Journal articles on the topic 'Hostis Herodes'

Innovation Concept: In Sudbury, ON 44% of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients receive bystander CPR (bCPR), and only 4.7% survive cardiac arrest. The Northern City of Heroes (NCH) community initiative was launched in April 2019 with a goal of improving survival from OHCA through hands-only bCPR in the municipality. One NCH initiative is an interactive exhibit at Science North, a science centre in Sudbury that hosts 250,000 visitors annually. The exhibit employs simulation trainers for CPR, accompanying signage and interactive elements. The goals of the exhibit are to activate bCPR, change and measure behaviours through exhibit interactions on how to deliver excellent CPR, and improve survival rates in OHCA patients. Methods: Data is being collected from 3000 visitors using self-reported surveying via SurveyGizmo to assess likelihood of performing bCPR, pre and post interacting with the exhibit. Visitor behaviour will be examined at the exhibit using video-recorded interactions and coding those behaviours using BORIS software. Behavioural data will be analyzed using the Visitor Engagement Framework (VEF) where initiation, transition and breakthrough learning-behaviours are coded and an exhibit Visitor Engagement Profile (VEP) is created. The VEF and VEP are tools used in informal learning settings to assess exhibit impacts on learning. Curriculum, Tool, or Material: The use of an easily-apprehendable, hands-on exhibit tool located in a public setting, such as a science centre, creates a platform for engaging large and diverse public audiences. This type of bCPR exhibitry has not been implemented in other similar environments. The informal learning setting allows the science centre staff to engage in personalized interactions that can solidify the quality of learning and confidence in employing the new skills developed. Conclusion: The NCH exhibit and new strategies for embedding informal curriculum are powerful tools to reach diverse audiences, build knowledge and skills, and have a measurable impact on bCPR and OHCA survival rates. Data is being captured and tracked by Health Sciences North around the City of Greater Sudbury's bCPR and OHCA survival rates to monitor long-term impacts of the NCH community initiatives. Limitations of the study may be found in the focused demographics as well as the nature of self-reported learning. Future research directions include broader geographical surveying to assess improvements in community response to OHCA as a direct result of an interactive bCPR exhibitry.

Experimental infections of laboratory-raised birds supported field data indicating that Common Mergansers (Mergus merganser L.) (prevalence = 20.8%, mean intensity = 3.2) and Red-breasted Mergansers (Mergus senator L.) (prevalence = 4.0%, mean intensity = 1) are important hosts of Eustrongylides tubifex in Ontario. Fourth-stage larvae from naturally infected fish were used to infect birds. In birds, the fourth moult occurred 2 days postinfection and adult worms retained the fourth-stage cuticle. In experimentally infected mergansers, E. tubifex developed in the tunica muscularis of the proventriculus, eliciting raised, oval tumours. Worms matured rapidly, produced eggs 10 to 17 days postinfection, and then degenerated. Tumours resolved rapidly in the proventriculus which returned to its normal condition by approximately 30 days postinfection. Worms were sometimes found in aberrant locations such as the gizzard and liver but this occurred less frequently in Common Mergansers and Red-breasted Mergansers than in other experimentally infected birds (Hooded Mergansers (Mergus cucullatus L.), Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias L.), Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus (Lesson), and domestic ducks (Anas platyrhynchos L.).

There are many positive relationships between micromycetes and birds: They can spread fungal spores, and fungi facilitate cavity woodpecker excavation by preparing and modifying excavation sites. In turn, bird nests are mainly a source of potentially zoopathogenic fungi. The Wrocław city centre hosts the biggest grey heron breeding colony in Poland with at least 240 breeding birds pairs. To assess the possible public health risks associated with bird nests, the goal of the present study was to identify cultivable fungi present in the nests of grey herons (Ardea cinerea) in Wrocław. Additionally, attempts were made to determine whether the obtained species of fungi may pose a potential threat to animal health. Fungi were cultured at 23 and 37 ± 0.5 °C, and identified based on phenotypic and genotypic traits. Moreover, during routine inspection, visible fungal growth in some of the nests was found. Overall, 10 different fungal species were obtained in the study (Alternaria alternata, Aspergillus fumigatus, Botryotrichum piluliferum, Cladosporium cladosporioides, Epicoccum layuense, Mucor circinelloides, M.hiemalis, Penicillium atramentosum, P.coprophilum, and P.griseofulvum). They are both cosmopolitan species and a source of potential threat to humans, homoiothermous animals and plants. The greatest number of fungal species was obtained from the nest fragments with visible fungal growth incubated at 23 °C, and the least from western conifer seed bugs (Leptoglossus occidentalis) inhabiting the nests. The species such as A. fumigatus, P. coprophilum, and P.griseofulvum can be directly related to the occurrence of visible fungal growth on plant fragments of grey heron’s nests.

This paper examines two realisations of the television talk show in North America: The Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil, looking specifically at how they function within the sub-genre of ‘therapeutic talk show’ in keeping with Livingstone and Lunt’s (1994) classification of talk shows. Talk shows are defined by Ilie (2001) as “semi-institutional discourse” having features of a given setting (TV studio), topic- and goal-oriented talk, high degree of topic control, as well as restrictions on time and turn-taking. Theorists examining this sub-genre of therapeutic talk show have argued that it provides a valuable means by which stories otherwise unrecognized have a forum, or that values of truth and honesty can be conveyed (Livingstone & Lunt 1994; Masciarotte 1991; Carbaugh 1988). However, theorists such as Abt and Seesholtz (1994) view therapeutic talk shows as potentially demeaning to guests who appear on them as well as a means by which suffering can be trivialized. Through an examination and analysis of requests for information, both direct and indirect, which are the principal features of all interviews, I look at how Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil problematize the narratives told by their guests. Both hosts rely heavily on one type of request, B-Event assertions functioning as indirect requests for information, to provoke specific response. My findings indicate that these talk shows do not in fact provide a forum for talk that would otherwise not be considered as suggested by Livingstone and Lunt (1994). Both Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil appropriate the stories provided by their guests; they also participate in their own overarching meta-narrative whereby as ‘heroes’ they solve their guests’ problems within a given time frame. Guests’ narrative responses share more with the speech act of confession than with free self-expression. The speech act of confession encouraged by these therapeutic talk shows serves in turn to reinforce conservatively-held values on the part of the at-home audience for whom such confession is also entertainment.

