality. Through an analytical synopsis of those works that use the motif of map-drawing as a central theme and often refer to each other in direct intertextual reference, namely the novel Captain Nemo’s Library, the essay collection Kartritarna [‘The cartographers’], and Enquist’s biography Ett annat liv [‘A different life’], this article examines the metaphorical function and poetological meaning that the depiction of the author’s own region and home as well as references to his own life story and origin have in Enquist’s work.

Persons in the stage of adolescence are eager to know who they are. They are curious about their unique characteristics and identities and how they can start to bring about the self-realization that provides a gateway to adulthood by exploring those characteristics and identities. In this process of self-exploration, adolescents who receive encouragement as they search for an authentic identity, though they sometimes have conflicts with parents and others, are likely to develop a secure ego-identity and a strong sense of independence and self-control. By contrast, adolescents who fail to receive encouragement during the process of identity exploration, for whatever reason, may remain unsure about who they are, and hence feel insecure and confused about themselves as well as their future. The present study uses the fictional character Harry Potter to explore these issues in greater depth, mainly focusing on his early adolescent years—that is, when he is 11-13 years old. The study demonstrates that Harry Potter can manage to resolve conflicting ideas and thereby lay the foundations for a healthy ego-identity despite difficult circumstances. The study uses Erikson’s and other psychologists’ understanding of the importance of self-exploration in adolescence as an interpretive lens to examine the dynamics of trauma, love, and self-realization in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. More specifically, it considers how family love (or the lack thereof), mentorship, and friendship in adolescence impact Harry’s mental and physical behaviors and influence the development of his identity.

The Menexenus is also known as Plato's Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The body of the work is a fictional funeral oration, composed as an example of what should be said at a public funeral for Athenians who have fallen in war. The oration is framed by an encounter between Socrates and a certain Menexenus, an eager young man who thinks he has reached the end of education and philosophy, but who is still rather young to take an active party in the city's affairs. Nevertheless, he is anxious to follow in the tradition of his family, which (Socrates tells us) has always provided someone to look after the Athenians (τινα μν πιμελητν). Menexenus' interest in public affairs has led him to attend a meeting of the Council at which a speaker was to be chosen to compose and deliver the funeral oration at the imminent public funeral. However, no final decision was reached at the meeting, and Menexenus remarks that by the time the choice is made, the speaker will have almost to improvise his speech. Socrates gently mocks Menexenus' respect for public orators, saying that speeches about a dead person follow a predictable pattern; a speaker exaggerates all a dead person's good points and minimizes all the bad, so that one who has died appears a paragon of virtue even if he was not really good for much. Socrates claims that listening to such public orations, when not only individuals but also the state is eulogized, always makes him feel that in living in Athens he is living in the Islands of the Blessed.

“THE PRINCESS,”TENNYSON's narrative poem about a radically feminist princess and a cross-dressing prince, framed by an imagined argument between Victorian men and women concerning the role of women in modern society, has, understandably, formed the central text in a number of articles about nineteenth-century gender poetics. Critics have been eager to engage with the fictional authors of the narrative, casting Tennyson as, on the one hand, a bastion of Victorian patriarchy, and on the other a subversive feminist. Donald E. Hall, in an essay, published in his collectionFixing Patriarchy, is the most persuasive advocate for a masculinist Tennyson, presenting “The Princess” as undertaking a project of “subsumption,” in which the words and demands of the women are “ingested, modified and incorporated by the patriarch” (46). In an article entitled: “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critiques of Conventionality in ‘The Princess,’“ Alisa Clapp-Itnyre provides a representative case for the defence, presenting the lyrics as “pivotal feminist commentaries” that work to interrupt and deconstruct the male narrative (229). Herbert Tucker locates a third way, identifying the poem as a “textbook Victorian compromise” (Tennyson352). He argues that it “avoids taking a position on a hotly debated issue by taking up any number of positions” and characterizes this compromise, not as a commitment to portraying a complex contemporary issue with integrity, but as the result of Tennyson's not caring particularly either way: “neither the rallying of Victorian feminism” he writes, “nor the patriarchal status quo was sufficient stimulus to commitment” (352). In order to open up a new line of enquiry into “The Princess” I would like to look beyond the gender questions that continue to be batted back and forth amongst Tennyson's critics and to offer the figure of the child as an alternative and more powerful cultural, aesthetic and professional stimulus to Tennyson's poem.

Abstract The paper offers a comparative perspective on transmigrant cultural identities as illustrated in the works of two contemporary South Asian American and Romanian American authors, Jhumpa Lahiri and Aura Imbăruș. The comparison involves Gogol, a South Asian American character, and Aura, the author of the memoir Out of the Transylvania Night. Although Gogol is a fictional character and Aura is an actual transmigrant, their comparative assessment relies on the assumption that both narratives are inspired by the authors’ background of relocation. Despite their different cultural origins, both authors share thematic aspects related to the dynamics of cultural identity in the context of migration. This paper aims to provide a starting point for an enlarged framework of comparative analysis, in order to foreground intersections between different experiences of cultural negotiation in the context of displacement. Born and raised in America, Gogol is challenged by his cultural multiplicity and strives to suppress elements of his Indian identity. After years of rebelling against his parents’ norms, Gogol shifts to the Bengali model, when his father dies. Once he accepts the relevance of his cultural roots, Gogol is able to plunge into a dimension situated beyond his Bengali and American selves. His transcendent strategy is illustrated by his decision to plunge into a third space of redefinition, suggested by the Russian literature which is appreciated by Gogol’s father. Aura Imbăruș offers the example of a first generation Romanian transmigrant who undergoes voluntary relocation to the United States. Fascinated by the American world, Aura is eager to take over norms of material success and consumerism, overlooking the relevance of her cultural roots. When she undergoes a personal family crisis, Aura eventually reassesses the value of her Romanian background, aiming to reconcile her source culture with her Americanised self. In a manner similar to Gogol’s, Aura manages to integrate American norms of success, while forging enduring bonds with the Romanian American community in California.

Stone is turned into meat. This spectacular project entitled “Prometheus delivered” is an installation that Thomas Feuerstein stages as a fascinating laboratory of bubbling bioreactors, mysterious fluids, pumps and endless tubes which wind around a classicist marble sculpture of Prometheus and meander through the entire exhibition. It is the first major solo exhibition of the Austrian artist in Munich. At the center of the installation is a sculpture, a replica of the Prometheus statue by Nicolas-Sébastien Adam (1762), and features its gradual decomposition. The miraculous protagonists of this process of metabolism are stone-eating (chemolithoautotrophic) bacteria. They convert the marble into plaster and, in a further complex transformation, they themselves become the food of human liver cells. The cycle of destruction and re-creation inherent in the Prometheus myth is replicated in a biochemical process. Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock in the Caucasus as punishment for bringing fire to people and thus technology. An eagle rips his liver out of his body – but every night it grows back again. The final result of Thomas Feuerstein's “Prometheus delivered” is – by analogy to the myth – a bioreactor in which human hepatocytes grow and finally form a new three- dimensional liver sculpture. As in antiquity, the liver becomes the organ and a medium that looks into the future because Feuerstein’s installation gives us a glimpse into a time to come in which human beings no longer subsist on animals and plants, but possibly on their own body cells. The exhibition presents this narrative using drawings and objects, sets them to music that also incorporates a radio play, and performs them by means of biochemical processes. In addition to focusing on sound scientific facts, the show is also a science fiction story and a splatter movie on the brink of horror. Resumen La Piedra se convierte en carne. Este espectacular proyecto titulado “Prometeo liberado” es una obra que Thomas Feuerstein plantea como un laboratorio fascinante de biorreactores burbujeantes, fluidos misteriosos, surtidores y tubos sin fin que envuelven una escultura clásica de mármol de Prometeo y que serpentean por toda la exposición. Es la primera gran exposición en solitario del artista austríaco en Múnich. En el centro de la obra hay una escultura, una réplica de la estatua de Prometeo de Nicolas-Sébastien Adam (1762), y presenta su descomposición gradual. Los protagonistas milagrosos de este proceso son bacterias comedoras de piedra (quimiolitoautotróficas). Convierten el mármol en escayola y, en una transformación más compleja, ellas mismas se convierten en el alimento de células del hígado humano. El ciclo de destrucción y re-creación inherente al mito de Prometeo se replica en un proceso bioquímico. Zeus encadenó a Prometeo a una roca en el Cáucaso como castigo por llevar el fuego al hombre, y así, la tecnología. Un águila le arranca el hígado del cuerpo—pero cada noche vuelve a crecer. El resultado final del “Prometeo Liberado” de Thomas Feuerstein es—análogo al mito—un biorreactor en el que los hepatocitos humanos crecen y finalmente forman una nueva escultura tridimensional del hígado. Como en la antigüedad, el hígado se convierte en el órgano y en un medio que mira hacia el futuro porque la obra de Feuerstein nos permite ojear un tiempo venidero en el que los seres humanos ya no viven de animales y plantas, sino posiblemente de sus propias células. La exposición presenta esta narrativa usando dibujos y objetos, usa música que también incorpora una obra radiofónica, y los pone en funcionamiento mediante procesos bioquímicos. Además de centrarse en hechos científicos sobre el sonido, el espectáculo también es una historia de ciencia ficción y una película con salpicaduras al borde del terror.

Background/Context Taking up an issue explored by John Dewey, Austin Sarat, and Walter Parker, as well as many others, I continue my study of the conditions under which people choose to listen to a perspective that challenges their own beliefs. Research Question In my book, Learning to Teach Through Discussion: The Art of Turning the Soul (2009), I present a case study that shows students and teachers learning to listen. The reader sees that as they engage in what I call “interpretive discussion”—that is, discussion about the meaning of texts—they become more eager to understand their meaning and to understand the ideas of others in the group. In some instances, people work to listen to ideas that challenge their own, rather than eschewing them. The present article continues my investigation into the conditions under which people try to listen to a challenging perspective and draws implications for the challenge of so doing for teachers. Research Design The research described in Learning to Teach Through Discussion moved me to examine a fictional case and assert five hypotheses about the conditions under which listening to a challenging perspective occurs. Then, I examined a nonfictional, introspective case that focused my attention on the second of the five hypotheses. Next, with Elizabeth Meadows and others, I studied two nonintrospective, nonfictional cases. These analyses helped to clarify four conditions that obtain at the point identified by the second hypothesis. Clarification of the four conditions enabled me to identify a challenge that teachers face in trying to help students and themselves listen to challenging perspectives. Conclusions The evidence that I have collected suggests that when one listens to a challenging view, it is because one is trying to resolve a question and seeks help in doing so. Then, one allows one's listening to be interrupted; that is, one stops trying to answer the initial question and starts trying to resolve a new question. The shift occurs because one hears, in the other's words, an idea that challenges a heretofore tacit belief. The listener then starts listening to determine whether the belief should be accepted or rejected. I argue that when teachers allow their listening to be interrupted by a challenging perspective, they open themselves to recognition of heretofore tacit beliefs, to new questions, and to new ideas about the resolution of those questions.

Despite the fact, that literary work of O.P. Chuhuy has already become an object of scientific research by A. Novikov, T. Kononchuk, T. Virchenko and others, drama portrait still remains unnoticed by literary critics. The aim of the author’s research is an attempts to analyze the chosen type of biographical work which requires keeping a specific filling of measure while using actual material and fiction. The peculiarities of using biographical material in the literary work of O.P. Chuhuy, in particular when creating the images of H. Skovoroda, V. Karazin, O. Kurbas, V. Ivasuk and others are surveyed in the article. The main attention is concentrated on analyzing the bibliographical portrait of I.P. Kotlyarevskiy, the famous of the new Ukrainian literature, created by O.P. Chuhuy in his play “Steppe eagle” (which appeared in 2012), reflecting his versatile activity aimed of defending the rights of the Ukrainian people for their identity, realizing cultural and enlightment process in their native language. A high mastery of the author in plot creating, in building up characters, very often by just a few phrases, making up monologs and dialogues, independent of space and time, for that matter, in widely using folklore in confirmed. The important role of drama portrait for achieving of genre diversity of the authors plays is emphasized. The above works by O.P. Chuhuy testify to complete mastery of biographical genre in the process of drama reflection of the reality, great mastery of using techniques and means of poetics, in particular, when choosing conflicts and characters capable of fighting either to a complete victory or failure, achieving maximal tension, unity and concentration of action, expressive psychological characteristics. Thanks to these peculiarities of the play I.P. Kotlyarevskiy as a personality is shown multi-faceted and attractive way so typical of him, closely connected with social and political events of that time, in particular, with the desembrist community and national liberation movement. That is why, the drama portrait created by O.P. Chuhuy in “Steppe eagle” maybe used not only by the teachers of high and secondary schools but also by all admires and masters of literature, music and theatre and hence is worth of being staged by the talented servants of Melpomene.

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peacocks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peacocks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basement of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. Thus food in both the real world and in the imagined world serves to nourish and sustain us in these ways. References Adams, Riley. Delicious and Suspicious. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Finger Lickin’ Dead. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Hickory Smoked Homicide. New York: Berkley, 2011. Baltazar, Lori. “A Novel About Food, Recipes Included [Book review].” Dessert Comes First. 28 Feb. 2012. 20 Aug. 2012 ‹http://dessertcomesfirst.com/archives/8644›. Berkeley, Anthony. The Poisoned Chocolates Case. London: Collins, 1929. Bishop, Claudia. Toast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Dread on Arrival. New York: Berkley, 2012. Brady, Jacklyn. A Sheetcake Named Desire. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Cake on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Berkley, 2012. Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Capella, Anthony. The Food of Love. London: Time Warner, 2004/2005. Carroll, Kent in Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Childs, Laura. Death by Darjeeling. New York: Berkley, 2001. –– Shades of Earl Grey. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Blood Orange Brewing. New York: Berkley, 2006/2007. –– The Teaberry Strangler. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Collins, Glenn. “Your Favourite Fictional Crime Moments Involving Food.” The New York Times Diner’s Journal: Notes on Eating, Drinking and Cooking. 16 Jul. 2012. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/your-favorite-fictional-crime-moments-involving-food›. Coyle, Cleo. On What Grounds. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Murder Most Frothy. New York: Berkley, 2006. –– Holiday Grind. New York: Berkley, 2009/2010. –– Roast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Christie, Agatha. A Pocket Full of Rye. London: Collins, 1953. Dahl, Roald. Lamb to the Slaughter: A Roald Dahl Short Story. New York: Penguin, 1953/2012. eBook. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. In Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors, Vol. CCXXIX. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838/1839. Duran, Nancy, and Karen MacDonald. “Information Sources for Food Studies Research.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 2.9 (2006): 233–43. Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. New York: Vintage, 1983/1996. Esquivel, Laura. Trans. Christensen, Carol, and Thomas Christensen. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, romances and home remedies. London: Black Swan, 1989/1993. Evans, Jeanne M. The Crime Lovers’s Cookbook. City: Happy Trails, 2007. Fluke, Joanne. Fudge Cupcake Murder. New York: Kensington, 2004. –– Key Lime Pie Murder. New York: Kensington, 2007. –– Cream Puff Murder. New York: Kensington, 2009. –– Apple Turnover Murder. New York: Kensington, 2010. Greenwood, Kerry, and Jenny Pausacker. Recipes for Crime. Carlton: McPhee Gribble, 1995. Greenwood, Kerry. The Corinna Chapman Recipe Book: Mouth-Watering Morsels to Make Your Man Melt, Recipes from Corinna Chapman, Baker and Reluctant Investigator. nd. 25 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.allenandunwin.com/_uploads/documents/minisites/Corinna_recipebook.pdf›. –– A Question of Death: An Illustrated Phryne Fisher Treasury. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Halmagyi, Ed. The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2012. Haywood, B. B. Town in a Blueberry Jam. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Town in a Lobster Stew. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Town in a Wild Moose Chase. New York: Berkley, 2012. Hyzy, Julie. State of the Onion. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Hail to the Chef. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Eggsecutive Orders. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Buffalo West Wing. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Affairs of Steak. New York: Berkley, 2012. Israel, Andrea, and Nancy Garfinkel, with Melissa Clark. The Recipe Club: A Novel About Food And Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. McHenry, Jael. The Kitchen Daughter: A Novel. New York: Gallery, 2011. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. London: Pan, 1936/1974 O’Reilly, Brian, with Virginia O’Reilly. Angelina’s Bachelors: A Novel, with Food. New York: Gallery, 2011. Payany, Estérelle. Recipe for Murder: Frightfully Good Food Inspired by Fiction. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Peacocks Tearooms. Peacocks Tearooms: Our Unique Selection of Teas. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.peacockstearoom.co.uk/teas/page1.asp›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. “A Taste of Conflict: Food, History and Popular Culture In Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 79–91. Risson, Toni, and Donna Lee Brien. “Editors’ Letter: That Takes the Cake: A Slice Of Australasian Food Studies Scholarship.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 3–7. Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930/2003. Schmidt, Shannon McKenna, and Joni Rendon. Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009. Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo: A Novel. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. Spang, Rebecca L. “All the World’s A Restaurant: On The Global Gastronomics Of Tourism and Travel.” In Raymond Grew (Ed). Food in Global History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. 79–91. Taylor, Timothy. “Food/Crime Fiction.” Timothy Taylor. 2010. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.timothytaylor.ca/10/08/20/foodcrime-fiction›. The Moat Bar and Café. The Moat Bar and Café: Welcome. nd. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://themoat.com.au/Welcome.html›. Wenger, Shaunda Kennedy, and Janet Kay Jensen. The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages that Feature Them. New York: Ballantine, 2003/2005.

To what extent should we be accepting of a foreign culture’s morality? Is all non-voluntary meat eating a violent act? Do we have an obligation to correct what we see as the immoral behavior of others? In this work of philosophical fiction, there is a group of technology advanced people living on an island. They have already mastered space flight, and have abolish poverty, crime, and violence. They are vegetarians, except for their cannibalism. However, they only eat the meat of those who volunteer to be killed and used for food. Of course, it is an honor to be killed, and an honor to be selected to be allowed to eat the meat of those that have died. One day, a seafaring people come cross the island for the first time. The islanders have the ability to easily destroy them, but do not as they are a generally peaceful people. The seafaring people are eager to learn have a technological exchange, but are abhorred to find out about the islander’s cannibalism. An agreement is made for a trial, of sorts. The islanders agree and invite the seafaring people to the island. They participate honestly and openly in a discussion about their culture. When the trial is over the islanders see little cultural understanding has been made ask the seafaring people to leave the island. However, before they do, the seafaring people secretly steal and leave an atomic bomb on the island destroying all the cannibals, except those that are currently living among the stars.

