Journal articles on the topic 'German literature – explication'

Abstract This article reviews foundational research on the problem of unmarked word order in German. Focussing on the two most influential seminal papers by Lenerz (1977) and Höhle (1982), I argue that their attempts to determine unmarked, normal word order (either by definition or by explication) is flawed by the fact that both authors presuppose a certain empirical data base without offering a complete grammatical analysis of the data in question. I contend that a more comprehensive, linguistically satisfying analysis of these data will in turn presuppose a pre-given notion of unmarked, normal word order, thus making for a circular definition or explication. As is well-known, normal word order interacts with factors like point of view, thematic roles, animacy, and others. I will argue that influential suggestions for designing a precise theory of these interactions are unsuccessful on both methodological and empirical grounds. I suggest that the traditional modular analysis based on cumulation and treshold values is still the best model we have at present; however, a large and hitherto unresolved issue is the vast variety of contradicting acceptability judgments found in the literature. A careful analysis of these meta-data should enable us to determine paradigmatic core cases while, at the same time, leave room for deviations in various directions, and even for individual ad hoc preferences at the periphery.

For the first time in the Russian-language literature, the article analyzes the works of the English mathematician, geographer and astronomer Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) related to the binary number system. The various variants of the binary notation of numbers presented in the works, examples of converting a decimal number to a binary number and vice versa, examples of four arithmetic operations in the binary number system, the execution methods of which coincide with modern ones, as well as an example of multiplication by an original method, the name of which can be translated in Latin as "another method is sequential addition" are given. All this allows us to conclude that Thomas Harriot described the binary number system earlier than the great German scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who did so in his work "Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire" in 1703.

The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the expression of temporal future tense semantics in various types of subordinate clauses of complex sentences, which so far have not received adequate coverage in linguistic literature. Analyzed are utterances with complex sentences containing direct speech, obtained with the random sampling method from the German fictional and publicistic texts. The total volume of the analyzed material makes up 1089 linguistic units with future tense semantics. In spite of dependent character of predication in the subordinate clause, the explication of future tense semantics in it is very heterogeneous. The most frequent types of subordinate clauses with future-oriented meaning in both analyzed discourses are conditional clauses, attribute, object, and subject clauses as well as subordinate clauses of time and purpose. The diverse repertoire of linguistic means, among which are not only grammatical ones (for example, Präsens, Futur I, Perfekt, Konditionalis I, Präteritum Konjunktiv), but also lexical and grammatical (for example, modal verb constructions), allows of formal and semantic variation, revealing a certain sensitivity in relation to discursive characteristics of the utterance. The most significant explicators of future tense semantics in the subordinate clause are the grammatical forms Präsens and Futur I. Präsens is characterized by high frequency in all types of subordinate clauses and “neutrality” against Futur I, which has limitations when used, for example, in conditional clauses, subordinate clauses of time and purpose, in view of their future time orientation. Futur I can also serve to focus attention on the upcoming action, which contributes to frequency of its use in dependent predication. The semantics of perfect forms, modal verbs, their functional synonyms and conjunctive forms also reveals certain combination preferences by expressing future tense semantics in a subordinate clause.

Frank in this article treats the disagreement between François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas over whether there are arguments that cannot be decided rationally. Lyotard identifies rational undecidability as the “postmodern condition.” Habermas objects that reasonable procedures do exist that are adequate for the resolution of any argument among reasonable participants. Frank judges Lyotard’s argument as unpersuasive yet blames Habermas for dismissing altogether the idea of rationally undecidable disagreements. Frank then turns from contemporary philosophy to early German Romantic hermeneutics and literary theory to substantiate a claim that unresolvable disagreement exists even amid consensus. “Every consensus,” Frank writes in explication of Friedrich Schleiermacher, “contains a residual misunderstanding that will never entirely go away, and this is why no consensus as to either the meaning or the interpretation of the world can ever be final or universally valid.” Frank moreover cites the even more radical position of Friedrich Schlegel: “All truth is relative—but together with that proposition another must be coordinated: there is essentially no such thing as error.” Frank’s own conclusion, reached after comparing these Romantic notions with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, is that “the shaping of consensus will never lead us to a universal symbolism that everyone must make use of in the same way.”

Abstract Given the current call for interdisciplinarity, we reflect on pragmatic methodological implementations of collaborative research – by drawing on empirical evidence from two large-scale cross-disciplinary research projects and by theoretically framing them in trilingual contexts (German, French, and English). These are two major innovations compared to the existing body of literature in this domain. Our empirical analysis shows that multi-, inter- or trans-disciplinary collaboration is an oscillating process along a spectrum of cross-disciplinarity – spanning additive, converging and synthesizing work patterns, i.e. multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity. Such an umbrella-term avoids the common amalgamation of ‘interdisciplinarity’ as the overarching category (cross-disciplinarity of whatever form) and one of the relevant subcategories (the specific work form that a research team chooses). Concretely, if the majority of methods are developed through communal negotiation processes, then a truly interdisciplinary analysis of research results can only be guaranteed through recursive self-reflexive loops. Initial research questions may still be additive and interactions can oscillate during the project process between addition und tentative convergence. We label this process situative interdisciplinarity. Multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity are thus subsumed as a processual entity: flexible, possibly hybrid subforms of cross-disciplinarity. It needs constant reactivation, framing, timing and mediation by project managers. The major challenge lies in the collaborative transfer of concepts, theories, methods and research subjects. This transfer requires translation, explication and transposition of the various disciplinary ‘languages’ and can only be converged in an open-minded, team-oriented and reflexive work environment.

In the paper, the author states that in the UK the emergence of theoretical compendia that represent and simultaneously revise the literary landscape of this country (as well as the United States), determines the necessity to outline the boundaries of the period, which in these works is defined as post-postmodernism. The latter concept has no clear theoretical explication and is discussed in the form of literary directions (altermodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism) that define new aesthetic and philosophical grounds that differ from postmodernism. In the paper, the author substantiates the historical boundaries of post-postmodernism, in particular emphasizing the factors that led to the formation of a new literary paradigm after 2000s. The ideas of British theorists on «realisms» in contemporary British literature have been developed with the emphasis on the presentation of new worldview models and identities in the contemporary British novels. A review of «The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction» (edited by D. O’Gorman and R. Eaglestone) is represented, which gives a condensed view of the aesthetic and philosophical pursuits of the contemporary British novel. The transformation of the archetype of Home in the paradigm of the contemporary (postpostmodern) novel has been spotlighted. Attention is drawn to explaining the representation of «one’s own» and «another’s» («alien») concepts, which reconstructs the traditional idea of Home as a space of protection and security. The transcultural processes inherent in the British novel have been discussed. The new character of the worldview (based on the materials of the novels by D. Mitchell and M. Haddon) has been outlined, which gives reason to speak abouta special postpostmodern way of observing the reality and provide its interpretations. The outline of the corpus of epistemological problems in the contemporary British novel actualizes the experience of philosophy of I. Kant, which is emphasized primarily by British theorists, referring in their own interpretative models to this tradition of German classical philosophy, which becomes important for the post-postmodern novels since 2000s.

AbstractTraditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for child labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older, more densely populated farming regions. In this paper, we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet district in South Africa’s Cape Colony from 1798–1828. We show that the number of children in farming households increased with frontier closure, while the presence of non-family labourers decreased over time. Contrasting with the classic interpretation, we explain this by acknowledging that the demand for family labour was not a function of its marginal productivity and that farmers reacted differently to diminishing land availability depending on their wealth. Poorer households, which made up the majority of this frontier population, responded to shrinking land availability by employing relatively more family labour, while the wealthiest group invested in strengthening market access.TRANSLATED ABSTRACTS FRENCH – GERMAN – SPANISHJeanne Cilliers et Erik Green. L’hypothèse sur la disponibilité de terres et la main d’œuvre dans une économie de colons: richesse, main d’œuvre et composition du ménage à la frontière sud-africaine.La littérature traditionnelle de la frontière identifie une corrélation positive entre la disponibilité de terres et la fertilité. Une explication courante est que la demande de travail des enfants est supérieure dans les régions frontalières nouvellement établies, par comparaison avec d’anciennes régions agricoles plus densément peuplées. Dans cet article, nous contribuons au débat en analysant la relation entre la composition du ménage et la disponibilité de terres dans une région frontalière en train de fermer, le district de Graaff-Reinert dans la Colonie du Cap en Afrique du Sud, entre 1798 et 1828. Les auteurs montrent que le nombre des enfants dans les ménages agricoles augmenta avec la fermeture des frontières, tandis que la présence d’ouvriers agricoles non familiaux déclina au fil des ans. Contrairement à l’interprétation classique, nous expliquons ce phénomène en reconnaissant que la demande de travailleurs familiaux ne dépendit pas de sa productivité marginale, et que les exploitants agricoles réagirent différemment selon leur richesse à la disponibilité de terres diminuante. Les foyers plus pauvres, qui constituaient la majorité de cette population frontalière, répondirent à la disponibilité de terres déclinante en employant relativement plus de main d’œuvre familiale, tandis que le groupe le plus riche investit dans le renforcement de l’accès au marché.Traduction: Christine Plard

AbstractBased on a review of the literature and historical evidence, I argue that the use of the methodological principle known as the priority principle in Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship is inconsistent and irreconcilable with historical evidence. It attempts to demarcate between the published works and the Nachlass. However, there are no agreed upon necessary and sufficient conditions of a particular textual object being considered “Nachlass.” This absence leads to implicit and often tacit value demarcation criteria that can be broadly grouped into four types of consideration: publication, authorization, publicness, and audience. Each of these criteria pick out a different set of texts as “Nachlass.” Thus, despite the veneer of agreement, the most broadly accepted methodological approach in the Anglo-American tradition of Nietzsche scholarship is applied inconsistently. I argue that we must either offer necessary and sufficient conditions for a piece of text being Nachlass, or we ought to abandon such abstract criteria altogether and embrace a contextual and historical approach. I then argue that the first option is impossible given historical evidence. I conclude this article by explicating several recent German approaches to the Nachlass which I think can offer a new possible approach.

Abstract My paper discusses the controversial relationship between literature and literary studies by using the example of the term ›migration literature‹. It demonstrates in the first part that ›migration literature‹ as a term in literary studies does not expose explications of rational reconstructions of a conceptual content in Harald Fricke’s and Klaus Weimar’s understanding. In its history (Adelson 1991; 2004), ›migration literature‹ goes back to a chain of different terms and definitions as Gastarbeiter- or Ausländerliteratur and reflects strategies of homogenization and exclusion. From the 1980s forward, those terms produce in cultural contexts a semantic field that propagates culture based on a definition of ex negativo (Tafazoli 2019). The first part of my paper describes an outline of influences of homogenization and reductionism on the discourses of migration in literary studies and explains in the second part an asymmetrical relationship between motive on the one hand and terminology on the other. The term ›migration literature‹ seems to dominate this relationship by determination of a source of ›accepted truths‹ related to the life and background – specifically to the place of birth and the origin – of the author (Bay 2017). By prioritization of criteria beyond narrative reality, literary studies led in the 1980s and 1990s discourses on migration on the sidelines of canon of German speaking literature (Weigel 1991; Wilpert 2001). With regard to terminological determination in order to produce interpretative sovereignty (Foucault 1994), my paper exemplifies in the second part that the term ›migration literature‹ collects selected and limited fields of social, historical and political knowledge in perspective adjustment and in order to classify literature beyond aesthetic criteria. By this means, inductive standards (Müller 2010a; 2010b) classify the literary object ›migration‹ ontologically and regardless of factuality of the author’s life on the one hand and fictionality of narrative text on the other. The ontological classification has been used, for example, in contexts that replace the figure of stranger (Fremder) by the figure of migrant and determines the latter as figuration of external space of culture. The replacement suggests a perspective rigidity in the cultural production of knowledge that flows into a terminological classification and claims with the term ›migration literature‹ sovereignty over culture. From this point of view, the author and his work should be located in the external space of canonized literature. The second part of my paper comes to the conclusion that the term ›migration literature‹ has been developed in politicized frames of external-textual ›accepted truths‹ and bases its stability on cultural essentialism and exclusion regardless of heterogenetic appearance (Bhatti 2015). With regard to theories of »literature on the move« (Ette 2001), my paper understands that migration has always formed a considerable part of literary production. Therefore, migration could be understood as a literary motive. This meaning would undermine an ontological understanding of culture. Narrative texts develop poetics of migration and create by figurations of migration a poly-perspectivity in which migration advances to a polysemantic motive. My paper discusses these thoughts in the context of cultural memory in the third part and understands varied and multifaceted constructions of cultural memory on all sides of cultural borders. This part confronts the asymmetrical relationship between motive and terminology with discussions on migration as narrative of cultural memory that belongs to cultural majority and minority equally, at the same time and in the same space. Based on this understanding, my paper argues that migration as a motive construct shapes and leads discourses of culture under the conditions of global re-formation. The shift of the perspective from conceptual classification to close-readings of literary constructions should lead us to considerations about the openness of the narrative in distinction to terminological unity and should also initiate a paradigm shift in locating migration in discourses of literary studies. The theoretical considerations will be exemplified in the fourth section by Mohammad Hossein Allafis Frankfurter Trilogie that is a collection of the novels Die Nächte am Main (1998), Die letzte Nacht mit Gabriela (2000) and Gabriela findet einen Stapel Papier (2012). The fourth part of my paper examines in Frankfurter Trilogie a reading that integrates migration as a motive into the discourse of cultural memory of global challenges. Using the example of the Trilogie, this part of my paper demonstrates that discussions on migration in the context of cultural memory could initiate a shift in the perspective of reception from conceptual homogenization to narrative openness. The shift of perspective shows that literature translates the questions of community into the aesthetic perception of the form of culture and civilization in which the community actually articulates and appears itself and shows also that reading of migration as a statement about one nation has lost its explanatory power. The last part of my paper resumes my thoughts and takes position in the current fields of research in literary studies.

