Journal articles on the topic 'Moral and ethical aspects of Fairy tales'

Happiness as an ethical category and as one of the most universal dimensions of human world views has been recognized as one of the most important concepts in the specification of ethnic culture within the paradigm of humanitities. The objective of this paper is therefore to reveal the notion of happiness in Latgalian fairy tales. For this purpose, one hundred Latgalian fairy tales were selected in which the word ‘happiness’ was used in different forms and combinations. Taking into consideration the specifics of a folklore text, a linguoculturological approach was used to determine the notion of happiness in Latgalian folklore, and to observe the concept of happiness in folklore texts in the discourses of language and culture and of language and ethnic mentality (Маслова 2001: 28). This concept is interpreted in this paper as a body of collective knowledge, which expresses itself through language and which shows the specifics of an ethnic culture (Воркачев 2002: 22). Three components are distinguished in the structure of the concept – a notional, a figurative, and an axiological component. Of these, the notional component is considered to be the most important one by the majority of researchers (Карасик 1999: 39). It is disclosed in the semantics of the language of folklore when studying the lexemes that happiness is connected with, in the analysis of semantic and pragmatic aspects of the word ‘happiness’, regarding word combinations where happiness is described specifically along the most typical components, and from a contrastive view which allows to identify happiness in comparison to unhappiness. Contextual semantics of the notion of happiness reveals one of the most common theories of the notion of happiness – happiness as luck or as a coincidence of favorable circumstances. A lucky situation can in Latgalian fairy tales also be defined according to the importance of the task which has to be accomplished by a hero and when it is particularly difficult or even impossible to fulfil. In such cases, happiness is denoted with the use of adjectives and as an accomplishment, thereby changing the emphasis from chance to the lucky hero. In the end of the fairy tales, the adverb ‘laimeigi’ (‘happily’) or the adjective ‘laimeigs/-a’ (‘happy’) appears most often in combination with the word ‘dzeivuoja’ (‘lived’), thereby suggesting that there is a special awareness of the word combination „happy life” in Latgalian consciousness. Final formulas of fairy tales relating to the basic elements of happiness distinguish social well-being from the well-being of a family. In addition, fragments of other values contribute to elements of happiness in the final formulas, for example, life/health, harmony, and even loneliness. Under the influence of Christianity, wealth looses importance as a subject of happiness, and its place is taken by the combination of poverty and happiness. A perspective of action of the characters regarding happiness in fairy tales is also created by verbs, which allow to divide characters into three groups: those who look for happiness for themselves, those who give happiness to others, and those who try to deprive others of happiness. Traditionally, protagonists of fairy tales fall into the first group. Their actions are described by using the verbs ‘to look for’, ‘to get’, ‘to meet’, ‘to catch’, or ‘to inquire’, which all imply an active behaviour. In the second group there are so called magic helpers, whose actions are characterized by the verbs ‘to wish’, ‘to make’, ‘to give’, ‘to promise’, or ‘to enchant’. In the third group there are the antagonists of a hero who are best described with the word ‘to envy’. Verbs as a characterization of an attitude towards happiness attest an active position of the characters in the Latgalian fairy tales. Even when happiness is predetermined, the characters do not remain static but actively participate in securing happiness. According to the logic of mythological thinking, happiness is made understandable and organized in recognizable artistic images and positioned in the local environment in equivalence to humans. Two of the most popular artistic techniques of substantiating happiness are anthropomorphization and objectification, which evolve along demythologization. There are two ways of interpreting happiness as an anthropomorphic image. First, the characterization of happiness emphasizes elements symbolizing prosperity and wealth: happiness is dressed in gold and silver (12.A.735.), it appears as a corpulent woman (11.A.735.) or a beautiful girl whose wreath shines like the sun (7.), etc. The second technique is to describe the appearance of happiness in correspondence to the hero’s psychological notion of happiness – when a hero is unhappy, happiness is a black old maid (7.), pale or exhausted (15.A.735.567.). Typical of a hero’s attitude towards happiness are persistence and even superiority. Additional features in the anthropomorphic image of happiness are revealed in those fairy tales where happiness tries its strength against the personifications of other moral values, such as wisdom (8.A.736.). In the end of these fairy tales, wisdom has to admit that wisdom without happiness is not possible. Equally great significance of both moral values (also in reversed priority) is revealed in the paroemiac folk foundation: Laima bez gudreibas ir caurojs maiss. (LSD, 1940 2971) (Happiness without wisdom is like a sack full of holes). An objectification of happiness appears in fairy tales where the idea of happiness is immanently part of the idea of money as a source and a content of happiness. In these fairy tales money can appear to people in the form of a wolf, a bird, a midge, etc. Such an interpretation of happiness was probably determined by the human belief in happiness and the possibility of finding it. Happiness can appear in different unexpected ways, and humans shall only be prepared to recognize it and grasp it. The analyzed material of fairy tales shows how the Latgalians see, understand and evaluate happiness. To sum up the conclusions made in the paper, it shall be noted that happiness is one of the highest moral values of the Latgalians. It is interpreted as both luck and destiny. The Latgalians are active regarding happiness – they look for happiness and they find it. If necessary, they remind happiness of their existence and are not afraid of changing their lives. Regarding the content of values of happiness, the most important parts are well-being (different ways of wealth/prosperity) and family happiness (with a spouse or parents). However, under the influence of Christianity, fairy tales introduced also philosophical contemplation about the problem – whether happiness really is about wealth, whether a poor person can be happy, and whether happiness is possible in this world at all. Folklore does not give the one and only correct answer to what happiness is. Folklore shows where happiness could possibly be and how one can obtain it. Specific aspects of the interpretation of happiness in Latgalian folklore can also be found in other genres of folklore, for instance in folk songs and brahilogisms. It is very well possible that other ethnic groups emphasize different aspects in the interpretation of happiness which should be studied separately. However, as studies of the concept of happiness point out, due to the influence of globalization ethnic differences in the interpretation of happiness could be evened out (Veenhoven 1995: 5).