IntroductionOver three days in November 2017, 400 people gathered for a conference at the Sam’s Town Hotel and Gambling Hall in Las Vegas, Nevada. The majority of attendees were fiction authors but the conference program looked like no ordinary writer’s festival; there were no in-conversation interviews with celebrity authors, no panels on the politics of the book industry and no books launched or promoted. Instead, this was a gathering called 20Books2017, a self-publishing conference about the business of fiction ebooks and there was expertise in the room.Among those attending, 50 reportedly earned over $100,000 US per annum, with four said to be earning in excess of $1,000,000 US year. Yet none of these authors are household names. Their work is not adapted to film or television. Their books cannot be found on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores. For the most part, these authors go unrepresented by the publishing industry and literary agencies, and further to which, only a fraction have ever actively pursued traditional publishing. Instead, they write for and sell into a commercial fiction market dominated by a single retailer and publisher: online retailer Amazon.While the online ebook market can be dynamic and lucrative, it can also be chaotic. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—an industry almost stoically adherent to various gatekeeping processes: an influential agent-class, formalized education pathways, geographic demarcations of curatorial power (see Thompson)—the nascent ebook market is unmapped and still somewhat ungoverned. As will be discussed below, even the markets directly engineered by Amazon are subject to rapid change and upheaval. It can be a space with shifting boundaries and thus, for many in the traditional industry both Amazon and self-publishing come to represent a type of encroaching northern dread.In the eyes of the traditional industry, digital self-publishing certainly conforms to the barbarous north of European literary metaphor: Orwell’s ‘real ugliness of industrialism’ (94) governed by the abject lawlessness of David Peace’s Yorkshire noir (Fowler). But for adherents within the day-to-day of self-publishing, this unruly space also provides the frontiers and gold-rushes of American West mythology.What remains uncertain is the future of both the traditional and the self-publishing sectors and the degree to which they will eventually merge, overlap and/or co-exist. So-called ‘hybrid-authors’ (those self-publishing and involved in traditional publication) are becoming increasingly common—especially in genre fiction—but the disruption brought about by self-publishing and ebooks appears far from complete.To the contrary, the Amazon-led ebook iteration of this market is relatively new. While self-publishing and independent publishing have long histories as modes of production, Amazon launched both its Kindle e-reader device and its marketplace Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) a little over a decade ago. In the years subsequent, the integration of KDP within the Amazon retail environment dramatically altered the digital self-publishing landscape, effectively paving the way for competing platforms (Kobo, Nook, iBooks, GooglePlay) and today’s vibrant—and, at times, crassly commercial—self-published fiction communities.As a result, the self-publishing market has experienced rapid growth: self-publishers now collectively hold the largest share of fiction sales within Amazon’s ebook categories, as much as 35% of the total market (Howey). Contrary to popular belief they do not reside entirely at the bottom of Amazon’s expansive catalogue either: at the time of writing, 11 of Amazon’s Top 50 Bestsellers were self-published and the median estimated monthly revenue generated by these ‘indie’ books was $43,000 USD / month (per author) on the American site alone (KindleSpy).This international publishing market now proffers authors running the gamut of commercial uptake, from millionaire successes like romance writer H.M. Ward and thriller author Mark Dawson, through to the 19% of self-published authors who listed their annual royalty income as $0 per annum (Weinberg). Their overall market share remains small—as little as 1.8% of trade publishing in the US as a whole (McIlroy 4)—but the high end of this lucrative slice is particularly dynamic: science fiction author Michael Anderle (and 20Books2017 keynote) is on-track to become a seven-figure author in his second year of publishing (based on Amazon sales ranking data), thriller author Mark Dawson has sold over 300,000 copies of his self-published Milton series in 3 years (McGregor), and a slew of similar authors have recently attained New York Times and US Today bestseller status.To date, there is not a broad range of scholarship investigating the operational logics of self-published fiction. Timothy Laquintano’s recent Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (2016) is a notable exception, drawing self-publishing into historical debates surrounding intellectual property, the future of the book and digital abundance. The more empirical portions of Mass Authorship—taken from activity between 2011 to 2015—directly informs this research and his chapter on Amazon (Chapter 4) could be read as a more macro companion to my findings below; taken together and compared they illustrate just how fast-moving the market is. Nick Levey’s work on ‘post-press’ literature and its inherent risks (and discourses of cultural capitol) also informs my thesis here.In addition to which, there is scholarship centred on publishing more generally that also touches on self-published writers as a category of practitioner (see Baverstock and Steinitz, Haughland, Thomlinson and Bélanger). Most of this later work focuses almost entirely on the finished product, usually situating self-publishing as directly oppositional to traditional publishing, and thus subordinating it.In this paper, I hope to outline how the self-publishers I’ve observed have enacted various tactical approaches that specifically strive to tame their chaotic marketplace, and to indicate—through one case study (Amazon exclusivity)—a site of production and resistance where they have occasionally succeeded. Their approach is one that values information sharing and an open-source approach to book-selling and writing craft, ideologies drawn more from the tech / start-up world than commercial book industry described by Thompson (10). It is a space deeply informed by the virtual nature of its major platforms and as such, I argue its relation to the world of traditional publishing—and its representation within the traditional book industry—are tenuous, despite the central role of authorship and books.Making the Virtual Self-Publishing SceneWithin the study of popular music, the use of Barry Shank and Will Straw’s ‘scene’ concept has been an essential tool for uncovering and mapping independent/DIY creative practice. The term scene, defined by Straw as cultural space, is primarily interested in how cultural phenomena articulates or announces itself. A step beyond community, scene theorists are less concerned with examining an evolving history of practice (deemed essentialist) than they are concerned with focusing on the “making and remaking of alliances” as the crucial process whereby communal culture is formed, expressed and distributed (370).A scene’s spatial dimension—often categorized as local, translocal or virtual (see Bennett and Peterson)—demands attention be paid to hybridization, as a diversity of actors approach the same terrain from differing vantage points, with distinct motivations. As a research tool, scene can map action as the material existence of ideology. Thus, its particular usefulness is its ability to draw findings from diverse communities of practice.Drawing methodologies and approaches from Bourdieu’s field theory—a particularly resonant lens for examining cultural work—and de Certeau’s philosophies of space and circumstantial moves (“failed and successful attempts at redirection within a given terrain,” 375), scene focuses on articulation, the process whereby individual and communal activity becomes an observable or relatable or recordable phenomena.Within my previous work (see Bennett and Rogers, Rogers), I’ve used scene to map a variety of independent music-making practices and can see clear resemblances between independent music-making and the growing assemblage of writers within ebook self-publishing. The democratizing impulses espoused by self-publishers (the removal of gatekeepers as married to visions of a fiction/labour meritocracy) marry up quite neatly with the heady mix of separatism and entrepreneurialism inherent in Australian underground music.Self-publishers are typically older and typically more upfront about profit, but the communal interaction—the trade and gifting of support, resources and information—looks decidedly similar. Instead, the self-publishers appear different in one key regard: their scene-making is virtual in ways that far outstrip empirical examples drawn from popular music. 20Books2017 is only one of two conferences for this community thus far and represents one of the few occasions in which the community has met in any sort of organized way offline. For the most part, and in the day-to-day, self-publishing is a virtual scene.At present, the virtual space of self-published fiction is centralized around two digital platforms. Firstly, there is the online message board, of which two specific online destinations are key: the first is Kboards, a PHP-coded forum “devoted to all things Kindle” (Kboards) but including a huge author sub-board of self-published writers. The archive of this board amounts to almost two million posts spanning back to 2009. The second message board site is a collection of Facebook groups, of which the 10,000-strong membership of 20BooksTo50K is the most dominant; it is the originating home of 20Books2017.The other platform constituting the virtual scene of self-publishing is that of podcasting. While there are a number of high-profile static websites and blogs related to self-publishing (and an emerging community of vloggers), these pale in breadth and interaction when compared to podcasts such as The Creative Penn, The Self-Publishing Podcast, The Sell More Books Show, Rocking Self-Publishing (now defunct but archived) and The Self-Publishing Formula podcast. Statistical information on the distribution of these podcasts is unavailable but the circulation and online discussion of their content and the interrelation between the different shows and their hosts and guests all point to their currency within the scene.In short, if one is to learn about the business and craft production modes of self-publishing, one tends to discover and interact with one of these two platforms. The consensus best practice espoused on these boards and podcasts is the data set in which the remainder of this paper draws findings. I have spent the last two years embedded in these communities but for the purposes of this paper I will be drawing data exclusively from the public-facing Kboards, namely because it is the oldest, most established site, but also because all of the issues and discussion presented within this data have been cross-referenced across the different podcasts and boards. In fact, for a long period Kboards was so central to the scene that itself was often the topic of conversation elsewhere.Sticking in the Algorithm: The Best Practice of Fiction Self-PublishingSelf-publishing is a virtual scene because its “constellation of divergent interests and forces” (Shank, Preface, x) occur almost entirely online. This is not just a case of discussion, collaboration and discovery occurring online—as with the virtual layer of local and translocal music scenes—rather, the self-publishing community produces into the online space, almost exclusively. Its venues and distribution pathways are online and while its production mechanisms (writing) are still physical, there is an almost instantaneous and continuous interface with the online. These writers type and, increasingly dictate, their work into the virtual cloud, have it edited there (via in-text annotation) and from there the work is often designed, formatted, published, sold, marketed, reviewed and discussed online.In addition to which, a significant portion of these writers produce collaborative works, co-writing novels and co-editing them via cooperative apps. Teams of beta-readers (often fans) work on manuscripts pre-launch. Covers, blurbs, log lines, ad copy and novel openings are tested and reconfigured via crowd-sourced opinion. Seen here, the writing of the self-publishing scene is often explicitly commercial. But more to the fact, it never denies its direct co-relation with the mandates of online publishing. It is not traditional writing (it moves beyond authorship) and viewing these writers as emerging or unpublished or indeed, using the existing vernacular of literary writing practices, often fails to capture what it is they do.As the self-publishers write for the online space, Amazon forms a huge part of their thinking and working. The site sits at the heart of the practices under consideration here. Many of the authors drawn into this research are ‘wide’ in their online retail distribution, meaning they have books placed with Amazon’s online retail competitors. Yet the decision to go ‘wide’ or stay exclusive to Amazon — and the volume of discussion around this choice — is illustrative of how dominant the company remains in the scene. In fact, the example of Amazon exclusivity provides a valuable case-study.For self-publishers, Amazon exclusivity brings two stated and tangible benefits. The first relates to revenue diversification within Amazon, with exclusivity delivering an additional revenue stream in the form of Kindle Unlimited royalties. Kindle Unlimited (KU) is a subscription service for ebooks. Consumers pay a flat monthly fee ($13.99 AUD) for unlimited access to over a million Kindle titles. For a 300-page book, a full read-through of a novel under KU pays roughly the same royalty to authors as the sale of a $2.99 ebook, but only to Amazon-exclusive authors. If an exclusive book is particularly well suited to the KU audience, this can present authors with a very serious return.The second benefit of Amazon exclusivity is access to internal site merchandising; namely ‘Free Days’ where the book is given away (and can chart on the various ‘Top 100 Free’ leaderboards) and ‘Countdown Deals’ where a decreasing discount is staggered across a period (thus creating a type of scarcity).These two perks can prove particularly lucrative to individual authors. On Kboards, user Annie Jocoby (also writing as Rachel Sinclair) details her experiences with exclusivity:I have a legal thriller series that is all-in with KU [Kindle Unlimited], and I can honestly say that KU has been fantastic for visibility for that particular series. I put the books into KU in the first part of August, and I watched my rankings rise like crazy after I did that. They've stuck, too. If I weren't in KU, I doubt that they would still be sticking as well as they have. (anniejocoby)This is fairly typical of the positive responses to exclusivity, yet it incorporates a number of the more opaque benefits entangled with going exclusive to Amazon.First, there is ‘visibility.’ In self-publishing terms, ‘visibility’ refers almost exclusively to chart positions within Amazon. The myriad of charts — and how they function — is beyond the scope of this paper but they absolutely indicate — often dictate — the discoverability of a book online. These charts are the ‘front windows’ of Amazon, to use an analogy to brick-and-mortar bookstores. Books that chart well are actively being bought by customers and they are very often those benefiting from Amazon’s powerful recommendation algorithm, something that expands beyond the site into the company’s expansive customer email list. This brings us to the second point Jocoby mentions, the ‘sticking’ within the charts.There is a widely held belief that once a good book (read: free of errors, broadly entertaining, on genre) finds its way into the Amazon recommendation algorithm, it can remain there for long periods of time leading to a building success as sales beget sales, further boosting the book’s chart performance and reviews. There is also the belief among some authors that Kindle Unlimited books are actively favoured by this algorithm. The high-selling Amanda M. Lee noted a direct correlation:Rank is affected when people borrow your book [under KU]. Page reads don't play into it all. (Amanda M. Lee)Within the same thread, USA Today bestseller Annie Bellet elaborated:We tested this a bunch when KU 2.0 hit. A page read does zip for rank. A borrow, even with no pages read, is what prompts the rank change. Borrows are weighted exactly like sales from what we could tell, it doesn't matter if nobody opens the book ever. All borrows now are ghost borrows, of course, since we can't see them anymore, so it might look like pages are coming in and your rank is changing, but what is probably happening is someone borrowed your book around the same time, causing the rank jump. (Annie B)Whether this advantage is built into the algorithm in a (likely) attempt to favour exclusive authors, or by nature of KU books presenting at a lower price point, is unknown but there is anecdotal evidence that once a KU book gains traction, it can ‘stick’ within the charts for longer periods of time compared to non-exclusive titles.At the entrepreneurial end of the fiction self-publishing scene, Amazon is positioned at the very centre. To go wide—to follow vectors through the scene adjacent to Amazon — is to go around the commercial centre and its profits. Yet no one in this community remains unaffected by the strategic position of this site and the market it has either created or captured. Amazon’s institutional practices can be adopted by competitors (Kobo Plus is a version of KU) and the multitude of tactics authors use to promote their work all, in one shape or another, lead back to ‘circumstantial moves’ learned from Amazon or services that are aimed at promoting work sold there. Further to which, the sense of instability and risk engendered by such a dominant market player is felt everywhere.Some Closing Ideas on the Ideology of Self-PublishingSelf-publishing fiction remains tactical in the de Certeau sense of the term. It is responsive and ever-shifting, with a touch of communal complicity and what he calls la perruque (‘the wig’), a shorthand for resistance that presents itself as submission (25). The entrepreneurialism of self-published fiction trades off this sense of the tactical.Within the scene, Amazon bestseller charts aren’t as much markers of prestige as systems to be hacked. The choice between ‘wide’ and exclusive is only ever short-term; it is carefully scrutinised and the trade-offs and opportunities are monitored week-to-week and debated constantly online. Over time, the self-publishing scene has become expert at decoding Amazon’s monolithic Terms of Service, ever eager to find both advantage and risk as they attempt to lever the affordances of digital publishing against their own desire for profit and expression.This sense of mischief and slippage forms a big part of what self-publishing is. In contrast to traditional publishing—with its long lead times and physical real estate—self-publishing can’t help but appear fragile, wild and coarse. There is no other comparison possible.To survive in self-publishing is to survive outside the established book industry and to thrive within a new and far more uncertain market/space, one almost entirely without a mapped topology. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—very much a legacy, a “relatively stable” population group (Straw 373)—self-publishing cannot escape its otherness, not in the short term. Both its spatial coordinates and its pathways remain too fast-evolving in comparison to the referent of traditional publishing. In the short-to-medium term, I imagine it will remain at some cultural remove from traditional publishing, be it perceived as a threatening northern force or a speculative west.To see self-publishing in the present, I encourage scholars to step away from traditional publishing industry protocols and frameworks, to strive to see this new arena as the self-published authors themselves understand it (what Muggleton has referred to a “indigenous meaning” 13).Straw and Shank’s scene concept provides one possible conceptual framework for this shift in understanding as scene’s reliance on spatial considerations harbours an often underemphazised asset: it is a theory of orientation. At heart, it draws as much from de Certeau as Bourdieu and as such, the scene presented in this work is never complete or fixed. It is de Certeau’s city “shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” (93). These scenes—be they musicians or authors—are only ever glimpsed and from a vantage point of close proximity. In short, it is one way out of the essentialisms that currently shroud self-published fiction as a craft, business and community of authors. The cultural space of self-publishing, to return Straw’s scene definition, is one that mirrors its own porous, online infrastructure, its own predominance in virtuality. Its pathways are coded together inside fast-moving media companies and these pathways are increasingly entwined within algorithmic processes of curation that promise meritocratization and disintermediation yet delivery systems that can be learned and manipulated.The agility to publish within these systems is the true skill-set required to self-publish fiction online. It traverses specific platforms and short-term eras. It is the core attribute of success in the scene. Everything else is secondary, including the content of the books produced. It is not the case that these books are of lesser literary quality or that their ever-growing abundance is threatening—this is the counter-argument so often presented by the traditional book industry—but more so that without entrepreneurial agility, the quality of the ebook goes undetermined as it sinks lower and lower into a distribution system that is so open it appears endless.ReferencesAmanda M. Lee. “Re: KU Page Reads and Rank.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,232945.msg3245005.html#msg3245005>.Annie B [Annie Bellet]. “Re: KU Page Reads and Rank.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,232945.msg3245068.html#msg3245068>.Anniejocoby [Annie Jocoby]. “Re: Tell Me Why You're WIDE or KU ONLY.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,242514.msg3558176.html#msg3558176>.Baverstock, Alison, and Jackie Steinitz. “Why Are the Self-Publishers?” Learned Publishing 26 (2013): 211-223.Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson, eds. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.———, and Ian Rogers. Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge, 1984.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.Haugland, Ann. “Opening the Gates: Print On-Demand Publishing as Cultural Production” Publishing Research Quarterly 22.3 (2006): 3-16.Howey, Hugh. “October 2016 Author Earnings Report: A Turning of the Tide.” Author Earnings. 12 Oct. 2016 <http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2016/>.Kboards. About Kboards.com. 2017. 4 Oct. 2017 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,242026.0.html>.KindleSpy. 2017. Chrome plug-in.Laquintano, Timothy. Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing. University of Iowa Press, 2016.Levey, Nick. “Post-Press Literature: Self-Published Authors in the Literary Field.” Post 45. 1 Oct. 2017 <http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/02/post-press-literature-self-published-authors-in-the-literary-field-3/>.McGregor, Jay. “Amazon Pays $450,000 a Year to This Self-Published Writer.” Forbes. 17 Apr. 2017 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2015/04/17/mark-dawson-made-750000-from-self-published-amazon-books/#bcce23a35e38>.McIlroy, Thad. “Startups within the U.S. Book Publishing Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 33 (2017): 1-9.Muggleton, David. Inside Subculture: The Post-Modern Meaning of Style. Berg, 2000.Orwell, George. Selected Essays. Penguin Books, 1960.Fowler, Dawn. ‘‘This Is the North – We Do What We Want’: The Red Riding Trilogy as ‘Yorkshire Noir.” Cops on the Box. University of Glamorgan, 2013.Rogers, Ian. “The Hobbyist Majority and the Mainstream Fringe: The Pathways of Independent Music Making in Brisbane, Australia.” Redefining Mainstream Popular Music, eds. Andy Bennett, Sarah Baker, and Jodie Taylor. Routlegde, 2013. 162-173.Shank, Barry. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin Texas. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.Straw, Will. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5.3 (1991): 368–88.Thomlinson, Adam, and Pierre C. Bélanger. “Authors’ Views of e-Book Self-Publishing: The Role of Symbolic Capital Risk.” Publishing Research Quarterly 31 (2015): 306-316.Thompson, John B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Penguin, 2012.Weinberg, Dana Beth. “The Self-Publishing Debate: A Social Scientist Separates Fact from Fiction.” Digital Book World. 3 Oct. 2017 <http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/self-publishing-debate-part3/>.

