Journal articles on the topic 'French Creole poetry'

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

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

In the article, the characteristics and manifestations of post-colonial Kazakh poetry are analysed based on the concept of “minor literature” introduced by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to the field of social sciences and postmodern discourse. During the period of the Soviet Union, that is, in the understanding of colonialism, the literature of the colonised peoples was always considered as someone else's literature, and the author himself was excluded and considered as “another person”. Even after independence, these complexes continued on literary/cultural/political basis. As a result, the image of the typical writer in literary texts, works, language, style, political content and collective discourse has undergone significant changes. This article analyses these and other changes in post-colonial Kazakh poetry in the context of minor literature. Focusing on the works of Kazakh poets, including Turmanbay Moldagaliyev's poems written after independence, and poets such as Yesengali Raushanov, Bakhytzhan Kanapiyanov, Meirkhan Akdauletuly, Temirkhan Medetbek, Bakhyt Kenzheev, it draws attention to the deterritorialisation of the language and the transformation of the Kazakh language into a creole language and the political and collective discourse of literary works. Within the framework of these studies, the psychological impact of colonialism and emancipation tendencies in post-colonial Kazakh society and political and social issues were evaluated through literary texts.

Malagasy literary production has long displayed a discourse with Madagascar’s unique environment, often linking this with an exploration of island identity. This article examines and compares poetic writing in Madagascar across 350 years. It studies the anti-colonial prose poems of eighteenth-century white creole poet Évariste Parny alongside early twentieth-century poems of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, who brings French Symbolism into contact with traditional Malagasy verse, and lyrical poetry by the musicians in the modern folk-pop band Mahaleo, who bring a mixture of traditions to a unique Malagasy style of music. Parny, Rabearivelo, and Mahaleo all build on and break with generic convention of poetic form, and all do so to draw attention to the island’s specific experience of ecological colonial violence and to their interpretation of eco-regional identity. Their writings help us make sense of the ecological changes in Madagascar during and after colonisation, and of the human response to these changes.

-Stanley L. Engerman, Heather Cateau ,Capitalism and slavery fifty years later: Eric Eustace Williams - A reassessment of the man and his work. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. xvii + 247 pp., S.H.H. Carrington (eds)-Philip D. Morgan, B.W. Higman, Writing West Indian histories. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1999. xiv + 289 pp.-Daniel Vickers, Alison Games, Migration and the origins of the English Atlantic world. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. xiii + 322 pp.-Christopher L. Brown, Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, An empire divided: The American revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. xviii + 357 pp.-Lennox Honychurch, Samuel M. Wilson, The indigenous people of the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. xiv + 253 pp.-Kenneth Bilby, Bev Carey, The Maroon story: The authentic and original history of the Maroons in the history of Jamaica 1490-1880. St. Andrew, Jamaica: Agouti Press, 1997. xvi + 656 pp.-Bernard Moitt, Doris Y. Kadish, Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone world: Distant voices, forgotten acts, forged identities. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. xxiii + 247 pp.-Michael J. Guasco, Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. xviii + 316 pp.-Michael J. Jarvis, Roger C. Smith, The maritime heritage of the Cayman Islands. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xxii + 230 pp.-Paul E. Hoffman, Peter R. Galvin, Patterns of pillage: A geography of Caribbean-based piracy in Spanish America, 1536-1718. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. xiv + 271 pp.-David M. Stark, Raúl Mayo Santana ,Cadenas de esclavitud...y de solidaridad: Esclavos y libertos en San Juan,siglo XIX. Río Piedras: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997. 204 pp., Mariano Negrón Portillo, Manuel Mayo López (eds)-Ada Ferrer, Philip A. Howard, Changing history: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and societies of color in the nineteenth century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. xxii + 227 pp.-Alvin O. Thompson, Maurice St. Pierre, Anatomy of resistance: Anti-colonialism in Guyana 1823-1966. London: Macmillan, 1999. x + 214 pp.-Linda Peake, Barry Munslow, Guyana: Microcosm of sustainable development challenges. Aldershot, U.K. and Brookfield VT: Ashgate, 1998. x + 130 pp.-Stephen Stuempfle, Peter Mason, Bacchanal! The carnival culture of Trinidad. Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, 1998. 191 pp.-Christine Chivallon, Catherine Benoît, Corps, jardins, mémoires: Anthropologie du corps et de l' espace à la Guadeloupe. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000. 309 pp.-Katherine E. Browne, Mary C. Waters, Black identities: Wsst Indian immigrant dreams and American realities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. xvii + 413 pp.-Eric Paul Roorda, Bernardo Vega, Los Estados Unidos y Trujillo - Los días finales: 1960-61. Colección de documentos del Departamento de Estado, la CIA y los archivos del Palacio Nacional Dominicano. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1999. xx+ 783 pp.-Javier Figueroa-de Cárdenas, Charles D. Ameringer, The Cuban democratic experience: The Auténtico years, 1944-1952. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. ix + 230 pp.-Robert Lawless, Charles T. Williamson, The U.S. Naval mission to Haiti, 1959-1963. Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999. xv + 395 pp.-Noel Leo Erskine, Arthur Charles Dayfoot, The shaping of the West Indian Church, 1492-1962. Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies; Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xvii + 360 pp.-Edward Baugh, Laurence A. Breiner, An introduction to West Indian poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxii + 261 pp.-Lydie Moudileno, Heather Hathaway, Caribbean waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xi + 201 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Claudette M. Williams, Charcoal and cinnamon: The politics of color in Spanish Caribbean literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xii + 174 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Marie Ramos Rosado, La mujer negra en la literatura puertorriqueña: Cuentística de los setenta: (Luis Rafael Sánchez, Carmelo Rodríguez Torres, Rosario Ferré y Ana Lydia Vega). San Juan: Ed. de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ed. Cultural, and Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1999. xxiv + 397 pp.-William W. Megenney, John H. McWhorter, The missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the birth of plantation contact languages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi + 281 pp.-Robert Chaudenson, Chris Corne, From French to Creole: The development of New Vernaculars in the French colonial world. London: University of Westminster Press, 1999. x + 263 pp.

Aligned with global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and multidisciplinary approaches integrating AI with sustainability, this research introduces an innovative AI framework for analyzing Modern French Poetry. It applies feature extraction techniques (TF-IDF and Doc2Vec) and machine learning algorithms (especially SVM) to create a model that objectively classifies poems by their stylistic and thematic attributes, transcending traditional subjective analyses. This work demonstrates AI’s potential in literary analysis and cultural exchange, highlighting the model’s capacity to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and enhance poetry education. The efficiency of the AI model, compared to traditional methods, shows promise in optimizing resources and reducing the environmental impact of education. Future research will refine the model’s technical aspects, ensuring effectiveness, equity, and personalization in education. Expanding the model’s scope to various poetic styles and genres will enhance its accuracy and generalizability. Additionally, efforts will focus on an equitable AI tool implementation for quality education access. This research offers insights into AI’s role in advancing poetry education and contributing to sustainability goals. By overcoming the outlined limitations and integrating the model into educational platforms, it sets a path for impactful developments in computational poetry and educational technology.

Born in Calcutta in 1856 and dying only twenty-one years later of tuberculosis, the young Bengali writer Toru Dutt wrote novels and poems in English and French, translated French poetry into English, and toward the end of her life revisited Bengali myths and tales from the Ramayana in her poetry. Her multilingual poems and translations have traditionally been interpreted as seeking to dissolve or fragment cultural differences. This essay instead argues for Dutt seeking to consolidate difference, reconceived as possibility: by distributing her poems to friends in England and receiving gifts of poems in return, Dutt sought to create a transnational friendship economy involving the material exchange of poetic texts. She then theorises this exchange in the work itself, arguing in novels, poems and inexact translations for regarding the resistant materiality of poetry and language both as imperfect tools that can nonetheless be utilised to forge community and understanding – however utopian, however fragile and temporary – across seemingly incommensurable cultural differences, perhaps even across the inequities of imperial history.

This paper analyses the essay entitled "The Word as a Principle" by Yvan Goll (1891-1950), published in Zenit (Issue 9, November 1921), which shows the non European tendency of Avant-garde poetics. In his text, Goll emphasises the need to create a new form of poetry quoting the verses of the Japanese poet Daigaku Horiguchi (1892-1981), one of the most important Japanese poets and translators of the last century. As the son of a distinguished diplomat, a rare bilingual poet among the Japanese at the time, he published poems in French and Japanese. After reviewing research on Zenit conducted in Japan so far, the first part of this paper determines the original text of the mentioned poem. In December 1921, Horiguchi published in Paris his first collection of Tankas in French. The foreword to it was written by the famous French poet Paul Fort (1872-1960). Goll, however, did not take it from there, but from the manuscript of his anthology Les Cinq Continents, which was published in Paris in 1922. The chosen song by Horiguchi is not traditional, but shows a new poetic spirit. Although it was written in five lines, which is reminiscent of the tanka form (5; 7; 5; 7; 7), the poet introduced a new topic: how the Japanese feel in a foreign country. In order to clarify the nature of Goll's connection with Horiguchi, a detailed description of Horiguchi's life is given, focusing on his stay abroad from 1911 to 1925. It can be seen from his biography that the meeting with the French painter Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) in Madrid in 1915 marked Horiguchi's poetic turn: his interest shifted from the poetics of symbolism to the Avant-garde, as the painter introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire's (1880-1918) poetry. After staying in foreign countries (Mexico, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Brazil and Romania), when he returned to Japan in 1925, Horiguchi published the Crowd under the Moon anthology, which contains translations of French songs from Parnassians to Avant-garde poets, including Yvan Goll. Although no traces of their connection can be established, it is clear that they both felt poetically related and close, with mutual respect. Finally, Goll's understanding of Japanese poetry in the context of Avant-garde poetics is considered in comparison with Miloš Crnjanski's essay entitled "For Free Verse" (1922), which also mentions Japanese poetry. While Goll emphasises the simplicity and conciseness of Japanese poetry, Crnjanski points to the improvisation as its significant feature. While Goll is searching for new poetry that is in line with living fast in the high-tech society, Crnjanski sees the everlasting connection of man with nature, which Japanese poetry is all about.

The aim of the study is to provide a typological description of the lyric poetry of A. Tastu. The genre-thematic aspect, which is given predominant attention in the article, is not accidental because it allows us to judge the innovation or traditionality of the texts, the degree of the author’s involvement in the contemporary literary process. Transitional stages between significant literary phenomena (precisely the period during which A. Tastu was forming and beginning to create) are of special interest to the researcher as they allow to observe the disappearance, transformation, or preservation of old traditions. The stages provide insight into the types of artists in demand during that time, as well as an understanding of their value. Figures representing transitional periods generally do not enjoy much popularity, as the audiences tend to favour those who embody completed and cohesive periods. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the systematic consideration of the lyrical works of this remarkable French poetess in a typological aspect for the first time, ultimately allowing for the understanding of the role and significance of A. Tastu in her contemporary poetry. The obtained results suggest that the lyrical legacy of the French poetess includes works related not only to the phenomena being contemporary for the author (romantic texts), but also those connected with preceding epochs, spanning various stages such as the poetry of the 18th century, the First Empire, and the early Restoration period. Tastu’s universalism turns her work into a unique anthology of lyrical traditions spanning over a century.

Surrealism, the XX century literature and art movement, inspired an impressive number of scientific research regarding different aspects of the phenomenon. This paper studies surrealism as a type of artistic thinking which raised the role of the unconscious in poetry. It focuses on the core of surrealist aesthetics – an automatic image, which allowed the poets to study human irrational states, such as dreams. Focusing on the themes of dreams and dream-like narrations, surrealists created poetry which was formed by specific images. An automatic image coming directly from one’s unconscious mind was expected to reveal new knowledge about the world and people. But as the poet ’functions’ only as a conductor of the unconscious images, it is the reader who has to create meanings in this kind of poetry.The paper regards surrealism in terms of a lingvo-poetic experiment and analyzes the linguistic characteristics of the automatic texts in the early poetic collection of David Gascoyne (1916–2001). It outlines the peculiarities of the British poet’s techniques which are built upon French surrealist concepts and theories and examines phonetic, semantic and syntactic aspects of his poetry. David Gascoyne’s lyrics demonstrates the poet’s commitment to the French version of surrealism, his interest in the unconscious and dream-like narration. The streams of arbitrary visual images, deep emotionality, the artistic use of the word, semantic increments of meaning make Gascoigne’s texts open to interpretation. And though the poet actually refers visual effects (we rather see dreams), specific dream-like patterns are created not only by lexical, but also by phonetic repetitions, via intonation in which lexemes acquire a new semantic load.

The article is devoted to the rhythms of French Baroque poetry, which are considered as an important source of emotional expressiveness in the dances of that time period. One example chosen is the Sarabande, as presented in the genres of the chanson à danser and the danse chantée by French composers of the 17th and the early 18th centuries. Special attention is given to the so-called unbalanced phrasing of poems, which leads to the emergence of ‘passionate rhythms.’ Their expressiveness was stipulated by the three types of accents present in the French spoken language — the grammatical, the logical and the pathetic (oratorical), which, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, create an impact on musical intonation and are important for composers who write music in dance forms. The equivalents of the grammatical accents, which mark the open or the closed sounds, as well as the brevity vs. the length of the syllables, are presented by the downbeats and the offbeats of the measures. The logical accents indicate the connections and relationships of the expressed thoughts uttered in the sentences of speech. The pathetic, or oratorical accents express the feelings of the speaker and communicate them to the listeners.

Abstract In competing with Rabelais’ French novel Garguanta, the German author Fischart aims to illustrate the richness of the German language and its poetry in his comic novel Geschichtklitterung. Focusing on the second chapter of this text, which has so far been viewed as nothing more than an absurd play on language, this article offers a new interpretation and demonstrates how the German author stylizes himself as a poeta vates in his Pantagruelian prophecy and presents himself as a being purified by wine in his poem “Glucktratrara”. In the end, inspired by Apollo and the Muses, he seems to create an epic poem praising both Germans and the German language.

Abstract The French physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet was the author of an impressive quantity of writings, including novels and poetry. He was an out-and-out eugenicist, convinced that “intentional, conscious, scientific, and methodical” selection could achieve “any result, provided we have enough patience.” He believed that the quantitative and qualitative growth of the population was of vital importance for France. In La sélection humaine (1919) and other writings, he dreamt of conscious selection to create “intellectual élites.” This process would be crowned by the production of a “higher human nature, a real surhumanité.” A staunch believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Richet combined Darwinism and Lamarckism.

Lewis’s “effort of the historical imagination” in The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition—commensurate with his innate romanticism—bolstered by like-minded writers as his sources, resulted in his reconstructing of Courtly Love and its characters as a fantasy. While this approach limited his understanding of Courtly Love, its origins and its relationship to marriage and adultery, it allowed him to create a mythology of a Religion of Love: a “quasi-religion” of “service love” between a chevalier/poet and his sovereign lady, under the auspices of the god Amor. This view would elevate the medieval Anglo-French allegorical poem, which he will discuss in the following chapters of his book, as the foundation of the best of poetry that led to Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, his favorite poet.