It was the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan who first introduced the term ‘global village’ into the lexicon, almost fifty years ago. He was referring to the phenomenon of global interconnectedness of which we are all too aware today. At that time, we were witnessing the world just opening up. In 1946, British Airways had commenced a twice weekly service from London to New York. The flight involved one or two touch downs en-route and took a scheduled 19 hours and 45 minutes. By the time McLuhan had published his book “Understanding media; the extensions of man”, there were regular services by jet around the globe. London to Sydney was travelled in just under 35 hours. Moving forward to a time immediately pre-covid, there were over 30 non-stop flights a day in each direction between London and New York. The travel time from London to Sydney had been cut by a third, to slightly under 22 hours, with just one touchdown en-route. The world has well and truly ‘opened up’. No place is unreachable by regular services. But that is just one part of the picture. In 1962, the very first live television pictures were transmitted across the Atlantic, via satellite. It was a time when sports’ fans would tune in besides a crackling radio set to hear commentary of their favourite game relayed from the other side of the world. Today of course, not only can we watch a live telecast of the Olympic Games in the comfort of our own homes wherever the games are being held, but we can pick up a telephone and talk face to face with friends and relatives in real time, wherever they may be in the world. To today’s generation – generation Z – this does not seem in the least bit remarkable. Indeed, they have been nicknamed ‘the connected generation’ precisely because such a degree of human interconnectedness no longer seems worth commenting on. The media technology and the transport advances that underpin this level of connectedness, have become taken for granted assumptions to them. This is why the global events of 2020 and the associated public health related reactions, have proved to be so remarkable to them. It is mass travel and the closeness and variety of human contact in day-to-day interactions, that have provided the breeding ground for the pandemic. Consequently, moving around and sharing close proximity with many strangers, have been the activities that have had to be curbed, as the initial primary means to manage the spread of the virus. This has caused hardship to many, either through the loss of a job and the associated income or, the lengthy enforced separation from family and friends – for the many who find themselves living and working far removed from their original home. McLuhan’s powerful metaphor was ahead of its time. His thoughts were centred around media and electronic communications well prior to the notion of a ‘physical’ pandemic, which today has provided an equally potent image of how all of our fortunes have become intertwined, no matter where we sit in the world. Yet it is this event which seems paradoxically to have for the first time forced us to consider more closely the path of progress pursued over the last half century. It is as if we are experiencing for the first time the unleashing of powerful and competing forces, which are both centripetal and centrifugal. On the one hand we are in a world where we have a World Health Organisation. This is a body which has acted as a global force, first declaring the pandemic and subsequently acting in response to it as a part of its brief for international public health. It has brought the world’s scientists and global health professionals together to accelerate the research and development process and develop new norms and standards to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and help care for those affected. At the same time, we have been witnessing nations retreating from each other and closing their borders in order to restrict the interaction of their citizens with those from other nations around the world. We have perceived that danger and risk are increased by international travel and human to human interaction. As a result, increasingly communication has been carried out from the safety and comfort of one’s own home, with electronic media taking the place of personal interaction in the real world. The change to the media dominated world, foreseen by McLuhan a half century ago, has been hastened and consolidated by the threats posed by Covid 19. Real time interactions can be conducted more safely and more economically by means of the global reach of the internet and the ever-enhanced technologies that are being offered to facilitate that. Yet at a geopolitical level prior to Covid 19, the processes of globalism and nationalism were already being recognised as competing forces. In many countries, tensions have emerged between those who are benefitting from the opportunities presented by the development of free trade between countries and those who are invested in more traditional ventures, set in their own nations and communities. The emerging beneficiaries have become characterised as the global elites. Their demographic profile is one associated with youth, education and progressive social ideas. However, they are counter-balanced by those who, rather than opportunities, have experienced threats from the disruptions and turbulence around them. Among the ideas challenged, have been the expected certainties of employment, social values and the security with which many grew up. Industries which have been the lifeblood of their communities are facing extinction and even the security of housing and a roof over the heads of self and family may be under threat. In such circumstances, some people may see waves of new immigrants, technology, and changing social values as being tides which need to be turned back. Their profile is characterised by a demographic less equipped to face such changes - the more mature, less well educated and less mobile. Yet this tension appears to be creating something more than just the latest version of the generational divide. The recent clashes between Republicans and Democrats in the US have provided a very potent example of these societal stresses. The US has itself exported some of these arenas of conflict to the rest of the world. Black lives Matter and #Me too, are social movements with their foundation in the US which have found their way far beyond the immediate contexts which gave them birth. In the different national settings where these various tensions have emerged, they have been characterised through labels such as left and right, progressive and traditional, the ‘haves’ versus the ‘have nots’ etc. Yet common to all of this growing competitiveness between ideologies and values is a common thread. The common thread lies in the notion of competition itself. It finds itself expressed most potently in the spread and adoption of ideas based on what has been termed the neoliberal values of the free market. These values have become ingrained in the language and concepts we employ every day. Thus, everything has a price and ultimately the price can be represented by a dollar value. We see this process of commodification around us on a daily basis. Sports studies’ scholars have long drawn attention to its continuing growth in the world of sport, especially in situations when it overwhelms the human characteristics of the athletes who are at the very heart of sport. When the dollar value of the athlete and their performance becomes more important than the individual and the game, then we find ourselves at the heart of some of the core problems reported today. It is at the point where sport changes from an experience, where the athletes develop themselves and become more complete persons experiencing positive and enriching interactions with fellow athletes, to an environment where young athletes experience stress and mental and physical ill health as result of their experiences. Those who are supremely talented (and lucky?) are rewarded with fabulous riches. Others can find themselves cast out on the scrap heap as a result of an unfair selection process or just the misfortune of injury. Sport as always, has proved to be a mirror of life in reflecting this process in the world at large, highlighting the heights that can be climbed by the fortunate as well as the depths that can be plumbed by the ill-fated. Advocates of the free-market approach will point to the opportunities it can offer. Figures can show that in a period of capitalist organised economies, there has been an unprecedented reduction in the amount of poverty in the world. Despite rapid growth in populations, there has been some extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2010, the numbers in poverty fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries, from 43% to 21%—a reduction of almost 1 billion people (The Economist Leader, June 1st, 2013). Nonetheless the critics of capitalism will continue to point to an increasing gap between the haves and don’t haves and specifically a decline in the ‘middle classes’, which have for so long provided the backbone of stable democratic societies. This delicate balance between retreating into our own boundaries as a means to manage the pandemic and resuming open borders to prevent economic damage to those whose businesses and employment depend upon the continuing movement of people and goods, is one which is being agonised over at this time in liberal democratic societies around the world. The experience of the pandemic has varied between countries, not solely because of the strategies adopted by politicians, but also because of the current health systems and varying social and economic conditions of life in different parts of the world. For many of us, the crises and social disturbances noted above have been played out on our television screens and websites. Increasingly it seems that we have been consuming our life experiences in a world dominated by our screens and sheltered from the real messiness of life. Meanwhile, in those countries with a choice, the debate has been between public health concerns and economic health concerns. Some have argued that the two are not totally independent of each other, while others have argued that the extent to which they are seen as interrelated lies in the extent to which life’s values have themselves become commodified. Others have pointed to the mental health problems experienced by people of all ages as a result of being confined for long periods of time within limited spaces and experiencing few chances to meet with others outside their immediate household. Still others have experienced different conditions – such as the chance to work from home in a comfortable environment and be freed from the drudgery of commuting in crowded traffic or public transport. So, at a national/communal level as well as at an individual level, this international crisis has exposed people to different decisions. It has offered, for many, a chance to recalibrate their lives. Those who have the resources, are leaving the confines of the big capital cities and seeking a healthier and less turbulent existence in quieter urban centres. For those of us in what can be loosely termed ‘an information industry’, today’s work practices are already an age away from what they were in pre-pandemic times. Yet again, a clear split is evident. The notion of ‘essential industries’ has been reclassified. The delivery of goods, the facilitation of necessary purchase such as food; these and other tasks have acquired a new significance which has enhanced the value of those who deliver these services. However, for those whose tasks can be handled via the internet or offloaded to other anonymous beings a readjustment of a different kind is occurring. So to the future - for those who have suffered ill-health and lost loved ones, the pandemic only reinforces the human priority. Health and well-being trumps economic health and wealth where choices can be made. The closeness of human contact has been reinforced by the tales of families who have been deprived of the touch of their loved ones, many of whom still don’t know when that opportunity will be offered again. When writing our editorial, a year ago, I little expected to be still pursuing a Covid related theme today. Yet where once we were expecting to look back on this time as a minor hiccough, with normal service being resumed sometime last year, it has not turned out to be that way. Rather, it seems that we have been offered a major reset opportunity in the way in which we continue to progress our future as humans. The question is, will we be bold enough to see the opportunity and embrace a healthier more equitable more locally responsible lifestyle or, will we revert to a style of ‘progress’ where powerful countries, organisations and individuals continue to amass increased amounts of wealth and influence and become increasingly less responsive to the needs of individuals in the throng below. Of course, any retreat from globalisation as it has evolved to date, will involve disruption of a different kind, which will inevitably lead to pain for some. It seems inevitable that any change and consequent progress is going to involve