La producción de conocimiento a través de la investigación académica está siendo cada vez más exigida y cuestionada, en un entorno de crisis socio-económica e institucional generalizada de la Universidad. Por su parte, la investigación académica se ve exigida para dar respuesta a las presiones y necesidades del entorno, concretamente a las prioridades de las organizaciones productivas y del mercado. Al mismo tiempo, la investigación en gestión, contabilidad y finanzas es cuestionada por conseguir un impacto muy modesto, en términos de relevancia y difusión de sus hallazgos a un público más amplio, que trascienda el contexto de los mismos investigadores. Estas exigencias y cuestionamientos reclaman una reflexión detenida por parte de los académicos; por ello, en este editorial queremos aportar algunos breves elementos para el debate.Boaventura de Sousa santos, uno de los más influyentes pensadores sociales contemporáneos, ha senalado que actualmente la Universidad vivencia una crisis de hegemonía, una crisis de legitimidad y una crisis institucional (De Sousa, 2007).Hoy en día, el conocimiento autorizado ya no se genera solo en la Universidad, lo que tiene implicaciones profundas en su centralidad-hegemonía y en la forma en que la sociedad misma ve a esta institución. En la sociedad del conocimiento, las empresas y otras entidades privadas parecen preocuparse por la creación del conocimiento, tanto o más que la Universidad y el propio Estado. La presión por la innovación atraviesa todo el tejido societal y no se entiende por fuera de la generación de nuevo conocimiento, con capacidad de ser usado y asimilado colectivamente. Allí, la tensión entre conocimiento e interés toma un realce particular, puesto que los fines altruistas y los mecanismos que acompañaron los procesos de producción de conocimiento en la "academia" se ven desplazados y/o transformados en un escenario de nuevas prioridades económicas (Habermas, 1982).La crisis de legitimidad de la Universidad surge en el marco de las contradicciones sociales y de las funciones y valores que la misma Universidad asumió en la modernidad (De sousa, 2007). El proyecto de educación de masas, bajo el amparo de los valores de la ilustración, implicaba el aumento de la cobertura de la educación superior como un camino hacia la construcción de una sociedad más democrática e incluyente. Pero las relaciones complejas entre educación para el ascenso social, reproducción de los valores dominantes y de la alta cultura y la prioridad en las necesidades económicas (mano de obra para el trabajo) han llevado a que, sobre todo en los países industrializados, la educación superior no logre colmar todas las expectativas de retornos económicos y/o de desarrollo democrático de tales sociedades.Finalmente, la crisis institucional de la Universidad deviene de la contradicción de sus valores, entre ellos la autonomía necesaria para la búsqueda del conocimiento comprometido solo con el bien común y la verdad, y las exigencias crecientes de eficiencia y de gestión bajo los parámetros de las entidades empresariales. La transformación paulatina de las prioridades y valores de las clases dominantes llevó a que la Universidad lentamente perdiera el compromiso estatal de su financiación, teniendo que desplegar procesos de gestión de sus ingresos y costos. La búsqueda de ingresos hace que sus actividades misionales se adapten al mercado, por ejemplo, con impactos profundos en la creación de conocimiento desinteresado, en la formación para la ciudadanía o en el cultivo de la estética y las artes liberales (Nussbaum, 2010).De esta manera, la conjunción de estas crisis conduce a la situación social, institucional y económica que hoy viven las universidades, no solo en Colombia, sino en gran parte del mundo industrializado, que podemos catalogar francamente como "crítica". Es en tal contexto en el que la presión por desarrollar agendas de investigación más "aplicadas" o cercanas a las necesidades de las organizaciones y del mercado se torna prioritaria en las instituciones universitarias. Es también en este contexto donde la relevancia es entendida como la consecución de aplicaciones concretas de los resultados de investigación a problemas organizacionales, con retornos económico-financieros positivos conseguidos en el mercado (p.e. patentes, contratos de [&D, etc.).Es innegable que en el ámbito de las ciencias de gestión, de la contabilidad y de las finanzas, la naturaleza de tales conocimientos reclama un vínculo muy profundo con el mundo organizacional. No obstante, debemos diferenciar con cuidado la búsqueda del conocimiento y la verdad, de la generación de publicidad o de la producción de relatos que pretenden legitimidad. La investigación aplicada se torna más relevante y confiable para conocer el mundo empresarial, cuando está soportada en marcos conceptuales y estructuras teóricas robustas, que son propias de la investigación básica y que permiten entregar sentido explicativo y comprensivo a los eventos empíricos; todo ello implica que no solo la aplicación es válida para la investigación en nuestras disciplinas. Pero al mismo tiempo, la investigación aplicada puede poner a prueba los referentes teóricos traídos de otras latitudes y ser germen para la construcción de un conocimiento endógeno de nuestra realidad tropical (Mora-Osejo y Fals-Borda, 2004).De esta manera, el vínculo entre Universidad, por una parte, y entorno empresarial y mercado, por otra, requiere ser permanente repensado y reconstruido. Debemos comprender que los tiempos de la generación del conocimiento no necesariamente siguen los ritmos de la producción empresarial, expuesta a las presiones para la subsistencia económica en la lucha del mercado. Pero también debemos entender que la comprensión, intervención y transformación de nuestra realidad reclama un proceso disciplinado y comprometido con la entrega de resultados tangibles, que repercutan en sugerencias y estrategias de acción para el mediano y largo plazo.La relevancia de los resultados de investigación y la efectividad de su difusión vienen siendo también discutidas. Una evaluación de las diferentes posturas no puede perder de vista el contexto de crisis que la Universidad afronta. En el fondo, la relevancia de la investigación universitaria es cuestionada dadas las crisis financiera y de legitimidad que esta institución enfrenta. El debate por el sentido de la publicación universitaria y académica debe ser abordado, sin perder de vista los matices sociológicos que están inmersos en la producción del conocimiento. De ello se desprende la conveniencia de admitir que los académicos son individuos que actúan en estructuras sociales y con ciertos grados de agencia-autonomía; por tanto, también pueden ser más o menos altruistas, utilitaristas, interesados u oportunistas.Si bien la difusión de los resultados de investigación primero requiere del lente experto de los académicos, para garantizar el carácter científico de los hallazgos y la autorregulación responsable, no es menos cierto que la investigación debe trascender el reducido espacio de los claustros, impactando a los actores con capacidad de decisión política y económica y a la opinión pública. No obstante, no solo la Universidad está en crisis. La sociedad enfrenta una crisis de iniquidad y valores democráticos que tiene pocos precedentes. En un escenario como estos, la verdad puede ser incómoda, no solo para el poder económico (que hoy se funde con el poder político) sino para los propios ciudadanos. El riesgo sería confundir relevancia y pertinencia, solo con conocimiento interesado y retórica de legitimación sobre el statu quo en el mundo organizacional y en el mercado global.Por estas razones, entre otras, desde esta tribuna que es [NNOVAR, invitamos a los académicos iberoamericanos de las ciencias de gestión (así como de otras ciencias sociales), para plantear debates y reflexiones que permitan aumentar nuestra comprensión de la realidad organizacional de la región. Estamos comprometidos con el conocimiento científico para el bienestar social y para la construcción de procesos organizacionales más sostenibles. Trabajaremos en conseguir que la revista no solo sea un medio de difusión dirigido a académicos, sino en que la base de profesionales, empresarios y tomadores de decisiones públicas que acceden a nuestra publicación sea cada vez mayor.En este número presentamos diez (10) artículos de investigación, agrupados en tres (3) de nuestras tradicionales secciones: Estrategia y organizaciones, Contabilidad y finanzas, y Educación y empleo.En la primera sección, Estrategia y organizaciones, recogemos cuatro (4) artículos.Desde Uruguay, el profesor Luis silva-Domingo aporta su investigación bajo el título "Management Control: Unsolved Problems and Research Opportunities". En este trabajo el autor identifica un conjunto de conceptos centrales para el control de gestión, llamando la atención sobre la importancia del consenso entre los académicos e investigadores para fortalecer este campo de conocimientos. Los tres conceptos clave que requieren mayores acuerdos son: el problema del control de gestión; la definición y caracterización de los mecanismos del control de gestión; y, finalmente, el alcance de los sistemas de control de gestión.En una colaboración hispano-chilena, los profesores Patricia Huerta, Paloma Almodóvar, Liliana Pedraja, José Navas y Sergio Contreras nos presentan el artículo "Factores que impactan sobre los resultados empresariales: un estudio comparativo entre empresas chilenas y españolas". El trabajo realiza una importante revisión de la literatura sobre los factores que definen el resultado empresarial. Al mismo tiempo, lleva a cabo una muy juiciosa contrastación en empresas de los dos países estudiados, entregando evidencia empírica sobre los factores que influyen decisivamente en los resultados empresariales.Las profesoras españolas Natalia Vila e [Nés Kúster contribuyen a este número con el trabajo titulado "¿Conduce la internacionalización al éxito de una empresa familiar?: aplicación al sector textil". Esta investigación buscó contrastar en las empresas del sector textil espanol, un sector altamente competitivo, la manera en que la internacionalización promovió el éxito empresarial. Para ello, asumió como variables definitorias del éxito empresarial: los resultados empresariales (volumen de ventas, nivel de beneficios, etc.) y los indicadores de desempeño (satisfacción de los clientes, reputación percibida, calidad, etc.). La investigación se basó en encuestas realizadas a 154 gerentes de empresas textiles de España.Para cerrar esta sección, se presenta en la revista el artículo titulado "Project Management in Development Cooperation. Non Governmental Organizations", de autoría de los profesores Maricela Montes-Guerra, Aida De-Miguel, Amaya Pérez-Ezcurdia, Faustino Gimena y Mauricio Díez-silva, fruto de una colaboración colombo-espanola. En esta investigación, los autores llaman la atención sobre la relevancia de la gestión de proyectos para las iniciativas de apoyo y cooperación internacional al desarrollo. En particular, el trabajo permite concluir que la gestión de proyectos puede mejorar la eficiencia y la rendición de cuentas de tales proyectos.Nuestra sección de Contabilidad y finanzas está constituida, igualmente, por cuatro (4) artículos científicos.El primer artículo de esta sección es de autoría del profesor colombiano Javier Humberto Ospina Holguín, y se titula "Medidas dinámicas de predictibilidad en el índice S&P 500 y sus determinantes". Esta investigación buscó medir la predictibilidad del índice Standard and Poor's 500. Para ello construyó un algoritmo basado en medidas dinámicas de predictibilidad. La investigación concluye que el mercado no es estáticamente predecible, sino que la predictibilidad evoluciona dinámicamente, lo que corrobora la hipótesis teórica de la tendencia adaptativa del mercado.Los profesores españoles Fernando Azcárate Llanes, Manuel Fernández Chulián y Francisco Carrasco Fenech aportan el trabajo "Memorias de sostenibilidad e indicadores integrados: análisis exploratorio sobre características definitorias. Una reflexión crítica". Esta investigación buscó caracterizar las empresas que publican memorias de sostenibilidad (informes de desarrollo sostenible, siguiendo la guía No. 3 del Global Reporting [niciative-GR[ G3-) y que contienen indicadores integrados. A partir de la realización de un análisis clúster, el trabajo permitió agrupar a las empresas que producen los informes (memorias) de mayor calidad. Se concluye que las memorias muestran deficiencias, pese al alto reconocimiento que, en materia de Responsabilidad social, tienen las empresas que las emiten.Bajo el título "El empleo de la Webmetría para el análisis de los indicadores de desempeño y posición financiera de la empresa: un análisis exploratorio en diversos sectores económicos de los Estados Unidos", presentamos la colaboración de los profesores Esteban Romero Frías, Liwen Vaughan y Lázaro Rodríguez Ariza, de universidades de España y Canadá. Esta investigación busca identificar si existe relación entre las variables financieras y los enlaces recibidos por empresas de diversos sectores económicos. El trabajo buscó extender los hallazgos previos de la literatura, más allá de empresas del sector de tecnología, particularmente en el contexto estadounidense. Los resultados muestran que existe un vínculo entre el número de enlaces que reciben las páginas web de las empresas y su dimensión económica (posición y desempeño financiero).Cierra esta sección con la investigación de los profesores espanoles Belén Vallejo-Alonso, José Domingo García-Merino y Gerardo Arregui-Ayastuy, artículo titulado "Motives for Financial Valuation of Intangibles and Business Performance in SMEs". Este trabajo buscó analizar la relación existente entre los motivos que llevan a la valoración de los intangibles y el desempeño de las pequeñas y medianas empresas (Pymes). La investigación empírica implicó entrevistar telefónicamente a 369 gerentes financieros de Pymes españolas y la vinculación de sus respuestas con el análisis de la información financiera de tales empresas. Los resultados muestran que las Pymes consideran que la valoración financiera de sus intangibles permite un mejor desempeño.En la sección de Educación y empleo, para este número, publicamos dos (2) resultados de investigación.El primer trabajo se denomina "¿Es posible potenciar la capacidad de liderazgo en la universidad?", fruto de la colaboración de los profesores Carmen Delia Dávila Quintana, José-Ginés Mora, Pedro Pérez Vázquez y Luis Eduardo Vila, quienes están vinculados con universidades de España y el Reino Unido. El trabajo analizó la importancia de la educación superior en el comportamiento de los egresados en el puesto de trabajo, particularmente en las dimensiones del liderazgo orientado a las tareas, las relaciones y al cambio. A partir de modelos de ecuaciones estructurales, los resultados muestran que el comportamiento de los egresados como líderes depende crucialmente de determinadas competencias clave.El segundo artículo, fruto del trabajo de las investigadoras colombianas Silvia Morales Gualdrón y Astrid Giraldo Gómez, se titula "Análisis de una innovación social: el Comité Universidad Empresa Estado del Departamento de Antioquia (Colombia) y su funcionamiento como mecanismo de interacción". La investigación buscó caracterizar el Comité Universidad Empresa Estado (CUEE) del Departamento de Antioquia, desde la teoría de redes y la teoría de la comunicación funcional. La metodología observada fue cualitativa y se basó en entrevistas a profundidad y en la triangulación de documentos, tales como las actas del CUEE. El trabajo concluye que el CUEE opera como una red de conocimiento en el que la comunicación, la deliberación, la confianza y la negociación se construyen por medio del consenso.Como siempre, estamos seguros de que nuestros lectores encontrarán valiosos estos trabajos. También, partimos de reconocer que nuestros colaboradores continúan aportando a la comprensión de la dinámica organizacional y socioeconómica, en un ambiente complejo y retador como el que enfrenta hoy la Universidad internacional e iberoamericana.