The given article deals with investigation of the poem of a French poet-romantic, A. de Vinji «The Death of a Wolf». The author of the article analyses the images of the animals in the poem and artistic devices of their realization. The main topics and problematics of this literary work are viewed both in the context of A. de Vinji’s creative work and in the context of European Romanticism. The given article deals with investigation of the poem of a French poet-romantic, A. de Vigny ’The Death of a Wolf’. The author of the article analyses animal images in the poem and the means of artistic embodiment of the latter. The main topics and problematics of this literary work are considered both in the context of A. de Vigny’ s creative work and in the context of European Romanticism. The poetic work of A. de Vigny begins in 1816 and continues throughout his life. It should be noted that the distinctive peculiarity of de Vigny’s poetry is its all-pervading disbelief both in bourgeois society and in the Restoration Regime, which was trying to save the remnants of the feudal system. The poet has in mind the whole ephemerality of the desire of the nobility to drag out the course of history and return the pre-revolutionary sociopolitical system. That is why Vigny’s poetry is imbued with the utmost skepticism and pessimism. Hence, from this rejection of modernity, the character of de Vigny’s plots and images derives. As the literary critic T. V. Bovsunevskaya emphasizes: “Romantics had to synthesize a new, Renaissance type of person, but in such a way that he reflected the features of a new era and professed a new spirit.” De Vigny was looking for such a hero all his creative life; however, his hero will always be a lonely, misunderstood person, in a state of deepest conflict both with society and often with himself. It should be noted that de Vigny’s poetry is inherently deeply personal and lyrical, and in its external form it is emphatically epic and philosophical. Vigny himself argued that if he was ahead of his contemporaries in some way, it was in the ability to create philosophical poetry. The poet wraps in the form of a mythological or historical parable, an ancient plot such problems as the fatal loneliness of a genius, the impotence of a person in front of a cruel and blind deity, the suffering of the innocent. Thus, another feature of his poetry is also manifested — its being alien to topicality. The poet finds out the relationship not with his age, but with history in general, with God, with fate. In the later period of his work, the theme ’poet and society’ often sounds.

This paper investigates the translation strategies used while translating Sia’s lyrics intitled Unstoppable into French. It aims at identifying the translation strategies used while translating the selected lyrics into French in order to determine the most suitable strategies for lyrics translation on the one hand and provide a new interpretation for the selected lyrics on the other hand. The theories that underpin this work are Levefere (1975)’s strategies of poetry translation and Baker (1992)’s strategies for non-equivalence at word level. A mixed method has helped the researcher identify and analyze the translation strategies used in the French version of the selected lyrics. The study reveals different proportions of translation strategies: metrical translation 42%, interpretation 38%, rhymed translation 8%, phonemic translation 8% and literal translation 4% following Levefere (1975)’ theory on the one hand. On the other hand, the study reveals following Baker (1992)’s theory, paraphrase using related words 58%, paraphrase using unrelated words 25% and omission 17%. It has been observed that metrical translation strategy is the most suitable for song translation since the translator needs to respect not only the original meter and rhythm but also the melody. This explains the high use of metrical translation strategy. The strategy of interpretation helps the translator create new forms in the target language basing on her own understandings, cultures and styles for the purpose of conveying adapted meanings from the original ones.

Despite frequent attempts to explain the emergence of a coherent type of polyphonic song in the early 14th century, our understanding is dominated by views drawn from lyric poetry, romance, criticism of musical and literary register, traditions of performance, and other abstract conceptualizations of this remarkable moment in the history of music. But there exists an extensive body of musical evidence that points to an energetic and sophisticated experimentation with musical and poetic elements that anticipated the style of polyphonic song cultivated by Machaut and his contemporaries. One such experimental repertory consists of the 22 motets based on vernacular tenors copied into the seventh and eighth fascicles of the Montpellier Codex (F-MOf H 196) and in the Turin motet book (I-Tr vari 42) ca.1300. The vernacular tenors that underpin these motets exhibit the types of repeating structures familiar from secular monody around 1300: six- and eight-line rondeaux and various other types of structure as described by Ludwig, Gennrich, and Walker. What has been less systematically explored is the degree to which the upper voices of the motets reflect the repetitions that characterize their tenors. The composers of these motets were attempting——within the stylistic restraints that the genre imposed on them——to create polyphonic works whose entire texture followed the structure of the tenor: in other words, to construct a musical entity that had much in common with the polyphonic song of the next generation, but that still retained the overlapping phrase patterns and poetic line length of the motet as had been traditional for nearly a century.

This study compares the features of poetry works of Victor Hugo from the Romantic Movement to those of Alfred Lord Tennyson from the Victorian Age of literature who lived in cutting age of the two periods of literature. These two ages experienced great expansion of industrial and agricultural revolutions, expansion of British as a super power nation with many colonies and the French revolution which to a great extent influenced the writings of these authors. Romanticism style of portraying themes of imagination, natural beauty and individual emotions over reasoning and sense of intellect influenced the poets of the age of Victorian literature though they still addressed the problems of the Victorian age. Both poets composed short and long poems, used description and sentimental styles, used nature metaphorically to create imagery and describe the emotions of appreciating beauty of the nature and reflecting peoples struggle in different situations of life.Key words: Literature of the Romantic period, literature of the Victorian Age, Victor Hugo,Alfred Tennyson.

This article is part of a deeper study of the phenomenon of "picto-poetry" on the example of Paul Eluard and Man Ray's collection "Free Hands". The article proves the intermediality hypothesis of a collection based on the history of its creation, where the two types of arts not only complement each other, but merge into one, creating new forms and genres of French poetry. The purpose of the study is to determine the nature and imagery of the interaction of visual and verbal codes of artistic reality in the collection "Free Hands", as well as to identify the basic features of the composition " in four hands" on the example of the frontispiece of the collection. Research methods: descriptive, structural and semantic analysis methods that allow the identification of relationships between different sign systems (visual, plastic, etc.). The main feature of Paul Eluard and Man Ray's picto-poetic collection "Free Hands", in the preface to which P. Eluard outlined the principles of a single picto-poetic reproduction of the world, is the special principle of organizing the artistic space, when graphic realities also become "literary text", and the poetic text and its graphic "second voice" cannot be interpreted separately. The multi-layered and heterogeneous internal connections in the texts and graphics of authors serve as a form of reproduction of the underlying processes that take place in the human psyche, and the texts of Eluard create visual metaphors that resemble dreams.

The best manifestation of rebel romanticist poetry is in the works of Byron in England, H. Heine – in Germany, J. Leopard – in Italy, N. Baratashvili – in Georgia, A. Mickie-wicz – in Poland. However, the socio-political situation of the country somewhat de-fined the nature of romanticism. The rebellious Romanticists put the following issues on the agenda: criticism of the bourgeois order, aspiration from singularity to gen-eral, thus they confronted rationalism, the attitude to ideal and reality, development of new literary genres, collecting, processing and publication of literary and folklore works. As a science the history of the world literature was founded, which is derived from Goethe. Although Goethe called romantic sick, and classical – healthy, in doing so, he literally acknowledged that common trends could be reflected in the literary processes of other peoples independently or influenced by those who have common values and gave impetus to development of the issues of globalization and cultural integration. The fusion of personal, national and universal has led to revolutionary shifts in the literary world. However, the French critic F. Brunetiere calls this an evolutionary method in literature (“The Evolution of lyric poetry in France in the XIX century”). The question is how to review Romanticism, as an expression of rebel ideas or as an evolutionary process. We think that Romanticism in its essence includes both, because the society that lacks a sense of protest cannot develop and cannot create values.

Summary This article examines the relationship between literary practice and literary criticism in Polish late Neoclassicism in the work of Euzebiusz Słowacki, who combined the roles of writer and critic in a way not untypical at that time. Born in 1773, he made his reputation as a playwright, literary critic, poet and translator, and in 1811 became Professor of Poetry and Elocution at the University of Wilno. First, the article sets out to prove that both his literary work and his criticism are greatly indebted to the late eighteenth-century doctrine of taste, of which he wrote at length himself. The second part is concerned with a comparison of his theoretical reflections about tragedy and his own tragedies. The analysis of their form shows that Euzebiusz Słowacki not only strove to scale the ultimate tragic heights but also to create a Polish version of the neoclassic tragedy. His tragedy follows the best French and ancient models - especially Racine (whom he probably translated into Polish) - but also questions them in a way which shows that Słowacki was no mere imitator.

The age of Louis XIV was an age of contrasts. It was fond of spectacle and ostentation, typified in the great fêtes of Versailles, yet it is rightly known as ‘l'époque classique’, characterised by order and decorum. Its greatest playwright was Jean Racine, whose eleven tragedies had only the barest of sets, presented one action in one place during a maximum of twenty-four hours, chose subjects from history or mythology that featured only mortal characters in easily believable situations, relegated violence and other unseemly behaviour to the wings and to descriptions (récits), and used a limited, noble vocabulary to explore the depths of the human condition and to create poetry of extraordinary beauty. However, in 1673, during the peak of Racine's career, Quinault and Lully created French opera (tragédie lyrique), which, while also using a limited, noble vocabulary, featured spectacular sets and costumes for each act, allowed subplots (even comic ones in the first three operas), staged battles, storms and divine interventions, eschewed historical characters, and presented simpler situations and characterisations in order to leave time for music and dance.

В статье рассматриваются песни Полины Виардо, имеющие несколько вариантов текста на разных языках; определяется роль, которую сыграл Иван Тургенев в композиторском творчестве певицы, а также обосновывается гипотеза о влиянии музыки Виардо на выполненные для нее Тургеневым поэтические переводы. В качестве необходимого контекста излагается информация о художественном кружке, сложившемся в Баден-Бадене в 1860-е годы вокруг семьи Виардо и Тургенева, а также об изданиях песен Виардо в России, Германии и Франции. Специфические требования Тургенева к переводу текстов песен выясняются путем анализа его переписки с Фридрихом фон Боденштедтом. Заключительный раздел статьи содержит подробный разбор взаимодействия музыки и слова в двух песнях Виардо: «Синица» на стихи Тургенева и «In der FrChe» на стихи Эдуарда Мёрике («На заре» в переводе Тургенева). Как показывает автор статьи, Виардо удалось тонкими музыкальными приемами подчеркнуть экзистенциальные глубины стихотворения Тургенева, оставшиеся без внимания его переводчиков на немецкий и французский языки. В то же время Тургенев, переводя миниатюрный шедевр Мёрике, не просто вдохновлялся музыкой Виардо, но принял под впечатлением от нее важные художественные решения, которые помогли ему эксплицировать христианские смыслы, заложенные немецким поэтом, и создать конгениальное оригиналу произведение. The article examines the songs by Pauline Viardot, which have several versions in different languages, determines the role Ivan Turgenev played in the musical compositions by the singer, and substantiates the hypothesis of the influence of Viardot's music on the poetic translations made for her by Turgenev. As a necessary context, the information is provided about the artistic circle that developed in Baden-Baden in the 1860s around the Viardot family and Turgenev, as well as about the publications of Viardot's songs in Russia, Germany and France. Turgenev's specific requirements for the translation of song lyrics are clarified by analysing his correspondence with Friedrich von Bodenstedt. The final section of the article contains a detailed analysis of the interaction of music and poetry in two songs by Viardot: “The Tit” (“Sinitsa,” in Turgenev's text) and “In der Frühe” by Eduard Mörike (“Na zare,” in Turgenev's translation). As shown by the author, Viardot succeeded in using subtle musical devices to emphasize the existential depths of Turgenev's poem, which were ignored by its translators in German and French. At the same time, when translating Mörike's miniature masterpiece, Turgenev was not only inspired by Viardot's music, but under its influence, he made important artistic decisions that helped him explicate the Christian dimension of the original and create a congenial work.

The article studies reception of the work of Alexander Fredro, the comedy playwright in the Ukrainian Galician theater culture. the sources of his artistic development and, at the same time, the reasons that led to the completion of the publication of new works almost at the peak stage of his creative burning. Already in the first quarter of the 19th century, the dramaturgy of Alexander Fredro gradually turned Galicia into a center of Polish culture. The article ex- amines the peculiarities of the psychology of creativity, the transformation and creative development of the playwright: from children’s plays to juvenile obscene poetry during the Napoleonic Wars, and then to comedies. Fredro’s comedies are not a theater of characters, schematized and precisely outlined by the classicist cutter of stylistic devices. These figures go beyond the boundaries of schematism. Fredro moves away from presenting his characters as special human types, unambiguous in their weaknesses and passions. His char- acters are alive and complete – even in their pettiness, worthless passions and the neediness of their ideals and aspirations. All this makes them real. Together they create a great theater of the life of Galicia. S. Goszczyński really insisted: the cosmopolitanism of A. Fredro’s comedies can be seen from the fact that his heroes are not national characters: they are borrowed from French classical comedy and linguistically stylized according to French ease. He was the last prophet of Clas- sicism, who heralds the dawn of Romanticism, destroying the poetics of classicist comedy, laying bridges and paving new ways of development for comedy. The Ukrainian Galician theatre, which began to form somewhat later than the Polish theater in Galicia, was not interested in A. Fredro’s comedies. The most important reason for this is the huge gap between the mental and cultural spaces of the Poles and Ukrainians of Galicia. The world of Fredro’s comedies is often a timeless world of aristocratic courtyards and city residences, aristocratic families with their values, traditions and ideas of the noble people of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In the second half of the 16th century, Europe was a stage of various political, military, religious and cultural actions, which took place as a result of the occurrence of larger processes, such as counter-reformation, or they were an impulse for change themselves. Such a situation took place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when the last male representative of the Jagiellonian dynasty died without an heir in 1572. The result of this event was the exciting political game for the Polish crown, and the winner was Henry III, the young prince d’Anjou, son of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, whose election in 1573 opened a new chapter in the Polish statehood.Three months after the election ,Polish emissaries stood at the gates of Paris to bow to the new king, present him with conditions for taking the throne and bring him to Poland where his coronation was to be held in Cracow. Polish legation was awaited in the French capital city and a grand welcoming was prepared for them – the welcoming was to be the first of several celebrations constituting a monumental ceremony of proclamation of Henry III as King of Poland. The present article discusses the stages of Parisian celebrations held in August and September 1573 with their artistic setting. It was arranged and performed by a numer of ourstanding artists representing different fields of art: architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, music, choreography and dance, and the artists we should mention are Orlando di Lasso, Jean Dorat, Antoine Caron and Germain Pillon. The setting (among other elements) consisted of occasional architectural decorations with complementary visual and inscriptive material, acrobatic shows, and dancing and drama performances, which – thanks to their sophisticated symbolism – were an important tool to create the image of the new king.

The work considers traditional use of the term “saga” meaning the quantum of the Old Irish epic narrative, in Russian and European research. The correlation of the Russian term’s saga semantics with the English and French (saga) as well as German (die Sage) usages of the notion in scholarly texts describing the same denotates is also analyzed. The comparison with the semantic field of the original term scél, having “story, tale” as one of its meanings, is conducted. The work also attempts at singling out certain formal features making it possible to relate some Old Irish prose narrative to “saga” (in contrast with historical tales, prose texts on legal subjects et al.). As a working hypothesis the author suggests to single out the four aspects: 1) the presence of the initial formula referring to the oral stage of the narrative tradition; 2) the presence of a character’s long descriptions of ekphrastic type; 3) the presence of unjustified use of the Present Tense (the so-called Scenic Present); 4) the presence of verse insertions marking characters’ emotional speech yet not regarded as poetry proper. It is supposed that the three latter aspects should create the described events’ epic visualization. As the time passes traditional Irish narrative prose loses those aspects, neither are they preserved in the oral folklore tradition. To sum up, the conclusion concerning the term’s “saga” relative quality as a mediaeval genre is made, and the necessity to appeal to the researcher’s intuition is pointed out.