winners and losers. Already airline companies and the travel industry are putting pressure on governments to “get back to normal” i.e. where things were previously. Yet, in the shadow of widespread support for climate activism and the extinction rebellion movement, reports have emerged that since the lockdowns air pollution has dropped dramatically around the world – a finding that clearly offers benefits to all our population. In a similar vein the impossibility of overseas air travel in Australia has resulted in a major increase in local tourism, where more inhabitants are discovering the pleasures of their own nation. The transfer of their tourist and holiday dollars from overseas to local tourist providers has produced at one level a traditional zero-sum outcome, but it has also been accompanied by a growing appreciation of local citizens for the wonders of their own land and understanding of the lives of their fellow citizens as well as massive savings in foregone air travel. Continuing to define life in terms of competition for limited resources will inevitably result in an ever-continuing run of zero-sum games. Looking beyond the prism of competition and personal reward has the potential to add to what Michael Sandel (2020) has termed ‘the common good’. Does the possibility of a reset, offer the opportunity to recalibrate our views of effort and reward to go beyond a dollar value and include this important dimension? How has sport been experiencing the pandemic and are there chances for a reset here? An opinion piece from Peter Horton in this edition, has highlighted the growing disconnect of professional sport at the highest level from the communities that gave them birth. Is this just another example of the outcome of unrestrained commodification? Professional sport has suffered in the pandemic with the cancelling of fixtures and the enforced absence of crowds. Yet it has shown remarkable resilience. Sport science staff may have been reduced alongside all the auxiliary workers who go to make up the total support staff on match days and other times. Crowds have been absent, but the game has gone on. Players have still been able to play and receive the support they have become used to from trainers, physiotherapists and analysts, although for the moment there may be fewer of them. Fans have had to rely on electronic media to watch their favourites in action– but perhaps that has just encouraged the continuing spread of support now possible through technology which is no longer dependent on personal attendance through the turnstile. Perhaps for those committed to the watching of live sport in the outdoors, this might offer a chance for more attention to be paid to sport at local and community levels. Might the local villagers be encouraged to interrelate with their hometown heroes, rather than the million-dollar entertainers brought in from afar by the big city clubs? To return to the village analogy and the tensions between global and local, could it be that the social structure of the village has become maladapted to the reality of globalisation? If we wish to retain the traditional values of village life, is returning to our village a necessary strategy? If, however we see that today the benefits and advantages lie in functioning as one single global community, then perhaps we need to do some serious thinking as to how that community can function more effectively for all of its members and not just its ‘elites’. As indicated earlier, sport has always been a reflection of our society. Whichever way our communities decide to progress, sport will have a place at their heart and sport scholars will have a place in critically reflecting the nature of the society we are building. It is on such a note that I am pleased to introduce the content of volume 43:1 to you. We start with a reminder from Hoyoon Jung of the importance of considering the richness provided by a deep analysis of context, when attempting to evaluate and compare outcomes for similar events. He examines the concept of nation building through sport, an outcome that has been frequently attributed to the conduct of successful events. In particular, he examines this outcome in the context of the experiences of South Africa and Brazil as hosts of world sporting events. The mega sporting event that both shared was the FIFA world cup, in 2010 and 2014 respectively. Additional information could be gained by looking backwards to the 1995 Rugby World Cup in the case of South Africa and forward to the 2016 Olympics with regard to Brazil. Differentiating the settings in terms of timing as well as in the makeup of the respective local cultures, has led Jung to conclude that a successful outcome for nation building proved possible in the case of South Africa. However, different settings, both economically and socially, made it impossible for Brazil to replicate the South African experience. From a globally oriented perspective to a more local one, our second paper by Rafal Gotowski and Marta Anna Zurawak examines the growth and development, with regard to both participation and performance, of a more localised activity in Poland - the Nordic walking marathon. Their analysis showed that this is a locally relevant activity that is meeting the health-related exercise needs of an increasing number of people in the middle and later years, including women. It is proving particularly beneficial as an activity due to its ability to offer a high level of intensity while reducing the impact - particularly on the knees. The article by Petr Vlček, Richard Bailey, Jana Vašíčková XXABSTRACT Claude Scheuer is also concerned with health promoting physical activity. Their focus however is on how the necessary habit of regular and relevant physical activity is currently being introduced to the younger generation in European schools through the various physical education curricula. They conclude that physical education lessons, as they are currently being conducted, are not providing the needed 50% minimum threshold of moderate to vigorous physical activity. They go further, to suggest that in reality, depending on the physical education curriculum to provide the necessary quantum of activity within the child’s week, is going to be a flawed vision, given the instructional and other objectives they are also expected to achieve. They suggest implementing instead an ‘Active Schools’ concept, where the PE lessons are augmented by other school-based contexts within a whole school programme of health enhancing physical activity for children. Finally, we step back to the global and international context and the current Pandemic. Eric Burhaein, Nevzt Demirci, Carla Cristina Vieira Lourenco, Zsolt Nemeth and Diajeng Tyas Pinru Phytanza have collaborated as a concerned group of physical educators to provide an important international position statement which addresses the role which structured and systematic physical activity should assume in the current crisis. This edition then concludes with two brief contributions. The first is an opinion piece by Peter Horton which provides a professional and scholarly reaction to the recent attempt by a group of European football club owners to challenge the global football community and establish a self-governing and exclusive European Super League. It is an event that has created great alarm and consternation in the world of football. Horton reflects the outrage expressed by that community and concludes: While recognising the benefits accruing from well managed professionalism, the essential conflict between the values of sport and the values of market capitalism will continue to simmer below the surface wherever sport is commodified rather than practised for more ‘intrinsic’ reasons. We conclude however on a more celebratory note. We are pleased to acknowledge the recognition achieved by one of the members of our International Review Board. The career and achievements of Professor John Wang – a local ‘scholar’- have been recognised in his being appointed as the foundation E.W. Barker Professor in Physical Education and Sport at the Nanyang Technological University. This is a well-deserved honour and one that reflects the growing stature of the Singapore Physical Education and Sports Science community within the world of International Sport Studies. John Saunders Brisbane, June 2021

AbstractAcknowledging the neurological symptoms of COVID‐19 and the long‐lasting neurological damage even after the epidemic ends are common, necessitating ongoing vigilance. Initial investigations suggest that extracellular vesicles (EVs), which assist in the evasion of the host's immune response and achieve immune evasion in SARS‐CoV‐2 systemic spreading, contribute to the virus's attack on the central nervous system (CNS). The pro‐inflammatory, pro‐coagulant, and immunomodulatory properties of EVs contents may directly drive neuroinflammation and cerebral thrombosis in COVID‐19. Additionally, EVs have attracted attention as potential candidates for targeted therapy in COVID‐19 due to their innate homing properties, low immunogenicity, and ability to cross the blood‐brain barrier (BBB) freely. Mesenchymal stromal/stem cell (MSCs) secreted EVs are widely applied and evaluated in patients with COVID‐19 for their therapeutic effect, considering the limited antiviral treatment. This review summarizes the involvement of EVs in COVID‐19 neuropathology as carriers of SARS‐CoV‐2 or other pathogenic contents, as predictors of COVID‐19 neuropathology by transporting brain‐derived substances, and as therapeutic agents by delivering biotherapeutic substances or drugs. Understanding the diverse roles of EVs in the neuropathological aspects of COVID‐19 provides a comprehensive framework for developing, treating, and preventing central neuropathology and the severe consequences associated with the disease.

Can the Markan disciples still be viewed as potential role models for the Gospel audience if Mark’s writing is identified as a biography? This long-standing line of narrative interpretation has recently been rejected as anachronistic by Helen K. Bond, who maintains that in Graeco-Roman biographies, secondary characters are only included for what they bring to the portrait of the protagonist. In response, this paper demonstrates that ancient biographies regularly use followers of their main characters to provide multiple mimetic patterns that clarify, broaden, and mitigate what it means to imitate their heroes. In particular, Mark’s cast of secondary characters offers three alternative patterns of behaviour for potential followers of Jesus: apostles, who emulate his itinerant lifestyle of preaching, healing, and exorcism; hosts, who provide apostles with food and shelter in their homes; and supporters, who serve the movement in other ways in accordance with their abilities and social status.

Superheroes offer a promise of not only a better tomorrow, but better versions that we, as humans, can be. They represent the epoch of our evolution, and as demonstrated by their continued popularity, it is a promise that speaks to many of us directly. This said, another reason that superheroes are intriguing, from a curriculum studies perspective, is how the superhero trope has been overlaid onto teachers and teaching. “Teachers are the real superheroes,” the saying goes. But is this belief, like superheroes themselves, simply a myth or story we tell ourselves? Is it the hope or promise that never arrives? If so, is it to shield us from some monstrous truth? Could it be that superheroes represent something much darker? Using several superhero examples, the television series Westworld, and the work of Sylvia Wynter, this paper posits that superheroes, as a metaphor for teachers, are problematic because of their true monstrous nature and that the better metaphor are the “hosts” in Westworld who are seemingly monsters but are actually “heroes.”

Abstract Adults of the genus Posthodiplostomum, Dubois, 1936 are parasites of fish-eating birds, mainly of the family Ardeidae, and are globally distributed. The genus currently comprises 35 species, although recent molecular evidence has shown that the diversity of the genus is underestimated since several candidate species have been recognized. In the Neotropical region of Mexico, at least 6 Posthodiplostomum lineages have been detected with metacercaria stages recovered from unrelated fish hosts. Here, we obtained adult specimens of Posthodiplostomum from 6 fish-eating birds representing 2 families (Butorides virescens, Ardea herodias, Nycticorax nycticorax, Tigrisoma mexicanum – Ardeidae, and Rynchops niger and Leucophaeus atricilla – Lariidae) from 4 localities in southern Mexico. Specimens were sequenced for 2 nuclear (28S and ITS1–5.8S–ITS2) and 1 mitochondrial (cox1) molecular marker. Phylogenetic analyses allowed us to link metacercariae and adult specimens and recognized a lineage, which was described morphologically. The new species can be distinguished from its congeners by its prosoma morphology and body size; this is the first described species in the Neotropical region of Mexico. Additionally, new host and locality records for P. macrocotyle and P. pricei are presented, expanding their geographical distribution range in the Americas.