Senior preschool age is a period of active development of ethical norms, rules, the formation of moral feelings and inclinations. It is considered to be the most important stage in the formation of mechanisms of behavior and activity; in the development of the individuality of a preschooler in general. This is due to significant changes that occur in the emotional and volitional, mental development of children, the development of the motivational sphere, communication with coevals and adults, especially acquired by the level of moral culture. Hence, the opportunities for moral education of senior preschoolers are rising nowadays.The article aims at groundingthe possibilities of a fairy-tale as a means of formation moral feelings of children of preschool age; at determining pedagogical and methodical methods of moral education of senior preschoolers by means of fairy tales.The article highlights the notion of fairy-tale as means of formation of moral feelings of children of preschool age. The urgency of the problem under consideration lies in the necessity of formation moral and ethical norms and rules of behavior, which are transmitted to a child due to the influence of fairy tales onto preschooler’s personality. Various types of fairy-tales have been selected and their role in formation of moral qualities have been analyzed. Scientific novelty of the present article is to highlight the algorithm of using pedagogical and methodological techniques to acquaint children with different types of fairy tales and their importance in the development of the personality of the preschooler.Conclusions. Summing up the information mentioned above, it is possible to conclude that the methods of pedagogical work with fairy tales in a preschool educational establishment is caused by the qualitative heterogeneity of this genre. In order to intensify the depth of world concept of fairytales, its metaphorical, moral and social content, emotional connotations to children, the teacher must guide the reading of fairy tales based on the literary specifics of the fairy tale genre, purposefully form the optimal range of skills of preschoolers. In addition, one of the factors of the low level of moral education of preschoolers is the insufficient use of fairy tales and its means in the daily work of the educator of a modern preschool educational establishment. The language of a fairy tale, especially of a folk fairy-tale, is close to a child, it helps a child to solve moral problems, due to clear, determined moral position of characters in a fairy-tale. In the process of implementation of different types of fairy tales, it is advisable to use the following pedagogical and methodological methods and techniques: reading, retelling, describing the illustrations, coloring and drawing fairy tale characters, applying dramatization games, self-composition of fairy tales that contribute to the formation of ethical and moral norms of everyday life. At the same time, this problem demands further study in order to improve the state programs of preschool education, which in turn will increase the level of moral education of preschoolers.Key words: children of senior preschool age, fairy-tale, moral feelings, education, preschool educational establishment.

Senior preschool age is a period of active development of ethical norms, rules, the formation of moral feelings and inclinations. It is considered to be the most important stage in the formation of mechanisms of behavior and activity; in the development of the individuality of a preschooler in general. This is due to significant changes that occur in the emotional and volitional, mental development of children, the development of the motivational sphere, communication with coevals and adults, especially acquired by the level of moral culture. Hence, the opportunities for moral education of senior preschoolers are rising nowadays.The article aims at groundingthe possibilities of a fairy-tale as a means of formation moral feelings of children of preschool age; at determining pedagogical and methodical methods of moral education of senior preschoolers by means of fairy tales.The article highlights the notion of fairy-tale as means of formation of moral feelings of children of preschool age. The urgency of the problem under consideration lies in the necessity of formation moral and ethical norms and rules of behavior, which are transmitted to a child due to the influence of fairy tales onto preschooler’s personality. Various types of fairy-tales have been selected and their role in formation of moral qualities have been analyzed. Scientific novelty of the present article is to highlight the algorithm of using pedagogical and methodological techniques to acquaint children with different types of fairy tales and their importance in the development of the personality of the preschooler.Conclusions. Summing up the information mentioned above, it is possible to conclude that the methods of pedagogical work with fairy tales in a preschool educational establishment is caused by the qualitative heterogeneity of this genre. In order to intensify the depth of world concept of fairytales, its metaphorical, moral and social content, emotional connotations to children, the teacher must guide the reading of fairy tales based on the literary specifics of the fairy tale genre, purposefully form the optimal range of skills of preschoolers. In addition, one of the factors of the low level of moral education of preschoolers is the insufficient use of fairy tales and its means in the daily work of the educator of a modern preschool educational establishment. The language of a fairy tale, especially of a folk fairy-tale, is close to a child, it helps a child to solve moral problems, due to clear, determined moral position of characters in a fairy-tale. In the process of implementation of different types of fairy tales, it is advisable to use the following pedagogical and methodological methods and techniques: reading, retelling, describing the illustrations, coloring and drawing fairy tale characters, applying dramatization games, self-composition of fairy tales that contribute to the formation of ethical and moral norms of everyday life. At the same time, this problem demands further study in order to improve the state programs of preschool education, which in turn will increase the level of moral education of preschoolers.Key words: children of senior preschool age, fairy-tale, moral feelings, education, preschool educational establishment.

A fairy tale is the genre which is well represented in preschool education programmes as well as in the curriculum of general primary education. A fairy tale is an important means for developing children's verbal creativity and their logical thinking. A fairy tale stimulates children's imagination, prepares them for the future life in the real world, broadens their horizons, fosters not only moral and ethical values but also the right attitude to the world. Folk tales were not initially created for children. Adults displayed their own mythological ideas about the world, nature and a man by means of these encoded texts. Over time a fairy tale lost its meaning in the life of adults and was transferred to children becoming part of their everyday reading. A child admires a fairy tale, its fantasy, but does not understand everything. «The Cubes of V. Y. Propp» represent the means and the techniques that help the child to understand the structure of a tale, its content, morality and allegory. Y.Propp proved that a fairy tale is illustrative of the fact that there was a system of various taboos in the life of our ancestors. All these prohibitions gradually formed moral and ethical principles, legal rules and laws of human behavior in society. In the structure of a fairy tale, V. Y. Propp names several main elements, the so-called «The Cubes of V. Y. Propp», namely «absentation», «interdiction», «violation of the interdiction», «departure», «first function of the donor», «hero’s reaction», «receipt of a magical agent», «victory», «return», «happy ending». This structure of a fairy tale serves its magical or ritual function, which makes a fairy tale resemble such an archaic genre as an incantation. In a fairy tale like in an incantation, a magical ritual action and a magical verbal formula are intrinsically linked, and therefore in a fairy tale a taboo as well as a potential punishment are often depicted. Y.Propp's schemes clearly show the typical structure, «models of fairy tales», according to which their «building material» can be defined: fairy tales have sets of «cubes», i.e. typical plot elements, situations, taboos and symbolic actions. And this is also the basis for the differentiation of the works of this folklore genre: some fairy texts have the whole set of «cubes», but there is also such a type of fairy tales in which some of the «cubes» are missing with a particular purpose. The article offers an analysis of fairy tales based on the structure of «V. Y. Propp's cubes». Such an analysis of fairy tales will help preschool and primary school students to understand the content of fairy tales, their morality and allegory. Creative tasks with «V. Y. Propp's cubes» will provide children with the clues to independent creativity, which may result in composing their own fairy tales.

The article reveals the essence of the concept of "New School", made a theoretical analysis of the moral education of children. On the example of Vasyl Sukhomlynsky's pedagogical ideas, different approaches to the education of the moral qualities of the individual are analyzed. Formation of moral experience in preschool children begins with fairy tales. The education of humane feelings, spiritual values, according to the teacher, should be considered in close connection with the overall development of the child. Fairy tales contribute to the formation of children's emotional attitude to the described events, nature, fairy-tale characters, to the people around them, to reality. An important role in the education of the child's personality is played by fairy tales and stories written by pupils of the Pavlovsk school and Vasyl Olexandrovich. A child who is just beginning to get to know the world around is in need of fairy tales that prepare her for school, an active life in society. Tales, passing through the imagination of the child, excite her feelings for the good and the beautiful, expand the general outlook, teach love, loyalty, stability, honesty and perseverance. Promote moral formation in children. The scientist gave a substantiation of the essence of the process of becoming morality: "In my opinion, the most important conclusion that defines this essence is the truth: teaching in the lessons is not the only, but very important sphere of spiritual life in which the teacher and the student come into contact." The moral education of schoolchildren takes place in all lessons without exception. It promotes self-esteem and self-esteem. Theoretical aspects of moral education of the child are considered. The rules of moral education, developed by the Ukrainian scientist Vasyl Sukhomlynsky, include: formation of moral feelings and behavior skills. Emphasis is placed on the use of pedagogical ideas of Vasyl Sukhomlynsky in moral education, their place in the formation of moral values, outlines the direction of use. The necessity of raising a morally healthy child in the course of education is substantiated, which involves a close connection with the institutions of pre-school education and the New Ukrainian School, taking into account the individual characteristics of each child.