“L’écriture m’a conduit au silence,” admitted Samuel Beckett to Charles Juliet in Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett (21). ‘Comment dire,’ his last written poem, was first published in 1989 and summarises a lifetime exercise of self-expression beyond the limits of language and time. Indeed, it was originally written in French only a year before Beckett died, devoid of a great deal of his communicative abilities. Thus, this poem represents a sort of literary testament (Carriedo 50) resonant of both his literary career and personal life. In fact, its misleading austerity reveals a challenging area of work for the translator to draw on the original text to create his/her own poetic interpretation. In Spanish- speaking countries, Beckett’s poetry has not been given as much prominence as his other works. However, there is evidence of three translations of ‘Comment dire,’ which thereafter demonstrates a surprising interest in Beckett’s late poetic production: Laura Cerrato’s ‘Cómo decir’ (1990), Loreto Casado’s version within Quiebros y Poemas (1998), and Jenaro Talens’ own interpretation in Obra poética completa (2000). The main objective of this paper is to comment on the essential convergences and disparities found in these translations and therefore to identify mutual sources of interest in Beckett’s original poem. I will also observe the predominant strategies they have chosen in translating ‘Comment dire’ on the basis of two fundamental parameters: creative freedom and respect for Beckettian standards founded on the poetics of silence.

This article traces two types of commentaries on the myth of Narcissus (Ovid, The Metamorphoses, III), which existed in the Middle Ages in French literature in the vernacular — the courtly and the moral and allegorical. The first type of commentary is represented by individual works in which this myth is mentioned (“The Lay of Narcissus”, “The Romance of the Rose”, “The Book of Love Chess” by Evrart de Conty). In these, Ovid’s personage is treated as a violator of Amor’s laws; consequently, he takes on the traits of the “Belle Dame sans merci”. Commentaries of the second kind, such as the poetic and prose versions of “Moralized Ovid” (Ovide moralisé), interpret the figure of Narcissus as the embodiment of the Christian sin of pride, and of Echo as the good name disregarded by the proud man. This second type of commentary fragments the text of the “Metamorphoses” into separate stories and personages, each with its own allegorical meaning. The figure of Narcissus and the story of his death becomes a didactic exemplum that can be used in a sermon. In addition, by the early 15th century, such commentaries had been adopted into treatises on poetry (seconde rhétorique) and poetics (poetria, poetic fiction). In them, Narcissus becomes a rhetorical figure destined to create poetic works of high style. The logical conclusion of this process of fragmentation, which is also embodied in the miniatures of illuminated manuscripts, is the appearance in the 16th century of a new form which Ovid’s poem takes, the form of a collection of emblems.

Statement of the problem. The creative activity by Florent Schmitt (1870–1958) took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when such stars of French music as C. Debussy, M. Ravel, and later the composers of the French “Six” group shone brightly. Therefore, Schmitt’s work remained in their shadow – among the performers of his piano works you will not find “big” names like V. Horowitz or G. Gould; nevertheless, in the last decade, the composer’s opuses have been increasingly included in the repertoire of foreign pianists. For example, Vincent Larderet (France), Ivo Kalchev (Bulgaria), Biljana Urban (Netherlands), and Edward Rushton (UK/Switzerland) are among them. The challenges of today are best suited to expanding the usual established horizons of Ukrainian performers, actualizing the need to pay attention to the work of lesser-known but no less interesting artists, among whom Florent Schmitt takes a worthy place. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. For a long time, anyone interested in the work by F. Schmitt faced a lack of resources. The scarcity of written materials about the composer is as surprising as it is disappointing. Moreover, almost all existing studies are published only in French, which makes research difficult for those who do not speak the language. In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of significant books were published, fully or partially devoted to the work of F. Schmitt (Ferroud, 1928; Aubert, Barraud, Pignari-Salles, 1937; Coeuroy, 1922; Dumesnil, 1946), most of which have long been out of reprint. Changes in the cultural context, traditions, perception and understanding of music, scientific approaches, and research quality requirements do not allow a modern scholar to rely exclusively on old publications. Besides, the composer’s piano music is not considered in detail, but is only included in a panoramic overview of his heritage. The absence of domestic research prompted the author of the article to delve into the French master’s heritage. The purpose of the article is to expand the horizons in the study of F. Schmitt’s piano works, to reveal the prerequisites and analyze the facets of his introspective expression on the example of the first book of the cycle “Musiques intimes” (“Intimate Music”) op. 16. The cultural-historical, structural-functional and comparative methods of analysis were used. Research results and conclusion. The program names of the pieces, landscape sketches, rich coloristic harmony, use of ostinato techniques, shimmering arpeggiated figures in the texture, etc., indicate the considerable influence of F. Schmitt’s compatriots music – C. Debussy and M. Ravel. The presence of sincere emotionality and poetry of expression, improvisation, and “through” dramaturgy resemble the ways of thinking of F. Chopin and R. Schumann. Nevertheless, a detailed analysis of the first book of “Musiques intimes” makes it easy to notice the characteristic features that will become a kind of “idioms” of textures, complex rhythmic patterns and an “orchestral” approach to the instrument, which are not aimed at external affectation, but create a feeling of being present on a secret excursion into the world of impressions and emotions close to the composer. Through the images of nature, the contemplation of which promotes communication between the individual and himself, the French artist introduces the listener to his personal space, opens personal boundaries, that in this case can be perceived as an invitation to a private intimate soirée with Maestro Florent Schmitt.

Summary: The major work of Joan Sales (1912-1983), the novel Incerta glòria, has suffered a peculiar fate. In spite of the high praise expressed by Mercè Rodoreda in a letter to the author, the work was little acknowledged in Spain (the French translation, on the other hand, was more successful and was compared with the best novels by Bernanos). Only in recent years have critics increasingly surfaced, paying a befitting tribute to the book as a masterpiece and as a unique panorama of the Spanish Civil War and – along with the sequel El vent de la nit – the years of Francoism. The novel is clearly written from the view of the vanquished. This article outlines the life of Sales and demonstrates his approach of a critical, liberal and Catalan intellectual. As will be shown, the chief aim of the author is to experience and to seek the abundance of an intensive life, to create an intensity which is expressed in his literary style that is full of metaphors and, particularly, contrasts. A longer section of the article is dedicated to the vestiges of Kierkegaard in the novel. Within this it is above all the figure of the intellectual Soleràs who seems influenced by the Danish philosopher and progenitor of existentialism. The religious aspect is treated by Sales with particular tolerance. He rejects any form of power and hierarchy within religion and represents the theology of the cross, by attributing Christ as the God of the conquered. He defends a version of Catholicism which displays ecumenical traits. Of course, the classical criticism of religion (which viewed the childhood soul of the believer as a scandal) can be applied to the author, but he remains true to the spirit of the Gospel. At the end of the essay an eye is cast over poetry written by the author, in addition to his novel., and the implied attitude towards surrealism is investigated. From this a certain break with the surreal and the conception of the unconscious becomes evident. Incerta glòria is, by contrast, is monolithic and wholeheartedly successful. The novel encompasses the totality of the human, and preaches a spirit for which any policies of exclusion are foreign. [Keywords: reception, biography, politics, existentialism, intensity, style, religion, poetry, surrealism]

Objective of the research is to find out structural-semantic and functionally stylistic features of the borrowed vocabulary in poetry by Lina Kostenko. Methods. Theoretical — analysis and synthesis of literature of the researched issue; practical — to obtain factual materials and based on them make conclusions regarding structural-semantic and functionally stylistic features of the borrowed vocabulary in oeuvre by Lina Kostenko. Results. Language (and therefore speech) is both stylistics, orthoepia, and compliance grammatical norms, etc., but above all it is vocabulary. And the vocabulary of the speaker is characterized first of all by its purity, synonymous and phraseological richness, normativity of pronunciation and, finally, correlation of native (Ukrainian) foreign words. Vocabulary of the modern Ukrainian language was formed in the process of its extended historical development and is a product of many epochs. Its shaping and development is closely connected with the history of Ukrainian people. Based on the factual material selected, we can conclude that Lina Kostenko most often uses words that are borrowed from Western European languages 48 % from 100 % (German, French, English, Italian); for the most part, it uses them without changing the value, but uses it as a comparison. Non-Slavic borrowings (from Latin, Ancient Greek, Turkic) make up 44 % of the studied words, the meaning of which the poet sometimes changes; uses for comparison. The borrowing from the Slavic languages (Old Slavic, Polonism, Russian) used by L. Kostenko is only 8 %. The author uses them without changing the values. The poet uses the borrowed elements of other languages with stylistic instruction with the purpose of creating the non-national diversity in the basis of Ukrainian language. Lina Kostenko also makes extensive use of terminology. After all, the potentialities of the corresponding lexical category create an artistic image, being part of a certain tropical figure, comparing and enriching the artistic color, expressive elevation of the artistic environment. Usage of vocabulary of foreign origin without its abuse and distortions, the way Lina Kostenko does, is one of the ways to enrich the vocabulary of language.

The plot basis of the N. F. Grammatin’s “Uslad and Vsemila. Old Russian Ballad” (1810) – the ballad “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine” from the novel “Monk” by M. G. Lewis (1796) is determined. To establish the probable source of acquaintance with the Lewis’s ballad, in addition to the English original, Russian (1803) and French (1797) translations of the novel were used for comparison. Comparison of the texts leads to the conclusion that the author is directly acquainted with the English ballad in the original language. To give the ballad a national flavor, Grammatin used a conventional historical background, archaized vocabulary, as well as images and expressions of the national epic tradition. It has been proved that Grammatin used motives of Russian epics to create a ballad on a similar plot ATU 974 “The Homecoming Husband” from the collection of Kirsha Danilov – on Solovei Budimirovich (contamination of two plots – the matchmaking and the return of a husband to his wife’s wedding) and on Dobryna Nikitich and Alyosha Popov (the return of the husband to his wife’s wedding). The basis for combining these different sources – the supposedly “old Spanish ballad” on Alonzo and Imogine (as it is presented by Lewis in the novel) and Russian epics – were Grammatin’s general views on ancient poetry. Revealed the author’s accents in a popular plot. Compared to the English sample, Grammatin reinforces the theme of heavenly punishment for treachery. The bridegroom-dead comes not only in fulfillment of the fidelity’s vow, first of all he is the messenger of heaven, the messenger of the punishing God. The connection of Grammatin’s poem with the ballad experiments of N. M. Karamzin, V. A. Zhukovsky, I. I. Dmitriev, P. A. Katenin, S. P. Zhikharev and other contemporary works are considered.

The article defends the thesis that Skovoroda is a representative of syncretic culture and thinking, which combines philosophy, religion (faith), poetry (literature), theology into an unity. His universality, as a talented and comprehensively developed personality, also lies in this combining different sphere of a human activity. To combine all this, Skovoroda must be the bearer of syncretic thinking and perception of the world. But, such combination includes also philosophy and, therefore, subordinates it to spirituality. Skovoroda is a sage, who imparts wisdom and sets an example of a morally clean life and strong faith. The works of Skovoroda should be viewed from the standpoint of syncretism. He did not create a new philosophy for Ukrainian culture, as did, for example, Socrates for Ancient Greek culture, Descartes for French culture, and Kant for German culture. To consider Skovoroda only a philosopher means to reduce him to a «highly specialized mental worker». It is necessary to read Skovoroda's works universally and syncretically, not philosophically (analytically and critically). The article examines also the weak and strong aspects of the syncretic creativity of Skovoroda for Ukrainian culture in general and Ukrainian philosophy in particular. In Skovoroda's works, there is no analysis and criticism of philosophical problems, there is no consistent rational-logical (step-by-step) construction of a philosophical conception, which he would defend with arguments. Instead, we find in Skovoroda's works many biblical quotations and their interpretation, that is, he uses the Bible to confirm his position and way of life. The authority of the Bible for Skovoroda is indisputable, so it is a source of wisdom for him. The author argues that Skovoroda is «internally new» for Ukrainian culture. He brings into Ukrainian culture Christianity, which differs from the traditional church, biblical symbolic hermeneutics and vegetarianism as a way of life. Skovoroda's life represents a life of integrated personality.

Background. In recent scholar resources musicologists actively study the problem of typology of chamber song cycle. The article cites analytical observations of M. Kolotylenko on works in this genre by R. Strauss (2014), of I. Leopa – on G. Mahler’s (2017), of N. Vlasova – on A. Schoenberg’s (2007). It is stated, that unlike Austro-German phenomena of this kind have been studied to a certain degree, song cycle “Summer Nights” by H. Berlioz hasn’t received adequate research yet, although it is mentioned by N. Vlasova as on of the foremost experiences of this kind. It allows to regard the French author as a pioneer in tradition of chamber song cycle. The aim of given research is to reveal the essence of orchestration as a part of songs cycle’s artistic whole. In order to achieve it, semantical, compositionally-dramaturgical and intonational methods of research are used. Originally, “Summer Nights” were meant to be performed by a duo of voice and piano (1834). It was not until 1856 that composer orchestrated this cycle, similarly to the way G. Mahler and in several cases R. Strauss done it later. The foundation of cycle by H. Berlioz are six poems from a set by T. Gautier «La Comédie de la mort», published in 1838. In spite of having epic traits, this set is still an example of lyrical poesy, where subjective is being generalised, while chosen motive of death, according to L.Ginzburg, corresponds to existential essence of lyric (L. Ginzburg). French poet, prose writer, critic, author ow the poems set to music in “Summer Nights” by H. Berlioz – Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) – is one of the most enigmatic and singular figures in history of XIX century art. He was eclipsed by his contemporaries, although his creativity paved the way for upcoming symbolism, that incarnated in poetry of C. Baudelaire, and set “Émaux et Camées” became an aesthetic ideal for Parnassian School. A work by H. Berlioz on lyrics by T. Gautier consists of four songs: “Villanelle”, “Le Spectre de la Rose”, “Sur le lagunes”, “Absence”, “Au cimetiere. Clair de Lune” and “L`ile Inconnue”. It is founded on a plot of lyrical type, that is built according to the principle of appearing associations. Lyrical “I”, whose inner world is revealed during the cycle, provides logical congruity of the work. Each mélodie has its own spectrum of images, united by general lyrical plot. The first and last songs, grounding on a theme of nature, create thematic arch. The denouement of the plat falls on “L`ile Inconnue”, where hero’s conclusion about impossibility of everlasting love is proclaimed. The orchestra part is equal significance with the voice and intonated verbal text, simultaneously playing an important role in illuminating underlying meaning of the lyrics. H. Berlioz doesn’t tend to use supplementary woodwind instruments. Although, each instrument reveals its unique sonic and expressive possibilities, demonstrating its singular characteristics. Due to that an orchestra becomes differentiated, turning into a flexible living organism. Composer doesn’t use exceedingly large orchestra, moreover, each song has its unique set of performers. However, there are stable players: strings (including double basses), two flutes, 2 clarinets (in A and in B). Besides of that, H. Berlioz occasionally uses the timbre of solo oboe, bassoons, natural French horns in different keys, and in the second song he employs coloristic potential of the harp. From a standpoint of the semantics, the score is built according to the principle of the opposition between two spheres. The former one is attached to the motives of the nature and has pastoral mod. At the same time, it reveals idealistic expanse of dreams and vision, thus being above the existing realm. This sphere is represented by woodwinds and brass. The latter, on the contrary, places the hero in real time. It is a sphere of sensuality, of truly human, it also touches themes of fate and inevitable death. It is characteristic that this sphere is incarnated through string instruments. Although, the harp cannot be bracketed with either of the groups. This elusive timbre in instrumental palette is saved for “Le Spectre de la Rose” and creates unsubstantial image of a soul ascending to Heaven. H. Berlioz evades usage of mixed timbers in joining of different groups of the orchestra. Even when he does it, it has sporadic nature and provides emphasis on a particular motive. Orchestral tutti are almost non-existent. Composer uses concerto principle quite regularly as well. Additional attention must be drawn to psychologising of role of clarinet and semantisation of flute and bassoon. Clarinet becomes a doppelganger of lyrical “I” and, quite like a personality of a human, acquires ambivalent characteristics. Because of that, it interacts not only with its light group, but with low strings as well, thus demonstrating an ability to transformation of the image. Bassoon reflects the image of the death. This explains its rare usage as well as specific way of interaction with other instruments and groups. Flute is attached to the image of the nature, symbolises a white dove, that in a poetry of T. Gautier represents an image of beautiful maiden. Consequently, this allows to state that timbre of flute incarnates the image of lyrical hero’s love interest. The most significant instruments of string group are the low ones, accenting either the aura of dark colours or sensuality and passion. Neglecting the tradition requiring lyrical hero to be paired with a certain voice type, H. Berlioz in each mélodie uses different timbres, that suit coloristic incarnation of the miniature the most in the terms of tessiture and colour. A conclusion is made, that composer become a forefather of chamber song cycle of new type, with its special trait being equivalence of the voice and the orchestra, that allows them to create united multi-layered integrity