RESUMENEl año 2021 se ha cumplido el VIII centenario del nacimiento del rey Alfonso X, acontecimiento que tuvo lugar en la ciudad de Toledo el 23 de noviembre de 1221. Nos encontramos ante la figura de uno de los reyes medievales hispanos de mayor relevancia, tanto por las ideas políticas innovadoras que intentó aplicar, aunque no lo consiguió, como, sobre todo, por la gran actividad intelectual que bajo su patronazgo se llevó entonces a cabo y que le ha merecido el apelativo de Sabio como es conocido. Son muchos los historiadores que, desde distintas ópticas (el Arte, el Derecho, la Astronomía, la Música, la Literatura, etcétera) se han acercado a su figura, lo que ha repercutido en que contemos con una bibliografía muy numerosa y de una gran variedad temática. Palabras clave: Historiografía, Imperio alemán, Partidas, Cantigas, Toledo.Topografía: Castilla y León.Periodo: siglo XIII ABSTRACTThe year 2021 has been the eighth centenary of the birth of King Alfonso X, an event that took place in the city of Toledo on November 21, 1221. We are faced with the figure of one of the most important Hispanic medieval kings both for the innovative political ideas that he tried to apply, although he did not succeed, as, above all, because of the great intellectual activity that took place under his patronage then and that has earned him the nickname of Wise as he is known. There are many historians who, from different perspectives (Art, Law, Astronomy, Music, Literature, etc.) have approached his figure, which has resulted in our having a very numerous bibliography and a great thematic variety. Keywords: Historiography, German Empire, Partidas, Cantigas, ToledoToponyms: Castilla y LeónPeriod: 13th century REFERENCIASÁlvarez Martínez, R. 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AbstractLiterary scholars draw comparisons more often than they reflect on the practice of that drawing. Our study of comparisons in hermeneutic practice shows that comparative study is not merely a characteristic of general and comparative literary studies. It can also be found as a (generally qualitative) practice within the monolingual disciplines. The comparison of texts with similar themes is particularly widespread and popular, typically discovering through this comparison the differences and similarities of the literary treatment, in order to prove the aesthetic worth of a work and thus to make increased aesthetic pleasure possible. In addition, there are also studies which, through comparison of sample texts test the validity of statements about literary history or the typology of genres. The practice is particularly associated with comparative literary studies, which claims thus to overcome the limitations of monolingual literary studies. In principle, this form of test study can be extended to an unlimited number of cases, whereby philologists can, among other things, demonstrate how well-read they are. Nevertheless, this form of comparison, too, has to date mostly been used qualitatively, without exploring the potential of a quantitative expansion of the study.Making reference to Descartes’ thesis (1628) that every growth in knowledge is always grounded in a comparison, it is discussed under what circumstances individual case studies may be understood as technically comparative in nature. In this regard one should be careful not to rob the concept of the comparison of the element of differentiation. Therefore, in what follows, we only class studies as comparative when they consider at least two cases (e. g. at least two works), although the main interest of the study may be reserved for one case.Further, in literary studies, comparisons may be used both to discover the characteristics of the object investigated (›discovery function‹) and as a (sometimes comparatively conceived) control testing the scope of assertions or hypotheses (›control function‹). The emphasis of the use of comparison, as a rule, lies on the qualitative description of the complexity of individual selected cases, whose aesthetic value and place in literary history may thus be judged. By contrast, quantitative comparisons of a few variables within many cases are seldom used by literary scholars. Literary studies have to date hardly taken into account the contrast between quantitative and qualitative comparisons which has been so thoroughly discussed in social science, nor of the attempts to overcome this contrast (for instance through multi-value comparative quantitative analysis, which takes account not only of the need to revise hypotheses, but also the possible necessity of the revision of categories during or after the drawing of comparisons). Instead, an appeal to the ›incomparability‹ of literary art, made as early as 1902 by Benedetto Croce frequently recurs, or the argument, borrowed from Ethnology and Religious Studies, for the need for necessary ›respect for the unique and different nature‹ (Haupt 2013) of the object of study is often made. Earlier attempts at empiricisation, for instance the empirical study of literature movement of the 1970s (cf. Schmidt 2005), were unable to establish themselves, much less become part of the regular course of German Studies. This was partly because the fundamentally hermeneutically oriented field of literary studies could not accept the empiricists’ rejection of hermeneutic methods (cf. Ort 1994). There was an almost reflex professorial defence of interpretative reading.Consequently, we think it important that empiricism should no longer be conceived of as an argument against hermeneutic approaches to philological objects of study, but rather to make it available as a useful aid to the improvement of established methods of literary study (cf. Groeben 2013). Literary studies can thus work against the reproach that its generalisations are based at best on insufficient data, and at worst on mere intuition. Building on the often overlooked, but well established philological technique of comparing parallel passages, we wish to demonstrate how, where, and to what extent, the corpus technology offered by the digital humanities can help to empiricise literary studies. Corpora offer, in the first instance, the possibility of qualitative comparison of verbal parallels, but also to make parallels of content in the form of intersubjectively explicable, repeatable search procedures more transparent (cf. Fricke 1991, 2007). In this respect, the comparison of parallel passages, an old established hermeneutic method can be made empirical.In a further step, we will discuss the possibilities of quantitative comparisons in corpora (i. e. hypothesis-led variables oriented comparisons): on the one hand, the statistical description of corpora through stylometrics, which allows texts as a whole to be described, for instance in terms of word and sentence length, or the frequency of specific graphemes; on the other the analysis of collocations and the determination of »usuelle Wortverbindungen« (common multi-word expressions), which allow for the study of individual textual characteristics. In this connection, we discuss the necessity and usefulness of comparative corpora for the scope of statements determined via corpus analysis, as well as the dependence of the quality of the comparison of parallel passages on the quality of the chosen corpus.To what extent literary studies as a field will adopt these statistical comparative techniques as a philological method in the age of the digital humanities, remains to be seen. We are, given the aversion to statistical matters which this predominantly hermeneutically oriented discipline has shown to date, somewhat sceptical. We are also sceptical about whether corpus linguistic quality standards of corpora composition will be accepted. We would therefore consider not only statistically based procedures for composing corpora, but also other means of plausibilization, such as the explication of the texts studied, and an argument for their selection, to be not only legitimate but appropriate.Despite the field of literary studies’ continued reluctance to use quantitative methods, we still see a possibility that quantitative textual comparisons could provide a stimulus to standardisation. Corpus based comparisons make us aware that the comparison of many texts presupposes explicit assumptions about the comparability of what is compared. This requires a precise formulation of the questions to be explored, as well as a precise explication of the textual phenomena studied, so that exact statements about the relationships between the characteristics compared become possible.