Image 1: Hasbro/Tiger Electronics 1998 Furby. (Photo credit: Author) Introduction Since the mid-1990s robotic and digital creatures designed to offer social interaction and companionship have been developed for commercial and research interests. Integral to encouraging positive experiences with these creatures has been the use of cute aesthetics that aim to endear companions to their human users. During this time there has also been a growth in online communities that engage in cultural production through fan fiction responses to existing cultural artefacts, including the widely recognised electronic companion, Hasbro’s Furby (image 1). These user stories and Furby’s online representation in general, demonstrate that contrary to the intentions of their designers and marketers, Furbys are not necessarily received as cute, or the embodiment of the helpless and harmless demeanour that goes along with it. Furbys’ large, lash-framed eyes, small, or non-existent limbs, and baby voice are typical markers of cuteness but can also evoke another side of cuteness—monstrosity, especially when the creature appears physically capable instead of helpless (Brzozowska-Brywczynska 217). Furbys are a particularly interesting manifestation of the cute aesthetic because it is used as tool for encouraging attachment to a socially interactive electronic object, and therefore intersects with existing ideas about technology and nonhuman companions, both of which often embody a sense of otherness. This paper will explore how cuteness intersects withand transitions into monstrosity through online representations of Furbys, troubling their existing design and marketing narrative by connecting and likening them to other creatures, myths, and anecdotes. Analysis of narrative in particular highlights the instability of cuteness, and cultural understandings of existing cute characters, such as the gremlins from the film Gremlins (Dante) reinforce the idea that cuteness should be treated with suspicion as it potentially masks a troubling undertone. Ultimately, this paper aims to interrogate the cultural complexities of designing electronic creatures through the stories that people tell about them online. Fan Production Authors of fan fiction are known to creatively express their responses to a variety of media by appropriating the characters, settings, and themes of an original work and sharing their cultural activity with others (Jenkins 88). On a personal level, Jenkins (103) argues that “[i]n embracing popular texts, the fans claim those works as their own, remaking them in their own image, forcing them to respond to their needs and to gratify their desires.” Fan fiction authors are motivated to write not for financial or professional gains but for personal enjoyment and fan recognition, however, their production does not necessarily come from favourable opinions of an existing text. The antifan is an individual who actively hates a text or cultural artefact and is mobilised in their dislike to contribute to a community of others who share their views (Gray 841). Gray suggests that both fan and antifan activity contribute to our understanding of the kinds of stories audiences want: Although fans may wish to bring a text into everyday life due to what they believe it represents, antifans fear or do not want what they believe it represents and so, as with fans, antifan practice is as important an indicator of interactions between the textual and public spheres. (855) Gray reminds that fans, nonfans, and antifans employ different interpretive strategies when interacting with a text. In particular, while fans intimate knowledge of a text reflects their overall appreciation, antifans more often focus on the “dimensions of the moral, the rational-realistic, [or] the aesthetic” (856) that they find most disagreeable. Additionally, antifans may not experience a text directly, but dislike what knowledge they do have of it from afar. As later examples will show, the treatment of Furbys in fan fiction arguably reflects an antifan perspective through a sense of distrust and aversion, and analysing it can provide insight into why interactions with, or indirect knowledge of, Furbys might inspire these reactions. Derecho argues that in part because of the potential copyright violation that is faced by most fandoms, “even the most socially conventional fan fiction is an act of defiance of corporate control…” (72). Additionally, because of the creative freedom it affords, “fan fiction and archontic literature open up possibilities – not just for opposition to institutions and social systems, but also for a different perspective on the institutional and the social” (76). Because of this criticality, and its subversive nature, fan fiction provides an interesting consumer perspective on objects that are designed and marketed to be received in particular ways. Further, because much of fan fiction draws on fictional content, stories about objects like Furby are not necessarily bound to reality and incorporate fantastical, speculative, and folkloric readings, providing diverse viewpoints of the object. Finally, if, as robotics commentators (cf. Levy; Breazeal) suggest, companionable robots and technologies are going to become increasingly present in everyday life, it is crucial to understand not only how they are received, but also where they fit within a wider cultural sphere. Furbys can be seen as a widespread, if technologically simple, example of these technologies and are often treated as a sign of things to come (Wilks 12). The Design of Electronic Companions To compete with the burgeoning market of digital and electronic pets, in 1998 Tiger Electronics released the Furby, a fur-covered, robotic creature that required the user to carry out certain nurturance duties. Furbys expected feeding and entertaining and could become sick and scared if neglected. Through a program that advanced slowly over time regardless of external stimulus, Furbys appeared to evolve from speaking entirely Furbish, their mother tongue, to speaking English. To the user, it appeared as though their interactions with the object were directly affecting its progress and maturation because their care duties of feeding and entertaining were happening parallel to the Furbish to English transition (Turkle, Breazeal, Daste, & Scassellati 314). The design of electronic companions like Furby is carefully considered to encourage positive emotional responses. For example, Breazeal (2002 230) argues that a robot will be treated like a baby, and nurtured, if it has a large head, big eyes, and pursed lips. Kinsella’s (1995) also emphasises cute things need for care as they are “soft, infantile, mammalian, round, without bodily appendages (e.g. arms), without bodily orifices (e.g. mouths), non-sexual, mute, insecure, helpless or bewildered” (226). From this perspective, Furbys’ physical design plays a role in encouraging nurturance. Such design decisions are reinforced by marketing strategies that encourage Furbys to be viewed in a particular way. As a marketing tool, Harris (1992) argues that: cuteness has become essential in the marketplace in that advertisers have learned that consumers will “adopt” products that create, often in their packaging alone, an aura of motherlessness, ostracism, and melancholy, the silent desperation of the lost puppy dog clamoring to be befriended - namely, to be bought. (179) Positioning Furbys as friendly was also important to encouraging a positive bond with a caregiver. The history, or back story, that Furbys were given in the instruction manual was designed to convey their kind, non-threatening nature. Although alive and unpredictable, it was crucial that Furbys were not frightening. As imaginary living creatures, the origin of Furbys required explaining: “some had suggested positioning Furby as an alien, but that seemed too foreign and frightening for little girls. By May, the thinking was that Furbies live in the clouds – more angelic, less threatening” (Kirsner). In creating this story, Furby’s producers both endeared the object to consumers by making it seem friendly and inquisitive, and avoided associations to its mass-produced, factory origins. Monstrous and Cute Furbys Across fan fiction, academic texts, and media coverage there is a tendency to describe what Furbys look like by stringing together several animals and objects. Furbys have been referred to as a “mechanized ball of synthetic hair that is part penguin, part owl and part kitten” (Steinberg), a “cross between a hamster and a bird…” (Lawson & Chesney 34), and “ “owl-like in appearance, with large bat-like ears and two large white eyes with small, reddish-pink pupils” (ChaosInsanity), to highlight only a few. The ambiguous appearance of electronic companions is often a strategic decision made by the designer to avoid biases towards specific animals or forms, making the companion easier to accept as “real” or “alive” (Shibata 1753). Furbys are arguably evidence of this strategy and appear to be deliberately unfamiliar. However, the assemblage, and exaggeration, of parts that describes Furbys also conjures much older associations: the world of monsters in gothic literature. Notice the similarities between the above attempts to describe what Furbys looks like, and a historical description of monsters: early monsters are frequently constructed out of ill-assorted parts, like the griffin, with the head and wings of an eagle combined with the body and paws of a lion. Alternatively, they are incomplete, lacking essential parts, or, like the mythological hydra with its many heads, grotesquely excessive. (Punter & Byron 263) Cohen (6) argues that, metaphorically, because of their strange visual assembly, monsters are displaced beings “whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.” Therefore, to call something a monster is also to call it confusing and unfamiliar. Notice in the following fan fiction example how comparing Furby to an owl makes it strange, and there seems to be uncertainty around what Furbys are, and where they fit in the natural order: The first thing Heero noticed was that a 'Furby' appeared to be a childes toy, shaped to resemble a mutated owl. With fur instead of feathers, no wings, two large ears and comical cat paws set at the bottom of its pudding like form. Its face was devoid of fuzz with a yellow plastic beak and too large eyes that gave it the appearance of it being addicted to speed [sic]. (Kontradiction) Here is a character unfamiliar with Furbys, describing its appearance by relating it to animal parts. Whether Furbys are cute or monstrous is contentious, particularly in fan fictions where they have been given additional capabilities like working limbs and extra appendages that make them less helpless. Furbys’ lack, or diminution of parts, and exaggeration of others, fits the description of cuteness, as well as their sole reliance on caregivers to be fed, entertained, and transported. If viewed as animals, Furbys appear physically limited. Kinsella (1995) finds that a sense of disability is important to the cute aesthetic: stubby arms, no fingers, no mouths, huge heads, massive eyes – which can hide no private thoughts from the viewer – nothing between their legs, pot bellies, swollen legs or pigeon feet – if they have feet at all. Cute things can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t in fact do anything at all for themselves because they are physically handicapped. (236) Exploring the line between cute and monstrous, Brzozowska-Brywczynska argues that it is this sense of physical disability that distinguishes the two similar aesthetics. “It is the disempowering feeling of pity and sympathy […] that deprives a monster of his monstrosity” (218). The descriptions of Furbys in fan fiction suggest that they transition between the two, contingent on how they are received by certain characters, and the abilities they are given by the author. In some cases it is the overwhelming threat the Furby poses that extinguishes feelings of care. In the following two excerpts that the revealing of threatening behaviour shifts the perception of Furby from cute to monstrous in ‘When Furbies Attack’ (Kellyofthemidnightdawn): “These guys are so cute,” she moved the Furby so that it was within inches of Elliot's face and positioned it so that what were apparently the Furby's lips came into contact with his cheek “See,” she smiled widely “He likes you.” […] Olivia's breath caught in her throat as she found herself backing up towards the door. She kept her eyes on the little yellow monster in front of her as her hand slowly reached for the door knob. This was just too freaky, she wanted away from this thing. The Furby that was originally called cute becomes a monster when it violently threatens the protagonist, Olivia. The shifting of Furbys between cute and monstrous is a topic of argument in ‘InuYasha vs the Demon Furbie’ (Lioness of Dreams). The character Kagome attempts to explain a Furby to Inuyasha, who views the object as a demon: That is a toy called a Furbie. It's a thing we humans call “CUTE”. See, it talks and says cute things and we give it hugs! (Lioness of Dreams) A recurrent theme in the Inuyasha (Takahashi) anime is the generational divide between Kagome and Inuyasha. Set in feudal-era Japan, Kagome is transported there from modern-day Tokyo after falling into a well. The above line of dialogue reinforces the relative newness, and cultural specificity, of cute aesthetics, which according to Kinsella (1995 220) became increasingly popular throughout the 1980s and 90s. In Inuyasha’s world, where demons and monsters are a fixture of everyday life, the Furby appearance shifts from cute to monstrous. Furbys as GremlinsDuring the height of the original 1998 Furby’s public exposure and popularity, several news articles referred to Furby as “the five-inch gremlin” (Steinberg) and “a furry, gremlin-looking creature” (Del Vecchio 88). More recently, in a review of the 2012 Furby release, one commenter exclaimed: “These things actually look scary! Like blue gremlins!” (KillaRizzay). Following the release of the original Furbys, Hasbro collaborated with the film’s merchandising team to release Interactive ‘Gizmo’ Furbys (image 2). Image 2: Hasbro 1999 Interactive Gizmo (photo credit: Author) Furbys’ likeness to gremlins offers another perspective on the tension between cute and monstrous aesthetics that is contingent on the creature’s behaviour. The connection between Furbys and gremlins embodies a sense of mistrust, because the film Gremlins focuses on the monsters that dwell within the seemingly harmless and endearing mogwai/gremlin creatures. Catastrophic events unfold after they are cared for improperly. Gremlins, and by association Furbys, may appear cute or harmless, but this story tells that there is something darker beneath the surface. The creatures in Gremlins are introduced as mogwai, and in Chinese folklore the mogwai or mogui is a demon (Zhang, 1999). The pop culture gremlin embodied in the film, then, is cute and demonic, depending on how it is treated. Like a gremlin, a Furby’s personality is supposed to be a reflection of the care it receives. Transformation is a common theme of Gremlins and also Furby, where it is central to the sense of “aliveness” the product works to create. Furbys become “wiser” as time goes on, transitioning through “life stages” as they “learn” about their surroundings. As we learn from their origin story, Furbys jumped from their home in the clouds in order to see and explore the world firsthand (Tiger Electronics 2). Because Furbys are susceptible to their environment, they come with rules on how they must be cared for, and the consequences if this is ignored. Without attention and “food”, a Furby will become unresponsive and even ill: “If you allow me to get sick, soon I will not want to play and will not respond to anything but feeding” (Tiger Electronics 6). In Gremlins, improper care manifests in an abrupt transition from cute to monstrous: Gizmo’s strokeable fur is transformed into a wet, scaly integument, while the vacant portholes of its eyes (the most important facial feature of the cute thing, giving us free access to its soul and ensuring its total structability, its incapacity to hold back anything in reserve) become diabolical slits hiding a lurking intelligence, just as its dainty paws metamorphose into talons and its pretty puckered lips into enormous Cheshire grimaces with full sets of sharp incisors. (Harris 185–186) In the Naruto (Kishimoto) fan fiction ‘Orochimaru's World Famous New Year's Eve Party’ (dead drifter), while there is no explicit mention of Gremlins, the Furby undergoes the physical transformation that appears in the films. The Furby, named Sasuke, presumably after the Naruto antagonist Sasuke, and hinting at its untrustworthy nature, undergoes a transformation that mimics that of Gremlins: when water is poured on the Furby, boils appear and fall from its back, each growing into another Furby. Also, after feeding the Furby, it lays eggs: Apparently, it's not a good idea to feed Furbies chips. Why? Because they make weird cocoon eggs and transform into… something. (ch. 5) This sequence of events follows the Gremlins movie structure, in which cute and furry Gizmo, after being exposed to water and fed after midnight, “begins to reproduce, laying eggs that enter a larval stage in repulsive cocoons covered in viscous membranes” (Harris 185). Harris also reminds that the appearance of gremlins comes with understandings of how they should be treated: Whereas cute things have clean, sensuous surfaces that remain intact and unpenetrated […] the anti-cute Gremlins are constantly being squished and disembowelled, their entrails spilling out into the open, as they explode in microwaves and run through paper shredders and blenders. (Harris 186) The Furbys in ‘Orochimaru's World Famous New Year's Eve Party’ meet a similar end: Kuro Furby whined as his brain was smashed in. One of its eyes popped out and rolled across the floor. (dead drifter ch. 6) A horde of mischievous Furbys are violently dispatched, including the original Furby that was lovingly cared for. Conclusion This paper has explored examples from online culture in which different cultural references clash and merge to explore artefacts such as Furby, and the complexities of design, such as the use of ambiguously mammalian, and cute, aesthetics in an effort to encourage positive attachment. Fan fiction, as a subversive practice, offers valuable critiques of Furby that are imaginative and speculative, providing creative responses to experiences with Furbys, but also opening up potential for what electronic companions could become. In particular, the use of narrative demonstrates that cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour. As above examples demonstrate, Furbys can move between cute, friendly, helpless, threatening, monstrous, and strange in one story. Cute Furbys became monstrous when they were described as an assemblage of disparate parts, made physically capable and aggressive, and affected by their environment or external stimulus. Cultural associations, such as gremlins, also influence how an electronic animal is received and treated, often troubling the visions of designers and marketers who seek to present friendly, nonthreatening, and accommodating companions. These diverse readings are valuable in understanding how companionable technologies are received, especially if they continue to be developed and made commercially available, and if cuteness is to be used as means of encouraging positive attachment. References Breazeal, Cynthia. Designing Sociable Robots. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Brzozowska-Brywczynska, Maja. "Monstrous/Cute: Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness." Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Niall Scott. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. 2007. 213 - 28. 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Harris, Daniel. “Cuteness.” Salmagundi 96 (1992). 20 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/40548402›. Inuyasha. Created by Rumiko Takahashi. Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation (YTV) & Sunrise, 1996. Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2 (1988). 19 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15295038809366691#.UwVmgGcdeIU›. Kellyofthemidnightdawn. “When Furbies Attack.” Fanfiction.net, 2006. 6 Oct. 2011. KillaRizzay. “Furby Gets a Reboot for 2012, We Go Hands-On (Video).” Engadget 10 July 2012. 11 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/furby-hands-on-video/›. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan.” In Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, eds. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press. 1995. 220–254. Kirsner, Scott. “Moody Furballs and the Developers Who Love Them.” Wired 6.09 (1998). 20 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/furby_pr.html›. 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Zhang, Qiong. “About God, Demons, and Miracles: The Jesuit Discourse on the Supernatural in Late Ming China.” Early Science and Medicine 4.1 (1999). 15 Dec. 2013 ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157338299x00012›.

Abstract:The 1890s saw an increasing feminization of the literary marketplace, as more than a hundred novels representing the ‘New Woman’ defying the conventional Victorian marriage plot and values were published. Contemporary print culture was aware of the emergence of a type of woman who was educated, independent-minded, and eager to consume both fiction and journalism. Focusing on four long issues of the magazine Womanhood (1894-1904), this article will explore the ways it departed from ‘family’ papers and emerged as an outlet for much of the New Woman thought. Womanhood sought to change the reading strategies of women by empowering them to gain a critical and crucial knowledge of social realities. Thus, ‘New Woman’ did not necessarily construct a gender identity in relation to the text, but developed a knowledge and empowerment of the female self by the act of reading print culture and novels in a new light.Keywords: New Woman; Womanhood; Fin-de-siècle; Print Culture; Selfhood.Title in Spanish: Periódicos femeninos de la cultura editorial de la Nueva Mujer en la Gran Bretaña de fin de sigloResumen:La década de 1890 fue testigo de una creciente feminización del mercado literario con la publicación de más de un centenar de novelas que representaban a la ‘Nueva Mujer’ desafiando a la trama convencional victoriana y sus valores. La cultura impresa contemporánea era consciente del emerger de una clase de mujer cultivada, independiente y ansiosa por consumir obras de ficción y periodismo. Este artículo se centra en cuatro números de la revista Womanhood (1894-1904) para explorar el modo en que sus contenidos se distanciaban de los periódicos “familiares” y se erigían como baluartes del pensamiento de la Nueva Mujer en el Reino Unido. Womanhood buscaba cambiar las estrategias de lectura de las mujeres capacitándolas para obtener un conocimiento crítico y crucial de las realidades sociales. De este modo, la Nueva Mujer no construía necesariamente una identidad de género en relación al texto, sino que desarrollaba un conocimiento y capacitación de la esencia femenina por el mero hecho de leer novelas y artículos bajo un prisma distinto.Palabras Clave: Nueva Mujer; Womanhood; Fin-de-siècle; Cultura impresa; identidad del yo.

Tom McCarthy’s fifth novel, The Making of Incarnation, delves into the field of time-and-motion studies, and it begins by focusing on one of its chief proponents, Lillian Gilbreth. McCarthy fictionalizes the American psychologist’s life and work by arranging a global chase around an artefact from Gilbreth’s personal archive: “Box 808”, a doll-house-sized motion model that would, according to Gilbreth’s notes, “change everything” in her field and beyond. A fascinating cast of characters goes on the hunt for Box 808, which several interested parties, from industry to shady secret services, are eager to get their hands on. Quickly cutting between several characters and settings, McCarthy’s novel follows professionals in the contemporary motion capture industry, as they pursue the potentials and pitfalls of their trade. One of them, Mark Phocan, is busy performing all sorts of motion capture tasks for Pantarey, the company that employs him. In one of the most meaningful – and most sublime – scenes of the novel, he visits a wind tunnel in the Netherlands and witnesses a simulation of an Austrian bob sleigh run. Phocan will ultimately do most of the detective work to uncover the mysteries of Box 808. While the novel surveys and deconstructs the captivating technological, social, emotional, and political dimensions of motion capture and how it seemingly reaches into every aspect of contemporary life, the book also explores the dealings of a fictional film studio that enlists motion capture engineers to aid with the special effects for their blockbuster space opera Incarnation. In our conversation in April 2023, we delved into the history of time-and-motion studies, the theoretical underpinnings of McCarthy’s work, as well as the capabilities and prospects of the contemporary novel.

A curious sense of the past, the present, and the future is evoked when I consider the sweeping curves and gleaming surfaces of the rocketships, rayguns and UFOs beloved of 1950s SF illustrators and filmmakers. A sense of the past, of course, because they are things of history, designed and conceived at the pre-dawn of the space age, and representing an old aesthetic and innocent notions of infinite progress and glistening technology. Modernity, pure and distilled. A sense of the present, because these designs and aesthetics are constantly being reworked, re-modelled, re-contextualised and re-incorporated into new images and artefacts by highly reflexive and postmodern designers. In them, I also see the future, because the present imagery of space travel is somewhat lacking in boldness and excitement. Humans went to the Moon a few times in a stubby little module, left most of it behind, and never returned. Whereas in the old movies (Forbidden Planet, Destination Moon, Flash Gordon), we elegantly traversed the ether in giant rockets that looked like interplanetary cruise liners. It's a strange nostalgia, to feel that we lost something we never really had. The second world war temporarily suspended the production of designed consumer artefacts, as the production resources of nations were funnelled into military purposes (McDermott 17). The devastation that the war caused meant that resources and money were in short supply for many years -- it was not until the 1950s that Western economies had sufficiently recovered for excess to come back in fashion. With it came new materials and technologies like nylon and anodised aluminium, developed for the war effort, and soon to be channelled into commercial applications. The explosion in fashion and industrial design has been called by Leslie Jackson "The New Look", after Christian Dior's "New Look" spring collection of 1947 (Jackson 7). The extravagance of Dior's New Look was initially funded by the French Government, eager to exploit the nation's reputation for excellence in design. There was initial hostility to such extravagance from nations inured to hardship and utility, but this soon dissipated (8). Overwhelmingly, a post-war austerity was replaced by a "vision of the future" (McDermott 19). Nowhere was this vision more evident than in the excitement over space exploration (21). Science and design again interacted at a high level and the symbols of the atom and the rocketship became central motifs in the New Look (21), harking back to Art Deco, the style movement of the 1920s, which was one of the first movements to apply contemporary technology to design. Industrial design became highly influenced by the organic sculpture of Moore, Calder and Arp (McDermott 20), and the preference for curving, fluid shapes became evident in everything from automobile design (complete with rocket fins) and interior decoration (20). It was a period where the visions of the future seemed to perfectly match the reality. Anything seemed possible. Space exploration was gearing up, Science Fiction was in its golden age, authors such as Heinlein, Asimov, Bester and Clarke were at the height of their creative powers. The UFO movement began in force with the activation of American military groups investigating sightings. Science Fiction films, when they weren't agitating over pseudo-communist alien menaces, depicted space travel as effortless and everyday occurrences. And the tool by which this was accomplished was the rocketship. There was a democratic notion of technology attached to these early visions of interplanetary craft: plot lines would frequently revolve around inspired individuals constructing their craft in back yards and sheds, sponsored by enlightened commercial interests. Truly, the American Dream. Technology and power that anyone could access, wrapped in a free-market ideology that was, ironically, almost eliminated by the billion dollar budgets of the resolutely governmental NASA Apollo projects, but still lives on in the cult of hobbyist miniature rocket builders. Much of the inspiration for the shape of those rocket ships undoubtedly sprang from the same well as contemporary aircraft design (indeed, many leading SF writers of the time were trained physicists and engineers). Central themes in the rocket designs were cigar shaped bodies, sweeping wings and foils; they usually took off like aeroplanes as well. This aesthetic stayed in SF illustration and filmmaking until the late 1960s, when Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the success of the Apollo missions changed the design paradigm forever. No longer were spaceships smooth tapering rockets. No longer did aliens arrive in spinning metal discs. In their place were textured and massively detailed objects, the functional products of heavy industry. Star Wars added speed, dirt, and rust to the equation. And so it remained, until the 1990s. The 1990s have become a time of (certainly not quiet) reflection, of looking to the past for fashion and philosophy, to rework, to revisit. In the early 1990s, music became the target, and first the 1960s, then the 70s, then the 80s were plundered for riffs, lyrics and attitudes. That's died down -- stealing from the early 1990s would be galling even for Oasis. Two very different media forms, Cinema and computer games, have taken up the challenge of stealing from the past. The 1980s are at last a definite historical era; ripe for parody, even if it can't be taken seriously just yet. And digital art makes the old look newer than ever. Like a pristine and gleaming Ed Wood movie, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks made the flying saucer cool again; The X-Files reworks the hoariest of horror and B-movie clichés with knowing, post-modern humour. The instruction manual for the computer game Fallout hilariously revisits 1950s cold war nuclear paranoia with cartoon diagrams depicting duck and cover techniques. In the game itself, a crashed flying saucer (complete with large headed skeletal remains) delivers to the player a powerful raygun (which despatches the mutant foe with a dayglo disintegration effect) and a velvet covered photograph of Elvis. These icons have remained with us, transformed, almost forgotten, from the age of the Atom (to rework Nicholas Negroponte) to the age of the Bit. If the visionaries are right, we might be headed back to atoms, with the oncoming Age of the Nano: technology that's constructed atom-by-atom into motors, circuits and eventually, perhaps, robots. If it happens, the economic and ideological constraints on our cultural and industrial production will fall away almost over night. Freed from our limitations, who's to say that the space vessels of the future might not take any shape we wish -- even those old fond shapes of our distant memory? The rhetoric is exciting, but I'm reminded of the optimism about atomic power. Time will tell. References Collins, Michael. Towards Post-Modernism: Design since 1851. London: British Museum Press, 1987. Jackson, Lesley. The New Look: Design in the Fifties. Manchester: Thames and Hudson: 1991. McDermott, Catherine. Essential Design. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Pye, David. The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. Bethel, CT: Cambium Press, 1978. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell. "Rocketships, Rayguns and UFOs: Memories of Kitsch SF Iconography." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/sf.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, "Rocketships, Rayguns and UFOs: Memories of Kitsch SF Iconography," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/sf.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell. (1998) Rocketships, rayguns and UFOs: memories of kitsch SF iconography. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/sf.php> ([your date of access]).