Background. The article tells about the work of the famous German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe and about the history of the creation of the famous "West-Eastern Divan". Methods. The famous German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was a poet, playwright, literary critic, jurist, orientalist, historian and philosopher, painter, theater critic, naturalist, and scientist and statesman who made discoveries in biology and mineralogy. He was one of the first to use the term "world literature." His 143-volume artistic and scientific legacy includes his works such as Faust, The Sufferings of Young Werther, West-east collection of poems, Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), Tawrida Iphigenia, Roman Elegies, Torquato Tasso, "The Evolution of Nabotot", "The Magic Whisper", "Information about Color", as well as more than three thousand poems have attracted the attention of readers around the world. Results. In particular, Goethe's main idea in his artistic heritage was to bring together the cultures of all the peoples of the world and to open the way to world literature. "West-east collection of poems" brought him a lot of fame. At that time, the poet was 70 years old. Discussion. Before Goethe created the "West-east collection of poems" (or “Mag‘ribu Mashriq devoni”), he began to study the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, which the Orient worships. At that time, the Qur'an was translated into German, as well as into Latin, English and French. Although the poet was still young, more precisely, twenty-four years old, he studied these translations by comparing them because he knew all the languages listed above. He even mastered the Arabic orthography, through which he tried to understand and study the essence of the verses of the Qur'an. He also took a keen interest in studying the life of Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and the hadeeths that are his sayings. The full manuscript of Surat an-Nas, written by Goethe in Arabic, includes "Allah," "Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace." The manuscript is still housed in the House Museum in Weimar, Germany. Conclusion. Thus, Goethe, who from an early age was interested in the languages, history, literature, religious and philosophical views, customs and traditions of the peoples of the East, wrote the "West-east collection of poems", primarily under the influence of the Qur'an and hadiths, mystical teachings. as well as in the interpretation of the ghazals of such famous representatives of Eastern poetry as Rudaki, Firdavsi, Hafiz Sherozi, Saadi, Anvari, Nizami, Rumi, Jami, Navoi. He even chose the oriental nickname "Hotam" to create it

In the modern world, Globalization, Colonialism, Technology, Politics and Economy have changed many cultural identities and contributed to the appearance of multilingual literature. Code-Switching could occur in different institutional languages, slangs, dialects, and sociolects; so, translators should find strategies to tackle this literary phenomenon and preserve the source text identity. But how could the translator (who is a reader and a transmitter at the same time) deal with these types of literary texts? And how could he/she produce a target multilingual text that preserves the identity and the magic expressed in the source text? The multilingual text is a specific genre of literature which combines two or more languages in the desire to express a multilingual and multicultural reality inherent to a particular group of individuals. Multilingual Literature appeared for the first time during the Middle Ages, but it was called originally Macaronic literature. The term 'Macaronic' is commonly used to indicate any hybrid language that mixes the vernacular with Latin. This mixture was frequent during the Middle Ages in all romance literature. Macaronic literature is therefore a phenomenon that represents the cultivated, highly educated and sophisticated categories of society like academics, novelists and poets. However, translators who used to identify the translation as an inter-linguistic transfer between two formal systems (source and target institutional languages) have faced obstacles in working with multilingual texts in which the author uses code-switching as an alternative to reflect the unfair categorization of people and registers in modern societies). This paper aims to examine the different strategies proposed by Venuti, Cincotta, Bojanin, Qoates and other scholars to transfer the code-switching device in the literary texts; and eventually proposes an integrated strategy that will preserve the code-switching aspect in the translation process, namely in Farah CHAMMA’s poem ‘I am No Palestinian’. Our strategy aims at creating such equilibrium between the translator’s creativity and identity losses, which will allow the target reader to be an active participant in the understanding process and revealing the otherness of the source text. The poem of Farah CHAMMA is chosen as a case study in this research, because it reflects the human being struggle for independence and freedom. However, the independence in this context does not mean the liberation from the colonizer who enters with his armed forces and military weapons to your country, the colonizer nowadays enters your brain trough globalization, migration, media, internet, and all these factors contributed to the fusion of the traditional notion of identities. The Islamic Arabic identity is contaminated by the French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Christian and Jewish identities due to this kind of colonialism which destroys all the identity and patriotism fundamentals such as: ethics, religion, thought, and of course language. This is why Farrah writes in her poem that she had lost her language and all the Arabic Palestinian identity that comes with, she masters many foreign languages but her mother tongue. She thinks, acts and does like the British, the French, The Portuguese poets and artists do, but she just knows little tales about the Palestinian poet Ziad RAFFIF who defends the Palestinian issue in his literary works. So, the poet Farah Chamma used the multilingualism in her poetry to draw a picture of the struggle that exists within herself, and to show us how a language can embody an identity with all its features. The multiplicity of identities may create a new identity for the writer of the source text. Thus, the translator will not deal anymore with all the different cultures that belong to the languages of the text, but he must instead, discover the new identity of this community that uses this kind of speech system i.e., the Code-Switching system.

Statement of the problem. Nowadays, there has been a high demand for historically informed performance, including in the educational process. However, a young performer often faces not only technical problems, but also a lack of understanding of the performance style. So, the relevance of the topic of the article is caused by urgent needs of modern concert and stage practice related to historically oriented performance as well as by the task of modern music education to introduce the Baroque styles into the educational process of vocal performers. The article offers the experience of musicological reception of the early aria genre using the example of the French “air de cour” as the personification of European Baroque aesthetics. The genre, which is little known to both Ukrainian and Chinese vocalists, is considered from the standpoint of a cognitive approach, which involves a combination of practical singing technology with the understanding of the aesthetic guidelines of the baroque vocal style as an original phenomenon. One of the manifestations of it is the “sung dance” (singing in ballet) as the embodiment of artistic synthesis rooted in the musical and theatrical practice of France during the time of Louis XIV with its luxurious court performances, a bright component of which were “airs de cour”. To reveal the chosen topic it was necessary to study scientific literature in such areas as the issues of performing early vocal music (Boiarenko, 2015), the history and modernity of vocal art (Shuliar, 2014; Hnyd, 1997; Landru-Chandès, 2017); peculiarities of the air de cour genre, which are highlighted with varying degrees of detailing in different perspectives in the works of European and American scholars: 1) in publications on the synthetic opera and ballet genres in the time and at the court of Louis XIV, in particular ballet-de-cour (Needham, 1997; Christout, 1998; Verchaly, 1957; Harris-Warwick, 1992; Cowart, 2008); 2) special studies (Durosoir, 1991; Khattabi, 2013; Brooks, 2001); 3) monographs on Baroque music (Bukofzer, 1947); 4) reference articles by authoritative musicologists (Baron, 2001, the editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica and others). A study that would focus on the aesthetic principles of the modern vocal interpretation of air de cour as a sample of the early aria genre has not been found. Research results. Air de cour, the origins of which are connected with the secular urban song (voix-de-ville) in arrangements for voice and lute and lute transcriptions of polyphonic vocal works of the Renaissance, was popular in France, and later, in Europe at the end of the 16th and 17th centuries. As part of the popular synthetic theatrical spectacle – ballet-de-cour, which combined dance, music, poetry, visual and acting arts and flourished at the court of Louis XIV as an active means of sacralizing the king’s person, “air de cour” even in its name (which gradually replaced “voix-de-villes”) alludes to the social transformations of the French Baroque era with its courtly preferences. With the transition to an aristocratic environment, the link of the genre with its folk roots (squareness, metricity, melodic unpretentiousness) weakens, giving way to the refined declamation style of musique mesurée; the strophic repetitions of the melody with a new text are decorated by the singers with unique ornamentation (broderies), which is significantly different from the Italian. The poetic word and music complement the art of dance since air de cour has also adapted to ballet numbers, providing great opportunities for various forms of interaction between singing and dancing and interpretation on the basis of versioning – the variable technique of combinations, which were constantly updated. Vocal numbers in ballets were used to create various musical imagery characteristics. When choosing singers, the author of the music had to rely on such criteria as the range and timbre of the voice. As leaders, the creators of airs de cour used high voices. This is explained by the secular direction of the genre, its gradual separation from the polyphonic traditions of the past era: the highest voice in the polyphony, superius, is clearly distinguished as the leading one in order to convey the meaning of the poetic declamation, to clearly hear the words, turning the polyphonic texture into a predominantly chordal one with the soprano as the leading voice. Hence, the modern performing reproduction of air de cour, as well as the early aria in general, requires a certain orientation in the characteristics of the expressive possibilities of this particular singing voice; for this purpose, the article provides a corresponding classification of sopranos. So, despite the small vocal range and the external simplicity of the air de cour form, the vocalist faces difficult tasks, from deep penetration into the content of the poetic text and reproduction of the free declamatory performance style to virtuoso mastery of the technique of ornamental singing and a special “instrumental” singing manner inherited from Renaissance polyphonic “equality” of vocal and instrumental voices. Conclusions. What are the aesthetic principles of vocal music of the European Baroque period that a vocalist should take into account when performing it? First of all, it is an organic synthesis of music, poetry and choreography. The connection of singing with dance plasticity is inherent in many early vocal works. Hence the requirement not only to pay attention to the culture ofrecitation, pronunciation of a poetic text, understanding of key words-images, which precedes any performance interpretation of a vocal work, but also to study the aesthetic influences of various arts inherent in this or that work of Baroque culture. Air de cour differs from the German church or Italian opera aria as other national manifestations of the psychotype of a European person precisely in its dance and movement plasticity. Therefore, the genre of the early aria requires the modern interpreter to understand the socio-historical and aesthetic conditions of its origin and existence and to rely on the systemic unity (polymodality) of vocal stylistics. The prospect of research. There are plenty of types of vocal and dance plasticity in early arias; among them, rhythmic formulas and dance patterns of sicilianas, pavanes, and tarantellas prevail; movement rhythm (passacaglia). And they received further rapid development in the romantic opera of the 19th century. This material constitutes a separate “niche” and is an artistic phenomenon that is practically unstudied in terms of historical and stylistic integrity, continuity in various national cultures, and relevance for modern music and theatre art.

This article examines the shared Imagistic principles of two poet-filmmakers in the experimental genre of cinepoetry. On the one hand, Jean Cocteau, the French poet-turned-filmmaker, epitomizes the Imagistic experimentations of a French filmmaker with the narrative framework of poetry to create a “page-based” movie. On the other hand, Abbās Kīyārustamī, the Iranian filmmaker-turned-poet, typifies the cinematic aesthetic of modern Persian poetry to offer visual images that rely entirely on the creative engagement of the reader. The rhetoric of Imagism, that short-lived modernist movement of the early twentieth century, is what these poet-filmmakers similarly employ in their cinepoetic study cases, namely Tempest of Stars (1997) by Cocteau and A Wolf Lying in Wait (2005) by Kīyārustamī. Following a comparative approach to their common Imagistic foundations such as economical wording and phrasing, cinematic adaptation of visual imagery, rigor and clarity of vision, the poetic prerogative of subject matter, the avoidance of vague and ambiguous descriptions, and the writerly approach to the rhetoric of the poem, this article proves that Cocteau and Kīyārustamī are respectively the epitomes of Imagistic cinepoetry in French and Persian literature.

This article explores the literary space of Canadian literature in world literature and the liminal space of Métis poetry, which is distinctive in being situated between the European and Indigenous aspects of Canadian literature. The paradox is that Métis poetry and literature in Canada, long marginalized, can now create another space for Canadian literature, or for poets born or living in Canada, in world literature and comparative literature, a small literature among large literatures. By examining Métis poetry in Canada and analyzing the poems by Louis Riel (1844–1885), Pauline Johnson (also known as Tekahionwake or Double Wampum, 1861–1913) and Naomi McIlwraith (contemporary), the article can provide a sense of distinctiveness and uniqueness, even if some of these qualities are also present in “Métis” poetry outside Canada. Riel and McIlwraith occupy a literary and cultural in-between space—Riel writing in French and McIlwraith in English and Cree—mixing major and minor centers and part of this “nation within a nation,” this threshold space where self, identity and other are all called into question.

As a writer and poet, I am particularly interested in language(s), in words in Tahitian and in French. Since 2016, I have explored themes of survival, duration, continuity, and transmission through poetry and artworks made of materials evoking cracks, fractures, disruption, remains, remnants, separation, and loss. In this poetic-photographic essay, I reflect on my creative process and show how Tahitian concepts, such as HU’A, HU’AHU’A, HI’O, HI’OHI’O, GLASS, MIRROR, and ITE, SIGHT, KNOWLEDGE, WITNESS have inspired my artworks. I explore how the elements I collected and transformed are both a mirror of society and an invitation to create new images and ideas. I also highlight the importance of – establishing a dialogue between French and – Tahitian and other Indigenous languages for conceptualising the arts and creativity.

Bouchard, David. Voices from the Wild: An Animal Sensagoria. Paintings by Ron Parker. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2013. Print.This gorgeous book brings together two extraordinarily-talented individuals. David Bouchard is a former teacher, a former president of the Metis Nation of Greater Victoria, a recipient of the Order of Canada, and the author of many books. His popular books use poetry, prose, and visual elements to explore Aboriginal and Métis culture and traditions in both French and English. Ron Parker is one of Canada’s best wildlife artists. His career took off in the 1990s when his realistic portraits of animals in their natural habitats stood alongside those of Robert Bateman and helped to create a very hot market for signed limited edition prints. The publisher is to be applauded for thinking of bringing together Parker’s glorious paintings and Bouchard’s inspiring poetry. It was a wonderful idea, but, unfortunately, it was not well executed. It is most unfortunate that Parker’s beautiful images were not packaged in a fresher and more contemporary book design, one that would appeal to today’s young people. The author says that he “wrote this book with young people in mind” and certainly he has organized his poetry into a familiar scheme for a children’s book—sections which explore the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste)—but unfortunately, the scheme is too childish for young adults while the poetry is too sophisticated for small children. There is great value and power in this poetry, in which the reader is asked to see the world through the senses and perspectives of numerous animals, but, just who is the intended audience?As it is, this volume does a disservice to both the author and the artist. The design may be appealing to parents or teachers of a certain age—who may feel a nostalgic affection for its familiar, if outdated, style, and who will be undaunted by the poetry—but the publisher has made a mistake in marketing this title as a children’s book. As it is, this book stands outside of normal publishing categories. Although too small to be classified as a coffee table book, both the design and the content seem more aligned with that category than any other. Although there is a great deal to applaud here, I cannot recommend this as a children’s book.Not recommended: one star out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Multicultural Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become the Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have been forgotten by history.