The paramount role in solving the problem of the formation of spiritual and moral qualities of the individual is played by the acquaintance of students with the national picture of the world, the basis of which are the characteristics of the culture of the people. Folklore is the conductor of national culture. Main attention is paid to one of the genres of the Russian folklore – a fairy tale, because it is in fairy tales that the best features of the people are reflected, contributing to the formation of moral values of students. The author determined not only the educational, but also the artistic value of fairy tales. The main aspects of the work on the analysis of the fairy tale are outlined: text analysis in the dialogue of cultures, the use of symbols, idioms, and appeal to the visual and expressive means of the language that contribute to a better understanding of the text.

The paper suggests methodological comments on how to tap into essential ethical issues after reading and discussing at classes fairy tales and sayings of all sorts of nations concerning compassion, mercifulness and cooperativeness and then unobtrusively, avoiding outright moral maxims, make pupils get insights in simple truths, underpinning universal human values. The recommendation are appropriate and desirable for fourgrade classes at the lessons of “The religious cultures and secular ethics” course, as well as at lessons of the “World around us” course and at Literature reading lessons.

Specific art practices, which include performance, are especially prevalent in popular culture at the turn of the 20th and 21st century. The concept of ‘performance’ means an action in the process of which creation involves a new experience both for the performer of the action and for the recipient. However, it is necessary to distinguish performance as a type of cultural action, dramatization, and performative potential of a work, creating conditions for influencing the consciousness of a person who, when perceiving a work, becomes a full participant in a creative act. Modern fairy-tale plays written by playwrights based on well-known works or the authors’ own dramatic tales have great performative potential. They connect the game principle, the performativity of a fairy tale, capable of activating empathy, influencing the child’s consciousness through the magic of the word, and the performance of the drama, the goal of which is to involve the young viewer in the show. At the same time, the theatrical performance of fairy-tale plays and the metatheatrical techniques involved in them have a significant visual impact on the young audience, which also contributes to the performative dialogue. The moralizing orientation of modern fairy-tale plays, reflecting the current moral and ethical problems of the society, increases the efficiency of the educational process, and contributes to the fulfilment of modern didactic tasks. In this article, based on the Russian playwright Anna Bogacheva, an attempt is made to identify those features of modern fairy-tale plays that convey their performative character and didactic potential.

Masnavi Khold-e-Barin is one of letters that educate people moral courses in different ways. Vahshi Bafghi by using his special technique, compose a word full of advice and using the different metaphor sings helps to understanding of good and bad issues in life. He expresses ethical messages in two ways, the theme of novel and direct expression. This paper tries to evaluate the Place of the educational literature in Vahshi Bafghi's Khold-e-Barin; the author shows aspects and features of didactic literature using content analysis in Khold-e-Barin. Issues such as the avoidance of envy, greed, worldly and other worldly courses, advice and the moral results of tales, praised of the knowledge and awareness, chastity word of poet, give didactic Ethics and Spirituality atmosphere to this letter. In this research, didactic poems in two sections of “sermon – ethical” and “Education – Spiritual” have been studied.

The Panji story is a popular cultural heritage during the Majapahit period, spreading to various regions andcountries of Southeast Asia. Panji's story is not just a romantic story of Panji Asmarabangun with Dewi Sekartajibut has many interesting aspects that can be studied from various sides. There are many fairy tales that tell the story ofPanji, as well as the performing arts of tradition, art, the art of chanting, and even the Panji Story enshrined in reliefsof dozens of temples in East Java and hundreds of manuscripts of Panji scattered in various countries. From thevarious stories of Panji is contained noble values that can be a role model in the life of society and state. In the story ofPanji there is a load of courage, heroism, unyielding spirit, creativity in running tactics, caring for others, love animalsand flora, not vengeance, do not apply cruelly, love to study, devoted to mother, love and master various art and so on. The Panji is an ideal figure so much is personified by many Kings throughout history. The story of the Panji becomesintertwined between fairy tales and facts. The Panji story becomes a myth that eventually becomes a reference in life. Infact, the example of the Panji Story is not only reflected in its traits as a person but the moral of the story contained init, as well as the inspiration that can be picked as a raw material for the creation of artwork and also the creativeeconomy.

Indonesia is a country with a high level of cultural heterogeneity. In accordance with the State of the Republic of Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo, the country needs disruptive innovations. Disruptive innovation reverses the impossibility into opportunities and results intransformative value for the Indonesian people and nation. Disruptive innovation can also be applied in the arts. Moreover, amid the setbacks in the ethical and moral values ​​of the Indonesian nation, art offers a way to shape character. One of the Balinese arts which has succeeded in changing the character is the art of Balinese traditional music. The tradition of storytelling, traditional children’s games and songs (gending) Bali is needed in upholding moral values ​​and character education early on. For this reason, the creation of the “Rare Kelangon” which has been tested by the international public at the Cultural Performance at the IMF in Nusa Dua Bali on October 11, 2018 and the 24th National Education Day on August 25, 2019. The method used in creating this music innovative of Gender wayang was the research and development of Brog and Gall combined with Bandem and Suteja’s Balinese art creation method. There are 8 stages of creations, namely ngerencana,nuasen, makalin, refinement of the initial product, ngebah I, revision of the final refinement and ngebah II. The results of the study found that the innovations which made in the creation of Rare Kelangon works were extension types, which the invention of the development of existing products, added so that it becomes something new and valuable. The gender wayanggamelan has existed before, but to revive the genderwayang songs, a component of work which also needs to be preserved is gending rare (traditional children’s songs), traditional games, and satua (fairy tales) of the Balinese people who are also full of values ​​of character education.