In the ever-evolving realm of agriculture, the convoluted interaction between plants and microorganisms have assumed paramount significance. Fungal endophytes, once perceived as mere bystanders within plant tissues, have now emerged as dynamic defenders of plant health. This comprehensive review delves into the captivating world of fungal endophytes and their multifaceted biocontrol mechanisms. Exploring their unique ability to coexist with their plant hosts, fungal endophytes have unlocked a treasure trove of biological weaponry to fend off pathogens and enhance plant resilience. From the synthesis of bioactive secondary metabolites to intricate signaling pathways these silent allies are masters of biological warfare. The world of fungal endophytes is quite fascinating as they engage in a delicate dance with the plant immune system, orchestrating a symphony of defense that challenges traditional notions of plant-pathogen interactions. The journey through the various mechanisms employed by these enigmatic endophytes to combat diseases, will lead to revelational understanding of sustainable agriculture. The review delves into cutting-edge research and promising prospects, shedding light on how fungal endophytes hold the key to biocontrol and the reduction of chemical inputs in agriculture. Their ecological significance, potential for bioprospecting and avenues for future research are also explored. This exploration of the biocontrol mechanisms of fungal endophytes promise not only to enrich our comprehension of plant-microbe relationships but also, to shape the future of sustainable and ecofriendly agricultural practices. In this intricate web of life, fungal endophytes are indeed the unsung heroes, silently guarding our crops and illuminating a path towards a greener, healthier tomorrow.

Gellner (1983) defines a nation as a myth whereas nationalism is an ideology through which people (re)invent traditions and culture to construct a nation. Nationalism revives extinct languages and reimagines extinct customs. To strengthen their nation's discourse, South Asian female writers have contributed significantly to the invention of traditions and the reconstruction of their lost culture. By addressing her nation's history and culture in her work, Hosain has also bolstered her national discourse. It is commonly known that history is typically presented through the eyes of men. Even though women have contributed substantially to the national process, their opinions are not included in history books. Since men write history, history favors men by making them the main heroes. This study aims to provide a female viewpoint on the history of the partition of the subcontinent. Thus, the researcher has selected Attia Hossain's novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, to view her perspective on the nation and the partition of India. The concept of a nation is complex to comprehend. Different theorists have different definitions of the nation. Renan (1883), Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), and Anderson's (1991) theories related to the nation have been used to construct a theoretical framework for this research. This study investigates factors contributing to the construction of a nation and nation-state by referencing the partition of the sub-continent and the formation of two nation-states, Pakistan and India.

In the morning of 5 May 2014, over sixty people took their seats in the cosy conference hall of the Holiday Villa Beach Resort and Spa Langkawi, to witness the opening ceremony of the THIC 2014 on the theme: Dimensions of Sustainability in the Planning, Development and Management of Tourism and Hospitality Industry. The Deputy Secretary General, Ministry of Tourism and Culture Malaysia, Rashidi Hasbullah, officiated at the ceremony and joined the conference Chair Dr. Shaharuddin Tahir in welcoming participants from over a dozen countries, mostly Malaysians, Indonesians and Thais, who were also collaborators in organising the meeting. As a display of regional fraternity, the Thai and Malaysian contingents took turns to entertain attendees with a repertoire of traditional dances. This social warm up was to be continued in the evening when UUM Dean of Tourism and Hospitality, Dr. Basri Rashid, played host at a dinner given by the Langkawi Development Authority (LADA). The theme on sustainability was a timely choice given the growing interest in Langkawi and the industry at large in green tourism and the issues of sustainability. Altogether, sixty-seven papers were presented but few addressed the theme explicitly. To be sure, most papers touched on aspects of tourism and hospitality management which were linked, directly or indirectly, to the general concept of sustainable development. Most of the papers that dealt with sustainability issues were contributed by tourism researchers and this preponderance was well reflected in the keynote addresses with three of the four papers focusing on tourism. The only keynote address from a hospitality perspective was a presentation by Dr. Yusak Anshori (Universitas Ciputra) who spoke on sustainable hotel business through environment friendly practices such as a ban on smoking and commercialised recycling of waste material. He observed that although there was a general skepticism if not rejection of the radical approach to ban smoking in the Surabaya Plaza Hotel while he was in charge, the management was able to secure ample sustenance from the segment of market that favoured a smoke-free facility. The three keynote papers that discussed sustainable tourism began with Kadir Din’s address which provided an overview of the concept, current thinking on the subject, and its application on the conference site, Langkawi Island. In his view, the three pillars of sustainability as commonly presented in the literature were arguably too general to capture the influence of context-specific features which may appear to be more localised such as location in areas prone to natural hazards, inept leadership, political instability and technological change. In the case of Langkawi, he considered resource limitations (water, space, power, food supply) to be possible impediments to sustainable tourism, besides a dozen other dimensions which may constrain the capacity of the island to cater to the needs of the visitor. The second address by Kalsom Kayat traced the evolution of the concept “sustainable tourism development” which was linked to the concept of balanced development as promulgated through activities organised by the Club of Rome in 1972. The concern with economic growth was whether it could be sustained in terms of the positive and negative consequences, inluding the impacts of development on the well being of future generations. A desirable model for community-based tourism would be a situation in which the entire community consisting of heterogeneous groups of stakeholders are empowered to plan for their own future with collective community welfare in mind. To do this, there must be appropriate policies, standards and institutional arrangements. As illustrations, Kalsom described examples from four different contexts in Thailand, Nepal, China and Fiji, which together presented a range of cases with different literacies, capacities and degrees of consensus in the community, indicating non-homogeneity among host stakeholders. Institutional support from the state is thus clearly needed to harmonise the needs of hosts and guests for now and the future. The next keynote speaker, Manat Chaisawat, is a familiar figure in the ASEAN tourism circle. His long established involvement in the tourism training gave him enough exposure to recall many regional pronouncements and institutional networks which were always promising on paper, but left much to be desired on the ground. Acharn Manat recounted many initiatives articulated in documents issued by the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), and Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT) since the 1980s. These regional bodies organised meetings where roadmaps, blueprints and strategic development models were presented, but as the THIC 2014 conference participants were fully aware, there had hardly been much meat that could be appreciated on the ground other than the initiatives which arose from private enterprises. Manat and the other keynote speakers were fortunate to be able to enjoy gratis the luxury of lodging at the Frangipani Langkawi Resort & Spa where innovations towards sustainable hospitality were being experimented as he had happily complimented during his keynote speech. The beaches to the east of Frangipani were probably cleaner than Waikiki, thanks to the operator Anthony Wong who continues to pursue green hospitality as his lifelong corporate goal. My own quick stroll on the beach abutting the venue of the THIC 2014 conference however, revealed a contrasting situation. I saw site occupiers engaged in open burning at the edge of a beachfront property. Along the beach there were plastic and styrofoam litters that could be seen on the spot which was ostensibly one of the best beaches on the island. The idea of acquiring a strip for a pedestrian walk, in line with the Langkawi Blueprint initiatives was strongly opposed by the local community. In this sense, Kalsom was correct in the observation that there was rarely a consensus in the community but there must be a common understanding among locals, tourists and industry insiders, before any blueprint can be effectively translated into a harmonious management of the environment. Manat’s expressed desire to see the development of a sacred heritage trail in honour of an eminent Buddhist monk Luang Pu Tuad was understandable given his religious background. The challenge here, however, was how to persuade the host community to share his sentiment that such a trail which would circumambulate non-Buddhist areas would be for the common good. My own reaction, from the lens of a believer in the wasatiyyah (moderate) approach, was that it was a great idea. Discussing the subject after his presentation, I also raised the need to promote heroines Mok and Chan, the two Malay sisters who are valourised in a downtown statue, in honour of their contributions to the provincial government of Phuket during their war of liberation from Burma. The last time I met Manat was in Pusan (Korea) where we were guests of honour as founding members of the Asia-Pacific Tourism Research Association. I subsequently attended a tourism conference and later a meeting he organised in Phuket which allowed me the opportunity to visit Kamala Beach where Aisyah the descendent of Mahsuri lived. Such was my networking with an old scholar who is now in his seventies. As we parted with a big hug at the Padang Matsirat airport, my hope was that we will meet again, so that we can continue to “gaze across the cultural border” as I had written in a presentation entitled “Gazing across the border from Sintok” in a regional meeting of a similar kind, held both in Sintok and Haatyai several years ago. My desire is that such meetings will strengthen interest among researchers in Malaysia to look beyond the Malaysian context. In so doing, they will also be interested in looking beyond the confines of their own cultural sphere, to be in a position to know and eventually accept the other. For me, this is the only way forward for a harmonious, and through that, a prosperous Malaysia. At the risk of being stigmatized by Non-Muslim readers, I must confess that I am fully committed to Prophet Muhammad’s teaching that one should not subscribe to groupism or asabiyyah. This is the way forward for a sustainable Malaysian society. If we go by the theme of the conference, there seems to be little interest in interrogating any of the multifarious dimensions of sustainable tourism, not even in the three presumed pillars—economic, social and environmental. Looking at the key words of papers, only six of the sixty-three papers mentioned sustainable or sustainability and among them only three had mindfully used the term. When a series of announcement on the conference was made almost a year earlier the subscript was intended to draw a wide audience who would be in the position to share ideas on their respective perspectives on sustainable tourism development since the concept in the subscript can be read as a catch-all tagline intended to persuade prospective participants to attend the gathering. In this sense, the organisers had succeeded in securing that critical mass of some eighty attendees, but in terms of sharing ideas and networking on sustainable tourism and hospitality the THIC series must await many more meetings before this interest in grand ideas and frameworks can gather the momentum it deserves. To be sure, as Kalsom said of the non-homegeneity of the host community, there was a non-homegeneity of attendees, with some showing spirited interest in the sustainability theme while others were more interested in the experience visiting Langkawi, period. As the meeting came to a close with a brief parting message from the conference Chair Shaharuddin and Dean Basri, we were left with a measure of excitement–on the prospect of meeting again for the THIC 2015 in Surabaya. As I write this report, there was an announcement on TV on the discovery of debris from Air Asia carrier flight QZ 8501 which left Surabaya two days earlier. It left us ordinary mortals with a tinge of sadness, but now that more people know the city called Surabaya, we hope our prospective co-organiser at Universitas Cipura will rekindle the regional IMT-GT spirit that we have tried to build together in Phuket, Haatyai and Langkawi.