Abstract: We present the comprehension of the choreographic piece as a poetic and educational experience, considering the presence of the body as body schema on the production of language, knowledge, and the presence of the education as inter corporeity. It is phenomenological research, based on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, in a dialogue with the history of art and Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne method. The corpus of research analysis was intentionally constituted from pieces of the French choreographer Jérôme Bel, highlighting in this article the piece Gala (2015). Besides the referred piece, we also ponder over the lived experiences with the UFRN Dance Group; with the students of Physical Education degree course/UFRN curricular component Body Awareness; and with the students of Dance degree course/UFRN curricular component Dance Technique and Aesthetics. From the phenomenological reduction process, we realized that the choreographic piece, as a poetic and educational experience, broadens our sensibility, and our capacity to know, interpret, and create sensible and intelligible relationships with the world of culture, art, and education. Furthermore, it educates us in the understanding of language as an unfolding of perceptive life, involving historicity, contingency, sensitivity, and affections. It is also worth mentioning the creation of senses in an intersubjective way as a fundamental element in the education process, and we ponder over education as intercorporeity, since there is in the other what is lacking in that one so that can put into perspective senses that were unthinkable until then.

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." NATE Classroom 17 (2012): 27–30.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1997. ———. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York UP, 2010.Hills, Matt. "Rebranding Dr Who and Reimagining Sherlock: 'Quality' Television as 'Makeover TV Drama'." International Journal of Cultural Studies 18.3 (2015): 317–31.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. Postmillennial Pop. New York: New York UP, 2013.Mars-Jones, Adam. "A Thin Slice of Cake." The Guardian, 16 Feb. 2003. 5 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/16/andrewmotion.fiction›.McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. 3rd ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York UP, 2015.Moraru, Christian. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. Herndon, VA: State U of New York P, 2001. Motion, Andrew. Silver: Return to Treasure Island. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount/Columbia Pictures, 1981.Wolf, Maryanne, and Mirit Barzillai. "The Importance of Deep Reading." Educational Leadership. March (2009): 32–36.Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.Consult the Genius of the Place in all;That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks or now directs, th’ intending Lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. (Epistle IV, ll 47–64) Whereas Addison still gestured towards estate management, Pope explicitly advocated a painterly approach to garden design. His epistle articulated some key principles that he enacted in his own garden at Twickenham and which would inform later garden design. No matter what one added to a landscape, one needed to be guided by nature; one should be moderate in one’s designs and neither plant too much nor too little; one must be aware of the spectator’s journey through the garden and take care to provide variety by creating “surprises” that would be revealed at different points. Finally, one had to find the “spirit” of the place that gave it its distinct character and use this to create the cohesion in diversity that was aspired to in a garden. Nature’s aestheticisation had begun with poetry, developed into painting, and was now enacted on actual natural environments with the emergence of English landscape style. This painterly approach to gardening demanded an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual engagement with place and it stylistically rejected the neo-classical geometry and regularity of the baroque garden (exemplified by Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles). Experiencing landscape now took on a third dimension as wealthy landowners and their friends put themselves within the picture frame and into the scene. Although landscape style changed during the century, a number of principles remained more or less consistent: the garden should be modelled on nature but “improved,” any improvements should not be obvious, pictorial composition should be observed, the garden should be concerned with the spectator’s experience and should aim to provoke an imaginative or emotional engagement with it. During the seventeenth century, developments in theatrical technology, particularly the emergence of the proscenium arch theatre with moveable scenery, showed that poetry and painting could be spectacularly combined on the stage. Later in the eighteenth century the artist and stage designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg combined picturesque painting aesthetics with theatrical design in works such as The Wonders of Derbyshire in 1779 (McGillivray 136). It was a short step to shift the onstage scene outside. Theatricality was invoked when pictorial principles were applied three dimensionally; gardens became sites for pastoral genre scenes that ambiguously positioned their visitors both as spectators and actors. Theatrical SceneryGardens and theatres were explicitly connected. Like “theatre,” the word “garden” was sometimes used to describe a collection, in book form, which promised “a whole world of items” which was not always “redeemable” in “straightforward ways” (Hunt, Gardens 54–55). Theatrum mundi could be emblematically expressed in a garden through statues and architectural fabriques which drew spectators into complex chains of associations involving literature, art, and society, as they progressed through it.In the previous century, writes John Dixon Hunt, “the expectation of a fine garden [. . .] was that it work upon its visitor, involving him [sic] often insidiously as a participant in its dramas, which were presented to him as he explored its spaces by a variety of statues, inscriptions and [. . .] hydraulically controlled automata” (Gardens 54). Such devices, which featured heavily in the Italian baroque garden, were by the mid eighteenth century seen by English and French garden theorists to be overly contrived. Nonetheless, as David Marshall argues, “eighteenth-century garden design is famous for its excesses [. . .] the picturesque garden may have aimed to be less theatrical, but it aimed no less to be theater” (38). Such gardens still required their visitors’ participation and were designed to deliver an experience that stimulated the spectators’ imaginations and emotions as they moved through them. Theatrum mundi is implicit in eighteenth-century gardens through a common idea of the world reimagined into four geographical quadrants emblematically represented by fabriques in the garden. The model here is Alexander Pope’s influential poem, “The Temple of Fame” (1715), which depicted the eponymous temple with four different geographic faces: its western face was represented by western classical architecture, its east face by Chinese, Persian, and Assyrian, its north was Gothic and Celtic, and its south, Egyptian. These tropes make their appearance in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. In Désert de Retz, a garden created between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville, about twenty kilometres west of Paris, one can still see amongst its remaining fabriques: a ruined “gothic” church, a “Tartar” tent (it used to have a Chinese maison, now lost), a pyramid, and the classically inspired Temple of Pan. Similar principles underpin the design of Jardin (now Parc) Monceau that I discuss below. Retz: Figure 1. Tartar tent.Figure 2. Temple of PanStowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire has a similar array of structures (although the classical predominates) including its original Chinese pavillion. It, too, once featured a pyramid designed by the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and erected as a memorial to him after his death in 1726. On it was carved a quote from Horace that explicitly referenced the dramaturgical version of theatrum mundi: You have played, eaten enough and drunk enough,Now is time to leave the stage for younger men. (Garnett 19) Stowe’s Elysian Fields, designed by William Kent in the 1730s according to picturesque principles, offered its visitor two narrative choices, to take the Path of Virtue or the Path of Vice, just like a re-imagined morality play. As visitors progressed along their chosen paths they would encounter various fabriques and statues, some carved with inscriptions in either Latin or English, like the Vanbrugh pyramid, that would encourage associations between the ancient world and the contemporary world of the garden’s owner Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, and his circle. Stowe: Figure 3. Chinese Pavillion.Figure 4. Temple of VirtueKent’s background was as a painter and scene designer and he brought a theatrical sensibility to his designs; as Hunt writes, Kent particularly enjoyed designing “recessions into woodland space where ‘wings’ [were] created” (Picturesque 29). Importantly, Kent’s garden drawings reveal his awareness of gardens as “theatrical scenes for human action and interaction, where the premium is upon more personal experiences” and it this spatial dimension that was opened up at Stowe (Picturesque 30).Picturesque garden design emphasised pictorial composition that was similar to stage design and because a garden, like a stage, was a three-dimensional place for human action, it could also function as a set for that action. Unlike a painting, a garden was experiential and time-based and a visitor to it had an experience not unlike, to cautiously use an anachronism, a contemporary promenade performance. The habit of imaginatively wandering through a theatre in book-form, moving associatively from one item to the next, trying to discern the author’s pattern or structure, was one educated Europeans were used to, and a garden provided an embodied dimension to this activity. We can see how this might have been by visiting Parc Monceau in Paris which still contains remnants of the garden designed by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) for the Duc de Chartres in the 1770s. Carmontelle, like Kent, had a theatrical background and his primary role was as head of entertainments for the Orléans family; as such he was responsible for designing and writing plays for the family’s private theatricals (Hays 449). According to Hunt, Carmontelle intended visitors to Jardin de Monceau to take a specific itinerary through its “quantity of curious things”:Visitors entered by a Chinese gateway, next door to a gothic building that served as a chemical laboratory, and passed through greenhouses and coloured pavilions. Upon pressing a button, a mirrored wall opened into a winter garden painted with trompe-l’œil trees, floored with red sand, filled with exotic plants, and containing at its far end a grotto in which supper parties were held while music was played in the chamber above. Outside was a farm. Then there followed a series of exotic “locations”: a Temple of Mars, a winding river with an island of rocks and a Dutch mill, a dairy, two flower gardens, a Turkish tent poised, minaret-like, above an icehouse, a grove of tombs [. . .], and an Italian vineyard with a classical Bacchus at its center, regularly laid out to contrast with an irregular wood that succeeded it. The final stretches of the itinerary included a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre [. . .], more Turkish and Chinese effects, a ruined castle, yet another water-mill, and an island on which sheep grazed. (Picturesque 121) Monceau: Figure 5. Naumachia.Figure 6. PyramidIn its presentation of a multitude of different times and different places one can trace a line of descent from Jardin de Monceau to the great nineteenth-century World Expos and on to Disneyland. This lineage is not as trite as it seems once we realise that Carmontelle himself intended the garden to represent “all times and all places” and Pope’s four quadrants of the world were represented by fabriques at Monceau (Picturesque 121). As Jardin de Monceau reveals, gardens were also sites for smaller performative interventions such as the popular fêtes champêtres, garden parties in which the participants ate, drank, danced, played music, and acted in comedies. Role playing and masquerade were an important part of the fêtes as we see, for example, in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19) where a “Moorishly” attired man addresses (or is dancing with) a young woman before an audience of young men and women, lolling around a fabrique (Watteau). Scenic design in the theatre inspired garden designs and gardens “featured prominently as dramatic locations in intermezzi, operas, and plays”, an exchange that encouraged visitors to gardens to see themselves as performers as much as spectators (Hunt, Gardens 64). A garden, particularly within the liminal aegis of a fête was a site for deceptions, tricks, ruses and revelations, assignations and seductions, all activities which were inherently theatrical; in such a garden visitors could find themselves acting in or watching a comedy or drama of their own devising. Marie-Antoinette built English gardens and a rural “hamlet” at Versailles. She and her intimate circle would retire to rustic cottages, which belied the opulence of their interiors, and dressed in white muslin dresses and straw hats, would play at being dairy maids, milking cows (pre-cleaned by the servants) into fine porcelain buckets (Martin 3). Just as the queen acted in pastoral operas in her theatre in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, her hamlet provided an opportunity for her to “live” a pastoral fantasy. Similarly, François Racine de Monville, who commissioned Désert de Retz, was a talented harpist and flautist and his Temple of Pan was, appropriately, a music room.Versailles: Figure 7. Hamlet ConclusionRichard Steele, Addison’s friend and co-founder of The Spectator, casually invoked theatrum mundi when he wrote in 1720: “the World and the Stage [. . .] have been ten thousand times observed to be the Pictures of one another” (51). Steele’s reiteration of a Renaissance commonplace revealed a different emphasis, an emphasis on the metaphor’s spatial and spectacular elements. Although Steele reasserts the idea that the world and stage resemble each other, he does so through a third level of abstraction: it is as pictures that they have an affinity. World and stage are both positioned for the observer within complementary picture frames and it is as pictures that he or she is invited to make sense of them. The formalist version of theatrum mundi invokes a spectator beholding the world for his (usually!) pleasure and in the process nature itself is transformed. No longer were natural landscapes wildernesses to be tamed and economically exploited, but could become gardens rendered into scenes for their aristocratic owners’ pleasure. Désert de Retz, as its name suggests, was an artfully composed wilderness, a version of the natural world sculpted into scenery. Theatrum mundi, through the aesthetic category of the picturesque, emerged in English landscape style and effected a theatricalised transformation of nature that was enacted in the aristocratic gardens of Europe.ReferencesAddison, Joseph. The Spectator. No. 414 (25 June 1712): 67–70. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.Garnett, Oliver. Stowe. Buckinghamshire. The National Trust, 2011.Hays, David. “Carmontelle's Design for the Jardin de Monceau: A Freemasonic Garden in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 447–62.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.———. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.Marshall, David. The Frame of Art. Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011.McGillivray, Glen. "The Picturesque World Stage." Performance Research 13.4 (2008): 127–39.Pope, Alexander. “Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” Epistles to Several Persons. London, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.———. The Temple of Fame: A Vision. By Mr. Pope. 2nd ed. London, 1715. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1991.Steele, Richard. The Theatre. No. 7 (23 January 1720).