It is known that, over time and for various reasons, part of a community chooses, expresses or accentuates a certain status (political, economic, religious, sexual etc.), gradually losing its general-community identity and individualizing one's own. Viewed and perceived as new socio-cultural constructions within the basic structure (community matrix), both inter-dependently and dependent on the majority, this minority acquires (or will be assigned!) new directions of evolution/involution, far away from the general pattern, in time stalking or even posturing a new identity and consciousness. Charged or fined by the majority community, sometimes tolerated, sometimes categorically rejected. There are many cases, both old and new, of such segmentations, enclavings or exclusions with an economic, cultural or racial nature, generated by the imagination and/or authoritarianism of the majority: homo sapiens will use slowly but surely and irreversibly the tyranny of the majority and progress on less advanced technological-cognitive relatives, neanderthals and denisovans (plus several other subspecies of hominids, contemporary with homo sapiens); over the time, Christians will anathematize, enclave and/or kill the Jews for improbable deeds or on the basis of arrogant ethical/moral superiorities; the ancient or feudal masters disposed of the lives and possessions of the slaves they had, as they pleased; those who did not conform to official dogmas became instantly heretics and liable to all sorts of punishments (see the actions and justifications of the Inquisition); the prejudices regarding skin color, sexual orientation, ethnic or political affiliation, sometimes aggressively (apartheid in South Africa or racial segregation in the US) have determined certain defensive behaviors of these minorities, marginalized or excluded. Examples can easily be multiplied (talking about minors, the marginalized or excluded ones culturally, economically, racially, medically etc. for almost every country), but this is not the desideratum of the present study. Functionally and adaptively, the norms of a traditional community such as the Romanian one, repeatedly violated and corroborated with the refusal of alterity, led to a cultural-negative perception and to the location outside of the limits set by the community of such socio-cultural categories. Such marginals (called gueux in France, rogue in England, abenteurer in Germany, or picaras in Spain) are often mentioned at the level of fantastic Romanian fairy tale even if the details are meteoric or extremely lapidary. As the fantastic Romanian fairy tale illustrates, it is established and legitimated first of all the ideal of purity, beauty and superiority (social, economic, moral); still there are mentions of the problematical interethnic relations, cultural conflicts, failures of social adaptation to the generally accepted system; finally, as we do not have such a study about these social categories, I find it appropriate to approach this topic. My approach will be a structural-functional one, dialectically speaking, most of the mentions about these social categories being found in the anthologies of fairy tales, juxtaposing, overlapping or complementing the three categories (marginal, minority, excluded) conceptually.

Historical experience of education by the means of books, known as culture of reading, started being weakened in “the age of Internet”. Novelty of the article is in the described process of impact of the book on criminals in the territory of Western Siberia considered through the cultural, historical and psychological aspects. With the use of previously unknown archival materials there are revealed the cure methods of the condemned by using the book, and the relationship to the prison literature of the political prisoners. The personality of prisoners differed by a set of moral qualities, but almost all of them were ready to the perception of people around and themselves through the literature. Illiteracy was the main obstacle in education of the condemned, but the administration of prisons opened prison schools and organized reading literature aloud. The first prison libraries appeared in the 1860-ies and were replenished generally at the expense of philanthropists. F.M. Dostoyevsky’s novels “Crime and Punishment” and “Notes from the Dead House”, fairy tales and poems by A.S. Pushkin were the most popular books: they filled life with romanticism and were a compensation factor. Political prisoners denied any educational methods, preferring to read revolutionary literature. It is impossible to track extent of impact of book on the process of correction of criminals, but it is possible to claim that libraries started forming the atmosphere of book which is the most important condition of education in prisons, and is a necessary prerequisite for correction of a convicted person.

The article substantiates the relevance of the formation of children's creative activity with the help of folklore in the process of integration of different types of artistic activities in the theory and practice of preschool education. It is noted that the highest form of human’s activity and at the same time his characteristic is creativi-ty, at the same time creative activity is defined as human activity in a particular type of creativity, which acquires essential and specific features of creativity. As a result we can mention that creativity and activity are interrelated, interpenetrating concepts that influence each other. Different approaches of understanding the essence of the concepts "creativity", "activity" are revealed and the main interpretations of these terms in philosophy, psy-chology and pedagogy are reflected. It is determined that in the studying of creativity there are two approaches: creativity as an activity; creativity as a personality trait. Based on the research of philosophers on the prob-lems of education of social activity, artistic creativity, we consider creative activity as a complex, integral quality of personality, which is a dialectical unity of general, peculi-ar to all types of social activity, and especially specific only as a measure of personality’s activity in art, has two interconnected aspects: external and internal. The external side involves the implementation of ac-tions and deeds which have creative nature. Internal involves a conscious, meaningful attitude to the activities performed, the manifestation of volitional qualities associ-ated with achieving the result. Older preschool age is the basis for the formation of creative activity and children's creativity in general, as the developmental perception of the child is the causative agent of the child's activity and creative activity in gen-eral. One of the means that contributes to younger genera-tion personality’s formation, which carries enormous educational potential, is folk art, because it contains wis-dom, the best people’s moral and aesthetic experience. In addition, it contributes to the formation of children’s crea-tivity. Based on the analysis of research, the possibilities of such types of oral folk art as fairy tales, proverbs and sayings, riddles in the formation of creative activity, based on their nature and content.