'He did what the cipher could not, he rescued himself.' -- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (23) On many levels, the new Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile is a gritty meditation about different types of End: the eternal relationship cycle of 'fragility, tension, ordeal, fragmentation' (adapted, with apologies to Wilhelm Reich); fin-de-siècle anxiety; post-millennium foreboding; a spectre of the alien discontinuity that heralds an on-rushing future vastly different from the one envisaged by Enlightenment Project architects. In retrospect, it's easy for this perspective to be dismissed as jargon-filled cyber-crit hyperbole. Cyber-crit has always been at its best too when it invents pre-histories and finds hidden connections between different phenomena (like the work of Greil Marcus and early Mark Dery), and not when it is closer to Chinese Water Torture, name-checking the canon's icons (the 'Deleuze/Guattari' tag-team), texts and key terms. "The organization of sound is interpreted historically, politically, socially ... . It subdues music's ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate", comments imagineer Kodwo Eshun (4) on how cyber-crit destroys albums and the innocence of the listening experience. This is how official histories are constructed a priori and freeze-dried according to personal tastes and prior memes: sometimes the most interesting experiments are Darwinian dead-ends that fail to make the canon, or don't register on the radar. Anyone approaching The Fragile must also contend with the music industry's harsh realities. For every 10 000 Goth fans who moshed to the primal 'kill-fuck-dance' rhythms of the hit single "Closer" (heeding its siren-call to fulfil basic physiological needs and build niche-space), maybe 20 noted that the same riff returned with a darker edge in the title track to The Downward Spiral, undermining the glorification of Indulgent hedonism. "The problem with such alternative audiences," notes Disinformation Creative Director Richard Metzger, "is that they are trying to be different -- just like everyone else." According to author Don Webb, "some mature Chaos and Black Magicians reject their earlier Nine Inch Nails-inspired Goth beginnings and are extremely critical towards new adopters because they are uncomfortable with the subculture's growing popularity, which threatens to taint their meticulously constructed 'mysterious' worlds. But by doing so, they are also rejecting their symbolic imprinting and some powerful Keys to unlocking their personal history." It is also difficult to separate Nine Inch Nails from the commercialisation and colossal money-making machine that inevitably ensued on the MTV tour circuit: do we blame Michael Trent Reznor because most of his audience are unlikely to be familiar with 'first-wave' industrial bands including Cabaret Voltaire and the experiments of Genesis P. Orridge in Throbbing Gristle? Do we accuse Reznor of being a plagiarist just because he wears some of his influences -- Dr. Dre, Daft Punk, Atari Teenage Riot, Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979), Tom Waits's Bone Machine (1992), David Bowie's Low (1977) -- on his sleeve? And do we accept no-brain rock critic album reviews who quote lines like 'All the pieces didn't fit/Though I really didn't give a shit' ("Where Is Everybody?") or 'And when I suck you off/Not a drop will go to waste' ("Starfuckers Inc") as representative of his true personality? Reznor evidently has his own thoughts on this subject, but we should let the music speak for itself. The album's epic production and technical complexity turned into a post-modern studio Vision Quest, assisted by producer Alan Moulder, eleventh-hour saviour Bob Ezrin (brought in by Reznor to 'block-out' conceptual and sonic continuity), and a group of assault-technicians. The fruit of these collaborations is an album where Reznor is playing with our organism's time-binding sense, modulating strange emotions through deeply embedded tonal angularities. During his five-year absence, Trent Reznor fought diverse forms of repetitious trauma, from endogenous depression caused by endless touring to the death of his beloved grandmother (who raised him throughout childhood). An end signals a new beginning, a spiral is an open-ended and ever-shifting structure, and so Reznor sought to re-discover the Elder Gods within, a shamanic approach to renewal and secular salvation utilised most effectively by music PR luminary and scientist Howard Bloom. Concerned with healing the human animal through Ordeals that hard-wire the physiological baselines of Love, Hate and Fear, Reznor also focusses on what happens when 'meaning-making' collapses and hope for the future cannot easily be found. He accurately captures the confusion that such dissolution of meaning and decline of social institutions brings to the world -- Francis Fukuyama calls this bifurcation 'The Great Disruption'. For a generation who experienced their late childhood and early adolescence in Reagan's America, Reznor and his influences (Marilyn Manson and Filter) capture the Dark Side of recent history, unleashed at Altamont and mutating into the Apocalyptic style of American politics (evident in the 'Star Wars'/SDI fascination). The personal 'psychotic core' that was crystallised by the collapse of the nuclear family unit and supportive social institutions has returned to haunt us with dystopian fantasies that are played out across Internet streaming media and visceral MTV film-clips. That such cathartic releases are useful -- and even necessary (to those whose lives have been formed by socio-economic 'life conditions') is a point that escapes critics like Roger Scruton, some Christian Evangelists and the New Right. The 'escapist' quality of early 1980s 'Rapture' and 'Cosmocide' (Hal Lindsey) prophecies has yielded strange fruit for the Children of Ezekiel, whom Reznor and Marilyn Manson are unofficial spokes-persons for. From a macro perspective, Reznor's post-human evolutionary nexus lies, like J.G. Ballard's tales, in a mythical near-future built upon past memory-shards. It is the kind of worldview that fuses organic and morphogenetic structures with industrial machines run amok, thus The Fragile is an artefact that captures the subjective contents of the different mind produced by different times. Sonic events are in-synch but out of phase. Samples subtly trigger and then scramble kinaesthetic-visceral and kinaesthetic-tactile memories, suggestive of dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved (van der Kolk 294). Perhaps this is why after a Century of Identity Confusion some fans find it impossible to listen to a 102-minute album in one sitting. No wonder then that the double album is divided into 'left' and 'right' discs (a reference to split-brain research?). The real-time track-by-track interpretation below is necessarily subjective, and is intended to serve as a provisional listener's guide to the aural ur-text of 1999. The Fragile is full of encrypted tones and garbled frequencies that capture a world where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. Turbulent wave-forms fight for the listener's attention with prolonged static lulls. This does not make for comfortable or even 'nice' listening. The music's mind is a snapshot, a critical indicator, of the deep structures brewing within the Weltanschauung that could erupt at any moment. "Somewhat Damaged" opens the album's 'Left' disc with an oscillating acoustic strum that anchor's the listener's attention. Offset by pulsing beats and mallet percussion, Reznor builds up sound layers that contrast with lyrical epitaphs like 'Everything that swore it wouldn't change is different now'. Icarus iconography is invoked, but perhaps a more fitting mythopoeic symbol of the journey that lies ahead would be Nietzsche's pursuit of his Ariadne through the labyrinth of life, during which the hero is steadily consumed by his numbing psychosis. Reznor fittingly comments: 'Didn't quite/Fell Apart/Where were you?' If we consider that Reznor has been repeating the same cycle with different variations throughout all of his music to date, retro-fitting each new album into a seamless tapestry, then this track signals that he has begun to finally climb out of self-imposed exile in the Underworld. "The Day the World Went Away" has a tremendously eerie opening, with plucked mandolin effects entering at 0:40. The main slashing guitar riff was interpreted by some critics as Reznor's attempt to parody himself. For some reason, the eerie backdrop and fragmented acoustic guitar strums recalls to my mind civil defence nuclear war films. Reznor, like William S. Burroughs, has some powerful obsessions. The track builds up in intensity, with a 'Chorus of the Damned' singing 'na na nah' over apocalyptic end-times imagery. At 4:22 the track ends with an echo that loops and repeats. "The Frail" signals a shift to mournful introspectiveness with piano: a soundtrack to faded 8 mm films and dying memories. The piano builds up slowly with background echo, holds and segues into ... "The Wretched", beginning with a savage downbeat that recalls earlier material from Pretty Hate Machine. 'The Far Aways/Forget It' intones Reznor -- it's becoming clear that despite some claims to the contrary, there is redemption in this album, but it is one borne out of a relentless move forward, a strive-drive. 'You're finally free/You could be' suggest Reznor studied Existentialism during his psychotherapy visits. This song contains perhaps the ultimate post-relationship line: 'It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, did it?' It's over, just not the way you wanted; you can always leave the partner you're with, but the ones you have already left will always stain your memories. The lines 'Back at the beginning/Sinking/Spinning' recall the claustrophobic trapped world and 'eternal Now' dislocation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder victims. At 3:44 a plucked cello riff, filtered, segues into a sludge buzz-saw guitar solo. At 5:18 the cello riff loops and repeats. "We're in This Together Now" uses static as percussion, highlighting the influence of electricity flows instead of traditional rock instrument configurations. At 0:34 vocals enter, at 1:15 Reznor wails 'I'm impossible', showing he is the heir to Roger Waters's self-reflective rock-star angst. 'Until the very end of me, until the very end of you' reverts the traditional marriage vow, whilst 'You're the Queen and I'm the King' quotes David Bowie's "Heroes". Unlike earlier tracks like "Reptile", this track is far more positive about relationships, which have previously resembled toxic-dyads. Reznor signals a delta surge (breaking through barriers at any cost), despite a time-line morphing between present-past-future. At 5:30 synths and piano signal a shift, at 5:49 the outgoing piano riff begins. The film-clip is filled with redemptive water imagery. The soundtrack gradually gets more murky and at 7:05 a subterranean note signals closure. "The Fragile" is even more hopeful and life-affirming (some may even interpret it as devotional), but this love -- representative of the End-Times, alludes to the 'Glamour of Evil' (Nico) in the line 'Fragile/She doesn't see her beauty'. The fusion of synths and atonal guitars beginning at 2:13 summons forth film-clip imagery -- mazes, pageants, bald eagles, found sounds, cloaked figures, ruined statues, enveloping darkness. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Pilgrimage" utilises a persistent ostinato and beat, with a driving guitar overlay at 0:18. This is perhaps the most familiar track, using Reznor motifs like the doubling of the riff with acoustic guitars between 1:12-1:20, march cries, and pitch-shift effects on a 3:18 drumbeat/cymbal. Or at least I could claim it was familiar, if it were not that legendary hip-hop producer and 'edge-of-panic' tactilist Dr. Dre helped assemble the final track mix. "No, You Don't" has been interpreted as an attack on Marilyn Manson and Hole's Courntey Love, particularly the 0:47 line 'Got to keep it all on the outside/Because everything is dead on the inside' and the 2:33 final verse 'Just so you know, I did not believe you could sink so low'. The song's structure is familiar: a basic beat at 0:16, guitars building from 0:31 to sneering vocals, a 2:03 counter-riff that merges at 2:19 with vocals and ascending to the final verse and 3:26 final distortion... "La Mer" is the first major surprise, a beautiful and sweeping fusion of piano, keyboard and cello, reminiscent of Symbolist composer Debussy. At 1:07 Denise Milfort whispers, setting the stage for sometime Ministry drummer Bill Reiflin's jazz drumming at 1:22, and a funky 1:32 guitar/bass line. The pulsing synth guitar at 2:04 serves as anchoring percussion for a cinematic electronica mindscape, filtered through new layers of sonic chiaroscuro at 2:51. 3:06 phase shifting, 3:22 layer doubling, 3:37 outgoing solo, 3:50-3:54 more swirling vocal fragments, seguing into a fading cello quartet as shadows creep. David Carson's moody film-clip captures the end more ominously, depicting the beauty of drowning. This track contains the line 'Nothing can stop me now', which appears to be Reznor's personal mantra. This track rivals 'Hurt' and 'A Warm Place' from The Downward Spiral and 'Something I Can Never Have' from Pretty Hate Machine as perhaps the most emotionally revealing and delicate material that Reznor has written. "The Great Below" ends the first disc with more multi-layered textures fusing nostalgia and reverie: a twelve-second cello riff is counter-pointed by a plucked overlay, which builds to a 0:43 washed pulse effect, transformed by six second pulses between 1:04-1:19 and a further effects layer at 1:24. E-bow effects underscore lyrics like 'Currents have their say' (2:33) and 'Washes me away' (2:44), which a 3:33 sitar riff answers. These complexities are further transmuted by seemingly random events -- a 4:06 doubling of the sitar riff which 'glitches' and a 4:32 backbeat echo that drifts for four bars. While Reznor's lyrics suggest that he is unable to control subjective time-states (like The Joker in the Batman: Dark Knight series of Kali-yuga comic-books), the track constructions show that the Key to his hold over the listener is very carefully constructed songs whose spaces resemble Pythagorean mathematical formulas. Misdirecting the audience is the secret of many magicians. "The Way Out Is Through" opens the 'Right' disc with an industrial riff that builds at 0:19 to click-track and rhythm, the equivalent of a weaving spiral. Whispering 'All I've undergone/I will keep on' at 1:24, Reznor is backed at 1:38 by synths and drums coalescing into guitars, which take shape at 1:46 and turn into a torrential electrical current. The models are clearly natural morphogenetic structures. The track twists through inner storms and torments from 2:42 to 2:48, mirrored by vocal shards at 2:59 and soundscapes at 3:45, before piano fades in and out at 4:12. The title references peri-natal theories of development (particularly those of Stanislav Grof), which is the source of much of the album's imagery. "Into the Void" is not the Black Sabbath song of the same name, but a catchy track that uses the same unfolding formula (opening static, cello at 0:18, guitars at 0:31, drums and backbeat at 1:02, trademark industrial vocals and synth at 1:02, verse at 1:23), and would not appear out of place in a Survival Research Laboratories exhibition. At 3:42 Reznor plays with the edge of synth soundscapes, merging vocals at 4:02 and ending the track nicely at 4:44 alone. "Where Is Everybody?" emulates earlier structures, but relies from 2:01 on whirring effects and organic rhythms, including a flurry of eight beat pulses between 2:40-2:46 and a 3:33 spiralling guitar solo. The 4:26 guitar solo is pure Adrian Belew, and is suddenly ended by spluttering static and white noise at 5:13. "The Mark Has Been Made" signals another downshift into introspectiveness with 0:32 ghostly synth shimmers, echoed by cello at 1:04 which is the doubled at 1:55 by guitar. At 2:08 industrial riffs suddenly build up, weaving between 3:28 distorted guitars and the return of the repressed original layer at 4:16. The surprise is a mystery 32 second soundscape at the end with Reznor crooning 'I'm getting closer, all the time' like a zombie devil Elvis. "Please" highlights spacious noise at 0:48, and signals a central album motif at 1:04 with the line 'Time starts slowing down/Sink until I drown'. The psychic mood of the album shifts with the discovery of Imagination as a liberating force against oppression. The synth sound again is remarkably organic for an industrial album. "Starfuckers Inc" is the now infamous sneering attack on rock-stardom, perhaps at Marilyn Manson (at 3:08 Reznor quotes Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'). Jungle beats and pulsing synths open the track, which features the sound-sculpting talent of Pop Will Eat Itself member Clint Mansell. Beginning at 0:26, Reznor's vocals appear to have been sampled, looped and cut up (apologies to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs). The lines 'I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype/I listened to everyone now I know everyone was right' is a very savage and funny exposure of Manson's constant references to Friedrich Nietzsche's Herd-mentality: the Herd needs a bogey-man to whip it into submission, and Manson comes dangerous close to fulfilling this potential, thus becoming trapped by a 'Stacked Deck' paradox. The 4:08 lyric line 'Now I belong I'm one of the Chosen Ones/Now I belong I'm one of the Beautiful Ones' highlights the problem of being Elect and becoming intertwined with institutionalised group-think. The album version ditches the closing sample of Gene Simmons screaming "Thankyou and goodnight!" to an enraptured audience on the single from KISS Alive (1975), which was appropriately over-the-top (the alternate quiet version is worth hearing also). "The danger Marilyn Manson faces", notes Don Webb (current High Priest of the Temple of Set), "is that he may end up in twenty years time on the 'Tonight Show' safely singing our favourite songs like a Goth Frank Sinatra, and will have gradually lost his antinomian power. It's much harder to maintain the enigmatic aura of an Evil villain than it is to play the clown with society". Reznor's superior musicianship and sense of irony should keep him from falling into the same trap. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "The Big Come Down" begins with a four-second synth/static intro that is smashed apart by a hard beat at 0:05 and kaleidoscope guitars at 0:16. Critics refer to the song's lyrics in an attempt to project a narcissistic Reznor personality, but don't comment on stylistic tweaks like the AM radio influenced backing vocals at 1:02 and 1:19, or the use of guitars as a percussion layer at 1:51. A further intriguing element is the return of the fly samples at 2:38, an effect heard on previous releases and a possible post-human sub-text. The alien mythos will eventually reign over the banal and empty human. At 3:07 the synths return with static, a further overlay adds more synths at 3:45 as the track spirals to its peak, before dissipating at 3:1 in a mesh of percussion and guitars. "Underneath It All" opens with a riff that signals we have reached the album's climatic turning point, with the recurring theme of fragmenting body-memories returning at 0:23 with the line 'All I can do/I can still feel you', and being echoed by pulsing static at 0:42 as electric percussion. A 'Messiah Complex' appears at 1:34 with the line 'Crucify/After all I've died/After all I've tried/You are still inside', or at least it appears to be that on the surface. This is the kind of line that typical rock critics will quote, but a careful re-reading suggests that Reznor is pointing to the painful nature of remanifesting. Our past shapes us more than we would like to admit particularly our first relationships. "Ripe (With Decay)" is the album's final statement, a complex weaving of passages over a repetitive mesh of guitars, pulsing echoes, back-beats, soundscapes, and a powerful Mike Garson piano solo (2:26). Earlier motifs including fly samples (3:00), mournful funeral violas (3:36) and slowing time effects (4:28) recur throughout the track. Having finally reached the psychotic core, Reznor is not content to let us rest, mixing funk bass riffs (4:46), vocal snatches (5:23) and oscillating guitars (5:39) that drag the listener forever onwards towards the edge of the abyss (5:58). The final sequence begins at 6:22, loses fidelity at 6:28, and ends abruptly at 6:35. At millennium's end there is a common-held perception that the world is in an irreversible state of decay, and that Culture is just a wafer-thin veneer over anarchy. Music like The Fragile suggests that we are still trying to assimilate into popular culture the 'war-on-Self' worldviews unleashed by the nineteenth-century 'Masters of Suspicion' (Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche). This 'assimilation gap' is evident in industrial music, which in the late 1970s was struggling to capture the mood of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Dickens, so the genre is ripe for further exploration of the scarred psyche. What the self-appointed moral guardians of the Herd fail to appreciate is that as the imprint baseline rises (reflective of socio-political realities), the kind of imagery prevalent throughout The Fragile and in films like Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) is going to get even darker. The solution is not censorship or repression in the name of pleasing an all-saving surrogate god-figure. No, these things have to be faced and embraced somehow. Such a process can only occur if there is space within for the Sadeian aesthetic that Nine Inch Nails embodies, and not a denial of Dark Eros. "We need a second Renaissance", notes Don Webb, "a rejuvenation of Culture on a significant scale". In other words, a global culture-shift of quantum (aeon or epoch-changing) proportions. The tools required will probably not come just from the over-wordy criticism of Cyber-culture and Cultural Studies or the logical-negative feeding frenzy of most Music Journalism. They will come from a dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge -- what socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson has described as 'Consilience'. Liberating tools and ideas will be conveyed to a wider public audience unfamiliar with such principles through predominantly science fiction visual imagery and industrial/electronica music. The Fragile serves as an invaluable model for how such artefacts could transmit their dreams and propagate their messages. For the hyper-alert listener, it will be the first step on a new journey. But sadly for the majority, it will be just another hysterical industrial album promoted as selection of the month. References Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. London: Millennium Books, 1999. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. "Trauma and Memory." Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Eds. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Nine Inch Nails. Downward Spiral. Nothing/Interscope, 1994. ---. The Fragile. Nothing, 1999. ---. Pretty Hate Machine. TVT, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Alex Burns. "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php>. Chicago style: Alex Burns, "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Alex Burns. (1999) 'This machine is obsolete': a listeners' guide to Nine Inch Nails' The fragile. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]).

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

"The Krell forgot one thing: monsters from the id." -- Warren Stevens (as Doc Ostrow), Forbidden Planet "What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines -- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections." -- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1) In conversation with Michel Foucault in 1972, Gilles Deleuze agreed with the principle of collapsing the distinction between "theory" and "practice," by stating the following: A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself [sic] ... then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don't revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others. (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 208) Reading this, I wonder if Deleuze had in mind his recent collaborative work with Félix Guattari, which was to be published as L'Anti-Oedipe in the same year. In particular, I wonder whether he was using the language of the pragmatist to reflect upon the utility of his own recent theoretical activity -- that is, reflecting upon the theory of the machine (the cornerstone upon which Anti-Oedipus bases its argument) as a "tool". In this sense, using Deleuze's own words, the theory of the machine as it is mapped out in Anti-Oedipus has proven to be "worthless", or at least not of an appropriate moment. Certainly, Deleuze and Guattari have subsequently constructed other theories (such as those of the "assemblage", the "rhizome", or "nomadology") that the critical community has been more eager to discuss. Yet Guattari recently revisited the deleuzo-guattarian theory of the machine in Chaosmosis, as if he had never wanted to let go of this idea: to discern various levels of ontological intensity and envisage machinism in its totality, in its technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars. And this will involve a reconstruction of the concept of machine that goes far beyond the technical machine. (34) The difficulty remains, of course, in trying to gain access to a concept of machine that is beyond the realm of the technical. How can we use a concept of machine that claims to go beyond the concept of utility (or techné, the function of technical machines)? Part of the problem, as I see it, is that this concept insists that "everything is a machine" (Anti-Oedipus 2) not figuratively or metaphorically, but literally, although this is a claim that cannot be demonstrated without in the first instance having the technical machines as a key frame of reference. It is thus difficult to demonstrate what a deleuzo-guattarian machine "looks like" unless we refer to mechanical apparatuses. What I hope to do here is provide another frame of reference, which might enable some of this difficulty to be removed. My suggestion is that a "useful" text for demonstrating the deleuzo-guattarian machine is the 1956 MGM film Forbidden Planet. Utility will be measured here by the degree in which we use the concept of machine to read this film, and by the degree to which this reading allows us to provide greater clarity to the concept of machine. For those unfamiliar with Forbidden Planet, a brief synopsis: Doctor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) are the only survivors of the human colony on Altair IV; a rescue mission, led by Commander John Adams (Leslie Nielsen), is warned by Morbius to stay away, to avoid the terrible fate that befell the colonists; as romance develops between Adams and Altaira, a monstrous creature menaces the crew, leading to the discovery that this monster is the fantastic creation of the unsuspecting Morbius (a result of experiments with the advanced technology of the Krell, the former inhabitants of Altair IV, who had also succumbed to similar monsters of their own). The plot is of course inspired by Shakespeare's Tempest, yet it differs from its source in some very telling ways -- in addition to the obvious differences that arise from a science fictional updating of a Renaissance text, such that spacecraft replace ships, and so on -- upon which I shall focus my reading of the film. The first difference is in the "staging", by which I mean that Forbidden Planet is spectacular and melodramatic. Stephen Orgel observes in his introduction to the Oxford edition of The Tempest that for more than two centuries the most popular productions of Shakespeare's play were those which relied on elaborate stage machinery to create spectacular effects, and which took liberties with the script to produce an operatic extravaganza. Yet he points out that these productions bore little resemblance to Shakespeare's text, which actually contains few direct staging instructions (64-77). In this sense, Forbidden Planet belongs to that tradition of texts which diverge from the original in their reliance on spectacular stage machinery, an example of what Orgel calls the "machine-play par excellence" (72). If it is reliant on machinery, however, the film also provides a harsh reflection upon the status of machinic technologies by drawing on familiar moralising science fiction narratives. As Charles Tashiro has noted, in his brief essay on the Unofficial Forbidden Planet Web Page, the story of Morbius owes as much to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as it does to Shakespeare's Prospero. To this claim, I will add that the monster from Morbius's own "subconscious mind" also seems to owe something to Robert Louis Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, at least insofar as the monster represents the destructiveness that inheres in being human. The story of Morbius thus introduces a second way in which Forbidden Planet differs from The Tempest: whereas Prospero grants his prisoners their freedom, and returns in moral triumph to his homeland (for the magic with which they are imprisoned is within his powers), Morbius refuses to recognise that the destructive force which threatens the crew is that part of himself which he cannot control, and he will ultimately die for this sin of misrecognition. The most telling difference (at least for my purposes here) relates to the question of why it is that Morbius refuses to recognise that the monster is himself. Missing from the text of Shakespeare's play is any direct parallel to the story of the Krell -- that is, the mystery of the sudden disappearance of the former inhabitants of Altair IV. As Doc Ostrow tells us in his death throes in Forbidden Planet (after taking the "brain booster" to double his intelligence), Morbius is "too close to the problem" to solve the riddle of the Krell and is therefore unable to recognise that he is repeating their mistakes by trying to revive the technology that led to their downfall. These mistakes: after demonstrating the vast technological advances that the Krell had achieved, Morbius states that he suspects they were in the process of developing a way to live in a "civilisation without instrumentalities" (to which Ostrow replies, "but that's impossible!"). This process involved harnessing the power at the core of the planet to enable its inhabitants to produce and project matter in any form, anywhere on the planet, with nothing more than a sheer act of will. Ostrow learns, of course, that the Krell successfully achieved this civilisation without instrumentalities. Instead of realising a utopian vision, however, they were destroyed by "monsters from the id" which had been instantaneously projected from the minds of the Krell onto the surface of the planet. Having been the only human to use the Krell technology, Morbius is the only current inhabitant whose monster has been unleashed to actualise his unconscious impulses (and we may suspect that his unconscious longing to be the sole benefactor of his discovery had been the catalyst for the deaths of the other humans that had arrived with him). This brings me to the question of the deleuzo-guattarian concept of the machine. Mark Jancovich suggests that Morbius's mistake is that, like the Krell, he valorises rationality and has "lost touch with the emotional world of the unconscious" (Rational Fears 264). Jancovich's reading is a suitably Freudian one, with the Oedipal god-father (Morbius) standing as the agent of repression against primitive emotional states (represented here by the romance between Adams and Altaira) in order to maintain his little kingdom. I suggest that this reading is well suited to Shakespeare's Prospero but is only useful as an explanation of Morbius's motivations to the extent that Morbius parallels Prospero. As I have suggested here, however, the story of the Krell complicates the situation. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari map out the development of civilisations, not as the rise of the machine in place of primitive states of subsistence, but as the emergence of the "civilised capitalist machine" out from (and in place of) the "primitive territorial machine" (passim). If we think of the rise (and fall) of the Krell along these lines, we can see that the development of a "civilisation without instrumentalities" is only going to be "impossible" in the degree to which civilisation is understood as the total sum of all technological advances (where techné or instrumentality and utility represent a logic of understanding) -- which is of course the mechanistic view represented by Ostrow. What the film demonstrates instead is that stripping a civilisation of its instrumentalities produces something other than just a return of the primitive repressed. Yes, we do learn that the stripping away of instrumentalities lays bare the most destructive of forces: the id. Yet this is the id ex machina, as it were, unleashed upon the stage upon which these characters must otherwise play out their little Oedipal drama. Shakespeare's tempest is replaced here by the "id monster", a force that is everywhere and nowhere at once, as it exists by "continually constituting and reconstituting its molecules from one second to the next" (Ostrow again, explaining why the monster is unaffected by their sophisticated weapons, such as ray guns). What the film demonstrates instead is that stripping a civilisation of its instrumentalities produces something other than just a return of the primitive repressed. Yes, we do learn that the stripping away of instrumentalities lays bare the most destructive of forces: the id. Yet this is the id ex machina, as it were, unleashed upon the stage upon which these characters must otherwise play out their little Oedipal drama. Shakespeare's tempest is replaced here by the "id monster", a force that is everywhere and nowhere at once, as it exists by "continually constituting and reconstituting its molecules from one second to the next" (Ostrow again, explaining why the monster is unaffected by their sophisticated weapons, such as ray guns). In this world -- or, these worlds: the world of Altair IV and the world of the film and its relation to its sources -- in which instrumentality seems ubiquitous, then, the id monster provides a terrifying glimpse of what it means to think beyond instrumentalities. The id monster may thus allow us to glimpse the actualisation of a deleuzo-guattarian machine, which was established conceptually (at least in the opening passage to Anti-Oedipus) as a way of reconfiguring Freud's concept of the id (see the second epigraph with which I have framed this essay). Freud's singular term it/the id is reconfigured, "everywhere", as machines, but not as machinic apparatuses or technical machines. Here, I have tried to demonstrate that the way to understand this manoeuvre away from the technical machine -- to understand what a machine that exceeds techné might "look like" -- is to provide an example of the way in which, in a world where instrumentality (the rule of techné) asserts itself everywhere, the id manifests itself (fleetingly, almost invisibly) as excess, that is, as the product of the absence of instrumentalities. Whether this example should prove to be "useful" elsewhere is, of course, out of my hands. As I indicated before embarking on this brief reading of Forbidden Planet and its relation to its sources, the utility of this exercise could only be measured by the degree to which it allowed us to read the film through the filter of the deleuzo-guattarian machine and vice versa. Is this, then, a tool -- a model for the application and re-application of a concept of the machine? I think not. Yet I do hope that it provides a template (the instrument, shall we say) for measuring the utility of such exercises. Take it or leave it. References Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1992. (Originally published as L'Anti-Oedipe. Les Editions de Minuit, 1972). Foucault, Michel, and Gilles Deleuze. "Intellectuals and Power." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Michel Foucault. Trans. D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon. Ithaca: Cornell, 1977. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethical-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. (Originally published as Chaosmose. Éditions Galilée, 1992.) Jancovich, Mark. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Orgel, Stephen, ed. The Tempest. The Oxford Shakespeare series. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Laurie Johnson. "Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/monster.php>. Chicago style: Laurie Johnson, "Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/monster.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Laurie Johnson. (1999) Félix and Gilles's tempestuous, monstrous machines. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/monster.php> ([your date of access]).