Introduction This article examines American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (2024), a four-part documentary released on Netflix. Directed by Zachary Treitz, the documentary follows young photojournalist Christian Hansen as he tries to solve the mysterious death of Danny Casolaro. In 1991, Casolaro was found deceased in a hotel room while tracking officials in the CIA and former Reagan White House. He had planned to write an explosive book about what he termed “The Octopus”, an octuplet of overlapping conspiracies that transpired in the 1980s. At the time, local officials ruled Casolaro’s death a suicide, but many suspect that someone murdered him for nearing a dangerous truth (McConnachie and Tudge 128). The series follows Christian Hansen between 2013-2024 as he traces his predecessor’s footsteps in a real-life film noir. He compiles forgotten documents, contacts old sources, and narrates his quest for a truth that has been buried for more than 30 years. However, American Conspiracy is not just about Casolaro’s death. In my view, it is also an artifact of generational conflict between the Millennials (born between 1982 and 1996) and the generations that preceded them (Traub and Donner 975). These include the Silent Generation (born before 1945) and the Baby Boomers (1946-1964; Vogels). I argue that the documentary depicts Millennials attempting to understand the world they have inherited—a world riven by neoliberal austerity (Cairns 125), the 9/11 attacks (Ng et al. 282), and the 2008 financial crisis (Barnes 34). These and other crises have led to wealth inequality and a disenchantment with democracy (Barnes 34; Bennett Inst. 2). While the series does not explicitly reference neoliberalism and democratic disenchantment, etc., it lends itself to this decoding, because it interrogates the Reagan era and foregrounds the unresolved crimes of the past, making generational conflict a key to the latent meanings of the text (Hall 507). American Conspiracy therefore cultivates suspicion of the “parent culture”, and specifically those who held power in the 1980s federal government (Clarke et al. 100). Moreover, the documentary showcases the “generational detective”, which is a temporal analogue to Fredric Jameson’s “social detective” concept (qtd. in Tait 9). Beyond asking “Was Danny murdered?”, it also asks: “What have our elders wrought?” The four-part series operates in the conspiracy theory tradition (Knight 1; Popp 256), but it also conveys the tropes of film noir (Dixon 1; Woltmann). Among the most conspicuous is the body double, which occurs when Hansen literally plays the role of Casolaro in dramatised scenes. Other noir tropes include Hansen as a lone detective consumed by an indifferent world; individuals cannot be trusted; information gathered is questionable; the narrative is convoluted; confirmed and suspected murders occur; the ending is neither happy nor satisfying; and a scam sets the story in motion, namely the theft of legal software in 1982. But it is also a true story, which places American Conspiracy into the rarer category of “documentary noir” (Carey). According to Jeffries, this genre entails the filmmaker embodying the role of investigator after authorities have proven ineffectual in the face of crime (301). In the following section, I will briefly outline the documentary narrative and then explain the method used to analyse the text. The third section relates the findings, which hinge on American Conspiracy serving a dual role as documentary noir and a generational detective story. The final section links this series to a “media subculture” of conspiracy theorists active in YouTube videos, podcasts, and social-media threads (Higdon and Lyons 40). This group is a “counterpublic” that espouses left-wing conspiracism (Sienkiewicz and Jaramillo 268) – an ideology otherwise known as “parapolitics” (Jimmy Falun Gong). Studying this subculture is important, because it suggests that conspiracy theory becomes a popular epistemology at a time when disillusionment with politics is at its highest among younger adults (Bennett Inst. 1). When questions are left unanswered from the past, and noir-like endings remain unsatisfying to the generational detective, suspicious media texts emerge in the culture and nourish conspiracy theories for another generation. From the Shadowy Reagan Era to Streaming Detective Story American Conspiracy comprises four episodes. It is disjointed and scattered in presentation, though this tracks with its attention to a convoluted story. As Dan Rather states in an old newscast repurposed for Episode 1 (“The End”), it is a “complex and confusing, still developing case” (00:39:11). It begins in the early 1980s, when a computer company, Inslaw, develops software for the criminal justice system. This PROMIS software could find similarities in criminal cases tried across the country, which would help the government build cases against career criminals. Inslaw soon sold PROMIS to the US Department of Justice (DOJ). Afterwards, however, the DOJ cut off payments, costing Inslaw millions of dollars. Casolaro caught wind of the PROMIS affair and began investigating the story. Episode 2 reveals that the DOJ stole PROMIS in 1982 for the benefit of a Reagan associate named Earl Brian. Allegedly, Brian helped transfer $40 million to Iran in 1980. The funds came with the demand to detain 52 American hostages until after the presidential election, thus compounding a hostage debacle that made incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, appear weak. After Reagan won the 1980 election, Brian was supposedly repaid for his “October Surprise” role by gaining access to PROMIS. The October Surprise is only one arm of the Octopus, but there is not enough space to explain the other seven. In fact, even the documentary ignores most of the Octopus’s anatomy, focussing on three limbs only: the Inslaw case, the October Surprise, and the strange activity that took place on the Cabazon Reservation in Indio, California. The remaining arms of the Octopus are an Australian bank called Nugan Hand, the 1980s Savings and Loans scandal, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Iran-Contra affair, and the covert adventures of two CIA agents: Frank Terpil and Edwin P. Wilson. A mysterious figure involved in the intrigue is Michael Riconoscuito, who claims to have tampered with the PROMIS software in the 1980s to turn it into an espionage tool. Riconoscuito speaks of the convoluted story in Episode 3 (“The Game”), saying: “I’ve got a matrix-like analysis [of the case, but] it would take days to go through it” (00:14:35). At another point, an exasperated Hansen says to the camera: “It never ends! It never ends” (00:23:47). As in film noir, Hansen and Casolaro embody the “hard-boiled detectives unravelling labyrinthian mysteries” (Dixon 1). As in conspiracy theory, the resolution is endlessly deferred (Fenster xvii); Hansen is never able to prove that someone murdered Casolaro, and Casolaro was unable to link all the conspirators in his lifetime. Method Netflix categorises American Conspiracy as “True Crime”, which Punnett defines as “nonfiction narratives of criminal events that actually happened” (qtd. in Maher and Cake 97). This may be sensible enough, especially given the genre’s “widespread popularity amongst subscribers of streaming services” (100). I argue that the series is too connotative to be tidily contained this way, however. I believe American Conspiracy addresses a larger question without realising it, which I expose through a “symptomatic” reading of the series (Althusser and Balibar 28). Texts are not only polysemic, but they include unconscious claims and silences that symptomatic readings can identify. A similar approach is Ricouer’s “hermeneutics of suspicion, [which] assumes that the manifest or surface meaning of a text is a veil that masks its true agenda” (Culver and Vuleta 11). To interpret the documentary, I draw on semiotic analysis (Barthes ix; Brown 113; Dunleavy 167). Attributed to such scholars as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1931) and Roland Barthes (1915-1960), this method works well for the series, because it allows me to single out visual signifiers on the screen. I next determine the “underlying meaning[s]” the signifiers have for the documentary as a whole (Titscher et al. 126). Semiotics can be used in conjunction with the broader method of textual analysis, which is useful for interpreting Hansen’s statements. Textual analysis traces back to such academic traditions as the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s (Dworkin 121). The method looks for “underlying ideological and cultural assumptions of a text” (Arya 173), or what Phillipov calls finding “a vocabulary to describe the elusive” (221). This is my general aim when interpreting American Conspiracy as a case study of both documentary noir and generational conflict. The Semiotics of Conspiracy Theory, Young Adulthood, and Media Technology Jameson argued that the conspiracy text was both a detective story and an “unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what … forces confront us” (qtd. in Tait 2). I agree with this assessment and claim that American Conspiracy adds an additional generational layer. The series is an expression of Millennial investigation from an age cohort who grew up in the triple shadow of neoliberalism, the War on Terror, and the 2008 financial crisis. The “problematic” of the text, or that which is answered without the producers’ acknowledgment, is that Millennials wish to know what treacherous forces were afoot before them (Storey 57). American Conspiracy is an unconscious prying open of the adult generations’ floorboards to search for the proverbial bodies. Noir provides a useful lens to explain what is going on. Generational detectives navigate an alienating world due to neoliberal precarity, and they face constant uncertainty in the form of conspiracy theories that never seem to resolve. In other words, noir is spilling over into their real