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ReCALL, 15, 1 (2003), 113–136.03–401 Gánem Gutiérrez, Gabriela Adela (University of Southampton, UK; Email: Adela@robcham.freeserve.co.uk). Beyond interaction: The study of collaborative activity in computer-mediated tasks. ReCALL, 15, 1 (2003), 94–112.03–402 Gibbons, Pauline. Mediating language learning: teacher interactions with ESL students in a content-based classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 37, 2 (2003), 213–245.03–403 Gwyn-Paquette, Caroline (U. of Sherbrooke, Canada; Email: cgwyn@interlinx.qc.ca) and Tochon, François Victor. The role of reflective conversations and feedback in helping preservice teachers learn to use cooperative activities in their second language classrooms. The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne des Langues Vivantes, 59, 4 (2003), 503–545.03–404 Hincks, Rebecca (Centre for Speech Technology, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden; Email: hinks@speech.kth.se). Speech technologies for pronunciation feedback and evaluation. 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TESL Canada Journal (BC, Canada), 20, 2 (2003), 52–64.03–410 Ko, Jungmin, Schallert Diane L., Walters, Keith (University of Texas). Rethinking scaffolding: examining negotiation of meaning in an ESL storytelling task. TESOL Quarterly, 37, 2 (2003), 303–336.03–411 Lazaraton, Anne (University of Minnesota, USA). Incidental displays of cultural knowledge in Nonnative-English-Speaking Teachers. TESOL Quarterly, 37, 2 (2003), 213–245.03–412 Lehtonen, Tuija (University of Jyväskylä, Finland; Email: tuijunt@cc.jyu.fi) and Tuomainen, Sirpa. CSCL – A Tool to Motivate Foreign Language Learners: The Finnish Application. ReCALL, 15, 1 (2003), 51–67.03–413 Lycakis, Françoise (Lycée Galilée, Cergy, France). Les TPE et l'enseignement de l'anglais. [Supervised individual projects and English teaching.] Les langues modernes, 97, 2 (2003), 20–26.03–414 Lyster, Roy and Rebuffot, Jacques (McGill University, Montreal, Canada; Email: roy.lister@mcgill.ca). Acquisition des pronoms d'allocution en classe de français immersif. [The acquisition of pronouns of address in the French immersion class.] Aile, 17 (2002), 51–71.03–415 Macdonald, Shem (La Trobe U., Australia). Pronunciation – views and practices of reluctant teachers. Prospect (NSW, Australia) 17, 3 (2002), 3–15.03–416 Miccoli, L. (The Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil; Email: lmiccoli@dedalus.lcc.ufmg.br). English through drama for oral skills development. ELT Journal, 57, 2 (2003), 122–129.03–417 Mitchell, R. (University of Southampton), and Lee, J.H-W. Sameness and difference in classroom learning cultures: interpretations of communicative pedagogy in the UK and Korea. Language teaching research (London, UK), 7, 1 (2003), 35–63.03–418 Moore, Daniele (Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon, France; Email: yanmoore@aol.com). Code-switching and learning in the classroom. 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Where Are We With Technology?: What Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Have to Say About the Presence of Technology in Their Teaching. Hispania (Los Angeles, USA), 86, 1 (2003), 88–96.03–426 Reza Kiany, G. and Shiramiry, Ebrahim (U. Essex, UK). The effect of frequent dictation on the listening comprehension ability of elementary EFL learners. TESL Canada Journal (BC, Canada), 20, 1 (2002), 57–63.03–427 Rifkin, Benjamin (U. Wisconsin, Madison, USA). A case study of the acquisition of narration in Russian: at the intersection of foreign language education, applied linguistics, and second language acquisition. Slavic and East European Journal (Tucson, AZ, USA), 46, 3 (2002), 465–481.03–428 Rosch, Jörg (Universität München, Germany). Plädoyer für ein theoriebasiertes Verfahren von Software-Design und Software-Evaluation. [Plea for a theoretically-based procedure for software design and evaluation.] Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Berlin, Germany), 40, 2 (2003), 94–103.03–429 Ross, Stephen J. (Kwansei Gakuin U., Japan). A diachronic coherence model for language program evaluation. Language learning (Oxford, UK), 53, 1 (2003), 1–33.03–430 Shei, Chi-Chiang (Chang Jung U., Taiwan; Email: shei@mail.cju.edu.tw) and Pain, Helen. Computer-Assisted Teaching of Translation Methods. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford, UK), 17, 3 (2002), 323–343.03–431 Solfjeld, Kåre. Zum Thema authentische Übersetzungen im DaF-Unterricht: Überlegungen, ausgehend von Sachprosaübersetzungen aus dem Deutschen ins Norwegische. [The use of authentic translations in the Teaching of German as a Foreign Language: considerations arising from some Norwegian translations of German non-fiction texts.] Info DaF (Munich, Germany), 29, 6 (2002), 489–504.03–432 Slatyer, Helen (Macquarie U., Australia). Responding to change in immigrant English language assessment. Prospect (NSW, Australia), 18, 1 (2003), 42–52.03–433 Stockwell, Glenn R. (Ritsumeikan Univeristy, Japan; Email: gstock@ec.ritsumei.ac.jp). Effects of topic threads on sustainability of email interactions between native speakers and nonnative speakers. ReCALL, 15, 1 (2003), 37–50.03–434 Tang, E. (City University of Hong Kong), and Nesi H. Teaching vocabulary in two Chinese classrooms: schoolchildren's exposure to English words in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Language teaching research (London, UK), 7,1 (2003), 65–97.03–435 Thomas, Alain (U. of Guelph, Canada; Email: Thomas@uoguelph.ca). La variation phonétique en français langue seconde au niveau universitaire avancé. [Phonetic variation in French as a foreign language at advanced university level.] Aile, 17 (2002), 101–121.03–436 Tudor, Ian (U. Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; Email: itudor@ulb.ac.be). Learning to live with complexity: towards an ecological perspective on language teaching. System (Oxford, UK), 31, 1 (2003), 1–12.03–437 Wolff, Dieter (Bergische Universität, Wuppertal, Germany). Fremdsprachenlernen als Konstruktion: einige Anmerkungen zu einem viel diskutierten neuen Ansatz in der Fremdsprachendidaktik. [Foreign-language learning as ‘construction’: some remarks on a much-discussed new approach in foreign-language teaching.] Babylonia (Comano, Switzerland), 4 (2002), 7–14.