Introduction. In the article the cycle of children’s choruses of S.Rachmaninov is considered, his characteristic features in subjects, figurative disclosure, the special role of lofty spiritualized lyric poetry; for the first time the appearance in the choral works of the composer of the themes “Dies irae”, “katabasis”; the spiritually-aesthetic value of Rachmaninov “Six Choruses” for secular children’s choral singing and performance is revealed. “Six choirs for children’s or women’s voices” op. 15 were written by S. Rachmaninov in 1895, the date of which he indicated in a letter to B. Asafiev on April 13, 1917. By the time the cycle was created, S. Rachmaninov was already the author of a considerable number of works. In the fall of 1894, he was employed by the Mariinsky Women’s School as a teacher of music theory and an accompanist of the choir. Specially for the choir of students, “Six choirs for children’s or women’s voices” were written: 1) “Glory!”, Words by N. Nekrasov; 2) ”Night”, words by V. Ladyzhensky; 3) “Pine”, words by M. Lermontov (from G. Heine); 4) “The waves dozed off”, words by K. Romanov, 5) “Captivity”, words by N. Tsyganov; 6) “Angel”, words by M. Lermontov. The features of S. Rachmaninov’s musical and artistic thinking, which researchers usually note in his romances – the significant role of accompaniment and a simple 3-part form, having their own historical archetype in the baroque three-part aria da capo (Antipov, 2014: 9) – can be found in “Six choirs”. The enormous artistic role of the piano accompaniment, its developed texture and organic unity with the score should be especially paid attention to. The vivid imagery of the cycle owes much to the instrumental part, which the composer not only went far beyond the accompaniment, but often has independent significance too. At first glance, the choral score of the cycle is uncomplicated – mainly with diatonic two-voice. But behind seeming simplicity, inexhaustible performing tasks for the choir and piano part are in favor. The extreme choral plays frame the cycle with themes of deep ethical and spiritual content that had not previously been encountered in children’s choral music. The middle rooms are dominated by bright lyrics, youthfully light sadness, and harmony between the pictures of nature and the states of the human soul reigns. No. 1 “Glory!” – the character of the work conveys pathetic, prayer (appeal to the Almighty for blessing) and lyrical-patriotic feelings. In the 3rd section of the miniatures, the accompaniment fills the music with fanfare intonations, in the last 6 beats, the dynamic tension within the framework of one tonic harmony is steadily increasing, and in the bass of the piano the bell ringing and ceremonial drum beat are imitated, completing the picture of the celebration. In No. 2 “Night”, the author embodies a dreamy-contemplative mood with the help of the choral cantilena. Frettonal ambiguity of the extreme parts (major-minor), functions languidly lasting for several measures, delicate harmonic colors, flexible ligature of figures, masterful techniques of sound-visualization contribute to a special refinement of moods and miniature images and are associated with impressionist music. No. 3 “Pine” – S. Rachmaninov chose M. Lermontov’s translation as the theme of loneliness and dreams of happiness, giving contrast to the musical images of northern Pine and southern Palma. No. 4 “The waves dosed off” – to convey the state of spiritual harmony and dreamy peace S. Rachmaninov found a set of expressive compositional techniques. Here we emphasize the special independence of the piano part, which does not contain a choral theme, but plays an important soundvisual role, enriching the narration of the choir. No. 5 “Captivity” – the image of a gentle bird, imprisoned in a golden cage, is widespread in fairy tales and poetry of the peoples of the world, as well as in choral music. In N. Tsyganov’s verses, the denouement is optimistic – the nightingale is set free. S. Rachmaninov relies intonationally on the Russian peasant cry-lamentation. The melody has a touching colour, the miniature is distinguished by a bright national color. No. 6 “Angel”. The poem tells of the great sacrament of conception in the spiritual world of a new person’s life. The Angel carries this person’s soul from heaven to earth to connect it with the body of the unborn child. In flight, an Angel sings a song about celestial gardens to this yet unincarnated Soul. The composer weaves a fragment of the motive-symbol “Dies irae” into Angel’s theme, entrusting it to a part of the alto and veiling from above the unrecognizabl third major second part of the soprano. The smoothly descending theme of the Soul can be described in this context as “katabasis”. This symbolism gives the miniature a deep philosophical meaning. S. Rachmaninov was the first Russian composer to create an example of concert purpose in The “Six choirs”. He raised to a new level the theme of children’s works, characteristic of the genre of that time. And that is education of a spiritually rich personality. The author revealed the extraordinary rhythmic and intonational richness of musical speech, the mastery of texture, harmony, the sophistication of technical techniques, and the tonal color scheme were rare for children’s choral music of that time. The richness of colors and the layering of the piano part bring it closer to the orchestra. In The “Six choirs for children’s or women’s voices” S. Rachmaninov revealed a new example of children’s choral music for concert purposes, which has high artistic merits, a deep substantive theme, and an aesthetic and educational orientation. The composer first attracted high poetry, revealed a spiritual and moral subtext. The theme of Faith, reflected in the first and last miniatures, “rings” the cycle, like Alpha and Omega, giving special semantics and significance to its figurative content. The essay reflected important artistic principles and writing techniques, characteristic of his subsequent opuses, but new to the children’s genre. Like the First Symphony (1895), created in the same year as the cycle, the “Six choirs” for the first time include the theme “Dies irae” symbolic for S. Rachmaninoff’s art, which further permeates his work up to “Symphonic dances”, as well as the theme “katabasis” revealing the spiritual and philosophical meaning of the work. This cycle was S. Rachmaninov’s only experience in children’s choral music, in which first for the genre he embodied high spiritual and ethical ideas of a romantic artist, his Christian picture of the world, the eternal themes of love for the Fatherland, life and death, good and evil, also actual for modern society and children of the XXI century. Prior to S. Rachmaninov, children’s choral music did not know such a depth of content, mastery of embodiment, aesthetic pleasure. The unsurpassed beauty of “Six choirs for children’s or women’s voices” made them a phenomenon of perfection in musical art for children, which is timeless, of course.