In a post September 11 era “the fight”, as a cultural construct, could hardly be more pertinent. We are seemingly forever poised on the edge of controversial U.S. led attacks on wayward Middle Eastern states and unexamined oppositions between the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are evoked as valid justifications for battle. Our leaders muster us into wars of vigilance and national cohesion against unseen, unknown and uncomprehended terrorists hiding where communists once lurked under our beds. The articles in this issue examine fights in terms of media strategies and cultural divides in a range of contexts. Our feature article is a work of a fiction, an extract from the sharply beautiful novella Moving by Julienne van Loon, describing a fight between friends, maybe lovers. Set against the harsh backdrop of urban working-class Sydney, the fight here is personal, a spontaneous response to a hurt done, an expression of anger and frustration. Loon’s work explores the nature of physical struggle, the bond of shared physicality between opponents and the potential for frustration and resolution. Perhaps a little akin to Fight Club in its affirmation of the distinctive intensity of violent contact Loon shifts the nuances to a female character living in a male dominated environment. Mark Mullen’s detailed analysis of the politics of death in computer games is a timely intervention into the debates over the relationship between ‘virtual’ and ‘real world’ violence. Contrary to the conservative and neo-Marxist theses that games routinise killing and desensitise us to violence, his work suggests that gamers regularly make conscious choices that are unavailable to people in “real life:” most importantly, gamers can sometimes choose to put death or killing on hold in order to find alternatives. Mullen goes so far as to propose that gaming literacy may even provide a set of ethical tools for avoiding the acute situations that, it seems, “inevitably” result in violence or war. Meanwhile, back in the “real” world, ex- war correspondent Chris Vaughan quotes the news maxim “If it bleeds, it leads” to open his often personal account of the journalistic imperative to get up close to violence. Vaughan’s essay reminds us that the news media’s focus on the acutely violent, explosive events that signify “ war” does not proceed directly from an amorphous “ideology” that simply expresses and safeguards the material interests of dominant groups. Rather, such representations are at the same time selected and shaped according to the conventions and constraints (whether economic or political) of the professions that produce them. “To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” (e. e. cummings) It is of course important to remember (as our feature story demonstrates) that fights can also be personal, local, part of everyday life—and these ordinary fights require as much rhetorical justification as any war. Paul Scott’s analysis of the fights between surfers at Australian surf breaks—superficially enacted as struggles for territory, but also functioning to police the boundaries of what may seem to participants of surf cultures to be the last vestige of subcultural authenticity—refracts two key problems of postmodern Western culture through the lens of surfing: firstly, he offers insight into how citizens and consumers manage the tensions between localism and (corporate) globalism and, secondly, his discussion of surf rage throws the articulation between normative masculinity and physical aggression into stark relief. “In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to the death for it.” (Monty Python) Moving from the personal to the political, Louis Kaplan examines John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s astute blend of radicalism, humour, stylistic flair and media negotiation in their battle for peace during the Vietnam War. The fight is depicted as a marketing campaign by the celebrity couple aimed at promoting peace as a desirable ‘product’ to the public and politicians whilst weathering criticism that it was mere self-promotion. Kaplan reveals their fight to be composed of both struggle and promotion of self and stance, hence making the personal political. Looking to a more recent campaign in the music world Axel Bruns scrutinizes the 2002 legal battles over royalty rates between America’s powerful recording industry (RIAA) and the emerging Webcasters of online radio, battling to survive and serve their audiences with alternative music fare. Bruns traces the stages in the campaign and studies the rival hostilities and motivations. This issue has a substantial concentration of articles devoted to the film Fight Club. Our authors have found it instructive to return to that nasty little fable about characters that turn to the fight as a way of assuaging an obscure sense of alienation from contemporary, capitalist society. They were all interested in how the particularly blokey sense of anomie depicted in Fight Club continues the tradition of Falling Down (Dir. Joel Schumacher, 1993) in creating a permanent sense of crisis about a perceived “masculine impotence in the face of a loss suffered but not remembered.” (Gatens 86) Melissa Iocco examines how this sense of crisis, this sense of men being divided from themselves, is somatically represented in spectacular screen displays of suffering, of damage. She looks at how fighting writes protest and resistance on the male—through the scars, the bleeding, and the destruction inflicted by fighting. She also reflects on how analogous crises may be displaying themselves culturally off-screen, as the kind of talented, disaffected young men responsible for flying planes into the Twin Towers seem to be helping remake the world we inhabit in the image of project mayhem. Kate Greenwood pursues the question of how doing things to the male body inflects the construction of masculine identity construction. She discusses Tyler’s assertion that the “real pain,” the total temporary immanence experienced by the men engaged in fighting, is a path back to an “authentic” experience of masculinity. Tracy Caldwell turns from exteriorities to interiorities, to conduct a psychoanalytic reading of how the film exploits grotesque confusion of boundaries and of gender identities to dramatise a contemporary struggle surrounding the construction of masculine subjectivity. She uses Creed’s readings of Kristeva to analyse how the ‘abject’ is used in Fight Club as an urgent warning about the danger of not finding a way to repair masculine identity. Taken together, these three articles illustrate how Fight Club extends a grand old American tradition of using the fight, the exchange of blows, as a way of constructing identity. Faulkner’s Addie lays out its virtues in As I Lay Dying: I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever. That the ‘fight’ described here is hugely asymmetrical—one party whips and the other is whipped—does not diminish the effectiveness of the assault for the one using it as a device for constructing identity, and asserting a particular relationship between the parties to the ‘fight.’ Perhaps this is why George W. Bush appears to be so eager, at the moment, to find that Iraq may have “faulted”… There is, in this issue, a thunderous silence about this most pressing and obvious fight. We were somewhat surprised, given the number and diversity of submissions to this issue, that none chose to directly discuss the politics of the U.S. led war on terrorism and campaign to attack Iraq. It seems a ready example of the construct of a ‘fight’ involving the framing of an opposition, the build up and exchange of hostilities and the development of a cultural discourse of security, national cohesion and identity. Yet perhaps this fight’s proximity renders it too immediate and disturbing for comfort, accentuating the closeness, the almost inevitable physical and deep emotional resonance of fights themselves. Which is why Julienne van Loon’s direct, credible and evocative prose seems such a good place to begin. Let’s rumble. Works Cited Gatens, Moira. "Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic." Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces. Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell. eds. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burgess, Jean; McEntee, Joy and Nelms, Emma. "How to Pick a Fight" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Burgess, J., McEntee, J. & Nelms, E., (2003, Feb 26). How to Pick a Fight. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/01-editorial.html

It happened 27 years ago, in the autumn of 1990, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. Having set apart some of the cash I’d been given for my seventeenth birthday, I caught a train into the city with only one thing in mind: buying a copy of the newly-released book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Having breathlessly devoured the eight-episode first season of Twin Peaks as it was broadcast on BBC2 from 23 October until 11 December 1990 (BBC), acquiring a copy of the “actual” diary that potentially held vital clues to the series’ central mystery—who killed Laura Palmer?—offered a temptation impossible for any fan to resist.Somewhat predictably, the actual rewards proved rather limited: while the diary’s contents certainly fleshed out Laura Palmer’s background and inner life as a character, thereby laying some of the groundwork for the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), plot spoilers were carefully avoided by skipping over crucial entries with several blank pages marked as “page missing.” Thus, eager fans were simultaneously granted advance insight into future narrative developments while also being denied answers to key questions. Similarly, the publication of franchise novels The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes (1991) and Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town (1991), as well as the audio cassette tape “Diane…” The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper (1990), added further background and depth to the TV series’ ongoing storyworld by offering more details about characters, locations, and back story. Most crucially, these transmedia expansions in many ways foreshadowed the larger development of 21st-century transmedia serialisation practices.When American premium cable channel Showtime finally returned fans to the world of Twin Peaks in an 18-episode weekly series airing from 21 May to 3 September 2017, the franchise promised to revive the characters, locations, and mythology so fondly remembered by the show’s original viewers, as well as the later generations who had discovered Twin Peaks via reruns, VHS recordings, DVD and Blu-ray discs, or video streaming services. Identified variously as Twin Peaks: The Return, Twin Peaks: Season Three, and Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series, the new series (hereafter Twin Peaks 2017) appeared in a media-industrial context where the revival of nostalgic television favourites has become fashionable and lucrative.In a hyper-competitive marketplace where many platforms are frantically vying for audience attention and engagement, reviving existing storyworlds with dedicated fan cultures offers an obvious advantage and competitive edge (Weinstock 14–16). At the same time, Twin Peaks seemed especially appropriate to revisit, having been singled out so often as an early paradigm for the 21st century’s alleged “Golden Age of Television” (Telotte 64). As a spectacularly short-lived pop-culture phenomenon, Twin Peaks quickly became a jealously guarded cult favourite watched over by a dedicated global fandom. Yet, its influence on 21st century television culture is often explained by the series’ combination of long-form storytelling and cinematic style with a complex and ever-expanding mythological deep structure, alongside its then-unusual emphasis on television authorship in the figure of auteurist film director David Lynch.However, more specifically related to the theme of this special issue, Twin Peaks has repeatedly adopted transmedia forms for serialised storytelling and world-building in ways that build upon the franchise’s own cultural legacy while also embracing contemporary media-industrial practices. While relatively limited in terms of the number of media texts, these practices illustrate the rich potential for the transmedia expansion of franchises that exist primarily within a single medium. In order to map out the key transmedia connections within this rich and surprisingly diverse franchise, I will first offer a few terms that help distinguish basic forms of transmedia multitexts (Parody 210–218) from each other, before moving on to a more detailed analysis of the transmedia forms that have come to surround, enhance, and enrich Twin Peaks 2017.Transmedia Models In his essay “Transmediality and the Politics of Adaptation,” Jens Eder develops a basic typology of transmedia multitexts (or “constellations”) that provides a helpful entrance for this discussion. While Henry Jenkins’ oft-cited but rather broadly worded description of transmedia storytelling gave media scholars a provocative starting point (97–98), it also clearly exaggerated the degree of organised and consistent cross-platform development of fictional storyworlds. Eder’s model adds a much-needed emphasis on the hierarchical structures that we inevitably encounter both within the various transmedia multitexts, and in the industries and audiences that engage with them. Eder’s typology distinguishes between four basic models (75–77).The form of transmedia storytelling that Jenkins foregrounded in Convergence Culture, with The Matrix (1999) as his primary example, constitutes what Eder’s essay describes as integration: the various media texts form a single and more or less coherent narrative whole, with each medium making the most of its medium-specific qualities and affordances. While this model is frequently cited as a kind of ideal or even default definition of transmedia storytelling, it is important to note that it is also fairly rare, as it requires a staggering amount of planning and coordination. Far more common is the expansion model, in which one primary media text (often referred to as the “mothership”) is expanded via a range of “satellite texts.” Most commonly, the mothership would be a costly, labour-intensive, and high-profile mass media production, like a feature film, television series, or AAA video game, while the expansions are much less expensive and clearly secondary texts that function simultaneously as world-building expansions and as entrance points to the franchise. A third model is the participation strategy, in which audience activity is integrated into the production cycle, as with game shows where audiences use apps, websites, or other satellite media to vote on or otherwise affect the ongoing narrative. Finally, multiple exploitation indicates a form of multitext in which a theoretically limitless number of transmedia texts exist alongside each other, without depending on any of the others to create meaning—for which a predominantly non-narrative transmedia brand like Hello Kitty may come to mind as an example.Clearly, these four paradigms are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. But they do help to emphasise not only the diverse forms transmedia multitexts can take, but also that each of these is thoroughly embedded within media-industrial practices. Thus, Eder’s typology helpfully foregrounds the inherent connections between transmedia as a narrative form—transmedia storytelling—and the political economy in which it circulates—transmedia franchising (see Johnson). In the case of Twin Peaks 2017, the forms of transmedia expansion that were pioneered alongside the original series effectively combine transmedia storytelling forms with contemporary industrial practices and digital fandom (Booth 25).The production practices of the television industry at the time Twin Peaks 2017 was broadcast are defined in the first place by their transitional character. Since the early 2010s, both television networks and cable channels like Showtime face growing pressure from industrial “disruptors” like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, which offer increasingly competitive video-on-demand (VOD) services (Lotz 132–133). Besides the obvious advantages of accessibility, mobility, and individual control, a key innovation that many of these VOD services have embraced is the “full-drop season” (Mittell 41), which does away with the traditional week-long wait between episodes. Taken alongside the long-term decline of traditional television audiences, the rise of cable-cutting and other digital entertainment alternatives, and the ongoing growth of what Chuck Tryon has dubbed “on-demand culture” (5), broadcasters embedded within television’s traditional industrial framework are forced to innovate in order to attract sufficient advertisers and/or subscribers.Within this hyper-competitive media environment, traditional television networks have been using cross-platform strategies to lure viewers back to weekly programming. In her analysis of the transmedia campaign surrounding the niche-marketed breakout TV hit Glee, Valerie Wee showed how the clever combination of licensed Twitter accounts and carefully timed releases of musical tracks via Apple’s iTunes Store helped Fox transform the weekly episodes into minor media events (7–8). While social media and other new digital services are generally seen as obvious competitors with traditional media platforms like network television, Wee’s analysis of Glee’s innovative use of transmedia practices shows that they can also be used to increase viewers’ engagement with weekly broadcasts.Twin Peaks 2017: The NovelsAs a more recent high-profile television production designed to be a media phenomenon for the cultural elite, Twin Peaks 2017 used similar methods to facilitate what Matt Hills has described as “just-in-time fandom”: a carefully regulated form of fan culture in which the most invested viewers are constantly forced to keep up with shifting production and distribution practices in order to stay abreast of the cultural conversation (140–141). For Twin Peaks 2017, this involved not only the meticulous synchronisation of digital music releases, but also the publication of two separate novels that elegantly bookended the new season’s broadcast.The first of these books, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, was published in October 2016, a good six months ahead of the new season’s premiere. Rather than introducing any of the third season’s new characters or filling in the blanks between the original series and the revival, the book instead expanded the storyworld in the opposite direction. Presented as an elaborate collection of annotated historical records, The Secret History of Twin Peaks begins with facsimiles of “historical documents” dating back to the early 19th century, before proceeding to map out a wide-ranging mythological superstructure for the franchise that spans two centuries of American history. Both foreshadowing the third season’s more expansive narrative framework and embellishing the franchise’s mythological superstructure, the book gave readers new information about the organisation of Twin Peaks’ storyworld without even hinting at the new season’s plot. Meanwhile, the simultaneous release of the audiobook featured the voices of several original cast members, thereby both authorising this transmedia expansion as consistent with the existing franchise and playing into the nostalgia that inevitably fuels most viewers’ interest in these television revivals.Almost a year later, and a mere six weeks after the final two episodes had been broadcast, the book’s companion volume Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017) was published. Similar in form but also shorter and less ambitious in narrative scope and graphic design, this second novel consisted of a collection of written FBI files on all major characters. These files, diegetically written and compiled by third-season newcomer Special Agent Tammy Preston, give plentiful background information on events preceding the third season, as well as providing some obvious hints about its enigmatic finale. Taken together, the two books perfectly match Eder’s “expansion” model: they not only expand and enrich the existing storyworld through transmedia storytelling, but they do so in such a way that the contents are carefully synchronised with the release of a serialised television event. The first book broadened the mythological framework while providing a more elaborate history for the storyworld, but did so without “spoiling” narrative developments in the third season, or providing essential information that would disadvantage more casual viewers. In this sense, its obvious similarity to The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer also added further layers of nostalgia for forensic fans eager to re-immerse themselves in the Twin Peaks storyworld (Mittell 43).At the same time, the books also provided a convenient way to resolve a longstanding tension within Twin Peaks authorship (Abbott 175–176). While director David Lynch has most commonly been singled out as the defining “visionary” behind the franchise and its appeal, his co-writer Mark Frost has somewhat uncomfortably shared the credit for the series. Therefore, as Twitter campaigns and online fan activism demonstrated all too clearly that Lynch was indeed the single most vital ingredient for a return to Twin Peaks, the two books gave Frost an avenue to express his own claim to authorship in ways that were emphatically his. The occasional public interviews and other paratexts clearly illustrated this practical division of authorial labour, with Lynch commenting at one point that he hadn’t even read The Secret History of Twin Peaks, noting en passant that the book represents his (i.e. Frost’s) history of Twin Peaks—while the episodes are, by implication, primarily Lynch’s (Hibberd).While it is obviously quite possible to read both books after (or before, or during) one’s first viewing of Twin Peaks 2017, the books’ narrative contents and their publication dates were clearly synchronised with Showtime’s broadcast schedule in ways that enhance its serialised structure. As a franchise that has embellished the (more or less) linear narrative movement of its television “mothership” with transmedia expansions largely dedicated to the series’ pre-history, the novels bookending Twin Peaks 2017 underline the revival’s “event-ness” while also acknowledging and respecting the franchise’s spoiler-averse fan culture. For just as the almost comically oblique series promos reassured fans about the revival’s authenticity while refusing to give even the slightest indication of what would happen, the first novel offered a deep dive into the storyworld’s mythology without hinting at what lay ahead. By the same token, the second book offered forensic fans a post-broadcast coda with great narrative closure, while Frost’s ambiguous status as an author left them free to speculate about alternative meanings. Both novels thereby functioned as expansions that supported Showtime’s broadcast of weekly episodes through cross-platform transmedia serialisation.Twin Peaks 2017: The SoundtracksSimilarly, the release schedule of two soundtrack albums playfully participated in the strategy of encouraging fan speculation in response to Showtime’s weekly broadcast schedule. The two soundtracks did this in different ways, and for slightly different reasons. One album contained the instrumental score, while the other was filled with tracks by a wide variety of popular artists. For both albums, the track list was kept secret until the release date, which closely followed the final episode’s broadcast. However, fans who pre-ordered either of these albums via Apple’s iTunes Music Store would see new tracks become available on a week-by-week basis just after a new episode had aired. For the instrumental soundtrack, keeping the track list secret served a clear purpose with regard to spoiler culture: for instance, while actor Carel Struycken is a familiar face from the original two seasons, his appearance in the opening scene of Twin Peaks 2017 is decidedly ambiguous, and his character’s name is pointedly referred to in the episode’s end credits as a series of seven question marks. The explicit suggestion that this iconic actor’s return represented a new mystery strongly encouraged fan speculation, while teasing a reveal that may or may not be forthcoming as the series progressed.The question in this case was answered by the incremental release of the soundtrack album long before it was confirmed within the text of the series proper: the character’s second appearance, in episode eight, was again followed by end credits that identified him only with question marks. But the day after, a new track “The Fireman” became available to those who had pre-ordered the digital soundtrack. Forensic fans within online communities like welcometotwinpeaks.com and the Twin Peaks wiki were quick to decode the seven question marks as representing the seven letters of the word “Fireman”—and from there on, to theorise that his function within the franchise’s mythology must be to help combat the evil associated with fire (as expressed throughout the franchise with the phrase “Fire Walk With Me”). And indeed, these fan theories were validated after the character’s third appearance, in episode 14, where the end credits identified him definitively as “The Fireman.”For the other soundtrack album, containing vocal performances of tracks featured in the series, a similar release strategy further encouraged online engagement and just-in-time fandom. One of the ways in which Twin Peaks 2017 departed from the original series was the novelty of ending most episodes with a live performance at the Twin Peaks Roadhouse by a contemporary musical act. While several of the names had been surmised from the cast list that was circulated widely amongst fans months before the series premiered, it remained unknown at what point in the series any given artist would appear, and in what capacity. Thus, the appearance of high-profile artists like Nine Inch Nails and Eddie Vedder could be experienced as a legitimate surprise, while fans were also rewarded for their weekly engagement with access to the song the day after its appearance via its addition to the pre-ordered album tracks. Thus, in both cases, the soundtrack release strategy gave forensic fans another level of engagement with the series that benefited both Showtime’s industrial practice of weekly broadcasts and the digital sales of non-narrative franchise expansions as another form or transmedia serialisation.ConclusionWhile Twin Peaks has been understandably celebrated (and criticised) for its divergence from television conventions, the new series also serves as a helpful and vivid case study for industrial practices of transmedia serialisation. Following the innovative ways in which the original series expanded its storyworld between seasons through transmedia expansions, Twin Peaks 2017 adapted these practices for its own media-industrial context. The accompanying books and soundtracks strongly emphasised the new series’ “eventness,” while at the same time contributing to the season’s serialised structure. The first novel, preceding the third season, prepared forensic fans for the new series’ elaboration of the storyworld’s mythology, while the second, appearing right after the finale, tied up narrative loose ends and clarified the plot. Meanwhile, the soundtracks’ incremental digital releases encouraged fan speculation, while also rewarding viewers for watching the episodes as they were being broadcast. Thus, to quote the Fireman’s cryptic instruction from the first episode, Twin Peaks 2017 managed to kill two birds with one stone by using transmedia serialisation to combine digital fandom and on-demand culture with traditional broadcast schedules.ReferencesAbbott, Stacey. “‘Doing Weird Things for the Sake of Being Weird’: Directing Twin Peaks.” Return to Twin Peaks. Eds. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 175–191.BBC. “BBC Genome Project.” <http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk>.Booth, Paul. Digital Fandom 2.0. New York: Peter Lang, 2016.Eder, Jens. “Transmediality and the Politics of Adaptation.” The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology. Eds. Dan Hassler-Forest and Pascal Nicklas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 66–81.Frost, Mark. The Secret History of Twin Peaks. London: Flatiron Books, 2016.———. Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier. London: Flatiron Books, 2017. Frost, Scott. The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.Hibberd, James. “Twin Peaks: David Lynch Holds a Weird Press Conference.” Entertainment Weekly 9 Jan 2017. 11 Jan 2018 <http://ew.com/tv/2017/01/09/twin-peaks-david-lynch-press-conference/>.Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York UP, 2013.Lotz, Amanda D. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. 2nd ed. New York: New York UP, 2014.Lynch, David, Mark Frost, and Richard Saul Wurman. Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town. New York: Pocket Books, 1991.Lynch, Jennifer. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. London: Penguin Books, 1990.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York UP, 2015.Parody, Clare. “Franchising/Adaptation.” Adaptation 4:2 (2011): 210–18.Telotte, J.P. “‘Complementary Verses’: The Science Fiction of Twin Peaks.” Return to Twin Peaks. Eds. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 161–174.Tryon, Chuck. On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2013.Wee, Valerie. “Spreading the Glee: Targeting a Youth Audience in the Multimedia, Digital Age.” The Information Society 32:5 (2016): 1–12.Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Introduction: ‘It Is Happening Again’: New Reflections on Twin Peaks.” Return to Twin Peaks. Eds. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 1–28.