lives (Dixon 153). A prominent signifier in the series is geographic sprawl, which suggests that the conspiracy is as wide as the country. Casolaro lived in Fairfax, Virginia, and he died in West Virginia. The PROMIS affair took place in Washington DC, and Riconosciuto hid evidence in the Pacific Northwest. Casolaro went to New York City to pitch his book, and a related murder took place in San Francisco. The sprawl accords with Jameson, who argues that films such as The Parallax View depict the detective “mapping the … social totality” (Tait 43). He traces this trope back to Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, “which propels us from one empty hotel room to another across continental North America” (Jameson 122). This is an overlap between conspiracy and noir. As Dixon writes, “noir is a state of paranoia, a zone in which nothing seems stable … and [a] world [that] is a constant battleground” (viii). In Episode 4 (“The Monster”), Hansen questions how he can return to his normal life after peering into this abyssal network of corruption and murder. Jameson likens this phenomenon to a peek below the surface – a conceit that stretches from Dante’s trek through the underworld to Marx’s exposure of “the hidden abode of production” (176). But instead of infiltrating Hell or the “Satanic mills” of industrial England, Hansen steps into a Reagan-era scandal (Linebaugh and Rediker 250). Jameson further states that the “promise of a deeper inside view is the hermeneutic content of the conspiracy thriller” (123). Incidentally, Freud and Marx were graduates of the “school of suspicion”, according to Paul Ricoeur (Felski). This is due to each thinker’s interest in uncovering “self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible … truths” (Felski). Marx exposed the commodity fetish, and Freud the subconscious desire. A textual analysis shows how this applies to American Conspiracy as well. Hansen admits in Episode 4 that the decade-long investigation was transformative, saying: “it changed me. And it changed the way I think about reality … and think about history … . This is the surface, but what’s going on in the shadows” (00:46:54). Hansen is awakening to truths concealed by the parent generation. Young adulthood is another prominent signifier in the documentary. When Hansen first learns about Casolaro in 2013, he is 25 years old. While the director (Treitz) does not say, he appears to be the same age. The two are also younger than the participants in the on-camera interviews. Markers of youth often surround Hansen, including photos from what appears to be college get-togethers, as well as footage of him skateboarding down the street (Atencio et al. 154). A scene in Episode 4 shows a young Hansen explaining the case and repeatedly saying “like” in between sentences – another giveaway of youth (Hill). Relatedly, Hansen has embraced digital media technology in his quest. The opening and closing scenes of Episode 1 depict a conversation through an iPhone. An external hard drive appears on a desk, an iMac computer looms in the background, and hi-tech video cameras and production equipment drift into scenes. The semiotic reading of this technology overlaps with the semiotics of young adulthood. This is because young people have especially embraced digital media in a way the Baby Boomers did not (Prensky 1). As Jenkins et al. claim, young people “have been the lead adopters of mobile, social, and gaming media” (viii). Vogels finds that 93% of Millennials own smartphones, compared to 68% of Boomers and 40% of Silents. Roughly 100% of Millennials use the Internet, and 86% use social media. Additionally, Millennials believe the Internet to be a benefit to society more than any preceding generation. Hansen and Treitz take this youth-coded gadgetry straight into the Casolaro case, thereby linking the concepts of suspicion, youth, and technology in the film. The documentary synthesises new media technologies with film-noir tropes of the 1940s and 50s, with Treitz even citing Hitchcock as an inspiration for his work (McGovern). While Hitchcock may be more of a noir “stylist” than a founding noir director, he worked in the genre in such 1950s classics as Rear Window and Vertigo (Olsen). Hitchcock used “intentionally mechanical” camerawork to bring his vision to life, with the camera circling actors and following them down flights of stairs, among other motions (Olsen). In American Conspiracy, media technology also takes on a conspicuous role: Hansen’s iPhone acts a key to the intelligence underworld; a covert camera shows the filmmakers visiting a home; and a handheld camera follows Hansen through a police station. As the two Millennials set off into the backwaters of Reagan-era scandal, they arrive on doorsteps of elderly couples. They situate greying interviewees before their own cameras. A semiotic reading suggests this is a generational autopsy of the 1980s, the era in which the filmmakers (and other Millennials) were born. Conclusion: The Persistence of Conspiracy In this concluding section, I connect American Conspiracy to a media subculture that uses conspiracy theories to excavate the origins of our political conjuncture. This subculture is sometimes known as the “para-political” left, which shares content on digital platforms and social media. It is loosely confederated, critical of capitalism, and (at times) internally combative. Podcasts in this milieu include American Exception (2021), Death Is Just around the Corner (2018), Ghost Stories for the End of the World (2020), Media Roots Radio (2010), ParaPower Mapping (2023), Programmed to Chill (2021), Subliminal Jihad (2020), and True Anon (2019). In February 2024, Hansen and Treitz appeared on True Anon, one of the few artifacts from the subculture to have attracted scholarly attention (Chase 214). Para-political podcasts share similarities with true-crime content creators. For instance, the conspiratorial hosts interact with fans and followers on social media, as true-crime podcasters do (Boling and Hull 97). True-crime hosts create a “discourse community”, which becomes recognisable to followers who use the same terms and phrases (van Driel 150). Whereas a true-crime fan might understand an in-joke or “specific lexis” (164), para-political enthusiasts might use the term “noided” – a play on the word “paranoid”. Both podcasting genres also present evidence to the audience (Morton 240), which “hails” listeners as members of a jury or investigative panel (Althusser 108). But on the other hand, the para-political subculture, to which Hansen and Treitz are marginally connected, is different. Mostly young to middle-aged men seem to make up its opinion leaders, which might translate to a majority-men listenership. This would clash with the majority-women consumers of true-crime fare (Boling and Hull 106). I make this connection between American Conspiracy and the para-political subculture because both expose aspects of the parent culture. The podcasts discuss topics such as the CIA and the JFK and RFK assassinations. They are similar to past noir authors who, for example, used literature and film to unmask that “bright, guilty place” of Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century (Davis 18) and evince a point that Kellner makes about the hit TV show, The X-Files, which he sees as an artifact of “generational war” (226). Kellner argues that the cohort of its creator, Chris Carter, has an “unhealed wound” from the Vietnam War, adding that it “keeps festering and generating tales to capture its hideousness and horrors” (216). He goes on to say that The X-Files depicts the “older generation [as] tremendously compromised and arguably corrupt, especially those in the military, political, and corporate bureaucracies” (226). It is up to the younger heroes to restore the moral order. While Chris Carter may no longer be doing this today, the para-political left carries the torch, using conspiracy theories to medicate their own “unhealed wound”. Shareable digital media and conspiracy theories have become fronts in a generational conflict. With different levels of political radicalism, suspicious Millennials negotiate neoliberalism and unresponsive government – a real-life film noir of “doubt and fear and uncertainty” (Dixon 1). They embody the earliest origins of noir, forged in the “depressingly stark 1930s … [when] even the seemingly protected middle classes were facing economic insecurity” (Palmer 389). Like those noir writers, they too expose “capitalism’s unsavoury undercurrents” (390). This media subculture likely embraces conspiracy theory as it does because traditional political processes have left them feeling alienated. Because political and economic problems persist, particularly for young adults in America, the age-old practice of conspiracy theorising will also persist. As Fiske and others have pointed out, marginalisation has long been the crucible for conspiratorial belief (192). 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Probably the most (in)famous Australian teenager of recent times, now-17-year-old Kim Duthie—better known as the “St Kilda Schoolgirl”—first came to public attention when she posted naked pictures of two prominent St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) players on Facebook. She claimed to be seeking revenge on the players’ teammate for getting her pregnant. This turned out to be a lie. Duthie also claimed that 47-year-old football manager Ricky Nixon gave her drugs and had sex with her. She then said this was a lie, then that she lied about lying. That she lied at least twice is clear, and in doing so, she arguably reinforced the pervasive myth that women are prone to lie about rape and sexual abuse. Precisely what occurred, and why Duthie posted the naked photographs will probably never be known. However, it seems clear that Duthie felt herself wronged. Can she therefore be held entirely to blame for the way she went about seeking redress from a group of men with infinitely more power than she—socially, financially and (in terms of the priority given to elite football in Australian society) culturally? The many judgements passed on Duthie’s behaviour in the media highlight the crucial, seldom-discussed issue of how problematic behaviour on the part of women might reinforce patriarchal norms. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the context of a spate of alleged sexual assaults committed by elite Australian footballers over the past decade. Given that representations of alleged rape cases in the media and elsewhere so often position women as blameworthy for their own mistreatment and abuse, the question of whether or not women can and should be held accountable in certain situations is particularly fraught. By exploring media representations of one of these complex scenarios, we consider how the issue of “complicity” might be understood in a rape culture. In doing so, we employ Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential concept of the “grey zone,” which signifies a complex and ambiguous realm that challenges both judgement and representation. Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone,” Patriarchy and the Problem of Judgement In his essay titled “The Grey Zone” (published in 1986), Levi is chiefly concerned with Jewish prisoners in the Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos who obtained “privileged” positions in order to prolong their survival. Reflecting on the inherently complex power relations in such extreme settings, Levi positions the “grey zone” as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: a realm with “ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. [The ‘grey zone’] possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure, and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (27). According to Levi, an examination of the scenarios and experiences that gave rise to the “grey zone” requires a rejection of the black-and-white binary opposition(s) of “friend” and “enemy,” “good” and “evil.” While Levi unequivocally holds the perpetrators of the Holocaust responsible for their actions, he warns that one should suspend judgement of victims who were entrapped in situations of moral ambiguity and “compromise.” However, recent scholarship on the representation of “privileged” Jews in Levi’s writings and elsewhere has identified a “paradox of judgement”: namely, that even if moral judgements of victims in extreme situations should be suspended, such judgements are inherent in the act of representation, and are therefore inevitable (see Brown). While the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections must be kept in mind, the corruptive influences of power at the core of the “grey zone”—along with the associated problems of judgement and representation—are clearly far more prevalent in human nature and experience than the Holocaust alone. Levi’s “grey zone” has been appropriated by scholars in the fields of Holocaust studies (Petropoulos and Roth xv-xviii), philosophy (Todorov 262), law (Luban 161–76), history (Cole 248–49), theology (Roth 53–54), and popular culture (Cheyette 226–38). Significantly, Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, “Groping through Gray Zones” 3–26) has recently applied Levi’s concept to the field of feminist philosophy. Indeed, Levi’s questioning of whether or not one can—or should—pass judgement on the behaviour of Holocaust victims has considerable relevance to the divisive issue of how women’s involvement in/with patriarchy is represented in the media. Expanding or intentionally departing from Levi’s ideas, many recent interpretations of the “grey zone” often misunderstand the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections. For instance, while applying Levi’s concept to the effects of patriarchy and domestic violence on women, Lynne Arnault makes the problematic statement that “in order to establish the cruelty and seriousness of male violence against women as women, feminists must demonstrate that the experiences of victims of incest, rape, and battering are comparable to those of war veterans, prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration camp inmates” (183, n.9). It is important to stress here that it is not our intention to make direct parallels between the Holocaust and patriarchy, or between “privileged” Jews and women (potentially) implicated in a rape culture, but to explore the complexity of power relations in society, what behaviour eventuates from these, and—most crucial to our discussion here—how such behaviour is handled in the mass media. Aware of the problem of making controversial (and unnecessary) comparisons, Card (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 515) rightly stresses that her aim is “not to compare suffering or even degrees of evil but to note patterns in the moral complexity of choices and judgments of responsibility.” Card uses the notion of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” citing numerous examples of women identifying with their torturers after having been abused or held hostage over a prolonged period of time—most (in)famously, Patricia Hearst. While the medical establishment has responded to cases of women “suffering” from “Stockholm Syndrome” by absolving them from any moral responsibility, Card writes that “we may have a morally gray area in some cases, where there is real danger of becoming complicit in evildoing and where the captive’s responsibility is better described as problematic than as nonexistent” (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 511). Like Levi, Card emphasises that issues of individual agency and moral responsibility are far from clear-cut. At the same time, a full awareness of the oppressive environment—in the context that this paper is concerned with, a patriarchal social system—must be accounted for. Importantly, the examples Card uses differ significantly from the issue of whether or not some women can be considered “complicit” in a rape culture; nevertheless, similar obstacles to understanding problematic situations exist here, too. In the context of a rape culture, can women become, to use Card’s phrase, “instruments of oppression”? And if so, how is their controversial behaviour to be understood and represented? Crucially, Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” were primarily motivated by his concern that most historical and filmic representations “trivialised” the complexity of victim experiences by passing simplistic judgements. Likewise, the representation of sexual assault cases in the Australian mass media has often left much to be desired. Representing Sexual Assault: Australian Football and the Media A growing literature has critiqued the sexual culture of elite football in Australia—one in which women are reportedly treated with disdain, positioned as objects to be used and discarded. At least 20 distinct cases, involving more than 55 players and staff, have been reported in the media, with the majority of these incidents involving multiple players. Reports indicate that such group sexual encounters are commonplace for footballers, and the women who participate in sexual practices are commonly judged, even in the sports scholarship, as “groupies” and “sluts” who are therefore responsible for anything that happens to them, including rape (Waterhouse-Watson, “Playing Defence” 114–15; “(Un)reasonable Doubt”). When the issue of footballers and sexual assault was first debated in the Australian media in 2004, football insiders from both Australian rules and rugby league told the media of a culture of group sex and sexual behaviour that is degrading to women, even when consensual (Barry; Khadem and Nancarrow 4; Smith 1; Weidler 4). The sexual “culture” is marked by a discourse of abuse and objectification, in which women are cast as “meat” or a “bun.” Group sex is also increasingly referred to as “chop up,” which codes the practice itself as an act of violence. It has been argued elsewhere that footballers treating women as sexual objects is effectively condoned through the mass media (Waterhouse-Watson, “All Women Are Sluts” passim). The “Code of Silence” episode of ABC television program Four Corners, which reignited the debate in 2009, was even more explicit in portraying footballers’ sexual practices as abusive, presenting rape testimony from three women, including “Clare,” who remains traumatised following a “group sex” incident with rugby league players in 2002. Clare testifies that she went to a hotel room with prominent National Rugby League (NRL) players Matthew Johns and Brett Firman. She says that she had sex with Johns and Firman, although the experience was unpleasant and they treated her “like a piece of meat.” Subsequently, a dozen players and staff members from the team then entered the room, uninvited, some through the bathroom window, expecting sex with Clare. Neither Johns nor Firman has denied that this was the case. Clare went to the police five days later, saying that professional rugby players had raped her, although no charges were ever laid. The program further includes psychiatrists’ reports, and statements from the police officer in charge of the case, detailing the severe trauma that Clare suffered as a result of what the footballers called “sex.” If, as “Code of Silence” suggests, footballers’ practices of group sex are abusive, whether the woman consents or not, then it follows that such a “gang-bang culture” may in turn foster a rape culture, in which rape is more likely than in other contexts. And yet, many women insist that they enjoy group sex with footballers (Barry; Drill 86), complicating issues of consent and the degradation of women. Feminist rape scholarship documents the repetitive way in which complainants are deemed to have “invited” or “caused” the rape through their behaviour towards the accused or the way they were dressed: defence lawyers, judges (Larcombe 100; Lees 85; Young 442–65) and even talk show hosts, ostensibly aiming to expose the problem of rape (Alcoff and Gray 261–64), employ these tactics to undermine