Обстоятельства помешали научному редактору номера – Елене Георгиевне Гребенщиковой – написать предисловие. В нашем молодом журнале есть уже своя традиция: научный редактор предваряет номер концептуальной преамбулой к статьям, посвященных обсуждению различных аспектов одной проблемы. Авторов данного номера объединяют исследовательские и организационные обстоятельства. Все мы были вовлечены в исследовательское поле биоэтики Борисом Григорьевичем Юдиным. Привлечение же методологических потенциалов семиотики для решения задач биоэтики произошло на «томской почве» как результат организации серий конференций. Эти серии стартовали с конференции «Антропологические основания биоэтики», которая, по словам Б.Г. Юдина, была первой в России научной конференцией «по биоэтике». Основные доклады этой научной встречи составили содержание номера журнала «Бюллетень сибирской медицины». Среди его публикаций были две статьи, определившее дальнейшее, – «Чтоб сказку сделать былью? (Конструирование человека)» [Юдин 2006] и «Тело страдания: философско-антропологическое истолкование» [Тищенко 2006]. Слова «Конструирование человека» дали случайным образом название ряду конференций, проводимых Томским государственным педагогическим университетом. Специализация указанного университета понятным образом привлекла к участию коллег-педагогов, интерпретировавших слово «конструирование» в качестве указания на суть образования. Было любопытно наблюдать такую стихийно складывающуюся прагматику с учетом различий русскоязычного и англоязычного названия статьи [Юдин 2006] – словами «Чтоб сказку сделать былью?», заканчивающими вопросительным знаком цитату из песни о цели рождения советского человека, и «To make a dream true?», где под вопрос ставилась возможность мечтой-иллюзией заменить действительность. Поскольку организаторы конференции испытывают некоторую зависимость от тематики заявляемых докладов, для «чистой» биоэтики была создана отдельная секция «Тело и власть», название которой стало парафразом другой упомянутой статьи [Тищенко 2006]. Параллельно с серией конференций «Конструирование человека» был организован ряд конференций «Системы и модели: границы интерпретаций», акцентировавших не столько биоэтику, сколько постнеклассическую парадигму семиотического моделирования. Слова «системы и модели» цитировали название известной в семиотике книги А.А. Шарова и Ю.А.Шрейдера; фиксировали проблему нахождения пределов применимости математических моделей в синергетике; приглашали к обсуждению системной методологии. Слова «границы интерпретаций» изначально определяли соотношение герменевтики и семиотики в методологии исследования социокультурной динамики. Замечу, что географическое образование заставляло меня трактовать понятие «границы» исключительно в семиотическом ракурсе. Доклады, представленные на первой конференции «Системы и модели: границы интерпретаций», составили номер журнала «Вестник Томского государственного педагогического университета» (2008, № 1), из содержания которого ясно, что эта научная встреча была посвящена обсуждению наследия Эрика Григорьевича Юдина и современному прочтению его версии системного подхода. В этом номере есть много заслуживающих внимания материалов, но для определения области пересечения биоэтики и семиотики, необходимо назвать статью Р.Г. Апресяна [Апресян 2008], хотя в самой статье отсутствует прямое обращение и к семиотике, и к биоэтике. В статье лаконично и предметно установлены ценностные границы локусов модели «этический квадрат», созданной Р.Г. Апресяном. Ясность изложения [Апресян 2008] позволила разглядеть сразу несколько моментов, объединяющих и разделяющих биоэтику с педагогикой. Настороженность биоэтики вызывает любое воззвание превзойти норму, а любая педагогика взывает к тому, чтобы превзойти норму. Общность биоэтики и педагогики составляет распределение символики ролей для всех своих субъектов, подчиненное коммуникативным форматам, устанавливающих пределы допустимого/отвергаемого внутри коммуникативных ареалов. Выяснение этой общности позволило увидеть, что модели биоэтики, по сути, формируют синтаксис коммуникативных ролей субъектов биомедицины. Причем, фиксируют эти роли или в индексах, или в иконических знаках, или даже в символах. Генезис биоэтики есть ответ на социальный запрос в необходимости «сторожа» (в смысле: «…пойди, поставь сторожа; пусть он сказывает, что увидит») для предотвращения моральных катаклизмов, вызываемых темпом прогресса (в чем бы он не выражался) и соблазнами прогресса. Темп трансформаций порождает неопределенность социальных сценариев, а, следовательно, технику биоэтических экспертиз диктует синхрония и абдукция, что явно служит указателем релевантности концепции семиозиса, созданной Ч.С. Пирсом. Семиотическая сущность решения задач биоэтики была увидена столь четко, что удивление вызывало только одно: почему биоэтика, потенциально обладая «ключом» методов семиотики, подбирает «отмычки» для анализа спонтанно возникающих кейсов? Подчеркну, что упомянутый «ключ» открывает «двери», не столько ведущие к анализу нарративов субъектов, нормативных дискурсов и уже случившихся кейсов, сколько к прогностике кейсов в синхронии с меняющимся контекстом. Вместе с тем представленные резоны для обоснования того, что методы семиотики обладают релевантностью для решения задач биоэтики, могут встретить вопрос: зачем биоэтике применять эти методы, если она и без них прекрасно решает свои задачи? Возможным ответом на этот вопрос будет – для того чтобы осуществить точную и опережающую диагностику социокультурных трансформаций, способных вызвать и уже вызывающих модификацию «человеческого в человеке», т.е. вызывающих скольжение границ нормы. Излишне объяснять преимущества диагностики в качестве процедуры с точным результатом, способным опередить наступление необратимых состояний. Семиотические методы устремлены к достижению точности, и их применение объединяет всё гуманитарное знание. При этом семиотика сама существует в нескольких конкурирующих направлениях, и ее исследовательские методы очень отличаются в конкретных научных областях, в том числе и тех, которые составляют «computer science», ответственных за тотальную «цифровизацию» и самоорганизацию «информационного общества». У перечисленных сущностей – точности, самоорганизации, семиотики, «computer science» и даже «цифровизации» – есть идейный общий знаменатель: философия процесса. Создатель философии процесса – А.Н. Уайтхед – видел ее результат в оригинальной концепции символизма, обладающей сущностными пересечениями с концепцией семиозиса Ч.С. Пирса. Если концепция семиозиса раскрывала микропроцессы, обеспечивающие самопроизвольный «рост символов», то концепция А.Н. Уайтхеда устанавливала направления воздействий этого «роста» и основной оператор воздействия: навык организаций «революций в символизме». А также критерии, по которым можно диагностировать событие «перекодирования» символа, т.е. отличить его от того, что событийным рождением нового символизма не является. Т.е. диагностировать дистанцию, отделяющую «событие-в-действительности» от «события-в-реальности». А, следовательно, диагностировать генезисы и цели идейных направлений «конструирования человека». Или диагностировать «семиотические аттракторы», завершающие фазовые переходы в конкуренции сценариев социокультурной динамики. В социокультурных трансформациях сила аттракторов аналогична силе мечты (вспомним слово «dream» в названии статьи [Юдин 2006]). Мечты, имеющей две стороны, – миф и утопию. Биоэтика как «сторож» социокультурных трансформаций вынуждена распознавать миф и утопию в манипуляции целями. Жизненными целями. Целями, диктующими вариативную селекцию ценностей. В феномене мечты и в его воплощениях – в мифе и в утопии – отсутствуют позитив или негатив. Всё зависит, с какой целью им придаются. Зависит от разновидности процессов: процесса рецепции символики мифа с компенсаторными целями или процесса акцептации символических асимптот с целями cамореализации [Брызгалина 2020; Бараш, Антоновский 2019; Шульман, Кутузова 2020]. Обладание представлениями о «росте символов» способно из наблюдаемых мерцаний визуального «вытянуть» то, что скрывают внешние эффекты – осуществить семиотическую диагностику на основе аналогий между симптомами и семантикой, синдромами и синтактикой, анамнезом (в сочетании с целеполаганием) и прагматикой. Такая диагностика создает область пересечения биоэтики и семиотики. Область формируют: (а) изначальные позиции биоэтики в её прагматической концентрации трансдисциплинарного знания для разрешения конкретной проблемы индивидуальности (с сочувственным принятием веера индивидуальных целей); и (б) постнеклассические преимущества семиотики, эффективно реализующие свои потенциалы в расширяющемся трансдисциплинарном поле. В завершении должна выразить благодарность Р.Г. Апресяну, П.Д. Тищенко, Б.Г.Юдину за их щедрые разъяснения существа задач биоэтики, что позволило увидеть эти задачи посредством «оптических» инструментов семиотики. И благодарность всем авторам этого номера за интерес к семиотике, проявленный на основе глубокого понимания решаемых в настоящее время биоэтикой задач и/или оригинальной постановкой этих задач. Circumstances prevented the scientific editor of the issue – Elena G. Grebenshchikova – from writing a foreword. Our young journal already has its own tradition: a scientific editor prefaces an issue with a conceptual preamble to articles discussing various aspects of one problem. The authors of this issue are united by research and organizational circumstances. We were all involved in the research field of bioethics by Boris G. Yudin. Implementation of the methodological potentials of semiotics for solving the problems of bioethics was begun on “Tomsk grounds” as a result of the organization of several conference series. These series started with the conference “Anthropological Foundations of Bioethics”, which, according to Yudin, was the first scientific conference “on bioethics” in Russia. The main reports of this scientific meeting became the content of an issue of Bulletin of Siberian Medicine journal. Among the publications in the issue, there were two articles that determined the further development – “To make a dream true? (Human engineering)” [Yudin 2006] and “The body of suffering: The philosophical and anthropological interpretation” [Tishchenko 2006]. The words “human engineering” (or “human construction”) incidentally gave a title to a number of conferences held by Tomsk State Pedagogical University. The specialization of this university understandably attracted the participation of fellow educators, who interpreted the word “construction” as an indication of the essence of education. It was curious to observe such a spontaneously emerging pragmatism, taking into account the differences between the Russian and English versions of the article title [Yudin 2006] – i.e. between the words “To make a fairy tale come true?” ending with a question mark a quote from a song about the purpose of the Soviet person’s birth and “To make a dream true?” calling the possibility to replace the reality by a dream-illusion into question. Since conference organizers experience some dependence on the subject of submitted reports, a separate section “Body and Power” was created for “pure” bioethics, and the title of the section became a paraphrase of another mentioned article [Tishchenko 2006]. In parallel with the series of conferences “Human Construction”, a number of conferences “Systems and Models: Limits of Interpretation” were organized, which emphasized the post-nonclassical paradigm of semiotic modeling rather than bioethics itself. The words “systems and models” quoted the title of the well-known book in semiotics by A. A. Sharov and Yu. A. Shreider; fixed the problem of finding the limits of applicability of mathematical models in synergetics; invited to discuss the system methodology. The words “limits of interpretation” initially determined the relationship between hermeneutics and semiotics in the methodology of sociocultural dynamics study. I note that the geographical education background forced me to interpret the concept “limit”, or “border”, exclusively from a semiotic perspective. The reports presented at the first conference “Systems and Models: Limits of Interpretation” made up an issue of the Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin journal (2008, No. 1). From the content of the issue it is clear that this scientific meeting was devoted to the discussion of the legacy of Eric G. Yudin and the modern interpretation of his version of the systems approach. The issue contains many noteworthy materials; however, in order to define the area of the intersection of bioethics and semiotics, it is necessary to highlight the article by Ruben G. Apressyan [Apressyan 2008], although the article itself lacks a direct reference to either semiotics or bioethics. The article laconically and substantively establishes the value boundaries of the loci of the “ethical square” model that Apressyan created. The clarity of presentation [Apressyan 2008] made it possible to discern simultaneously several points that unite and separate bioethics and pedagogy. The alertness of bioethics evokes any appeal to surpass the norm, while any pedagogy calls to surpass the norm. The commonality of bioethics and pedagogy is the distribution of the symbolism of roles for all their subjects, subordinated to communicative formats which set the limits of what is permissible/rejected within communicative areas. The elucidation of this commonality made it possible to see that the models of bioethics, in fact, form the syntax of the communicative roles of the subjects of biomedicine. Moreover, these models define the roles either in indices, or in iconic signs, or even in symbols. The genesis of bioethics is a response to the social demand for a “watchman” (in the sense: “Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth”) to prevent moral cataclysms caused by the pace of progress (whatever it is expressed in) and the temptations of progress. The pace of transformations gives rise to the uncertainty of social scenarios, and, consequently, the technique of bioethical examinations is dictated by synchrony and abduction, which clearly serves as an indicator of the relevance of the concept of semiosis created by Charles Sanders Peirce. The semiotic essence of solving the problems of bioethics was seen so clearly that only one thing aroused surprise: why does bioethics, potentially possessing the “key” of semiotics methods, select “lock-picking tools” for the analysis of spontaneously arising cases? Let me emphasize that the mentioned “key” opens “doors” that do not lead to the analysis of narratives of subjects, normative discourses and cases that have already happened, but to the forecasting of cases in synchrony with the changing context. At the same time, the presented reasons for substantiating the fact that the methods of semiotics are relevant for solving the problems of bioethics may face the question: why should bioethics apply these methods if it perfectly solves its problems without them? A possible answer to this question would be – in order to carry out accurate and advanced diagnostics of sociocultural transformations that can cause and are already causing a modification of the “human in a human being”, i.e. causing the sliding of norm boundaries. It is unnecessary to explain the advantages of diagnostics as a procedure with an accurate result that can anticipate the onset of irreversible conditions. Semiotic methods are aimed at achieving accuracy, and their application unites all humanitarian knowledge. At that, semiotics itself exists in several competing directions, and its research methods are very different in specific scientific fields, including those that make up “computer science” which is responsible for the total “digitalization” and self-organization of an “information society”. The listed entities – accuracy, self-organization, semiotics, “computer science”, and even “digitalization” – have an ideological common denominator: process philosophy. The creator of process philosophy – Alfred North Whitehead – saw its result in the original concept of symbolism, which has essential intersections with Peirce’s concept of semiosis. While the concept of semiosis revealed microprocesses that ensured the spontaneous “growth of symbols”, Whitehead’s concept established the directions of the impact of this “growth” and the main operator of the impact: the skill of organizing “revolutions in symbolism” as well as the criteria by which one can diagnose the occasion of “re-coding” of a symbol, i.e. distinguish the occasion from the fact that is not the eventual birth of a new symbolism, or diagnose the distance separating the “occasion-in-actuality” from the “occasion-in-reality”, and, consequently, diagnose the geneses and goals of the ideological directions of “human construction”, or “semiotic attractors” that complete phase transitions in the competition of sociocultural dynamics scenarios. In sociocultural transformations, the power of attractors is similar to the power of a dream (recalling the word “dream” from the article title [Yudin 2006]), a dream that has two sides – myth and utopia. Bioethics as a “watchman” of sociocultural transformations is forced to recognize myth and utopia in the manipulation of goals: life goals, goals dictating variable selection of values. There is neither the positive nor the negative in the phenomenon of dreams and its incarnations – myth and utopia. It all depends on what goals are being pursued. It depends on the variety of processes: process of the reception of the symbolics of a myth with compensatory goals, or of the acceptance of symbolic asymptotes with the goals of self-realization [Bryzgalina 2020; Barash, Antonovskiy 2019; Schulman, Kutuzova 2020]. Possession of ideas about the “growth of symbols” is capable to reveal what external effects hide, extracting it from the observed flickers of the visual – to carry out semiotic diagnostics based on analogies between symptoms and semantics, syndromes and syntactics, anamnesis (in combination with goal-setting) and pragmatics. Such diagnostics create an area of intersection of bioethics and semiotics. The area is formed by: (a) the initial position of bioethics in its pragmatic concentration of transdisciplinary knowledge for solving a specific problem of individuality (with a sympathetic acceptance of a set of individual goals); and (b) the post-nonclassical advantages of semiotics which effectively realize their potentials in the expanding transdisciplinary field. In conclusion, I would like to express my gratitude to Ruben G. Apressyan, Pavel D. Tishchenko, Boris G. Yudin for their generous explanations of the essence of the tasks of bioethics, which made it possible to see these tasks through the “optical” instruments of semiotics. I thank all the authors of this issue for their interest in semiotics demonstrated through the deep understanding of the problems currently being solved by bioethics and/or the original formulation of these problems.