1. In this paper, I want to begin to contemplate the possibility that the concept of culture could one day be thought outside modern Western thought, via a reading of Martin Heidegger's 'Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer'. As we shall see, for Heidegger, the dominant position here is representationalism. And so a large part of what I want to do here is to begin to shake the concept of culture from these dominant representationalist moorings.1 Heidegger's problem with the history of Western thought may be put as follows. In this tradition, the difference between Being and beings (the ontological difference) is forgotten so that Being comes primarily to be considered in terms of beings. Beings are, in turn, considered in terms of their relations to one another, with the being called 'man' routinely standing to one privileged side of those known as 'objects'. Thereby thinking about Being is reduced to the question: how is it that man relates to objects? The problem is compounded when the answer to this question is given as: man knows objects. And it is even further compounded by the dominance throughout all of this of representational thinking: the idea that man knows objects only 'indirectly' through their representations.2 To challenge representational thinking in Heidegger's sense, then, is to challenge not just a 'way of knowing' but also the dominance of 'man' (Foucault's central uptake of Heidegger), the separation between 'man' and 'things', subject and object, and, ultimately, it is to challenge the very idea that Being is no more than the aggregate of empirically accessible beings. To find alternatives to representational thinking Heidegger looks elsewhere, or, more precisely, in turning to the pre-Socratic Greeks, elsewhen. He does this throughout his work, but most explicitly in Early Greek Thinking. Yet even this work barely distinguishes between (what we would now think of as) natural and cultural production in any clear way. Instead, it appears there as if the ontological difference itself -- the difference between Being and beings, between sheer coming-to-presence and that which happens to be present -- is of such urgent importance that it cuts across the apparently less important distinction between natural and cultural varieties of beings. As an advancement of his claims about the ontological difference (as a neglected and almost unthinkable difference today), the Heidegger of Early Greek Thinking in effect obviates the nature/culture distinction along with representational thinking. If the modern Western concept of culture, then, depends for its existence on the prior existence of a constitutive outside (such as nature) then is it possible that culture as such (whatever theory of it we hold) is irrevocably part of representationalist thinking? Is it intrinsically representationalist -- from, say, Hobbes to the present day or, indeed, in whatever past or future manifestation -- by virtue of its dependence on a culture/non-culture distinction? If this is so, again, there is a remarkable consequence for all the cultural disciplines and for cultural studies in particular. It is this: any non-representationalist approach to culture would be a contradiction in terms; so that, by virtue of it being specifically culture we are interested in, our interest will be necessarily representationalist. Outside representationalism, what we are dealing with could not be culture as such. The sorts of objects which we have, until now, thought of as cultural objects (photographs, museums, policy documents, forms of dress, music and so on) become interesting and significant outside representationalism only to the extent that they instanciate the ontological difference. We can, that is, no longer afford to think of the cultural as ontologically separate in any way. Instead, the move away from representational thinking would mean that objects of whatever kind -- 'gods and men, temples and cities, sea and land, eagle and snake, tree and shrub, wind and light, stone and sand, day and night' (Early 40) -- are effects of the distinction between coming-to-presence and merely happening to be present. And they ought to be experienced, inspected and understood for what they are, fundamentally, in this respect. What would this mean? One occasion where the later Heidegger does treat 'cultural' matters (in several senses and by, perhaps for the first and only time, going across contemporary cultures) is in his 'Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer'.3 This strangely readable little colloquy requires inspection, I believe, if we are to proceed any further along what the Heidegger of Early Greek Thinking calls 'the lines of usage' and into the peculiar territory beyond representational thinking.4 2. What is at stake here may be this: whether in this dialogue we are experiencing a cultural difference. Or perhaps, whether we are experiencing the presence of culture(s) at all. Put another way: the essay in question (in the form of a dialogue) may be an instance of either (a) a cultural difference or dialogue; or else of (b) an accidental similarity or monologue. Let us look briefly at both possibilities. If (a), then we have a clear lesson (on the model of the 'danger' of language): the nature of culture cannot derive from a metaphysical distinction between culture and contenders for the title of 'non-culture' (for example, physical nature or science or barbarism); for anything that was a culture would have to be already in place in order to generate such a division (or anything like it) in the first place. The name, then, of this prior condition cannot be 'culture' itself. But that is precisely how the cultural disciplines have used the term -- 'cultures', we hear, are what make the 'nature/culture' distinction -- albeit that each may do it in its own, 'culturally specific', way.5 This is why the cultural disciplines cannot imagine a culture which does not, in itself, have a deeply-seated representational concept of culture as its ultimate ground. Anthropological thinking -- in the broadest philosophical sense, not just in reference to a specific discipline -- entails the search for the other's meaning of its own (anthropology's) idea of culture. In effect, it cannot imagine a culture outside Western metaphysics but must forever translate 'different cultures' into versions of it (albeit with minor empirical differences). So if the name of the condition for the nature/culture distinction (that is, the name of the nature of culture) cannot be 'culture', instead its name must be 'representational thinking' -- at least for all cultural theory to date. The modern concept of culture's ultimate contradiction would be that it would rest upon the assumption of its own universal presence while also denying cultural universals. If (b) -- if, that is, we are not, in this dialogue, undergoing an experience with culture at all -- then the 'Japanese' is no more than a token non-European Heideggerian. He is whatever may be non-European 'in' Heidegger himself. He is a fictional device for having Heidegger's fellow Europeans (his readers) see how it is possible to think outside Western thinking -- or at least to get a glimpse of such a possibility. He is a stooge, a ploy, and -- what's more -- an 'orientalised' ploy: a classically European fictional depiction of the mysterious Orient and its inscrutable thinking. So much is at stake in how we read this work. And a number of very important issues depend on our (necessarily ethical and political) decision as to how we should read the essay. For if reading (a) prevails, cultural difference (or whatever term we decide to use to replace it and its ultimately limited horizon) is not something, in itself, of its nature or essence, that can give any comfort to notions of 'orientalism' or 'stereotypes' or any of the other tropes of fashionable (cross-)cultural criticism. Instead, the cultural itself, wherever it is predicated on Western representational thinking, is intrinsically Western thinking. There is no outside of Western culture (the Western concept of culture) for that culture to grasp -- whether it would ideally grasp it in scientific, anthropological, liberal humanist, cultural relativist, orientalist, colonialist or racist ways. These 'ways' and the differences between them have no meaning on reading (a). They are all, in effect, one way. But if reading (b) prevails, then all seems well with Western representational thinking. It has no problem because, now, all cultures would, factually, have a Western concept of culture at their core, albeit of a particular inflexion. They would all be just like 'us' in their essential metaphysics. He who recorded the different tensions or versions of this single metaphysics might be a scientist or anthropologist. He who appreciated such small variations might be a liberal humanist or a cultural relativist. He who dogmatically believed in the superiority of his own tension or difference and degraded others might be an orientalist, a colonialist or a racist. But these would be, on reading (b), but small variations along a single path. They would be like the right, left and centre lanes of a one-way street. So neither reading turns out to be very hopeful for today's cultural disciplines. The first suggests a much deeper-seated difference than those disciplines have been able to imagine hitherto; something much less easily grasped than the culture/non-culture distinction (and such that some 'cultures' are not, in and of themselves, quite that). The second suggests that the easy victories of principled cultural criticism and cultural identity politics (as well as those of less 'enlightened' positions) are grounded on the most Western of Western thinking: its representationalist theology.6 It looks as if there are only two possibilities: either culture rests upon a bed of difference that lies so deep as to remain forever outside Western thinking; or every other is ultimately, at the deepest point of difference we can think, a version of the West. But on both sides of the divide, the initial idea of culture is culture-as-presence: 'are we in the presence of an intercultural dialogue?'; or 'are we in the presence of a culture talking to itself?' If we could move even a little way from this and begin to think of culture-as-coming-to-presence (or just as 'to come', to invoke a Derridean variation on the theme), then it turns out that (a) and (b) are necessarily undecidable matters within representational thinking itself but that, as we begin to move outside it,the decision becomes irrelevant. But we must reserve this (in)decision for another occasion and proceed with the dialogue at hand. 3. To proceed, we must continue with the dialogue's attention to language and particularly to the 'danger' of speaking about it. Language, that is, has a nature but it is concealed (by the representationalist difference between the sensuous and the suprasensuous) and this concealing is a 'danger' (21). One contender for the nature of language is to take it as 'the house of Being' (22). And this prompts us to remember that the dialogue describes the two cultures as different 'houses' (5) -- different 'language realities' (24) -- so that 'the nature of language remains something altogether different for the East asian and the European peoples' (23). In fact, it is so different that the question of what language is may not be a possible one for the Japanese (23). He insists that his people 'pay no heed' to the question of the nature of language. Instead they have a word that 'says the essential being of language, rather than being of use as a name for speaking and for language' (23). So this is not a referring word but rather a 'hinting' word (24). And the 'hint' would be what the Japanese translator feels when he feels the 'wellspring' from which such different languages as German and Japanese might arise. He also describes this in terms of a 'radiance'. This 'hinting', or 'gesturing', or 'bearing' (26) must not, the Inquirer demands, be clarified into a form of 'conceptual representation' (25). Were it to be, we would miss its nature outside Western reason. There is no analytic or empirical equivalent of 'the nature of language'. To think so is itself an instance of the worst sorts of metaphysics at work. Following through the dialogue, we also find that to ask about the nature of language is also to ask the hermeneutic question in its non-standard sense;that is not as a methodological question about the means of interpreting texts but as a metaphysical question about what interpretation itself is (29-30). And this in turn has to do with 'bearing' (as in bearing a message, being a messenger -- gesturing, bearing, hinting). The so-far unannounced Japanese word for the nature of language, on the one hand, and the question of what hermeneutics is, on the other, stand together. 'Man stands in hermeneutical relation to the two-fold' (32), where 'the two-fold' is glossed as presencing (coming-to-presence) and present beings. This hermeneutic relation, however, is complex. It involves man in preserving the two-fold (32) and also in the two-fold (presencing/present) using man (33). And, obviously enough perhaps, this idea of 'use' can no longer mean empirical usage in its quasi-linguistic sense. For, as we soon learn from the rest of the essays in On the Way to Language, the linguistic arts and sciences are thoroughly representationalist since they begin with the assumption of the simple existence of present beings (forgetting coming-to-presence and language's criticality to it) and consider language, as it were, to come later as a means of, and for, their re-presentation. (And this is, I would argue, precisely the function of terms such as 'language', 'discourse', 'signification' and 'image' in, for example, cultural studies.) Nevertheless the alternative to this mistaken view of language, the alternative that Heidegger calls 'the hermeneutic relation', is agentive. In fact it is doubly so. It involves, that is, practices (of preserving and using): 'the sway of usage' (33) and 'the sway of the two-fold' (34). The Japanese claims that there is a kinship between this thinking and his (or their) own (41). This hermeneutic relation, however, is complex. It involves man in preserving the two-fold (32) and also in the two-fold (presencing/present) using man (33). And, obviously enough perhaps, this idea of 'use' can no longer mean empirical usage in its quasi-linguistic sense. For, as we soon learn from the rest of the essays in On the Way to Language, the linguistic arts and sciences are thoroughly representationalist since they begin with the assumption of the simple existence of present beings (forgetting coming-to-presence and language's criticality to it) and consider language, as it were, to come later as a means of, and for, their re-presentation. (And this is, I would argue, precisely the function of terms such as 'language', 'discourse', 'signification' and 'image' in, for example, cultural studies.) Nevertheless the alternative to this mistaken view of language, the alternative that Heidegger calls 'the hermeneutic relation', is agentive. In fact it is doubly so. It involves, that is, practices (of preserving and using): 'the sway of usage' (33) and 'the sway of the two-fold' (34). The Japanese claims that there is a kinship between this thinking and his (or their) own (41). Footnotes Representational thinking is clearly alive and well today in cultural studies -- perhaps even to the point whereby this otherwise critical discipline rarely subjects this concept to critical scrutiny. See Hall (Representation). A draft paper 'Representation and Cultural Studies' (available on request) deals with this question. Hall's Representation book lists three such forms of indirect representation: 'the production of meaning through language, discourse and image'. Two other central locations for Heidegger on culture are 'The Age of the Word Picture' and 'Science and Reflection'. Here and elsewhere, of course, Heidegger has very little time for the idea of culture and 'culturalist' explanations -- possibly because of their traditionally deep imbrication in representationalism. At times, his opposition is so vehement that we can practically hear him reaching for his gun. In Early Greek Thinking, Heidegger translates a crucial part of the Anaximander fragment as follows: '... along the lines of usage [custom, practice]: for they let order and thereby also reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of disorder' (Early 57). A paper submitted for this issue of M/C nicely displays this in a single phrase: 'the Western cultural pattern that assigns things masculine to the cultural and things feminine to the natural' (my emphases). On this matter, see Hunter on 'Setting Limits'. References Hall, Stuart (ed). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997. Heidegger, Martin. "The Age of the Word Picture." Trans. W. Lovitt. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Garland, 1977. 115-54. ---. "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer." Trans. P.D. Hertz. On the Way to Language. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971. 1-54. [First German publication 1959] ---. Early Greek Thinking. Trans. D. Farrell Krell & F.A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. ---. "Science and Reflection." Trans. W. Lovitt. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Garland, 1977. 155-82. Hunter, Ian. "Setting Limits to Culture." Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural Studies. Ed. G. Turner. London: Routledge, 1993. 140-63. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Alec McHoul. "Talking (across) Cultures: Grace and Danger in the House of the European Inquirer." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/grace.php>. Chicago style: Alec McHoul, "Talking (across) Cultures: Grace and Danger in the House of the European Inquirer," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/grace.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Alec McHoul. (2000) Talking (across) cultures: grace and danger in the house of the European inquirer. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/grace.php> ([your date of access]).