Between 1927 and 1940, Walter Benjamin collected and systematized material around the Paris market arcades — their history, economics, architecture, and socio-communicative nature. The Arcades Project (Passagenarbeit) was never completed and appeared only in summary form during the philosopher’s life (Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century) and in fragments within a number of essays. The greater part of the manuscript was made up of 36 thematically organized files (fashion, leisure, the flaneur, interior, progress, etc.) and labelled with roman numerals, but not gathered together into a single volume. These fragments consisted of quotes in German and French from literature and documents of the 19th and 20th centuries. They are excerpts from historical tractates, libretti, memoirs, advertising prospectuses, and notices. Within Arcades the author’s re flections serve as framing devices that conceptually link these documents together, more rarely, they serve as the primary content of individual sections. Benjamin considered his project to be a non-linear text (like the panels of Aby Warburg’s Memnosyne Atlas) where each image would take part in a retrospective uncovering under the critique of ‘capitalism as religion’ and in unmasking the system of connections that enable us to ‘awaken’ from ‘the dream of history’. Without explicating links between objects and phenomena, Benjamin rather made use of constructive elements of display, overlap, and mounting that moved expression from abstract analysis to mimetic reconstruction. This article examines the history of the Arcades Project, illustrates its methodological and aesthetic principles, and links with Benjamin’s philosophical conception. It also prefaces the publication of Arcades: Convolute A introduces the joint project of Versus and Ad Marginem Press with the aim of publishing a complete commentary to Benjamin’s text.