В статье впервые в осетиноведении анализируется влияние традиций русской позна- вательной, научно-художественной литературы, а именно творчества Виталия Вален- тиновича Бианки, на становление осетинской детской словесности, на развитие жанров литературной сказки, природоведческого рассказа, научно-популярной повести. На мате- риале произведений осетинских авторов познавательный аспект рассматривается как один из важнейших составляющих детской литературы. Произведения К. Дзесова, В. Га- глоева М. Купеева, Ч. Айларова, М. Дзасохова, Г. Чеджемова и др. пропагандируют знания о природе, обществе, человеке и его деятельности, способствуют расширению кругозора ребенка. Во многих отношениях современная осетинская природоведческая литература – это продолжение и развитие традиций архаического животного эпоса. Герои ее наделены двойственными признаками – человеческими и животными. Они – своеобразный способ разговора взрослого с ребенком о жизненно важных вещах, которые невозможно объяснить на языке абстракций. Проведенные параллели позволили обозначить границы преемствен- ности в тематических, нравственно-этических и эстетических исканиях осетинских авторов. На основе сравнительного анализа произведений Бианки и осетинских детских писателей прослежены основные тенденции и характерные черты развития осетинской познавательной и природоведческой литературы XX в., а именно: синтез научных знаний и фольклорных традиций (система образов, антропоморфизм, прозрачная мораль расска- зов и сказок, находящаяся в несомненной связи с народной традицией и т.д.). Сочетание различных аспектов детской литературы, как то: познавательность, занимательность, художественность, соответствует специфике детского восприятия и способствует вы- полнению главной функции природоведческой литературы: экологическому воспитанию подрастающих поколений. In the article for the first time the influence of the traditions of Russian educational, scientific and fiction literature is analyzed, namely, the works of V.V. Bianki, on the formation of Ossetian children’s literature, on the development of genres of literary tales, natural stories, popular science novels. On the basis of the works of Ossetian authors, the cognitive aspect is considered as one of the most important component of children’s literature. The works of K. Dzesov, V. Gagloyev, M. Kupeev, Ch. Aylarova, M. Dzasokhova, G. Chedzhemova, and others advocate knowledge about nature, society, man and his activities, expand the child’s horizons. In many ways, modern Ossetic naturalistic literature is a continuation and development of traditions of archaic animal epic. Its heroes are endowed with dual signs – human and animal. They are a kind of way to an adult conversation with your child about the vital things that can not be explained in the language of abstraction. The parallels made it possible to identify the borders of continuity in the thematic, moral, ethical and aesthetic quest of the Ossetian authors. Based on the comparative analysis of works by V.V. Bianki and Ossetian children’s writers the main trends and characteristics of the development of Ossetian cognitive and natural history literature of the 20th century are traced, namely: the synthesis of scientific knowledge and folk traditions (images system, anthropomorphism, transparent morality of stories and fairy tales, which is undoubtedly connected with the folk tradition, etc.). The combination of various aspects of children’s literature, such as cognitive, entertaining, artistic, corresponds to the specifics of children’s perception and contributes to the implementation of the main function of natural history literature: the environmental education of the younger generation.