In recent years, the US television landscape has been flooded with reboots, remakes, and revivals of “classic” nineties television series, such as Full/er House (1987-1995, 2016-present), Will & Grace (1998-2006, 2017-present), Roseanne (1988-1977, 2018), and Charmed (1998-2006, 2018-present). The term “reboot” is often used as a catchall for different kinds of revivals and remakes. “Remakes” are derivations or reimaginings of known properties with new characters, cast, and stories (Loock; Lavigne). “Revivals” bring back an existing property in the form of a continuation with the same cast and/or setting. “Revivals” and “remakes” both seek to capitalise on nostalgia for a specific notion of the past and access the (presumed) existing audience of the earlier series (Mittell; Rebecca Williams; Johnson).Reboots operate around two key pleasures. First, there is the pleasure of revisiting and/or reimagining characters that are “known” to audiences. Whether continuations or remakes, reboots are invested in the audience’s desire to see familiar characters. Second, there is the desire to “fix” and/or recuperate an earlier series. Some reboots, such as the Charmed remake attempt to recuperate the whiteness of the original series, whereas others such as Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year (2017) set out to fix the ending of the original series by giving audiences a new “official” conclusion.The Roseanne reboot is invested in both these pleasures. It reunites the original cast for a short-lived, but impactful nine-episode tenth season. There is pleasure in seeing Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), Dan (John Goodman), Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), Becky (Lecy Goranson [seasons one to six, ten], Sarah Chalke [seasons six to nine]), Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and DJ (Michael Fishman) back in the Conner house with the same well-worn couch and afghan. The (attempted) recuperation is of author-star Barr, whose recent politics are in stark contrast to the working-class second-wave feminist politics of her nineties’ persona. This article is particularly interested in the second pleasure, because both the original series and the reboot situate the voice of Barr as central to the series’ narrative and politics.Despite achieving the highest ratings of any US sitcom in the past three years (O’Connell), on 29 May 2018, ABC announced that it was cancelling the Roseanne reboot. This decision came about in the wake of a racist tweet, where Barr compared a black woman (high-ranking Obama aide Valerie Jarrett) to an ape. Barr’s tweet and the cancellation of Roseanne, highlight the limits of nostalgia and Roseanne/Barr’s particular brand of white feminism. While whiteness and a lack of racial awareness are (and always have been) at the centre of Barr’s performance of feminism, the political landscape has shifted since the 1990s, with the rise of third and fourth-wave feminisms and intersectional activism. As such in the contemporary landscape, there is the expectation that white feminist figures take on and endorse anti-racist stances.This article argues that the reboot’s attempt to capitalise on nineties nostalgia exposes the limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism, as well as the limits of nostalgia. The feminist legacy of nineties-era Roseanne cannot and does not recuperate Barr’s star-persona. Also, the reboot and its subsequent cancellation highlight how the feminism of the series is embodied by Barr and her whiteness. This article will situate Roseanne and Barr within a feminist tradition on US television, before exploring how the reboot operates and circulates differently to the original series.From Roseanne (1988-1997) to Roseanne (2018)In its original form, Roseanne holds the distinction of being one of the most highly discussed and canonised feminist-leaning television series of all time, alongside The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Cagney and Lacey (1981-1988), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004). Roseanne also enabled and informed many popular feminist-leaning contemporary series, including Girls (2012-2017), Mom (2013-present), Better Things (2016-present), and Dietland (2018). Although it may seem anachronistic today, Roseanne and Barr helped define what it means to be a feminist and speak feminist politics on US television.Roseanne depicts the lives of the Conner family, headed by parents Roseanne and Dan. They live in the fictional blue-collar town of Lanford, Illinois with their three children Becky, Darlene, and DJ. Both Roseanne and Dan experience precarious employment and embark on numerous (mostly failed) business ventures throughout the series’ run. The reboot catches up with the Conner family in 2018, after Roseanne has experienced a health scare and single mom Darlene has moved into her parents’ house with her two children Harris (Emma Kenney) and Mark (Ames McNamara). In the new season, Roseanne and Dan’s children are experiencing similar working conditions to their parents in the 1990s. Becky works at a Mexican restaurant and is eager to act as surrogate mother to earn $50,000, Darlene is recently unemployed and looking for work, and DJ has just returned from military service.A stated objective of reviving Roseanne was to address the contentious US political landscape after the election of President Donald J. Trump (VanDerWerff). Barr is a vocal supporter of President Trump, as is her character in the reboot. The election plays a key role in the new season’s premise. The first episode of season 10 establishes that the titular Roseanne has not spoken to her sister Jackie (who is a Hillary Clinton supporter) in over a year. In both its nineties and 2018 incarnations, Roseanne makes apparent the extent to which feminist politics are indebted to and spoken through the author-star. The series is based on a character that Barr created and is grounded in her life experience. Barr and her character Roseanne are icons of nineties televisual feminism. While the other members of the Conner family are richly drawn and compelling, Roseanne is the centre of the series. It is her voice and perspective that drives the series and gives it its political resonance. Roseanne’s power in the text is authorised by Barr’s stardom. As Melissa Williams writes: “For nearly a decade, Barr was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood” (180).In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Roseanne (and Barr) represented a new kind of feminist voice on US television, which at that stage (and still today) was dominated by middle-class women. Unlike Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad), or Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen), Roseanne did not have a stable job and her family’s economic situation was often precarious. Roseanne/Barr adopted and used a feminism of personality popularised on television by Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. Unlike her foremothers, though, Roseanne/Barr was not slender, feminine, or interested in being likeable to men. Roseanne did not choose to work outside of the home, which marked her as different from many of US television’s other second-wave feminists and/or mothers. As Rachael Horowitz writes: “Roseanne’s feminism was for women who have to work because bills must get paid, who assert their role as head of the house despite the degrading work they often do during the day to pay for their kids’ food and clothes” (9).According to Kathleen Rowe, Barr is part of a long line of “female grotesques” whose defining features are excess and looseness (2-3). Rowe links Barr’s fatness or physical excess with her refusal to shut up and subversive speech. The feminism of Roseanne is contained within and expressed through Barr’s unruly white body (and voice). Barr’s unruliness and her unwillingness to follow the social conventions of politeness and decorum are tied to her (perceived) feminist politics.Understandings of Barr’s stardom, however, have shifted considerably in the years since the publication of Rowe’s analysis. While Barr is still “unruly,” her unruliness is no longer located in her body (which has been transformed to meet more conventional standards of western beauty), but rather in her Twitter presence, which is pro-Israel, pro-Trump, and anti-immigration. As Roxane Gay writes of the reboot: “Whatever charm and intelligence she [Barr] brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter.”Feminist Voice and Stardom on US TVRoseanne performs what Julie D’Acci calls “explicit general feminism,” which is defined by “dialogue and scenes that straightforwardly addressed discrimination against women in both public and private spheres, stories structured around topical feminist causes, and the use of unequivocal feminist language and slogans” (147). However, the feminist politics of Roseanne and Barr are (and never were) straightforward or uncomplicated.Studies of feminism on US television have primarily focused on comedies that feature female television stars who function as advocates for feminism and women’s issues (Spigel; Rabinovitz; D’Acci). Much of the critical discussion of feminist voice in US female-led television identifies the feminist intervention as taking place at the level of performance (Dow; Spigel; Spangler). Comedic series such as I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Murphy Brown (1988-1998, 2018-present), and Grace Under Fire (1993-1998), and dramatic series’, such as Cagney and Lacey and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, privilege the articulation of feminist ideas through performance and character.Roseanne is not a series that derives its comedy from a clash of different perspectives or a series where politics are debated and explored in a nuanced a complex way. Roseanne promotes a distinct singular perspective – that of Roseanne Barr. In seasons one to nine, the character Roseanne is rarely persuaded to think differently about an issue or situation or depicted as “wrong.” The series centres Roseanne’s pain and distress when Becky elopes with Mark (Glenn Quinn), or when Jackie is abused by her boyfriend Fisher (Matt Roth), or when Darlene accidently gets pregnant. Although those storylines are about other characters, Roseanne’s emotions are central. Roseanne/Barr’s perspective (as fictional character and media personality) informs the narrative, sensibility, and tone. Roseanne is not designed to contain multiple perspectives.Roseanne is acutely aware of its place in the history of feminist voice and representations of women on US television. Television is central to the series’ articulation of feminism and feminist voice. In season seven episode “All About Rosey,” the series breaks the fourth wall (as it does many times throughout its run), taking the audience behind the scenes where some of US television’s most well-known (and traditional) mothers are cleaning the Conner’s kitchen. June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley) from Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), Joan Nash (Pat Crowley) from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1965-1967), Ruth Martin (June Lockhart) from Lassie (1958-1964), Norma Arnold (Alley Mills) from The Wonder Years (1988-1993), and Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) at first sit in judgment of Barr and her character Roseanne, claiming she presents “wrong image” for a TV mother. However, Roseanne/Barr eventually wins over the TV mothers, declaring “the important thing is on my show, I’m the boss and father knows squat” (7.19). It is in contrast to more traditional television mothers that Roseanne/Barr’s feminist voice comes into focus.In the ninth and final season of Roseanne’s initial run, the series (arguably) becomes a parody of its former self. By this point in the series, “Barr was seen as the sole cause of the show’s demise, as a woman who was ‘imploding,’ ‘losing the plot,’ or ‘out of control’” (White 234). White argues that depicting the working-class Conners’ social and economic ascension to upper-class diminishes the distinction between Barr and her character (243). White writes that in the series’ finale, the “line between performer and character is irrevocably blurred; it is unclear whether the voice we are hearing is that of Roseanne Conner or Roseanne Barr” (244). This blurring between Roseanne and Barr becomes particularly contentious in season 10.Rebooting Roseanne: Season 10Season 10 redacts and erases most of the events of season nine, which itself was a fantasy, as revealed in the season nine finale. As such, the reboot is not a simple continuation, because in the season nine finale it is revealed that Dan suffered a fatal heart attack a year earlier. The final monologue (delivered in voice-over by Barr) “reveals” that Roseanne has been writing and editing her experiences into a digestible story. The “Conners winning the lottery” storyline that dominated season nine was imagined by Roseanne as an elaborate coping strategy after Dan’s death. Yet in the season 10 reboot, Dan is revealed to be alive, as is Darlene and David’s (Johnny Galecki) daughter Harris, who was born during the events of season nine.The limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism within the contemporary political landscape come into focus around issues of race. This is partly because the incident that incited ABC to cancel the reboot of Roseanne was racially motivated, and partly because Roseanne/Barr’s feminism has always relied on whiteness. Between 1997 and 2018, Barr’s unruliness has become less associated with empowering working-class women and more with railing against minorities and immigrants. In redacting and erasing the events of season nine, the reboot attempts to step back the conflation between Roseanne and Barr with little success.In the first episode of season 10, “Twenty Years to Life”, Roseanne is positioned as the loud-mouthed victim of circumstance and systemic inequality – similar to her nineties-persona. Yet in 2018, Roseanne mocks same things that nineties’ Roseanne took seriously, including collective action, community building, and labour conditions. Roseanne claims: “It is not my fault that I just happen to be a charismatic person that’s right about everything” (10.01). Here, the series attempts to make light of a now-outdated understanding of Barr’s persona, but it comes off as tone-deaf and lacking self-awareness.Roseanne has bigoted tendencies in both the 1990s and in 2018, but the political resonance of those tendencies and their relationships to feminisms and nostalgia differs greatly from the original series to the reboot. This is best illustrated by comparing season seven episode “White Men Can’t Kiss” and season 10 episode “Go Cubs.” In the former, Roseanne is appalled that she may have raised a racist son and insists DJ must kiss his black classmate Geena (Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly) in the school play. Towards the end of this episode, Geena’s father comes by the restaurant where Roseanne and Jackie are closing up. When the tall black man knocks on the locked door, Roseanne refuses to let him inside. She appears visibly afraid. Once Roseanne knows he is Geena’s father, she lets him in and he confronts her about her racist attitude. Roseanne (and the audience) is forced to sit in the discomfort of having her bigotry exposed. While there are no material consequences for Roseanne or DJ’s racism, within the context of the less intersectional 1990s, this interaction does not call into question Roseanne or Barr’s feminist credentials.In season 10, Roseanne tackles similar issues around race, ignorance, and bigotry, but it plays out very differently. In the reboot’s seventh episode, Roseanne suspects her Muslim refugee neighbours Fatima (Anne Bedian) and Samir (Alain Washnevky) are terrorists. Although Roseanne is proven wrong, she is not forced to reckon with her bigotry. Instead, she is positioned as a “hero” later in the episode, when she berates a supermarket cashier for her racist treatment of Fatima. Given what audiences know about Barr’s off-screen politics, this does not counteract the impression of racism, but compounds it. It also highlights the whiteness of the politics embodied by Roseanne/Barr both on-screen and off. Although these are two very different racial configurations (anti-blackness and Islamophobia), these episodes underline the shifting reception and resonance of the feminism Roseanne/Barr embodies.ConclusionIn June 2018, shortly after the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot, ABC announced that it was developing a spin-off without Barr called The Conners (2018-present). In the spin-off Roseanne is dead and her family is dealing with life after Roseanne/Roseanne (Crucchiola). Here, Roseanne suffers the same fate as Dan in season nine (she dies off-screen), but now it is Barr who is fictionally buried. While The Conners attempts to rewrite the story of the Conner family by rejecting Barr’s racist views and removing her financial and creative stake in their stories, Barr cannot be erased or redacted from Roseanne or the story of the Conner family, because it is her story.The reboot and its cancellation illuminate how Barr and Roseanne’s feminist voice has not evolved past its white second-wave roots. The feminism of Roseanne is embodied by Barr in all her unruliness and whiteness. Roseanne/Barr/Roseanne has not taken on the third and fourth-wave critiques of second-wave feminisms, which emphasise the limits of white feminisms. The failure of the Roseanne reboot reveals that the pleasure and nostalgia of seeing the Conner family back together is not enough. Ultimately, Roseanne is without intersectionality, and thus cannot (and should not) be recognised as feminist in the contemporary political landscape.ReferencesBetter Things. Cr. Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. FX, 2016 to present.Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cr. Joss Whedon. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1997-2004.Cagney and Lacey. Cr. Barbara Avedon and Barbara Corday. Orion Television, 1981-1988.Charmed. Cr. Constance M. Burge. Spelling Television, 1998-2006.Charmed. Cr. Jessica O’Toole, Amy Rardin, and Jennie Snyder Urman. CBS Television, 2018 to present.Conners, The. Cr. Bruce Helford and Matt Williams. Werner Entertainment, 2018 to present.Crucchiola, Jordan. “Roseanne Might Have Just Spoiled Her Own Death in The Conners.” Vulture, 17 Sep. 2018. <https://www.vulture.com/2018/09/roseanne-may-have-just-spoiled-her-own-death-in-the-conners.html>.D’Acci, Julie. Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1994.Dietland. Cr. Marti Noxon. Skydance Television, 2018.Dow, Bonnie J. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970. Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.Full House. Cr. Jeff Franklin, Warner Bros. Television, 1987-1995.Fuller House. Cr. Jeff Franklin. Warner Horizon Television, 2016 to present.Gay, Roxane. “The ‘Roseanne’ Reboot Is Funny. I’m Not Going to Keep Watching.” New York Times, 29 Mar. 2018. 2 Dec. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/opinion/roseanne-reboot-trump.html>.Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year. Cr. Amy Sherman-Palladino. Netflix, 2017.Girls. Cr. Lena Dunham. Apatow Productions, 2012-2017.Grace under Fire. Cr. Chuck Lorre. Carsey-Werner, 1993-1998.Horowitz, Rachael. “Mary, Roseanne, and Carrie: Television and Fictional Feminism.” Michigan Journal of History 2.2 (2005). 24 Sep. 2018 <https://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/horowitz_rachel.pdf>.I Love Lucy. Desilu Productions, 1951-1957.Jeffersons, The. Cr. Don Nicholl, Michael Ross, and Bernie West. CBS, 1975-1985Johnson, Derek. “Party like It’s 1999: Another Wave of Network Nostalgia.” Flow Journal (2015). 2 Oct. 2018 <https://www.flowjournal.org/2015/04/party-like-it%E2%80%99s-1999/>.Lavigne, Carlen, ed. Remake Television: Reboot, Re-Use, Recycle. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014.Lassie. Cr. Robert Maxwell. CBS, 1958-1964.Leave It to Beaver. Cr. Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. MCA TV, 1957-1963.Loock, Kathleen. “American TV Series Revivals: Introduction.” Television & New Media 19.4 (2018): 299-309.Mary Tyler Moore Show, The. Cr. James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. MTM Enterprises, 1970-1977.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York, NY: New York UP, 2015.Mom. Cr. Chuck Lorre, Eddie Gorodetsky, and Gemma Baker. Warner Bros. Television, 2013 to present.Murphy Brown. Cr. Diane English. Warner Bros. Television, 1988-1998, 2018.O’Connell, Michael. “TV Ratings: 'Roseanne' Revival Skyrockets with Stunning Premiere.” The Hollywood Reporter. 28 Mar. 2018. 2 Dec. 2018 <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tv-ratings-roseanne-revival-skyrockets-stunning-premiere-1097943>.Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Warner Bros. Television, 1965-1967Rabinovitz, Lauren. “Ms.-Representation: The Politics of Feminist Sitcoms.” Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays. Eds. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. 144-167.Roseanne. Cr. Matt Williams. Carsey-Werner, 1988-1997, 2018.Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1995.Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001.Spangler, Lynn C. Television Women from Lucy to Friends: Fifty Years of Sitcoms and Feminism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.VanDerWerff, Todd. “The Roseanne Revival, and the Argument over How TV Depicts Trump Supporters, Explained.” Vox. 30 Mar. 2018. 2 Dec. 2018 <https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/30/17174720/roseanne-2018-reboot-controversy-trump-explained-review>.Will and Grace. Cr. Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. Warner Bros. Television, 1998-2006, 2017 to present.Williams, Melissa. “‘Excuse the Mess, But We Live Here:’ Roseanne Barr’s Stardom and the Politics of Class.” Film and Television Stardom. Ed. Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 180-204.Williams, Rebecca. Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-Narrative. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2015.White, Rosie. “Roseanne Barr: Remembering Roseanne.” Hysterical: Women in American Comedy. Eds. Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2017. 233-250.Wonder Years, The. Cr. Neal Marlens and Carol Black. ABC, 1988-1993.

Home is the place where one knows oneself best; it is where one belongs, a space one longs to be. Indeed, the longing for home seems to be grounded in an anthropological need for anchorage. Although in English the German loanword ‘Heimat’ is often used synonymously with ‘home’, many would have claimed up till now that it has been a word particularly ill equipped for use outside the German speaking community, owing to its specific cultural baggage. However, I would like to argue that – not least due to the political dimension of home (such as in homeland security and homeland affairs) – the yearning for a home has experienced a semantic shift, which aligns it more closely with Heimat, a term imbued with the ambivalence of home and homeland intertwined (Morley 32). I will outline the German specificities below and invite an Australian analogy. A resoundingly positive understanding of the German term ‘Heimat’ likens it to “an intoxicant, a medium of transport; it makes people feel giddy and spirits them to pleasant places. To contemplate Heimat means to imagine an uncontaminated space, a realm of innocence and immediacy.“ (Rentschler 37) While this description of Heimat may raise expectations of an all-encompassing idyll, for most German speakers “…there is hardly a more ambivalent feeling, hardly a more painful mixture of happiness and bitterness than the experience vested in the word ‘Heimat’.” (Reitz 139) The emotional charge of the idiom is of quite recent origin. Traditionally, Heimat stimulates connotations of ‘origin’, ‘birth place, of oneself and one’s ancestors’ and even of ‘original area of settlement and homeland’. This corresponds most neatly with such English terms as ‘native land’, ‘land of my birth’, ‘land of my forefathers’ or ‘native shores’. Added to the German conception of Heimat are its sensitive associations relating, on the one hand, to Romanticism and its idolisation of the fatherland, and on the other, to the Nazi blood-and-soil propaganda, which brought Heimat into disrepute for many and added to the difficulties of translating the German word. A comparison with similar terms in Romance languages makes this clear. Speakers of those tongues have an understanding of home and homeland, which is strongly associated with the father-figure: the Greek “patra”, Latin and Italian “patria” and the French “patrie”, as well as patriarch, patrimony, patriot, and patricide. The French come closest to sharing the concept to which Heimat’s Germanic root of “heima” refers. For the Teutons “heima” denoted the traditional space and place of a clan, society or individual. However, centuries of migration, often following expulsion, have imbued Heimat with ambivalent notions; feelings of belonging and feelings of loss find expression in the term. Despite its semantic opaqueness, Heimat expresses a “longing for a wholeness and unity” (Strzelczyk 109) which for many seems lost, especially following experiences of alienation, exile, diaspora or ‘simply’ migration. Yet, it is in those circumstances, when Heimat becomes a thing of the past, that it seems to manifest itself most clearly. In the German context, the need for Heimat arose particularly after World War Two, when experiences of loss and scenes of devastation, as well as displacement and expulsion found compensation of sorts in the popular media. Going to the cinema was the top pastime in Germany in the 1950s, and escapist Heimat films, which showed idyllic country scenery, instead of rubble-strewn cityscapes, were the most well-liked of all. The industry pumped out kitsch films in quick succession to service this demand and created sugar-coated, colour-rich Heimat experiences on celluloid that captured the audience’s imagination. Most recently, the genre experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent accession of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also referred to as East Germany) to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) in 1990. Described as one of the most seminal moments in modern history, the events led to large-scale change; in world politics, strategic alliances, but were most closely felt at the personal and societal level, reshaping community and belonging. Feelings of disbelief and euphoria occupied the hearts and minds of people all around the world in the days following the night of the 9 November 1989. However, the fall of the Wall created within weeks what the Soviet Union had been unable to manage in the previous 40 years; the sense of a distinctly Eastern identity (cf. Heneghan 148). Most of the initial positive perceptions slowly gave way to a hangover when the consequences of the drastic societal changes became apparent in their effects on populace. Feelings of disenchantment and disillusionment followed the jubilation and dominated the second phase of socio-cultural unification, when individuals were faced with economic and emotional hardship or were forced to relocate, as companies folded, politically tainted degrees and professions were abolished and entire industry sectors disappeared. This reassessment of almost every aspect of people’s lifestyles led many to feel that their familiar world had dissipated and their Heimat had been lost, resulting in a rhetoric of “us” versus “them”. This conceptual divide persisted and was cemented by the perceived difficulties in integration that had emerged, manifesting a consciousness of difference that expressed itself metaphorically in the references to the ‘Wall in the mind’. Partly as a reaction to these feelings and partly also as a concession to the new citizens from the East, Western backed and produced unification films utilised the soothing cosmos of the Heimat genre – so well rehearsed in the 1950s – as a framework for tales about unification. Peter Timm’s Go, Trabi, Go (1991) and Wolfgang Büld’s sequel Go, Trabi, Go 2. Das war der Wilde Osten [That Was the Wild East, 1992] are two such films which revive “Heimat as a central cultural construct through which aspects of life in the new Germany could be sketched and grasped.” (Naughton 125) The films’ references to Eastern and Western identity served as a powerful guarantor of feelings of belonging, re-assuring audiences on both sides of the mental divide of their idiosyncrasies, while also showing a way to overcome separation. These Heimat films thus united in spirit, emotion and consumer behaviour that which had otherwise not yet “grown together” (cf. Brandt). The renaissance of the Heimat genre in the 1990s gained further momentum in the media with new Heimat film releases as well as TV screenings of 1950s classics. Indeed Heimat films of old and new were generally well received, as they responded to a fragile psychological predisposition at a time of change and general uncertainty. Similar feelings were shared by many in the post-war society of the 1950s and the post-Wall Europe of the 1990s. After the Second World War and following the restructure after Nazism it was necessary to integrate large expellee groups into the young nation of the FRG. In the 1990s the integration of similarly displaced people was required, though this time they were having to cope less with territorial loss than with ideological implosions. Then and now, Heimat films sought to aid integration and “transcend those differences” (Naughton 125) – whilst not disputing their existence – particularly in view of the fact that Germany had 16 million new citizens, who clearly had a different cultural background, many of whom were struggling with perceptions of otherness as popularly expressed in the stereotypical ethnographies of “Easterners” and “Westerners”. The rediscovery of the concept of Heimat in the years following unification therefore not only mirrored the status quo but further to that allowed “for the delineation of a common heritage, shared priorities, and values with which Germans in the old and new states could identify.” (Naughton 125) Closely copying the optimism of the 1950s which promised audiences prosperity and pride, as well as a sense of belonging and homecoming into a larger community, the films produced in the early 1990s anticipated prosperity for a mobile and flexible people. Like their 1950s counterparts, “unification films ‘made in West Germany’ imagined a German Heimat as a place of social cohesion, opportunity, and prosperity” (Naughton 126). Following the unification comedies of the early 1990s, which were set in the period following the fall of the Wall, another wave of German film production shifted the focus onto the past, sacrificing the future dimension of the unification films. Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (1999) is set in the 1970s and subscribes to a re-invention of one’s childhood, while Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) in which the GDR is preserved on 79 square metres in a private parallel world, advocates a revival of aspects of the socialist past. Referred to as “Ostalgia”; a nostalgia for the old East, “a ‘GDR revival’ or the ‘renaissance of a GDR Heimatgefühl’” (Berdahl 197), the films achieved popular success. Ostalgia films utilised the formula of ‘walking down memory lane’ in varying degrees; thematising pleasing aspects of an imagined collective past and tempting audiences to revel in a sense of unity and homogeneous identity (cf. Walsh 6). Ostalgia was soon transformed from emotional and imaginary reflection into an entire industry, manifesting itself in the “recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life” (Berdahl 192). This trend found further expression in a culture of exhibitions, books, films and cabaret acts, in fashion and theme parties, as well as in Trabi-rallies which celebrated or sent up the German Democratic Republic in response to the perceived public humiliation at the hands of West German media outlets, historians and economists. The dismissal of anything associated with the communist East in mainstream Germany and the realisation that their consumer products – like their national history – were disappearing in the face of the ‘Helmut Kohl-onisation’ sparked this retro-Heimat cult. Indeed, the reaction to the disappearance of GDR culture and the ensuing nostalgia bear all the hallmarks of Heimat appreciation, a sense of bereavement that only manifests itself once the Heimat has been lost. Ironically, however, the revival of the past led to the emergence of a “new” GDR (Rutschky 851), an “imaginary country put together from the remnants of a country in ruins and from the hopes and anxieties of a new world” (Hell et al. 86), a fictional construct rather than a historical reality. In contrast to the fundamental social and psychological changes affecting former GDR citizens from the end of 1989, their Western counterparts were initially able to look on without a sense of deep personal involvement. Their perspective has been likened to that of an impartial observer following the events of a historical play (cf. Gaschke 22). Many saw German unification as an enlargement of the West; as soon as they had exported their currency, democracy, capitalism and freedom to the East, “blossoming landscapes” were sure to follow (Kohl). At first political events did not seem to cause a major disruption to the lives of most people in the old FRG, except perhaps the need to pay higher tax. This understanding proved a major underestimation of the transformation process that had gripped all of Germany, not just the Eastern part. Nevertheless, few predicted the impact that far-reaching changes would have on the West; immigration and new minorities alter the status quo of any society, and with Germany’s increase in size and population, its citizens in both East and West had to adapt and adjust to a new image and to new expectations placed on them from within and without. As a result a certain unease began to be felt by many an otherwise self-assured individual. Slower and less obvious than the transition phase experienced by most East Germans, the changes in West German society and consciousness were nevertheless similar in their psychological effects; resulting in a subtle feeling of displacement. Indeed, it was soon noted that “the end of German division has given rise to a sense of crisis in the West, particularly within the sphere of West German culture, engendering a Western nostalgica for the old FRG” (Cooke 35), also referred to as Westalgia. Not too dissimilar to the historical rehabilitation of the East played out in Ostalgic fashion, films appeared which revisit moments worthy of celebration in West German history, such as the 1954 Soccer World Championship status which is at the centre of the narrative in Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern [Miracle of Bern, 2003]. Hommages to the 1968 generation (Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei [The Educators, 2004]) and requiems for West Berlin’s subculture (Leander Haußmann’s Herr Lehmann [Mr Lehmann, 2003]) were similar manifestations of this development. Ostalgic and Westalgic practices coexisted for several years after the turn of the millennium, and are a tribute to the highly complex interrelationship that exists between personal histories and public memories. Both narratives reveal “the politics, ambiguities, and paradoxes of memory, nostalgia, and resistance” (Berdahl 207). In their nostalgic contemplation of the good old days, Ostalgic and Westalgic films alike express a longing to return to familiar and trusted values. Both post-hoc constructions of a heimatesque cosmos demonstrate a very real reinvention of Heimat. Their deliberate reconstruction and reinterpretation of history, as well as the references to and glorification of personal memory and identity fulfil the task of imbuing history – in particular personal history – with dignity. As such these Heimat films work in a similar fashion to myths in the way they explain the world. The heimatesque element of Ostalgic and Westalgic films which allows for the potential to overcome crises reveals a great deal about the workings of myths in general. Irrespective of their content, whether they are cosmogonic (about the beginning of time), eschatological (about the end of time) or etiologic myths (about the origins of peoples and societal order), all serve as a means to cope with change. According to Hans Blumenberg, myth making may be seen as an attempt to counter the absolutism of reality (cf. Blumenberg 9), by providing a response to its seemingly overriding arbitrariness. Myths become a means of endowing life with meaning through art and thus aid positive self-assurance and the constructive usage of past experiences in the present and the future. Judging from the popular success of both Ostalgic and Westalgic films in unified Germany, one hopes that communication is taking place across the perceived ethnic divide of Eastern and Western identities. At the very least, people of quite different backgrounds have access to the constructions and fictions relating to one another pasts. By allowing each other insight into the most intimate recesses of their respective psychological make-up, understanding can be fostered. Through the re-activation of one’s own memory and the acknowledgment of differences these diverging narratives may constitute the foundation of a common Heimat. It is thus possible for Westalgic and Ostalgic films to fulfil individual and societal functions which can act as a core of cohesion and an aid for mutual understanding. At the same time these films revive the past, not as a liveable but rather as a readable alternative to the present. As such, the utilisation of myths should not be rejected as ideological misuse, as suggested by Barthes (7), nor should it allow for the cementing of pseudo-ethnic differences dating back to mythological times; instead myths can form the basis for a common narrative and a self-confident affirmation of history in order to prepare for a future in harmony. Just like myths in general, Heimat tales do not attempt to revise history, or to present the real facts. By foregrounding the evidence of their wilful construction and fictitious invention, it is possible to arrive at a spiritual, psychological and symbolic truth. Nevertheless, it is a truth that is essential for a positive experience of Heimat and an optimistic existence. What can the German situation reveal in an Australian or a wider context? Explorations of Heimat aid the socio-historical investigation of any society, as repositories of memory and history, escape and confrontation inscribed in Heimat can be read as signifiers of continuity and disruption, reorientation and return, and as such, ever-changing notions of Heimat mirror values and social change. Currently, a transition in meaning is underway which alters the concept of ‘home’ as an idyllic sphere of belonging and attachment to that of a threatened space; a space under siege from a range of perils in the areas of safety and security, whether due to natural disasters, terrorism or conventional warfare. The geographical understanding of home is increasingly taking second place to an emotional imaginary that is fed by an “exclusionary and contested distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’ (Blunt and Dowling 168). As such home becomes ever more closely aligned with the semantics of Heimat, i.e. with an emotional experience, which is progressively less grounded in feelings of security and comfort, yet even more so in those of ambivalence and, in particular, insecurity and hysteria. This paranoia informs as much as it is informed by government policies and interventions and emerges from concerns for national security. In this context, home and homeland have become overused entities in discussions relating to the safeguarding of Australia, such as with the establishment of a homeland security unit in 2003 and annual conferences such as “The Homeland Security Summit” deemed necessary since 9/11, even in the Antipodes. However, these global connotations of home and Heimat overshadow the necessity of a reclaimation of the home/land debate at the national and local levels. In addressing the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the removal and dislocation of Aboriginal children from their homes and families, the political nature of a home-grown Heimat debate cannot be ignored. “Bringing them Home”, an oral history project initiated by the National Library of Australia in Canberra, is one of many attempts at listening to and preserving the memories of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders who, as children, were forcibly taken away from their families and homelands. To ensure healing and rapprochement any reconciliation process necessitates coming to terms with one’s own past as much as respecting the polyphonic nature of historical discourse. By encouraging the inclusion of diverse homeland and dreamtime narratives and juxtaposing these with the perceptions and constructions of home of the subsequent immigrant generations of Australians, a rich text, full of contradictions, may help generate a shared, if ambivalent, sense of a common Heimat in Australia; one that is fed not by homeland insecurity but one resting in a heimatesque knowledge of self. References Barthes, Roland. Mythen des Alltags. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964 Berdahl, Daphne. “‘(N)ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.” Ethnos 64.2 (1999): 192-207. Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brandt, Willy. “Jetzt kann zusammenwachsen, was zusammengehört [Now that which belongs together, can now grow together].” From his speech on 10 Nov. 1989 in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg, transcript available from http://www.bwbs.de/Brandt/9.html>. Cooke, Paul. “Whatever Happened to Veronika Voss? Rehabilitating the ‘68ers’ and the Problem of Westalgie in Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (2000).” German Studies Review 27.1 (2004): 33-44. Gaschke, Susanne. “Neues Deutschland. Sind wir eine Wirtschaftsgesellschaft?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B1-2 (2000): 22-27. Hell, Julia, and Johannes von Moltke. “Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic.” The Germanic Review 80.1 (Winter 2005): 74-95. Heneghan, Tom. Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall. London: Reuters, 2000. Kohl, Helmut. “Debatte im Bundestag um den Staatsvertrag.” 21 June 1990. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000. Naughton, Leonie. That Was the Wild East. Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Rentschler, Eric. “There’s No Place Like Home: Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934).” New German Critique 60 (Special Issue on German Film History, Autumn 1993): 33-56. Reitz, Edgar. “The Camera Is Not a Clock (1979).” In Eric Rentschler, ed. West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 137-141. Rutschky, Michael. “Wie erst jetzt die DDR entsteht.” Merkur 49.9-10 (Sep./Oct. 1995): 851-64. Strzelczyk, Florentine. “Far Away, So Close: Carl Froelich’s Heimat.” In Robert C. Reimer, ed., Cultural History through the National Socialist Lens. Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 109-132. Walsh, Michael. “National Cinema, National Imaginary.” Film History 8 (1996): 5-17. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ludewig, Alexandra. "Home Meets Heimat." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>. APA Style Ludewig, A. (Aug. 2007) "Home Meets Heimat," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>.