IntroductionThe American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.Performing the Script: The Artist as Automedial ProsumerBoth “automedia” and “automediality” hold that the self (the “auto”) and its forms of expression (its “media”) are intimately linked, imbricated within processes of cultural and technological mediation. However, whereas “automedia” refers to general modes of self-presentation, “automediality” was developed by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser to explicitly relate to the autobiographical. Noting a tendency in literary studies to under-examine how life stories are shaped by their mediums, Dünne and Moser argued that the digital era has made it more apparent how literary forms are involved in complex processes of mediation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in response, called for an expansion of autobiography into “life writing,” claiming that automediality is useful as a theoretical frame for contemplating the growth of self-presentation platforms online, shifting from the life-narrative genre of autobiography towards more discursive and irresolute forms of first-person expression (4). One’s life story, in this context, can be communicated obliquely and performatively, with the choice of media inextricably contributing to the subjectivity that is being produced, not just as a tool for rendering a pre-existent self. Lauren Berlant conceives of life writing as a laboratory for “theorizing ‘the event’” of life rather than its narration or transcription (Prosser 181). Smith and Watson agree, describing automediality as the study of “life acts” that operate as “prosthetic extension[s] of the self in networks” (78). Following this, both “automedia” and “automediality” can be understood as expanding upon the “underlying intermedial premises” (Winthrop-Young 188) of media theory, addressing how technologies and mediums do not just constitute sensory extensions of the body (Mcluhan) but also sensory extensions of identity—armed with the potential to challenge traditional ideas of how a “life” is conveyed. For Julie Rak, “automedia” describes both the theoretical framing of self-presentation acts and the very processes of mediation the self-presenter puts themselves through (161). She prefers “automedia” over “automediality” due to the latter’s tendency to be directed towards the textual products of self-presentation, rather than their processes (161). Given Trecartin’s emphasis on narrative, poetic text, performativity, technology and commodification, both “automedia” and “automediality” will be relevant to my account here, highlighting not just the crossovers between the two terms but also the dual roles his work performs. Firstly, Trecartin’s videos express his own identity through the use of camp personas and exaggerated digital tropes. Secondly, they reflexively frame the phenomenon of online self-presentation, aestheticizing the “slice of life” and “personal history” posturings found on YouTube in order to better understand them. The line between self-presenter and critic is further muddied by the fact that Trecartin makes many of his videos free to download online. As video artist and YouTuber, he is interested in the same questions that Smith and Watson claim are central to automedial theory. When watching Youtube performers, they remind themselves to ask: “How is the aura of authenticity attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or ‘manufactured’ pseudo-individuality?” (124). Rather than setting out to identify “right” from “wrong” subjectivities, the role of both the automedia and automediality critic is to illuminate how and why subjectivity is constructed across distinct visual and verbal forms, working against the notion that subjectivity can be “an entity or essence” (Smith and Watson 125).Figure 1: Ryan Trecartin, Item Falls (2013), digital video stillGiven its literary origins, automediality is particularly relevant to Trecartin’s work because writing is so central to his methods, grounding his hyperactive self-presentations in the literary as well as the performative. According to Brian Droitcour, all of Trecartin’s formal devices, from the camerawork to the constructed sets his videos are staged in, are prefigured by the way he uses words. What appears unstructured and improvised is actually closely scripted, with Trecartin building on the legacies of conceptual poetry and flarf poetry (an early 2000s literary genre in which poetry is composed of collages of serendipitously found words and phrases online) to bring a loose sense of narrativization to his portrayals of characters and context. Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay for K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009)— a work which centres on a CEO named Global Korea (a pun on “career”) who presides over symbolic national characters whose surnames are also “Korea”:North America Korea: I specialize in Identity Tourism, ?Agency...I just stick HERE, and I Hop Around–HEY GLOBAL KOREA!?Identifiers: That’s Global, That’s Global, That’s GlobalFrench adaptation Korea: WHAT!?Global Korea: Guys I just Wanted to show You Your New Office!Health Care, I don’t Care, It’s All WE Care, That’s WhyWE don’t Care.THIS IS GLOBAL!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGlobal Korea: Global, Global !!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFigure 2: Ryan Trecartin, K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), digital video stillTrecartin’s performers are guided by their lines, even down to the apparently random use of commas, question marks and repeated capital letters. As a consequence, what can be alienating on the page is made lively when performed, his words instilled with the over-the-top personalities of each performer. For Droitcour, Trecartin’s genius lies in his ability to use words to subliminally structure his performances. Each character makes the artist’s poetic texts—deranged and derivative-sounding Internet-speak—their own “at the moment of the utterance” (Droitcour). Wayne Koestenbaum similarly argues that voice, which Trecartin often digitally manipulates, is the “anxiety point” in his works, fixing his “retardataire” energies on the very place “where orality and literacy stage their war of the worlds” (276).This conflict that Koestenbaum describes, between orality and literacy, is constitutive of Trecartin’s automedial positioning of the self, which presents as a confluence of life narrative, screenplay, social-media posing, flarf poetry and artwork. His videos constantly criss-cross between pre-production, production and postproduction, creating content at every point along the way. This circuitousness is reflected by the many performers who are portrayed filming each other as they act, suggesting that their projected identities are entangled with the technologies that facilitate them.Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)—a frenetic straight-to-camera chronicle of the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy (played by the artist)—was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, after which time his work became known around the world as an example of “postproduction” art. This refers to French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2001 account of the blurring of production and consumption, following on from his 1997 theory of relational aesthetics, which became paradigmatic of critical art practice at the dawn of Web 2.0. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists, in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud addressed new forms of citation, recycling and détournement, which he saw as influenced by digital computing, the service economies and other forms of immaterial social relations that, throughout the 1990s, transformed art from a subcultural activity to a key signifier and instrument of global capitalism.Because “word processing” was “indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the image-system of the home computer […] informed and colonized from the start by the world of work” (78), Bourriaud claimed that artists at the start of the twenty-first century were responding to the semiotic networks that blur daily and professional life. Postproduction art looked like it was “issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly” (19). However, whereas the artists in Bourriaud’s publication, such as Plamen Dejanov and Philippe Parreno, made art in order to create “more suitable [social] arrangements” (76), Trecartin is distinctive not only because of his bombastic style but also his apparent resistance to socio-political amelioration.Bourriaud’s call for the elegant intertextual “scriptor” as prosumer (88)—who creatively produces and consumes, arranges and responds—was essentially answered by Trecartin with a parade of hyper-affective and needy Internet characters whose aims are not to negotiate new social terrain so much as to perform themselves crazy, competing with masses of online information, opinions and jostling identities. Against Bourriaud’s strategic prosumerism, Trecartin, in his own words, chases “a kind of natural prosumerism synonymous with existence” (471). Although his work can be read as a response to neoliberal values, unlike Bourriaud, he refuses to treat postproduction methods as tools to conciliate this situation. Instead, his scripted videos present postproduction as the lingua franca of daily life. In aiming for a “natural prosumerism,” his work rhetorically asks, in paraphrase of Berlant: “What does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something?” (Prosser 181). Figure 3: Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), digital video stillPluralist CampTrecartin’s scripts direct his performers but they are also transformed by them, his words acquiring their individualistic tics, traits and nuances. As such, his self-presentations are a long way from Frederic Jameson’s account of pastiche as a neutral practice of imitation—“a blank parody” (125) that manifests as an addiction rather than a critical judgement. Instead of being uncritically blank, we could say that Trecartin’s characters have too much content and too many affects, particularly those of the Internet variety. In Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-2010), Trecartin (playing a character named J.J. Check, who wants to re-write the U.S constitution) states at one point: “Someone just flashed an image of me; I am so sure of it. I am such as free download.” Here, pastiche turns into a performed glitch, hinting at how authentic speech can be composed of an amalgam of inauthentic sources—a scrambling of literary forms, movie one-liners, intrusive online advertising and social media jargon. His characters constantly waver between vernacular clichés and accretions of data: “My mother accused me of being accumulation posing as independent free will,” says a character from Item Falls (2013)What makes Trecartin’s video work so fascinating is that he frames what once would have been called “pastiche” and fills it with meaning, as if sincerely attuned to the paradoxes of “anti-normative” posturing contained in the term “mass individualism.” Even when addressing issues of representational politics, his dialogue registers as both authentic and insipid, as when, in CENTER JENNY (2013), a conversation about sexism being “the coolest style” ends with a woman in a bikini asking: “tolerance is inevitable, right?” Although there are laugh-out-loud elements in all of his work—often from an exaggeration of superficiality—there is a more persistent sense of the artist searching for something deeper, perhaps sympathetically so. His characters are eager to self-project yet what they actually project comes off as too much—their performances are too knowing, too individualistic and too caught up in the Internet, or other surrounding technologies.When Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 of the aesthetic of “camp” she was largely motivated by the success of Pop art, particularly that of her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work looked kitsch yet Sontag saw in it a genuine love that kitsch lacks—a sentiment akin to doting on something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she claimed that whereas “the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves” (292).As an artistic device, camp essentially wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Frankfurt School theorists lamented of capitalism. The camp appropriator, does, however, convey himself as existing both inside and outside this low culture, communicating the “stink” of low culture in affecting ways. Sontag viewed camp, in other words, as at once deconstructive and reconstructive. In playing appearances off against essences, camp denies the self as essence only to celebrate it as performance.In line with accounts of identity in automediality and automedia theory, camp can be understood as performing within a dialectical tension between self and its representation. The camp aesthetic shows the self as discursively mediated and embedded in subjective formations that are “heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional” (Smith and Watson 71). Affiliated with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity, the camp artist typically foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same time he/she suggests how this approach is shaped by socio-political marginalization. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the criticality of camp is “additive and accretive” rather than oppositional; it is a surplus form that manifests as “the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products” (149).Trecartin, who identifies as gay, parodies the excesses of digital identity while at the same time, from camp and queer perspectives, he asks us to take these identifications seriously—straight, gay, transsexual, bisexual, inter-sexual, racial, post-racial, mainstream, alternative, capitalist or anarchist. This pluralist agenda manifests in characters who speak as though everything is in quotation marks, suggesting that everything is possible. Dialogue such as “I’m finally just an ‘as if’”, “I want an idea landfill”, and “It reminds me of the future” project feelings of too much and not enough, transforming Warhol’s cool, image-oriented version of camp (transfixed by TV and supermarket capitalism) into a hyper-affective Internet camp—a camp that feeds on new life narratives, identity postures and personalities, as stimuli.In emphasising technology as intrinsic to camp self-presentation, Trecartin treats intersectionality and intermediality as if corresponding concepts. His characters, caught between youthhood and adulthood, are inbetweeners. Yet, despite being nebulous, they float free of normative ideals only in the sense that they believe everybody not only has the right to live how they want to, but to also be condemned for it—the right to intolerance going hand-in-hand with their belief in plurality. This suggests the paradoxical condition of pluralist, intersectional selfhood in the digital age, where one can position one’s identity as if between social categories while at the same time weaponizing it, in the form of identity politics. In K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), Global Korea asks: “Who the fuck is that baby shit-talker? That’s not one of my condiments,” which is delivered with characteristic confidence, defensiveness and with gleeful disregard for normative speech. Figure 4: Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (2013), digital video stillThe Zaniness of the Neoliberal SelfIf, as Koestenbaum claims, Trecartin’s host of characters are actually “evolving mutations of a single worldview” (275), then the worldview they represent is what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypercommodified, information saturated, performance driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). Self-presentation in this context is not to be understood so much as experienced through prisms of technological inflection, marketing spiel and pluralist interpretative schemas. Ngai has described the rise of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category that perfectly encapsulates this capitalist condition. Zany hyperactivity is at once “lighthearted” and “vehement,” and as such it is highly suited to the contemporary volatility of affective labour; its tireless overlapping of work and play, and the networking rhetoric of global interconnectedness (Ngai, 7). This is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism, where a successful career is measured by one’s capacity to be “always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other persons, whose encounter is the result of being always driven by the drive for activity” (Chiapello and Fairclough 192).For Ngai, the zany—epitomized by Jim Carrey’s character in Cable Guy (1996) or Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes cartoons—performs first and asks questions later. As such, their playfulness is always performed in a way that could spin out of control, as when Trecartin’s humour can, in the next moment, appear psychotic. Ngai continues:What is essential to zaniness is its way of evoking a situation with the potential to cause harm or injury […]. For all their playfulness and commitment to fun, the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering not just themselves but also those around them. (10)Using sinister music scores, anxiety-inducing editing and lighting that references iconic DIY horror films such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin comically frames the anxieties and over-produced individualism of the global neoliberalist project, but in ways that one is unsure what to do with it. “Don’t look at me—look at your mother, and globalize at her,” commands Global Korea. Set in temporary (read precarious) locations that often resemble both domestic and business environments, his world is one in which young adults are incessantly producing themselves as content, as if unstable market testers run riot, on whose tastes our future global economic growth depends.Michel Foucault defined this neoliberal condition as “the application of the economic grid to social phenomena” (239). As early as 1979 he claimed that workers in a neoliberal context begin to regard the self as an “abilities-machine” (229) where they are less partners in the processes of economic exchange than independent producers of human capital. As Jodi Dean puts it, with the totalization of economic production, neoliberal processes “simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends” (32). As entrepreneurs of the self, people under neoliberalism become producers for whom socialization is no longer a byproduct of capitalist production but can be the very means through which capital is produced. With this in mind, Trecartin’s portrayal of the straight-to-camera format is less a video diary than a means for staging social auditions. His performers (or contestants), although foregrounding their individualism, always have their eyes on group power, suggesting a competitive individualism rather than the countering of normativity. Forever at work and at play, these comic-tragics are ur-figures of neoliberalism—over-connected and over-emotional self-presenters who are unable to stop, in fear they will be nothing if not performing.ConclusionPortraying a seemingly endless parade of neoliberal selves, Trecartin’s work yields a zany vision that always threatens to spin out of control. As a form of Internet-era camp, he reproduces automedial conceptions of the self as constituted and expanded by media technologies—as performative conduits between the formal and the socio-political which go both ways. This process has been described by Berlant in terms of life writing, but it applies equally to Trecartin, who, through a “performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity,” facilitates “a performance of being” for the viewer “made possible by the proximity of the object” (Berlant 25). Inflating for both comic and tragic effect a profoundly nebulous yet weaponized conception of identity, Trecartin’s characters show the relation between offline and online life to be impossible to essentialize, laden with a mix of conflicting feelings and personas. As identity avatars, his characters do their best to be present and responsive to whatever precarious situations they find themselves in, which, due to the nature of his scripts, seem at times to have been automatically generated by the Internet itself.ReferencesBourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as a Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lucas & Stenberg, 2001.Chiapello, E., and N. Fairclough. “Understanding the New Management Ideology: A Transdisciplinary Contribution from Critical Discourse Analysis and New Sociology of Capitalism.” Discourse and Society 13.2 (2002): 185–208.Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. London & New York: Verso, 2016.Droitcour, Brian. “Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet.” Rhizome 27 July 2001. 18 Apr. 2015 <http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/27/making-word-ryan-trecartin-poet/>.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien [Automediality: Subject Constitution in Print, Image, and New Media]. Munich: Fink, 2008.Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.Prosser, Jay. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography 34.1 (Winter 2012): 180- 87.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (Spring 2015): 155-180.Schjeldahl, Peter. “Party On.” New Yorker, 27 June 2011: 84-85.Smith, Sidonie. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 2010———, and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run: Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2016.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001.Trecartin, Ryan. “Ryan Trecartin.” Artforum (Sep. 2012): 471.Wayne Koestenbaum. “Situation Hacker.” Artforum 47.10 (Summer 2009): 274-279.Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Hardware/Software/Wetware.