Conceptually, “group-focused enmity” (GFE, long-term project in Germany, duration: 2002–2011) consists of several different attitudes that constitute a syndrome of group-focused enmity. These attitudes are empirically related to each other and share a common core which is the ideology of inequality. But is GFE really a one-dimensional homogeneous ideology? Over the years there have been considerable doubts about this fundamental assumption. We have two central theoretical argumentations for explicating and revising the concept of GFE. The first is based on the social psychological literature regarding differences between ideologies, attitudes, stereotypes and social prejudices. The second arises from one of the basic conceptual ideas of the GFE project, which states that depending on the respective societies different specific groups become targets of devaluation and discrimination. Therefore, we propose a revised version of the GFE syndrome as a two-dimensional concept: an ideology of inequality (generalized attitudes) and social prejudice (specific attitudes). The measurement models are strictly empirically tested using data from the GFE panel (waves 2006, 2008) as well as the representative GFE-surveys (cross-sections 2003, 2011) conducted in Germany. To test for discriminant and external validity, we have also included social dominance orientation (SDO). Additionally, within this framework, the methodological focus of the study is to test for several forms of measurement invariance in the context of higher-order factor models considering the issue of multidimensionality of latent variables. Our empirical results support the idea that GFE is a bi-dimensional concept consisting of an ideology of inequality and social prejudice. Moreover, SDO is demonstrated to be empirically distinct from both dimensions and correlates more strongly with the ideology of inequality in comparison to social prejudice. Additionally, the bi-dimensional GFE conceptualization proves to be at least metric invariant both between and within individuals. The impact of our proposed conceptualization and empirical findings will be discussed in the context of international research on ideologies, attitudes and prejudices. The dealing questions are why different explanatory factors have different effects on prejudicial and ideological attitudes and why there are different forms and manifestations of social prejudice in different societies over time.

Quality is a priority objective of journalism, linked to the fulfillment of the social function of the press. To make this concept evaluable, it is essential to know the degree of satisfaction of the expectations of journalists and audiences. In a context of online journalism, local news continues to be a key element in the shaping of local communities. Bearing these trends in mind, this research aims to develop a proposal for journalistic quality indicators that come from the profession itself, based on the experience and self-criticism of local journalists. We choose to focus on the local area because of its current explanatory capacity for transnational phenomena. In addition, local publications address the everyday needs of their readership. To achieve this aim, a multiple-case-study research strategy is used, following a hypothetical-deductive approach. First, the variables that are identified with journalistic quality in the literature are reviewed. These are then compared and completed with information obtained in the cases studied (digital newspapers from three countries). To study the perception of journalists regarding journalistic quality, semi-directed interviews are conducted with local media professionals in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, representing countries with different journalistic cultures, framed also in different quality schools. However, all three are characterized by a strong tradition of local information. The results reveal the existence of differences in the conception of journalistic quality. The degree of self-awareness about the work carried out is higher among German and British journalists than in the case of Spain. Likewise, codes that refer to the news production process (gatekeeping), such as commitment, transparency, or product quality, are preferred over those related to its reception (newsmaking). Resumen La calidad informativa es un objetivo prioritario de la actividad periodística, en cumplimiento de la función social de la prensa. Para transformar en evaluable este ideal es imprescindible conocer el grado de satisfacción de las expectativas de periodistas y audiencias. En un contexto de ciberperiodismo, la información de proximidad sigue siendo un elemento central en la construcción de vínculos comunes. Teniendo esto en cuenta, el objetivo principal de esta investigación es desarrollar una propuesta de indicadores de calidad informativa derivados de la propia profesión, a partir de la experiencia y autocrítica de los periodistas locales. La elección del ámbito de la proximidad se encuentra motivada por su actual capacidad explicativa de fenómenos transnacionales. Además, las publicaciones locales se encargan de las necesidades cotidianas de la audiencia. Para la consecución del objetivo fijado se emplea el método del estudio de caso, siguiendo un planteamiento hipotético-deductivo. Primero se revisan las variables identificadas con calidad informativa en la bibliografía, para posteriormente contrastarlas y completarlas a partir de la información obtenida en los casos estudiados (diarios digitales de tres países). Para indagar sobre la percepción que de calidad informativa tienen los periodistas se efectúan entrevistas semidirigidas a profesionales de medios locales en Alemania, España y Reino Unido, países de culturas periodísticas distintas, enmarcados a su vez en diferentes escuelas sobre calidad. No obstante, los tres se caracterizan por una fuerte tradición de información de cercanía. Como resultado, se observa la existencia de diferencias en la concepción de calidad informativa. El grado de reflexividad sobre el trabajo efectuado es mayor entre los periodistas alemanes y británicos que en el caso de España. Asimismo, se prefieren los códigos que aluden al proceso de producción de la noticia (gatekeeping), como compromiso, transparencia o calidad del producto, sobre los propios de la recepción (newsmaking).