Transmedia storytelling, as defined by Henry Jenkins in 2006 in his book Convergence Culture, highlights a production strategy that aims to augment the narration of a cultural work by scattering it across several media platforms—digital or non-digital. The term is certainly quite recent, but the practices are not new and allow us to understand the evolution of the cultural industries and the creation of a new media ecosystem. As Matthew Freeman states, transmedia storytelling always relies on industrial changes, the narration adapting itself to new media synergies and novelties to create engaging and coherent storyworlds.Producers of American TV shows, showrunners, and networks are more and more eager to develop narrative universes on other media platforms in order to target new audiences and to give food for thought to fans, as well as reward them for their intellectual and emotional investment. Ancillary content and tie-ins sometimes take the form of novelisations or comic books, highlighting the fact that strategies of transmedia storytelling can be deployed on non-digital platforms and still enhance the narrative aspects of the show. For example, Twin Peaks (1990) developed The Diary of Laura Palmer (1990), a journal written by the character Laura Palmer who gave insights on her life and details about her relationships with other characters before she was murdered at the beginning of the series. How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) published The BroCode (2008), first seen on episode “The Goat” (season 3 episode 17), and The Playbook (2012), first seen in an episode entitled “The Playbook” (season 5 episode 8). They are bibles written by character Barney Stinson that contain rules or advice for picking up women. For instance, The BroCode contains 150 articles, a glossary of terms, a definition of “a bro,” history of the code, amendments, violations, and approved punishments, all invented by Barney; some of these components were talked about on the show, while others were original additions for the book.Another way to create transmedia storytelling around TV shows is by developing comic books. This article will explore this specific media form in relation to transmedia strategies and will try to underline how comic books can make a narrative richer by focusing on parts of the plot, characters, times, or locations. First, I will focus on the importance of seriality from a historical perspective, because seriality appears to be one of the main principles of transmedia storytelling. Yet, is this narrative continuity always coherent and always canon when it comes to the publication of comic books? I will then propose a typology of the narratives comic books exploit to augment the storytelling of a show. I will give examples to illustrate how comic books can enrich the narrative universe of a given show and how characters can smoothly move from one platform to the other.A Transmedia World: Television and Comic Books Hand in HandSeriality is one of the main pillars of transmedia storytelling, and, according to Jenkins, “it is about breaking things down into chapters which are satisfying on their own terms, but which motivate us to come back for more” (“Transmedia”). These characteristics are already present in the way TV series are written, produced, and broadcast, and in the way comic books are created. They rely on episodes for TV shows and on issues for comic books that usually end with suspense and a suspension in the narrative continuity, commonly known as a cliff-hanger. For comic books, this narrative continuity took root in the early comic strips of the 18th and 19th century (Maigret and Stefanelli), which played a huge part in what we now know as comic books. As Pagello explains:The extensive practice of narrative serialisation played a major role in this context: the creative process, the industrial production and distribution, the editorial practices and, finally, the experience of comics readers all underwent dramatic changes when comics started to develop an identity distinguished from satirical cartoons, illustrated books and the various forms of children’s picture stories.According to Derek Johnson, these evolutions, in terms of production and reception, are closely linked to the widespread use of the franchise model in media industries. Johnson explains thatcomic books, video games, and other markets once considered ancillary now play increasingly significant and recentered roles in the production and consumption of everyday film and television properties such as Heroes, Transformers, and the re-envisioned Star Trek in ways that only very few innovators (such as George Lucas and his carefully elaborated and expanded Star Wars empire) had previously conceived in the twentieth century.The creation of transmedia strategies that capitalize on narrative continuity and seriality call for some synergies between media and for a “gatekeeper” of the stories who will ensure that all is coherent in the storyworld. Thus, “in 2006, the management of Heroes, for example, became a job for a professional ‘Transmedia Team’ charged with implementing creative coordination across television, comics, and the Internet” (Johnson).Another principle of transmedia storytelling, closely linked to seriality and the essence of the definition, is the creation of a narrative universe, that is “world-building,” in which plots and characters develop, and which will lay the foundations for the story. These foundations will be written in what is called a Bible, a document containing all the narrative elements in order to ensure coherence. In the notion of world-building, a matrix of possibilities is deployed, since stories can potentially become threads to weave, and re-weave. This rhizomatic world can be extended to infinity in a canonical way (by the official production) and in a non-canonical one (by the creations of fans). For Mark Wolf, these narrative worlds work like dynamic entities, and are transformative, transmedial, and transauthorial, which are similar to the notions and possibilities of transmedia storytelling, and media and cultural convergence. Stories that cannot be contained within the “real” of a single medium will be expended and developed on another or several other ones, creating a rich storyworlds. Comic books can be one of these tie-in media.New Term, Old Creations: An Historical OverviewMatthew Freeman wrote in his latest book Historicising Transmedia Storytelling that these transmedia practices do have a past and existed long before the introduction of the term due to new technologies, production strategies, and reception tactics. Comic books were often an option to enrich storylines and further develop the characters. For example, L. Frank Baum created a storyworld around The Wizard of Oz made of mock newspapers, conferences, billboards, novels, musicals, and comic strips in order to “appeal to a migratory audience” (Jenkins, “I Have”) and to deepen the characters, introduce new ones, and discover the land of Oz as if it were a real location. The author used techniques of advertising to promote and above all to expand his storyworld. As newspaper comic strips were quite popular at the time, Baum created several tie-in extensions in the newspapers and in a novel format. As Jason Scott underlines, “serial narratology enhances the possibilities of advertising and exploitation through the established market for the second and subsequent instalment” (14). The series of comic strips entitled Queer Visitor from the Marvellous Land of Oz (1904-1905) picked up, in terms of narration, just after the end of the book, offering a new temporality and life for the characters. As Freeman notes, this choice follows an economic logic:The era’s newspaper comic strips and their institutional tendency to prioritize recurring characters as successful advertising mechanisms (as witnessed in the cross-media dispersion of Buster Brown) had in fact influenced Baum to return to the series’ more familiar faces of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman (2371).Here, the beloved characters are moving from one medium to the next, giving new insights on their life after the end of the book, and enhancing their stories beyond its pages.A Typology of Comic Books and Tie-in Extensions of TV SeriesBefore diving into a tentative typology, I want to look at the definition of canon in a transmedia storyworld. There is a strong debate in academic discussions around the issues of canonicity, and here I understand canonicity as the production of official texts around a given cultural content. That is because of precisely what is qualified as an official text or an official extension, and what is not. In the book I co-edited with Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa), we respond by coining the term “transtexts,” which includes officially produced texts and fantexts in the same narrative universe. The dichotomy between both kinds of texts is thus diminished. Nonetheless, in production and transmedia strategies, canonicity is hard to evaluate because “few television series have attempted to create transmedia extensions that offer such a (high level of) canonic integration, with interwoven story events that must be consumed across media for full comprehension” (Mittell 298). He follows by proposing a typology of two possible transmedia extensions based on a canon perspective versus a non-canon one: “what is extensions” extend the storyworld canonically and in a coherent way, whereas “what if extensions” “pose(s) hypothetical possibilities rather than canonical certainties, inviting viewers to imagine alternate stories and approaches to storytelling that are distinctly not to be treated as potential canon” (Mittell 298). Mark Wolf refers to the term growth to qualify canonical materials which are going to expand a given storyworld and which nourish the stories. As argued by Gabriel et al., “Wolf’s definition of ‘growth’ makes it clear that, for him, a transmedial product can only be considered to contribute to a world’s growth if it adds new ‘canonical’ material, i.e. material that presents new pieces of information that are “true” for the fictional world” (Gabriel et al. 169). This notion of “truth” to the diegesis can be opposed in this context to the notion of alternate stories and alternate versions of the characters.My attempted typology lays its foundation upon this opposition between what is seen as an official extension and what is seen as an unofficial extension, but offers alternate perspectives to expand the storyworld using new characters, locations, or universes. The first category will look at canonical extensions and how they can deepen characters’ development and temporalities. The second category will deal with “canon divergent” (to use fans’ language) extensions and how they can offer new entries into the stories by creating new characters or presenting new locations.Canonical Extensions: CharactersTie-in extensions in the form of comic books help to deepen the characters, especially supporting characters, by delving into their motivations and psychology, or by giving them backstories and origin stories. According to Paolo Bertetti, “the transmedia character is a fictional hero whose adventures are told on several media platforms, each providing details about the character's life” (2344). Actually, motivated characters are the quintessential element of the narration of the classic Hollywood era, which was then reused in the narration of TV series, which were then penned into comic books. In her definition of transmedia superstructures, Marsha Kinder based her analysis on how characters moved from one medium to the next, making them the centre of the narrative universe and the element audiences would follow.For example, Fringe (2008), in a deal with DC comics, extended its stories and its characters in comic books, which were an integral part of the storyworld, and which included canon materials by offering Easter Eggs to fans and rewarding them for their investment in the narrative universe. Each issue of the second series dealt with a major or recurring character from the show, deepening them by giving them backgrounds. That way, audiences can discover the backstories of Agent Broyles, Nina Sharp, the CEO of Massive Dynamic, or even Gene, Walter’s cow, all of which are featured in the series but not well developed.Written by actor Tim Rozon (who plays Doc Holliday on the show) and author Beau Smith, Wynonna Earp Season Zero (2017) focuses on the past of main character Wynonna Earp when she was an outlaw and before she comes back to her hometown, Purgatory. The past comes to life on the pages, while it was only hinted at in the show. It is a good introduction to the main character before the show, since Wynonna comes back to Purgatory by bus at the beginning of the very first episode and there are no flashback episode relating her story earlier. Because the two authors of this comic book are part of the creative crew of the show, an actor and a writer, they ensure a sense of coherence in the extensions they write.In collaboration with Dynamite Entertainment, an American comic book company, NBC Universal launched a series of comic book issues entitled Origins (2008) as an ancillary text to Battlestar Galactica (2004). “Origin stories” are a specific genre related to superhero franchises. M.J. Clarke underlines that,the use of Origins Stories is influenced by the economic structure of the comic book industry, which continues to produce stories over years and decades. ... By remaining faithful to the Origins (which are frequently modified in their consistency), readers can discover a story without having to navigate in more than 400 numbers of commix. (54)The goal of these comic books is to create a "past" for the human characters that appeared in the series. The collection of comic books thus focuses on five main characters in 11 issues, spread out over a year: William Adama, Zarek, Gaius Baltar, Kara "Starbuck” Thrace, and Karl "Helo" Agathon. These issues are collected in an eponymous Omnibus. Likewise, Orphan Black (2011) also offered backstories for its “clone club” without disrupting the pace of the show. The stories, tied to the events of the series, focus on the opportunity to better understand the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that exemplify the characters of the show.It is interesting to note that the authors of these comic book extensions were in close contact with Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, showrunners of the Battlestar Galactica series, which guaranteed coherence and canonicity to the newly created material. In a personal interview, Robert Napton, writer of Origins, explained the creative process:so every week we would watch episodes and make sure our stories matched as closely as possible to what the television series was doing …we tried to make it feel like it was very much part of the series, so they were untold adventures and we tried to fit it into the continuity of the series as much as possible.Brandon Jerwa, writer for Battlestar Galactica comic book series Season Zero and Ghosts (2009), confirmed that, “It is my understanding that the comics were passed through Mr. Moore’s office, and they were certainly vetted by Syfy and Universal.” Jerwa also added an interesting input on perception of canonicity versus non-canonicity by fans who can be picky about the ancillary contents and added materials that extend a storyworld:Most comic tie-ins have a hard time being considered a legitimate part of the canon, and that is simply beyond the control of the creative team. I worked very hard to make sure that I was writing material that adhered to the continuity of the show as closely as humanly possible. I don’t believe in writing a licensed property in such a way as to put forward ‘my vision’ of the universe; I believe very firmly that it is my responsibility to serve the source material above all else.Canonical Extensions: TemporalitiesComic books as a licensed product can expand the temporalities of the show and tell stories before the beginning of the series and after it ended, as well as fill time voids and ellipses. For example, now in its 11th season in comic books, Joss Whedon managed to keep Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) alive and to attract new fans without alienating its original fanbase. Blogger and web entrepreneur Keith McDuffee felt that reading Buffy as a comic book after seeing it on television for seven years was strange, but the new format was a good sign because: “the medium lets creativity go completely wild without budget worries.” The comic books focus on the famous characters and created a life for them after the end of the show, making them jump from the screen onto the pages. Sometimes, the comic books told original stories that might seem out-of-character, like the issue in which Buffy sleeps with a woman. That kind of storyline wasn’t explored in the TV show, and comics offer one way to go deeper into the characters’ backgrounds and psychology. Sometimes, the tie-ins do not strictly follow the continuity and become non-canon regarding the stories of the TV shows. For example, DC/Wildstorm presented comic book issues around The X-Files (1993-) that were set in continuity of the show but failed to refer to main plot events (for example, Scully’s pregnancy). “Rather than offering ‘additive comprehension’ to a pre-existing television and film narrative, Spotnitz chose to write licensed comics on their own terms” (Pillai 112).DC is familiar with offering new adventures for its superhero characters in the form of comic books (which are first published online), going back to the basics. Of course, in this case, the relationship between the comic book medium and the television medium is more intricate, as the TV series are based on comic book characters whose stories are then extended again in comic books, which are created specifically to extend the TV shows’ storyworlds. The creation of the comic book series The Flash Season Zero (2015) set the stories between the episodes of the first season of The Flash and focus on the struggles of Barry Allen as he juggles between his job as a CSI, his love for Iris West, his childhood sweetheart, and his new identity as a vigilante with superpowers. This allows viewers to better understand a part of Barry Allen’s life that was not well developed in the show, adding temporal layers to the stories. The Adventures of Supergirl vol. 1 (2016) also depict the battles of the girl of steel between episodes, as well as her life with her sister, Alex (who is also a new addition in the comic book), and her co-workers at the DEO. For Arrow,the digital tie-ins offer producers [opportunities] to explore side stories they are unable to cover on screen. In the case of Season 2.5, the 22-chapter comic enabled the producers to fill in the blanks in between the seasons, thus offering more opportunities to explore the dynamics of fan-favorite characters such as Felicity and Diggle. (Bourdaa and Chin 183)These DC comic books are examples of giving life to a TV show beyond the TV screen, enhancing the timeframe of the stories and providing new content. The characters pass through the screen to live new adventures in comic books. In some cases, the involvement of the series' actor and writer in comic book scripting confirms the desire for consistency in the extensions of the series, whatever the medium used and whatever the objectives.Canon Divergent Extensions or the Real PossibilitiesFinally, comic books can deploy stories that will display a new point of view on the canon: a “multiplicity” (Jenkins, “La Licorne”) or a “what-if story” (Mittell), which will explore new possibilities and new characters.The second series of Orphan Black comic book tie-ins entitled Helsinki (2016) dealt with clones in the capital of Finland. The readers discover the lives of other clones, how they deal with the discovery of their “condition,” and that they have a caretaker. The comics are written by John Fawcett, who is also a showrunner for the series. The narrative universe is stretched into new possibilities, seen with new eyes, and shown from the perspective of new clones. The introduction of new characters gives opportunities to tell new stories and diverge from the canonical content, especially in terms of the characters’ development and depth.Battlestar Galactica, after the show ended, partnered once again with Dynamite Entertainment, to publish a new set of comic books entitled BSG: Ghosts (2009), which tells the story of new characters surviving the Cylon genocide. Writer Brandon Jerwa asks in BSG: Ghosts: "And if a squadron of secret agents had also survived Cylon Attack?" For him, comic books are a good opportunity to relaunch the narrative universe by introducing new characters in a well-known storyworld.The comic books will definitely have to evolve in order to survive because at some point we will end up exhausting the interest of the readers on the narrative continuity. Projects like Ghosts are definitely a good way to test public reaction to new ideas in a familiar environment. (Jerwa)Conclusion: From One Medium to the Next, From Narrative Extensions to MarketingThis article offers an overview of how comic books are used as tie-in products to extend TV series’ narrative universe. The ambition was not to give an exhaustive panorama but to propose a typology with some examples. I showed that characters’ development, temporalities, and new points of view are narrative angles exploited in comic books to give depth to a storyworld. Of course, this raises issues of labour, authorship, and canon content, which are already discussed elsewhere (see, for example: Clarke, Pillai, Scott). Yet, comic books are an integral part of transmedia storytelling and capitalise on notions of seriality, offering readers new stories, continuity, depth, and character motivations in order to enrich storylines and make them live beyond the screen. However, Robert Napton, in our interview, underlines an interesting opposition between licensing and marketing: “Frankly, comic books are considered licensing and marketing, not official canon. The only TV comic that is canon is Buffy Season 8 and 9 because Joss Whedon says they are, but that is not the normal situation.” He clearly draws a line between what he considers to be a licensed product, in this article what I describe as canonical content, and a marketing product, which could be understood in this article as a canon divergent tie-in. The debate here is clearly on, since understandings of transmedia vary between the perspectives of production companies, which are trying to gain profit by providing new content, the perspectives of fans, who know the storyworlds and the characters extensively and could be very possessive of them, and the perspectives of extension authors, who “have very strict story guidelines” (Jerwa) and have to make their stories fit within the narrative universe as it is told onscreen.ReferencesBertetti, Paolo. “Towards a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2344-2361.Boni, Marta. World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “Transmedia Storytelling: Entre Narration Augmentée et Logiques Immersives.” InaGlobal (2012). 16 December 2017 <http://www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/le-transmedia-entre-narration-augmentee-et-logiques-immersives>.Bourdaa, Mélanie, and Bertha Chin. “World and Fandom Building: Extending the Universe of Arrow in Arrow 2.5.” Arrow and Superhero Television: Essays on Themes and Characters of the Series. Eds. James F. Iaccino, Cory Barker, and Myc Wiatrowski. Jefferson: MacFarland, 2017.Clarke, M.J. Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production. New York: Continuum Publishing, 2013.Derhy Kurtz, WL Benjamin, and Mélanie Bourdaa. The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities. London: Routledge, 2016.Freeman, Matthew. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London: Routledge, 2017.Gabriel, Nicole, Bogna Kazur, and Kai Matuszkiewicz. “Reconsidering Transmedia(l) Worlds.” Convergence Culture Reconsidered: Media—Participation—Environments. Eds. Claudia Georgi and Brigitte Johanna Glaser. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2015.Gillan, Jennifer. Television and New Media: Must-Click TV. New York: Routledge, 2010.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.Jenkins, Henry. “I Have Seen the Future of Entertainment… And It Works.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2008. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2008/10/i_have_seen_the_futures_of_ent.html>.Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Education: The 7 Principles Revisited.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2010. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2010/06/transmedia_education_the_7_pri.html>.Jenkins, Henry. “La Licorne Origami Contre-attaque: Réflexions Plus Poussées sur le transmedia storytelling.” Terminal 10-11 (2013): 11-28. <http://journals.openedition.org/terminal/455>.Jerwa, Brandon. Personal Correspondence. 2013.Johnson, Derek. “A History of Transmedia Entertainment.” Spreadable Media: Web Exclusive Essays. <http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.Wo6g24IiGgQ>.Maigret, Eric, and Matteo Stefanelli. La Bande Dessinée: Une Médiaculture. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012.McDuffee, Keith. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, Part 1. Season premiere. 2007. <http://www.aoltv.com/2007/03/16/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-the-long-way-home-season-premiere/.>.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015.Napton, Robert. Personal Correspondence. 2013.Pagello, Federico. “Before the Comics: On Seriality of Graphic Narratives during the Nineteenth Century.” Belphégor 14 (2016). <http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/810>.Pillai, Nicolas. “What Am I Looking at Mulder?: Licensed Comics and Freedoms of Transmedia Storytelling.” Science Fiction and Television 6.1 (2013): 101-117.Scott, Jason. “The Character-Orientated Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913–1950.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (2009): 10–28.

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. 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