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Many years ago, while studying in Paris as a novice postgraduate, I was invited to accompany a friend to a seminar with Jacques Derrida. I leapt at the chance even though I was only just learning French. Although I tried hard to follow the discussion, the extent of my participation was probably signing the attendance sheet. Afterwards, caught up on the edges of a small crowd of acolytes in the foyer as we waited out a sudden rainstorm, Derrida turned to me and charmingly complimented me on my forethought in predicting rain, pointing to my umbrella. Flustered, I garbled something in broken French about how I never forgot my umbrella, how desolated I was that he had mislaid his, and would he perhaps desire mine? After a small silence, where he and the other students side-eyed me warily, he declined. For years I dined on this story of meeting a celebrity academic, cheerfully re-enacting my linguistic ineptitude. Nearly a decade later I was taken aback when I overheard a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney re-telling my encounter as a witty anecdote, where an early career academic teased Derrida with a masterful quip, quoting back to him his own attention to someone else’s quote. It turned out that Spurs, one of Derrida’s more obscure early essays, employs an extended riff on an inexplicable citation found in inverted commas in the margins of Nietzsche’s papers: “J’ai oublié mon parapluie” (“I have forgotten my umbrella”). My clumsy response to a polite enquiry was recast in a process of Chinese whispers in my academic community as a snappy spur-of-the-moment witticism. This re-telling didn’t just selectively edit my encounter, but remixed it with a meta-narrative that I had myself referenced, albeit unknowingly. My ongoing interest in the more playful breaches of scholarly conventions of quotation and attribution can be traced back to this incident, where my own presentation of an academic self was appropriated and remixed from fumbler to quipster. I’ve also been struck throughout my teaching career by the seeming disconnect between the stringent academic rules for referencing and citation and the everyday strategies of appropriation that are inherent to popular remix culture. I’m taking the opportunity in this paper to reflect on the practice of scholarly quotation itself, before examining some recent creative provocations to the academic ‘author’ situated inventively at the crossroad between scholarly convention and remix culture. Early in his own teaching career at Oxford University Lewis Carroll, wrote to his younger siblings describing the importance of maintaining his dignity as a new tutor. He outlines the distance his college was at pains to maintain between teachers and their students: “otherwise, you know, they are not humble enough”. Carroll playfully describes the set-up of a tutor sitting at his desk, behind closed doors and without access to today’s communication technologies, relying on a series of college ‘scouts’ to convey information down corridors and staircases to the confused student waiting for instruction below. The lectures, according to Carroll, went something like this: Tutor: What is twice three?Scout: What’s a rice-tree?Sub-scout: When is ice free?Sub-sub-scout: What’s a nice fee??Student (timidly): Half a guinea.Sub-sub-scout: Can’t forge any!Sub-scout: Ho for jinny!Scout: Don’t be a ninny!Tutor (looking offended, tries another question): Divide a hundred by twelve.Scout: Provide wonderful bells!Sub-scout: Go ride under it yourself!Sub-sub-scout: Deride the dunderhead elf!Pupil (surprised): What do you mean?Sub-sub-scout: Doings between!Sub-scout: Blue is the screen!Scout: Soup tureen! And so the lecture proceeds… Carroll’s parody of academic miscommunication and misquoting was reproduced by Pierre Bourdieu at the opening of the book Academic Discourse to illustrate the failures of pedagogical practice in higher education in the mid 1960s, when he found scholarly language relied on codes that were “destined to dazzle rather than to enlighten” (3). Bourdieu et al found that students struggled to reproduce appropriately scholarly discourse and were constrained to write in a badly understood and poorly mastered language, finding reassurance in what he called a ‘rhetoric of despair’: “through a kind of incantatory or sacrificial rite, they try to call up and reinstate the tropes, schemas or words which to them distinguish professorial language” (4). The result was bad writing that karaoke-ed a pseudo academic discourse, accompanied by a habit of thoughtlessly patching together other peoples’ words and phrases. Such sloppy quoting activities of course invite the scholarly taboo of plagiarism or its extreme opposite, hypercitation. Elsewhere, Jacques Derrida developed an important theory of citationality and language, but it is intriguing to note his own considerable unease with conventional acknowledgement practices, of quoting and being quoted: I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time, and the subservience that always accompany the classic pedagogical procedures of forging links, referring back to past premises or arguments, justifying one’s own trajectory, method, system, and more or less skilful transitions, re-establishing continuity, and so on. These are but some of the imperatives of classical pedagogy with which, to be sure, one can never break once and for all. Yet, if you were to submit to them rigorously, they would very soon reduce you to silence, tautology and tiresome repetition. (The Ear of the Other, 3) This weariness with a procedural hyper-focus on referencing conventions underlines Derrida’s disquiet with the self-protecting, self-promoting and self-justifying practices that bolster pedagogical tradition and yet inhibit real scholarly work, and risk silencing the authorial voice. Today, remix offers new life to quoting. Media theorist Lev Manovich resisted the notion that the practice of ‘quotation’ was the historical precedent for remixing, aligning it instead to the authorship practice of music ‘sampling’ made possible by new electronic and digital technology. Eduardo Navas agrees that sampling is the key element that makes the act of remixing possible, but links its principles not just to music but to the preoccupation with reading and writing as an extended cultural practice beyond textual writing onto all forms of media (8). A crucial point for Navas is that while remix appropriates and reworks its source material, it relies on the practice of citation to work properly: too close to the original means the remix risks being dismissed as derivative, but at the same time the remixer can’t rely on a source always being known or recognised (7). In other words, the conceptual strategies of remix must rely on some form of referencing or citation of the ideas it sources. It is inarguable that advances in digital technologies have expanded the capacity of scholars to search, cut/copy & paste, collate and link to their research sources. New theoretical and methodological frameworks are being developed to take account of these changing conditions of academic work. For instance, Annette Markham proposes a ‘remix methodology’ for qualitative enquiry, arguing that remix is a powerful tool for thinking about an interpretive and adaptive research practice that takes account of the complexity of contemporary cultural contexts. In a similar vein Cheré Harden Blair has used remix as a theoretical framework to grapple with the issue of plagiarism in the postmodern classroom. If, following Roland Barthes, all writing is “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (146), and if all writing is therefore rewriting, then punishing students for plagiarism becomes problematic. Blair argues that since scholarly writing has become a mosaic of digital and textual productions, then teaching must follow suit, especially since teaching, as a dynamic, shifting and intertextual enterprise, is more suited to the digital revolution than traditional, fixed writing (175). She proposes that teachers provide a space in which remixing, appropriation, patch-writing and even piracy could be allowable, even useful and productive: “a space in which the line is blurry not because students are ignorant of what is right or appropriate, or because digital text somehow contains inherent temptations to plagiarise, but because digital media has, in fact, blurred the line” (183). The clashes between remix and scholarly rules of attribution are directly addressed by the pedagogical provocations of conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who has developed a program of ‘uncreative writing’ at the University of Pennsylvania, where, among other plagiaristic tasks, he forces students to transcribe whole passages from books, or to download essays from online paper mills and defend them as their own, marking down students who show a ‘shred of originality’. In his own writing and performances, which depend almost exclusively on strategies of appropriation, plagiarism and recontextualisation of often banal sources like traffic reports, Goldsmith says that he is working to de-familiarise normative structures of language. For Goldsmith, reframing language into another context allows it to become new again, so that “we don’t need the new sentence, the old sentence re-framed is good enough”. Goldsmith argues for the role of the contemporary academic and creative writer as an intelligent agent in the management of masses of information. He describes his changing perception of his own work: “I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor” (Perloff 147). For him, what is of interest to the twenty-first century is not so much the quote that ‘rips’ or tears words out of their original context, but finding ways to make new ‘wholes’ out of the accumulations, filterings and remixing of existing words and sentences. Another extraordinary example of the blurring of lines between text, author and the discursive peculiarities of digital media can be found in Jonathan Lethem’s essay ‘An Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’, which first appeared in Harpers Magazine in 2007. While this essay is about the topic of plagiarism, it is itself plagiarized, composed of quotes that have been woven seamlessly together into a composite whole. Although Lethem provides a key at the end with a list of his sources, he has removed in-text citations and quotation marks, even while directly discussing the practices of mis-quotation and mis-attribution throughout the essay itself. Towards the end of the essay can be found the paragraph: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. …By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste ourselves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? (68) Overall, Lethem’s self-reflexive pro-plagiarism essay reminds the reader not only of how ideas in literature have been continuously recycled, quoted, appropriated and remixed, but of how open-source cultures are vital for the creation of new works. Lethem (re)produces rather than authors a body of text that is haunted by ever present/absent quotation marks and references. Zara Dinnen suggests that Lethem’s essay, like almost all contemporary texts produced on a computer, is a provocation to once again re-theorise the notion of the author, as not a rigid point of origin but instead “a relay of alternative and composite modes of production” (212), extending Manovich’s notion of the role of author in the digital age of being perhaps closest to that of a DJ. But Lethem’s essay, however surprising and masterfully intertextual, was produced and disseminated as a linear ‘static’ text. On the other hand, Mark Amerika’s remixthebook project first started out as a series of theoretical performances on his Professor VJ blog and was then extended into a multitrack composition of “applied remixology” that features sampled phrases and ideas from a range of artistic, literary, musical, theoretical and philosophical sources. Wanting his project to be received not as a book but as a hybridised publication and performance art project that appears in both print and digital forms, remixthebook was simultaneously published in a prestigious university press and a website that works as an online hub and teaching tool to test out the theories. In this way, Amerika expands the concept of writing to include multimedia forms composed for both networked environments and also experiments with what he terms “creative risk management” where the artist, also a scholar and a teacher, is “willing to drop all intellectual pretence and turn his theoretical agenda into (a) speculative play” (xi). He explains his process halfway through the print book: Other times we who create innovative works of remix artare fully self-conscious of the rival lineagewe spring forth fromand knowingly take on other remixological styles just to seewhat happens when we move insideother writers’ bodies (of work)This is when remixologically inhabitingthe spirit of another writer’s stylistic tendenciesor at least the subconsciously imagined writerly gesturesthat illuminate his or her live spontaneous performancefeels more like an embodied praxis In some ways this all seems so obvious to me:I mean what is a writer anyway buta simultaneous and continuous fusion ofremixologically inhabited bodies of work? (109) Amerika mashes up the jargon of academic writing with avant-pop forms of digital rhetoric in order to “move inside other writers’ bodies (of work)” in order to test out his theoretical agenda in an “embodied praxis” at the same time that he shakes up the way that contemporary scholarship itself is performed. The remixthebook project inevitably recalls one of the great early-twentieth century plays with scholarly quotation, Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Instead of avoiding conventional quoting, footnoting and referencing, these are the very fabric of Benjamin’s sprawling project, composed entirely of quotes drawn from nineteenth century philosophy and literature. This early scholarly ‘remixing’ project has been described as bewildering and oppressive, but which others still find relevant and inspirational. Marjorie Perloff, for instance, finds the ‘passages’ in Benjamin’s arcades have “become the digital passages we take through websites and YouTube videos, navigating our way from one Google link to another and over the bridges provided by our favourite search engines and web pages" (49). For Benjamin, the process of collecting quotes was addictive. Hannah Arendt describes his habit of carrying little black notebooks in which "he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of 'pearls' and 'coral'. On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection" (45). A similar practice of everyday hypercitation can be found in the contemporary Australian performance artist Danielle Freakley’s project, The Quote Generator. For what was intended in 2006 to be a three year project, but which is still ongoing, Freakley takes the delirious pleasure of finding and fitting the perfect quote to fit an occasion to an extreme. Unlike Benjamin, Freakley didn’t collect and collate quotes, she then relied on them to navigate her way through her daily interactions. As The Quote Generator, Freakley spoke only in quotations drawn from film, literature and popular culture, immediately following each quote with its correct in-text reference, familiar to academic writers as the ‘author/date’ citation system. The awkwardness and seeming artificiality of even short exchanges with someone who responds only in quotes might be bewildering enough, but the inclusion of the citation after the quote maddeningly interrupts and, at the same time, adds another metalevel to a conversation where even the simple platitude ‘thank you’ might be followed by an attribution to ‘Deep Throat 1972’. Longer exchanges become increasingly overwhelming, as Freakley’s piling of quote on quote, and sometimes repeating quotes, demands an attentive listener, as is evident in a 2008 interview with Andrew Denton on the ABC’s Enough Rope: Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope (2008) Denton: So, you’ve been doing this for three years??Freakley: Yes, Optus 1991Denton: How do people respond to you speaking in such an unnatural way?Freakley: It changes, David Bowie 1991. On the streets AKA Breakdance 1984, most people that I know think that I am crazy, Billy Thorpe 1972, a nigger like me is going insane, Cyprus Hill 1979, making as much sense as a Japanese instruction manual, Red Dwarf 1993. Video documentation of Freakley’s encounters with unsuspecting members of the public reveal how frustrating the inclusion of ‘spoken’ references can be, let alone how taken aback people are on realising they never get Freakley’s own words, but are instead receiving layers of quotations. The frustration can quickly turn hostile (Denton at one point tells Freakley to “shut up”) or can prove contaminatory, as people attempt to match or one-up her quotes (see Cook's interview 8). Apparently, when Freakley continued her commitment to the performance at a Perth Centerlink, the staff sent her to a psychiatrist and she was diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, then prescribed medication (Schwartzkoff 4). While Benjamin's The Arcades Project invites the reader to scroll through its pages as a kind of textual flaneur, Freakley herself becomes a walking and talking word processor, extending the possibilities of Amerika’s “embodied praxis” in an inescapable remix of other people’s words and phrases. At the beginning of the project, Freakley organised a card collection of quotes categorised into possible conversation topics, and devised a ‘harness’ for easy access. Image: Danielle Freakley’s The Quote Generator harness Eventually, however, Freakley was able to rely on her own memory of an astounding number of quotations, becoming a “near mechanical vessel” (Gottlieb 2009), or, according to her own manifesto, a “regurgitation library to live by”: The Quote Generator reads, and researches as it speaks. The Quote Generator is both the reader and composer/editor. The Quote Generator is not an actor spouting lines on a stage. The Quote Generator assimilates others lines into everyday social life … The Quote Generator, tries to find its own voice, an understanding through throbbing collations of others, constantly gluttonously referencing. Much academic writing quotes/references ravenously. New things cannot be said without constant referral, acknowledgement to what has been already, the intricate detective work in the barking of the academic dog. By her unrelenting appropriation and regurgitating of quotations, Freakley uses sampling as a technique for an extended performance that draws attention to the remixology of everyday life. By replacing conversation with a hyper-insistence on quotes and their simultaneous citation, she draws attention to the artificiality and inescapability of the ‘codes’ that make up not just ordinary conversations, but also conventional academic discourse, what she calls the “barking of the academic dog”. Freakley’s performance has pushed the scholarly conventions of quoting and referencing to their furthest extreme, in what has been described by Daine Singer as a kind of “endurance art” that relies, in large part, on an antagonistic relationship to its audience. In his now legendary 1969 “Double Session” seminar, Derrida, too, experimented with the pedagogical performance of the (re)producing author, teasing his earnest academic audience. It is reported that the seminar began in a dimly lit room lined with blackboards covered with quotations that Derrida, for a while, simply “pointed to in silence” (177). In this seminar, Derrida put into play notions that can be understood to inform remix practices just as much as they do deconstruction: the author, originality, mimesis, imitation, representation and reference. Scholarly conventions, perhaps particularly the quotation practices that insist on the circulation of rigid codes of attribution, and are defended by increasingly out-of-date understandings of contemporary research, writing and teaching practices, are ripe to be played with. Remix offers an expanded discursive framework to do this in creative and entertaining ways. References Amerika, Mark. remixthebook. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 29 July 2013 http://www.remixthebook.com/. Arendt, Hannah. “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940.” In Illuminations. New York, NY: Shocken, 1969: 1-55. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image Music Text. Trans Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 142-148. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Blaire, Cheré Harden. “Panic and Plagiarism: Authorship and Academic Dishonesty in a Remix Culture.” Media Tropes 2.1 (2009): 159-192. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Monique de Saint Martin. Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Trans. Richard Teese. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965. Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson). “Letter to Henrietta and Edwin Dodgson 31 Jan 1855”. 15 July 2013 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Letters_of_Lewis_Carroll. Cook, Richard. “Don’t Quote Me on That.” Time Out Sydney (2008): 8. http://rgcooke.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/interview-danielle-freakley.Denton, Andrew. “Interview: The Quote Generator.” Enough Rope. 29 Feb. 2008. ABC TV. 15 July 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsrGvwXsenE. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs, Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. London: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Text, Transference. Trans Peggy Kampf. New York: Shocken Books, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. “The Double Session”. Dissemination. Trans Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981. Dinnen, Zara. "In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Letham's 'The Ecstasy of Influence'". Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2 (2012). Freakley, Danielle. The Quote Generator. 2006 to present. 10 July 2013 http://www.thequotegenerator.com/. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing. New York: University of Colombia Press 2011. Gottlieb, Benjamin. "You Shall Worship No Other Artist God." Art & Culture (2009). 15 July 2013 http://www.artandculture.com/feature/999. Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 2007: 59-71. http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/. Manovich, Lev. "What Comes after Remix?" 2007. 15 July 2013 http://manovich.net/LNM/index.html. Markham, Annette. “Remix Methodology.” 2013. 9 July 2013 http://www.markham.internetinquiry.org/category/remix/.Morris, Simon (dir.). Sucking on Words: Kenneth Goldsmith. 2007. http://www.ubu.com/film/goldsmith_sucking.html.Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. New York: Springer Wein, 2012. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Schwartzkoff, Louise. “Art Forms Spring into Life at Prima Vera.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Sep. 2008: Entertainment, 4. http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/art-forms-spring-into-life-at-primavera/2008/09/18/1221331045404.html.Singer, Daine (cur.). “Pains in the Artists: Endurance and Suffering.” Blindside Exhibition. 2007. 2 June 2013 http://www.blindside.org.au/2007/pains-in-the-artists.shtml.

Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this cocktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.

Introduction Explorations of the multimedia game format within cultural studies have been broadly approached from two perspectives: one -- the impact of technologies on user interaction particularly with regard to social implications, and the other -- human computer interactions within the framework of cybercultures. Another approach to understanding or speaking about games within cultural studies is to focus on the game experience as cultural practice -- as an activity or an event. In this article I wish to initiate an exploration of the aesthetics of player space as a distinctive element of the gameplay experience. In doing so I propose that an understanding of aesthetic spatial issues as an element of player interactivity and engagement is important for understanding the cultural practice of adventure gameplay. In approaching these questions, I am focussing on the single-player exploration adventure game in particular Myst and The Crystal Key. In describing these games as adventures I am drawing on Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Game Design, which although a little dated, focusses on game design as a distinct activity. He brings together a theoretical approach with extensive experience as a game designer himself (Excalibur, Legionnaire, Gossip). Whilst at Atari he also worked with Brenda Laurel, a key theorist in the area of computer design and dramatic structure. Adventure games such as Myst and The Crystal Key might form a sub-genre in Chris Crawford's taxonomy of computer game design. Although they use the main conventions of the adventure game -- essentially a puzzle to be solved with characters within a story context -- the main focus and source of pleasure for the player is exploration, particularly the exploration of worlds or cosmologies. The main gameplay of both games is to travel through worlds solving clues, picking up objects, and interacting with other characters. In Myst the player has to solve the riddle of the world they have entered -- as the CD-ROM insert states "Now you're here, wherever here is, with no option but to explore." The goal, as the player must work out, is to release the father Atrus from prison by bringing magic pages of a book to different locations in the worlds. Hints are offered by broken-up, disrupted video clips shown throughout the game. In The Crystal Key, the player as test pilot has to save a civilisation by finding clues, picking up objects, mending ships and defeating an opponent. The questions foregrounded by a focus on the aesthetics of navigation are: What types of representational context are being set up? What choices have designers made about representational context? How are the players positioned within these spaces? What are the implications for the player's sense of orientation and navigation? Architectural Fabrication For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. The creation of a digital architecture in adventure games mimics the Pompeii wall paintings with their interplay of extruded and painted features. In visualising the space of a cosmology, the environment starts to be coded like the urban or built environment with underlying geometry and textured surface or dressing. In The Making of Myst (packaged with the CD-ROM) Chuck Carter, the artist on Myst, outlines the process of creating Myst Island through painting the terrain in grey scale then extruding the features and adding textural render -- a methodology that lends itself to a hybrid of architectural and painted geometry. Examples of external architecture and of internal room design can be viewed online. In the spatial organisation of the murals of Pompeii and later Rome, orthogonals converged towards several vertical axes showing multiple points of view simultaneously. During the high Renaissance, notions of perspective developed into a more formal system known as the construzione legittima or legitimate construction. This assumed a singular position of the on-looker standing in the same place as that occupied by the artist when the painting was constructed. In Myst there is an exaggeration of the underlying structuring technique of the construzione legittima with its emphasis on geometry and mathematics. The player looks down at a slight angle onto the screen from a fixed vantage point and is signified as being within the cosmological expanse, either in off-screen space or as the cursor. Within the cosmology, the island as built environment appears as though viewed through an enlarging lens, creating the precision and coldness of a Piero della Francesca painting. Myst mixes flat and three-dimensional forms of imagery on the same screen -- the flat, sketchy portrayal of the trees of Myst Island exists side-by-side with the monumental architectural buildings and landscape design structures created in Macromodel. This image shows the flat, almost expressionistic trees of Myst Island juxtaposed with a fountain rendered in high detail. This recalls the work of Giotto in the Arena chapel. In Joachim's Dream, objects and buildings have depth, but trees, plants and sky -- the space in-between objects -- is flat. Myst Island conjures up the realm of a magic, realist space with obsolete artefacts, classic architectural styles (the Albert Hall as the domed launch pad, the British Museum as the library, the vernacular cottage in the wood), mechanical wonders, miniature ships, fountains, wells, macabre torture instruments, ziggurat-like towers, symbols and odd numerological codes. Adam Mates describes it as "that beautiful piece of brain-deadening sticky-sweet eye-candy" but more than mere eye-candy or graphic verisimilitude, it is the mix of cultural ingredients and signs that makes Myst an intriguing place to play. The buildings in The Crystal Key, an exploratory adventure game in a similar genre to Myst, celebrate the machine aesthetic and modernism with Buckminster Fuller style geodesic structures, the bombe shape, exposed ducting, glass and steel, interiors with movable room partitions and abstract expressionist decorations. An image of one of these modernist structures is available online. The Crystal Key uses QuickTime VR panoramas to construct the exterior and interior spaces. Different from the sharp detail of Myst's structures, the focus changes from sharp in wide shot to soft focus in close up, with hot-spot objects rendered in trompe l'oeil detail. The Tactility of Objects "The aim of trompe l'oeil -- using the term in its widest sense and applying it to both painting and objects -- is primarily to puzzle and to mystify" (Battersby 19). In the 15th century, Brunelleschi invented a screen with central apparatus in order to obtain exact perspective -- the monocular vision of the camera obscura. During the 17th century, there was a renewed interest in optics by the Dutch artists of the Rembrandt school (inspired by instruments developed for Dutch seafaring ventures), in particular Vermeer, Hoogstraten, de Hooch and Dou. Gerard Dou's painting of a woman chopping onions shows this. These artists were experimenting with interior perspective and trompe l'oeil in order to depict the minutia of the middle-class, domestic interior. Within these luminous interiors, with their receding tiles and domestic furniture, is an elevation of the significance of rhyparography. In the Girl Chopping Onions of 1646 by Gerard Dou the small things are emphasised -- the group of onions, candlestick holder, dead fowl, metal pitcher, and bird cage. Trompe l'oeil as an illusionist strategy is taken up in the worlds of Myst, The Crystal Key and others in the adventure game genre. Traditionally, the fascination of trompe l'oeil rests upon the tension between the actual painting and the scam; the physical structures and the faux painted structures call for the viewer to step closer to wave at a fly or test if the glass had actually broken in the frame. Mirian Milman describes trompe l'oeil painting in the following manner: "the repertory of trompe-l'oeil painting is made up of obsessive elements, it represents a reality immobilised by nails, held in the grip of death, corroded by time, glimpsed through half-open doors or curtains, containing messages that are sometimes unreadable, allusions that are often misunderstood, and a disorder of seemingly familiar and yet remote objects" (105). Her description could be a scene from Myst with in its suggestion of theatricality, rich texture and illusionistic play of riddle or puzzle. In the trompe l'oeil painterly device known as cartellino, niches and recesses in the wall are represented with projecting elements and mock bas-relief. This architectural trickery is simulated in the digital imaging of extruded and painting elements to give depth to an interior or an object. Other techniques common to trompe l'oeil -- doors, shadowy depths and staircases, half opened cupboard, and paintings often with drapes and curtains to suggest a layering of planes -- are used throughout Myst as transition points. In the trompe l'oeil paintings, these transition points were often framed with curtains or drapes that appeared to be from the spectator space -- creating a painting of a painting effect. Myst is rich in this suggestion of worlds within worlds through the framing gesture afforded by windows, doors, picture frames, bookcases and fireplaces. Views from a window -- a distant landscape or a domestic view, a common device for trompe l'oeil -- are used in Myst to represent passageways and transitions onto different levels. Vertical space is critical for extending navigation beyond the horizontal through the terraced landscape -- the tower, antechamber, dungeon, cellars and lifts of the fictional world. Screen shots show the use of the curve, light diffusion and terracing to invite the player. In The Crystal Key vertical space is limited to the extent of the QTVR tilt making navigation more of a horizontal experience. Out-Stilling the Still Dutch and Flemish miniatures of the 17th century give the impression of being viewed from above and through a focussing lens. As Mastai notes: "trompe l'oeil, therefore is not merely a certain kind of still life painting, it should in fact 'out-still' the stillest of still lifes" (156). The intricate detailing of objects rendered in higher resolution than the background elements creates a type of hyper-reality that is used in Myst to emphasise the physicality and actuality of objects. This ultimately enlarges the sense of space between objects and codes them as elements of significance within the gameplay. The obsessive, almost fetishistic, detailed displays of material artefacts recall the curiosity cabinets of Fabritius and Hoogstraten. The mechanical world of Myst replicates the Dutch 17th century fascination with the optical devices of the telescope, the convex mirror and the prism, by coding them as key signifiers/icons in the frame. In his peepshow of 1660, Hoogstraten plays with an enigma and optical illusion of a Dutch domestic interior seen as though through the wrong end of a telescope. Using the anamorphic effect, the image only makes sense from one vantage point -- an effect which has a contemporary counterpart in the digital morphing widely used in adventure games. The use of crumbled or folded paper standing out from the plane surface of the canvas was a recurring motif of the Vanitas trompe l'oeil paintings. The highly detailed representation and organisation of objects in the Vanitas pictures contained the narrative or symbology of a religious or moral tale. (As in this example by Hoogstraten.) In the cosmology of Myst and The Crystal Key, paper contains the narrative of the back-story lovingly represented in scrolls, books and curled paper messages. The entry into Myst is through the pages of an open book, and throughout the game, books occupy a privileged position as holders of stories and secrets that are used to unlock the puzzles of the game. Myst can be read as a Dantesque, labyrinthine journey with its rich tapestry of images, its multi-level historical associations and battle of good and evil. Indeed the developers, brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, had a fertile background to draw on, from a childhood spent travelling to Bible churches with their nondenominational preacher father. The Diorama as System Event The diorama (story in the round) or mechanical exhibit invented by Daguerre in the 19th century created a mini-cosmology with player anticipation, action and narrative. It functioned as a mini-theatre (with the spectator forming the fourth wall), offering a peek into mini-episodes from foreign worlds of experience. The Musée Mechanique in San Francisco has dioramas of the Chinese opium den, party on the captain's boat, French execution scenes and ghostly graveyard episodes amongst its many offerings, including a still showing an upper class dancing party called A Message from the Sea. These function in tandem with other forbidden pleasures of the late 19th century -- public displays of the dead, waxwork museums and kinetescope flip cards with their voyeuristic "What the Butler Saw", and "What the Maid Did on Her Day Off" tropes. Myst, along with The 7th Guest, Doom and Tomb Raider show a similar taste for verisimilitude and the macabre. However, the pre-rendered scenes of Myst and The Crystal Key allow for more diorama like elaborate and embellished details compared to the emphasis on speed in the real-time-rendered graphics of the shoot-'em-ups. In the gameplay of adventure games, animated moments function as rewards or responsive system events: allowing the player to navigate through the seemingly solid wall; enabling curtains to be swung back, passageways to appear, doors to open, bookcases to disappear. These short sequences resemble the techniques used in mechanical dioramas where a coin placed in the slot enables a curtain or doorway to open revealing a miniature narrative or tableau -- the closure of the narrative resulting in the doorway shutting or the curtain being pulled over again. These repeating cycles of contemplation-action-closure offer the player one of the rewards of the puzzle solution. The sense of verisimilitude and immersion in these scenes is underscored by the addition of sound effects (doors slamming, lifts creaking, room atmosphere) and music. Geographic Locomotion Static imagery is the standard backdrop of the navigable space of the cosmology game landscape. Myst used a virtual camera around a virtual set to create a sequence of still camera shots for each point of view. The use of the still image lends itself to a sense of the tableauesque -- the moment frozen in time. These tableauesque moments tend towards the clean and anaesthetic, lacking any evidence of the player's visceral presence or of other human habitation. The player's navigation from one tableau screen to the next takes the form of a 'cyber-leap' or visual jump cut. These jumps -- forward, backwards, up, down, west, east -- follow on from the geographic orientation of the early text-based adventure games. In their graphic form, they reveal a new framing angle or point of view on the scene whilst ignoring the rules of classical continuity editing. Games such as The Crystal Key show the player's movement through space (from one QTVR node to another) by employing a disorientating fast zoom, as though from the perspective of a supercharged wheelchair. Rather than reconciling the player to the state of movement, this technique tends to draw attention to the technologies of the programming apparatus. The Crystal Key sets up a meticulous screen language similar to filmic dramatic conventions then breaks its own conventions by allowing the player to jump out of the crashed spaceship through the still intact window. The landscape in adventure games is always partial, cropped and fragmented. The player has to try and map the geographical relationship of the environment in order to understand where they are and how to proceed (or go back). Examples include selecting the number of marker switches on the island to receive Atrus's message and the orientation of Myst's tower in the library map to obtain key clues. A screenshot shows the arrival point in Myst from the dock. In comprehending the landscape, which has no centre, the player has to create a mental map of the environment by sorting significant connecting elements into chunks of spatial elements similar to a Guy Debord Situationist map. Playing the Flaneur The player in Myst can afford to saunter through the landscape, meandering at a more leisurely pace that would be possible in a competitive shoot-'em-up, behaving as a type of flaneur. The image of the flaneur as described by Baudelaire motions towards fin de siècle decadence, the image of the socially marginal, the dispossessed aristocrat wandering the urban landscape ready for adventure and unusual exploits. This develops into the idea of the artist as observer meandering through city spaces and using the power of memory in evoking what is observed for translation into paintings, writing or poetry. In Myst, the player as flaneur, rather than creating paintings or writing, is scanning the landscape for clues, witnessing objects, possible hints and pick-ups. The numbers in the keypad in the antechamber, the notes from Atrus, the handles on the island marker, the tower in the forest and the miniature ship in the fountain all form part of a mnemomic trompe l'oeil. A screenshot shows the path to the library with one of the island markers and the note from Atrus. In the world of Myst, the player has no avatar presence and wanders around a seemingly unpeopled landscape -- strolling as a tourist venturing into the unknown -- creating and storing a mental map of objects and places. In places these become items for collection -- cultural icons with an emphasised materiality. In The Crystal Key iconography they appear at the bottom of the screen pulsing with relevance when active. A screenshot shows a view to a distant forest with the "pick-ups" at the bottom of the screen. This process of accumulation and synthesis suggests a Surrealist version of Joseph Cornell's strolls around Manhattan -- collecting, shifting and organising objects into significance. In his 1982 taxonomy of game design, Chris Crawford argues that without competition these worlds are not really games at all. That was before the existence of the Myst adventure sub-genre where the pleasures of the flaneur are a particular aspect of the gameplay pleasures outside of the rules of win/loose, combat and dominance. By turning the landscape itself into a pathway of significance signs and symbols, Myst, The Crystal Key and other games in the sub-genre offer different types of pleasures from combat or sport -- the pleasures of the stroll -- the player as observer and cultural explorer. References Battersby, M. Trompe L'Oeil: The Eye Deceived. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Crawford, C. The Art of Computer Game Design. Original publication 1982, book out of print. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.php>. Darley Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Lunenfeld, P. Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P 1999. Mates, A. Effective Illusory Worlds: A Comparative Analysis of Interfaces in Contemporary Interactive Fiction. 1998. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://www.wwa.com/~mathes/stuff/writings>. Mastai, M. L. d'Orange. Illusion in Art, Trompe L'Oeil: A History of Pictorial Illusion. New York: Abaris, 1975. Miller, Robyn and Rand. "The Making of Myst." Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Milman, M. Trompe-L'Oeil: The Illusion of Reality. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1982. Murray, J. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Cyberspace from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday, 1999. Game References 7th Guest. Trilobyte, Inc., distributed by Virgin Games, 1993. Doom. Id Software, 1992. Excalibur. Chris Crawford, 1982. Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos Interactive, 1996. The Crystal Key. Dreamcatcher Interactive, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Bernadette Flynn. "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php>. Chicago style: Bernadette Flynn, "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Bernadette Flynn. (2000) Towards an aesthetics of navigation -- spatial organisation in the cosmology of the adventure game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]).