'Let me give you an analogy; analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.' -- Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures 72 (1933) This paper emerged from a larger study of Freud's view of culture, which used elements of Freud's own way of proceeding to mount a critique of the elaboration of that view. It is proposed here that the use of analogy is foundational to Freud's procedure in building his model of the mind, rather than just a temporary means to an end, and, crucially, that Freud is himself unaware of both the necessity of the analogical move and also of his desire for it. The creation of the concept of the Freudian psyche is a rhetorical tour de force, a structure made of figures of speech, the chief among which is the analogy. Freud constructs an analogy between culture and mind: what is left of his theory of both if this rhetorical connexion is removed? In the opening pages of one of his last works Freud considers the problem of the interpretation of culture, and he concludes that there too it is a question of getting the patient on the couch: '... one is justified [he writes] in attempting to discover a psychoanalytic -- that is, a genetic explanation ...' -- in that psychoanalysis is a method of explaining the origins of present condition of such things as states of mind, to which culture more generally is analogous (Civilization 65). Understanding may be an end in itself, but there may be a more practical purpose in bringing psychoanalysis to bear: a culture may become sick, neurotic, and psychoanalysis may be able to play a part in understanding the nature of the problem, if not also in treating it. Civilization and Its Discontents concludes with the idea that 'we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities' (144). What Freud has to say about culture can be read, I propose, on a number of levels. The smallest elements which begin to reveal meaning -- which are capable of being differentiated in a meaningful way, and therefore analysed as texts -- are parapraxes and the minute revelations of the psychoanalytic techniques of free association and dream analysis. A second level of text is that produced by a unitary, identified 'author', such as Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, or Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin with St Anne. An epoch, such as Freud's Civilization (and its Discontents), and then his view of a species (as in Totem and Taboo), each with its own teleology, form texts of a higher order. My engagement with Freud here is with his method of argument by analogy. On some occasions he makes explicit the extent to which he is dependent on (flexible!) analogies of the description of his method -- as when he writes this in The Question of Lay Analysis: 'In psychology we can only describe things by the help of analogies. There is nothing peculiar in this, it is the case elsewhere as well. But we have constantly to keep changing these analogies, for none of them lasts us long enough. (195) In a key moment in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he again explicitly uses analogy instead of argument, writing: 'Instead of a discussion, however, I shall bring forward an analogy to deal with the objection' (21). This is a point at which he is dealing with the reason for the forgetting of names, and although he is not yet prepared to indicate what is in his view the precise reason for this (namely: repression), he wishes to persuade his reader to stay with him; and so he inserts a narrative about what we would now call a mugging, an event with just the right combination of violence and yet familiarity to allow readers to accept that such things happen but that the agents are usually unknown. That he is confident of the efficacy of this procedure is indicated by that fact that he uses the same analogy again in the Lecture 3 of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (40-59). Although Freud uses analogy -- as a comparison between two separate and distinct and different things -- what he is most interested in is primary process. This is a mode of thinking which may be capable of an awareness of the differences between things, but is more interested in their confluences (overdetermination and condensation), and their similarities and ability to replace each other (displacement). I suggest that analogy is actually primary process subjected to 'secondary revision', and that Freud is himself unaware of the source of his recurrent need to use analogy. Consider also the 'Slovakia' example in Lecture 23 of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in which Freud is extrapolating his division of the mind into the three parts: super-ego, ego and id, the 'three realms, regions, provinces, into which we divide an individual's mental apparatus...' He introduces this in a characteristically persuasive way: 'Let me give you an analogy; analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home' (New Introductory Lectures 72). He then proceeds to a brief description of some of the characteristics of (what is now) Slovakia, in which German, Magyars and Slovaks live, in which there are three kinds of topography and also three groups of industry. He constructs the image partly to demonstrate the complexity of the interrelationships of the parts of the mental apparatus (and partly to have a shot at the powers that at Versailles divided up parts of Europe), and to show that the assignment of distinct names to them tends to obscure the way in which they in fact overlap and interact. However, what the analogy powerfully imports is the 'naturalness', indeed the inevitability, of the division into three. Despite the argument actually being that this division is in fact not clear-cut, it nevertheless implies the necessity of the division. So that his audience is all the more ready the accept the tripartite model of the mind. We could analyse this analogy between the two 'geographies' somewhat in the way that Freud would examine the account of a dream. Firstly, there are the day's residues: in this case his experiences in growing up in this part of Europe together with his reflections on the politics of defining a nation. Then we see the conflation of the two different realms of human experience, political geography and metapsychology; and the displacement of the one set of structures for the other. There is also the overdetermination of the tripartite structures: German, Magyars, Slovaks; hills, plains, lakes; cattle, cereals, fish; superego, ego, id. Finally an instance of secondary revision can be clearly seen in the conclusion of Freud's demonstration. If the partitioning could be neat and clear-cut like this, a Woodrow Wilson would be delighted by it; it would also be convenient for a lecture in a geography lesson. The probability is, however, that you will find less orderliness and more missing, if you travel through the region. ... A few things are naturally as you expected, for fish cannot be caught in the mountains and wine does not grow in the water. Indeed, the picture of the region that you brought with you may on the whole fit the facts; but you will have to put up with deviations in the details. (New Introductory Lectures 73) The implication for my analogy (with dream-analysis) is clearly that there will be a slippage between the different meanings of the images as the process of overdetermination tries to get each to do different work at the same time, and certain elements will have to be refined or retuned, whether in the service of more or less precise relation. A final point might be made, while still on the topic of Slovakia. Freud is, as we have seen, critical to some extent of the political-geographical situation that he receives and describes in his image. The reference to the American president suggests that there might have been a better way to carry out the partition, and certainly events in the region in our own very recent past suggest that this is so. Freud, however, is ultimately accepting of many of the aspects of the picture. He takes the different kinds of primary industry as givens: agriculture, viticulture, and the human culture implied in the national names. The fact that an outsider like Wilson might get it wrong only makes clearer the implication that received political geography is meaningful and in some senses right. This is an example of a cultural unconscious about which Freud does not speak because he cannot. It is not that his assumption about this matter, that which is taken-for-granted, is unthinkable: it is unsayable, something which is outside consciousness because it is so taken-for-granted. This kind of unconscious, which I am calling a kind of cultural unconscious for want of a better term -- and perhaps a notion of the 'non-conscious' might be more accurate -- simply cannot be accommodated by consciousness. Here Freud was appealing to geography to make his point. He far more often appeals to the authority of literature. To give a crude example, it is well known that it was the essay on nature -- thought at one time to be by Goethe -- which is supposed to have been the spur that pricked the side of Freud's intent and actually drove him into what was to become psychoanalysis. So literature not only has an inspirational effect for him, but is also evidence of the interpenetration of Freud's mind -- his way of thinking by analogy and citation -- and the culture of which he is the recipient, and in which he is caught up. If analogy is essential to Freud's theory, rather than just part of its explication (and space has permitted mention of only a few instances) -- if analogy functions as the clasps that hold together the new clothes of the Emperor of Psychoanalysis - what happens when the clasps are removed? References References to the works of Freud in English refer by volume to the Standard Edition (SE): Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the the Complete Psychological Works. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. SE 21. (1930.) 59-145. ---. "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva'." SE 9. (1907 [1906].) 1-95. ---. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. SE 15-6. (1916-17.) ---. "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood." SE 11. (1910.) 59-137. ---. Postscript. SE 20. (1927.) 251-8. ---. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. SE 22. (1933.) ---. The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Eric Mosbacher & James Strachey. Ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud and Ernst Kris. London: Imago; New York: Basic Books, 1950. (1887-1902.) Partly including "A Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1895), in SE 1. Freud, Sigmund. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. SE 6. (1901.) ---. "The Question of Lay Analysis." SE 20. (1926.) 177-250. ---. Totem and Taboo. SE 13. (1912-13.) 1-161. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Garry Gillard. "Mind and Culture: Freud and Slovakia." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/freud.php>. Chicago style: Garry Gillard, "Mind and Culture: Freud and Slovakia," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/freud.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Garry Gillard. (2000) Mind and culture: Freud and Slovakia. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/freud.php> ([your date of access]).

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-porn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.