a victim’s credibility and excuse the accused perpetrator. Nevertheless, although no woman can be in any way held responsible for any man committing sexual assault, or other abuse, it must be acknowledged that women who become in some way implicated in a rape culture also assist in maintaining that culture, highlighting a “grey zone” of moral ambiguity. How, then, should these women, who in some cases even actively promote behaviour that is intrinsic to this culture, be perceived and represented? Charmyne Palavi, who appeared on “Code of Silence,” is a prime example of such a “grey zone” figure. While she stated that she was raped by a prominent footballer, Palavi also described her continuing practice of setting up footballers and women for casual sex through her Facebook page, and pursuing such encounters herself. This raises several problems of judgement and representation, and the issue of women’s sexual freedom. On the one hand, Palavi (and all other women) should be entitled to engage in any consensual (legal) sexual behaviour that they choose. But on the other, when footballers’ frequent casual sex is part of a culture of sexual abuse, there is a danger of them becoming complicit in, to use Card’s term, “evildoing.” Further, when telling her story on “Code of Silence,” Palavi hints that there is an element of increased risk in these situations. When describing her sexual encounters with footballers, which she states are “on her terms,” she begins, “It’s consensual for a start. I’m not drunk or on drugs and it’s in, [it] has an element of class to it. Do you know what I mean?” (emphasis added). If it is necessary to define sex “on her terms” as consensual, this implies that sometimes casual “sex” with footballers is not consensual, or that there is an increased likelihood of rape. She also claims to have heard about several incidents in which footballers she knows sexually abused and denigrated, if not actually raped, other women. Such an awareness of what may happen clearly does not make Palavi a perpetrator of abuse, but neither can her actions (such as “setting up” women with footballers using Facebook) be considered entirely separate. While one may argue, following Levi’s reflections, that judgement of a “grey zone” figure such as Palavi should be suspended, it is significant that Four Corners’s representation of Palavi makes implicit and simplistic moral judgements. The introduction to Palavi follows the story of “Caroline,” who states that first-grade rugby player Dane Tilse broke into her university dormitory room and sexually assaulted her while she slept. Caroline indicates that Tilse left when he “picked up that [she] was really stressed.” Following this story, the program’s reporter and narrator Sarah Ferguson introduces Palavi with, “If some young footballers mistakenly think all women want to have sex with them, Charmyne Palavi is one who doesn’t necessarily discourage the idea.” As has been argued elsewhere (Waterhouse-Watson, “Framing the Victim”), this implies that Palavi is partly responsible for players holding this mistaken view. By implication, she therefore encouraged Tilse to assume that Caroline would want to have sex with him. Footage is then shown of Palavi and her friends “applying the finishing touches”—bronzing their legs—before going to meet footballers at a local hotel. The lighting is dim and the hand-held camerawork rough. These techniques portray the women as artificial and “cheap,” techniques that are also employed in a remarkably similar fashion in the documentary Footy Chicks (Barry), which follows three women who seek out sex with footballers. In response to Ferguson’s question, “What’s the appeal of those boys though?” Palavi repeats several times that she likes footballers mainly because of their bodies. This, along with the program’s focus on the women as instigators of sex, positions Palavi as something of a predator (she was widely referred to as a “cougar” following the program). In judging her “promiscuity” as immoral, the program implies she is partly responsible for her own rape, as well as acts of what can be termed, at the very least, sexual abuse of other women. The problematic representation of Palavi raises the complex question of how her “grey zone” behaviour should be depicted without passing trivialising judgements. This issue is particularly fraught when Four Corners follows the representation of Palavi’s “nightlife” with her accounts of footballers’ acts of sexual assault and abuse, including testimony that a well-known player raped Palavi herself. While Ferguson does not explicitly question the veracity of Palavi’s claim of rape, her portrayal is nevertheless largely unsympathetic, and the way the segment is edited appears to imply that she is blameworthy. Ferguson recounts that Palavi “says she was able to put [being raped] out of her mind, and it certainly didn’t stop her pursuing other football players.” This might be interpreted a positive statement about Palavi’s ability to move on from a rape; however, the tone of Ferguson’s authoritative voiceover is disapproving, which instead implies negative judgement. As the program makes clear, Palavi continues to organise sexual encounters between women and players, despite her knowledge of the “dangers,” both to herself and other women. Palavi’s awareness of the prevalence of incidents of sexual assault or abuse makes her position a problematic one. Yet her controversial role within the sexual culture of elite Australian football is complicated even further by the fact that she herself is disempowered (and her own allegation of being raped delegitimised) by the simplistic ideas about “assault” and “consent” that dominate social discourse. Despite this ambiguity, Four Corners constructs Palavi as more of a perpetrator of abuse than a victim—not even a victim who is “morally compromised.” Although we argue that careful consideration must be given to the issue of whether moral judgements should be applied to “grey zone” figures like Palavi, the “solution” is far from simple. No language (or image) is neutral or value-free, and judgements are inevitable in any act of representation. In his essay on the “grey zone,” Levi raises the crucial point that the many (mis)understandings of figures of moral ambiguity and “compromise” partly arise from the fact that the testimony and perspectives of these figures themselves is often the last to be heard—if at all (50). Nevertheless, an article Palavi published in Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph (19) demonstrates that such testimony can also be problematic and only complicate matters further. Palavi’s account begins: If you believed Four Corners, I’m supposed to be the NRL’s biggest groupie, a wannabe WAG who dresses up, heads out to clubs and hunts down players to have sex with… what annoys me about these tags and the way I was portrayed on that show is the idea I prey on them like some of the starstruck women I’ve seen out there. (emphasis added) Palavi clearly rejects the way Four Corners constructed her as a predator; however, rather than rejecting this stereotype outright, she reinscribes it, projecting it onto other “starstruck” women. Throughout her article, Palavi reiterates (other) women’s allegedly predatory behaviour, continually portraying the footballers as passive and the women as active. For example, she claims that players “like being contacted by girls,” whereas “the girls use the information the players put on their [social media profiles] to track them down.” Palavi’s narrative confirms this construction of men as victims of women’s predatory actions, lamenting the sacking of Johns following “Code of Silence” as “disgusting.” In the context of alleged sexual assault, the “predatory woman” stereotype is used in place of the raped woman in order to imply that sexual assault did not occur; hence Palavi’s problematic discourse arguably reinforces sexist attitudes. But can Palavi be considered complicit in validating this damaging stereotype? Can she be blamed for working within patriarchal systems of representation, of which she has also been a victim? The preceding analysis shows judgement to be inherent in the act of representation. The paucity of language is particularly acute when dealing with such extreme situations. Indeed, the language used to explore this issue in the present article cannot escape terminology that is loaded with meaning(s), which quotation marks can perhaps only qualify so far. Conclusion This paper does not claim to provide definitive answers to such complex dilemmas, but rather to highlight problems in addressing the sensitive issues of ambiguity and “complicity” in women’s interactions with patriarchal systems, and how these are represented in the mass media. Like the controversial behaviour of teenager Kim Duthie described earlier, Palavi’s position throws the problems of judgement and representation into disarray. There is no simple solution to these problems, though we do propose that these “grey zone” figures be represented in a self-reflexive, nuanced manner by explicitly articulating questions of responsibility rather than making simplistic judgements that implicitly lessen perpetrators’ culpability. Levi’s concept of the “grey zone” helps elucidate the fraught issue of women’s potential complicity in a rape culture, a subject that challenges both understanding and representation. Despite participating in a culture that promotes the abuse, denigration, and humiliation of women, the roles of women like Palavi cannot in any way be conflated with the roles of the perpetrators of sexual assault. These and other “grey zones” need to be constantly rethought and renegotiated in order to develop a fuller understanding of human behaviour. References Alcoff, Linda Martin, and Laura Gray. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation.” Signs 18.2 (1993): 260–90. 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Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. 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