The article focuses on the poetics of Mikhail Kuzmin’s fairy tales collected in a unified cycle by the author (1912–1914). Literary scholars have only occasionally turned to certain aspects of these works in the context of studying other Silver Age writers’ tales. Nevertheless, the artistic authenticity of Kuzmin’s fairy tales is an important problem, the solution of which allows one to come closer to understanding the peculiarities of the poetics of the writer's short prose. Our study showed that the poetics of Kuzmin’s literary tales is characterized by features of folklore tales (compositional features, narrative formulas, fabulous chronotop), but the main genre model is still a short story, with its common features: brevity, pointe and an unexpected ending. Most of Kuzmin’s fairy tales (“Prince Desire”, “The Knight’s Rules”, “The Six Brides of King Gilbert”, “The Daughter of the Genoese Merchant”, “The Golden Dress”) manifest features typical of his stylized novels: a counterintuitive combination of elements from different cultures, transformation and a mixture of genres, rich intertext (including autointertext), a high degree of aesthetics and irony, light eroticism, lack of didacticism, playing with the reader. Kuzmin's fairy tales incorporate poetic features of other genres (anecdote, parables, etc.). All these features make possible plural interpretations of the works and allow us to consider their poetics close to such a variety of post-symbolism as pre-postmodernism. All Kuzmin's tales are dedicated to one area of moral and philosophic problems – the flexibility and inertia of a person’s thinking, love, the search for answers to questions about life and others. The presence of these features of poetics in all Kuzmin's fairy tales and the type of problematics common to them testifies to their artistic unity, i. e. to the presence of a cycle.

Orientation in space plays an essential role for a human being in the view of his / her life. Beginning from the ancient times, people explored space through horizontal and later vertical dimensions. This led to symbolization of objects that surrounded them. Complete reflection of symbols of space, in particular, horizontal and vertical symbols, is concisely traced in the fairy tale genre. Being one of the archaic forms of folklore, the fairy tale co-opted various elements of mythological beliefs of primitive people, their cognition and way of life, and later was supplemented by individual idiosyncratic elements of the world view. Symbols of both dimensions actualize primary (physical) and secondary meanings (which are also signified by evaluative, moral and ethical, as well as ecclesiastically religious meanings). The most frequently used vertical and horizontal symbols in the fairy tales are those actualized according to the “right” / “left” and “top” / “bottom” criteria. Despite relatively extended research in the field of fairy tale symbols, there are few studies which deal with the issue of conveying vertical and horizontal symbols into the target language. The aim of the article is to highlight the ways of rendering vertical and horizontal symbols taken from English and Ukrainian fairy tales, and to assess adequacy of their reproduction in the target language. According to the results of the research, it can be concluded that due to its universal character, the symbols of vertical and horizontal space are easily rendered into the receiving cultures. However, adequate reproduction of vertical and horizontal symbols requires identification of their role in a certain fairy tale text, and, consequently, the importance of their rendering into the target language.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.

The Walt Disney Company has been creating magical fairy tales since the early 1900s and is a trusted brand synonymous with wholesome, family entertainment (Wasko). Over time, this reputation has resulted in the Disney brand’s huge financial growth and influence on audiences worldwide. (Wohlwend). As the largest global media powerhouse in the Western world (Beattie), Disney uses its power and influence to shape the perceptions and ideologies of its audience. In the twenty-first century there has been a proliferation of retellings of Disney fairy tales, and Kilmer suggests that although the mainstream perception is that these new iterations promote gender equity, new cultural awareness around gender stereotypes, and cultural insensitivity, this is illusory. Tangled, for example, was a popular film selling over 10 million DVD copies and positioned as a bold new female fairy tale character; however, academics took issue with this position, writing articles entitled “Race, Gender and the Politics of Hair: Disney’s Tangled Feminist Messages”, “Tangled: A Celebration of White Femininity”, and “Disney’s Tangled: Fun, But Not Feminist”, berating the film for its lack of any true feminist examples or progressiveness (Kilmer). One way to assess the impact of Disney is to look at the use of shape shifting and transformation in the narratives – particularly those that include women and young girls. Research shows that girls and women are often stereotyped and sexualised in the mass media (Smith et al.; Collins), and Disney regularly utilises body modification and metamorphosis within its narratives to emphasise what good and evil ‘look’ like. These magical transformations evoke what Marina Warner refers to as part of the necessary surprise element of the fairy tale, while creating suspense and identity with storylines and characters. In early Disney films such as the 1937 version of Snow White, the queen becomes the witch who brings a poison apple to the princess; and in the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty the ‘bad’ fairy Maleficent shapeshifts into a malevolent dragon. Whilst these ‘good to evil’ (and vice versa) tropes are easily recognised, there are additional transformations that are arguably more problematic than those of the increasingly terrifying monsters or villains. Disney has created what we have coined the ‘princess bubble’, where the physique and behaviour of the leading women in the tales has become a predictor of success and good fortune, and the impression is created of a link between their possession of beauty and the ‘happily-ever-after’ outcome received by the female character. The value, or worth, of a princess is shown within these stories to often increase according to her ability to attract men. For example, in Brave, Queen Elinor showcases the extreme measures taken to ‘present’ her daughter Merida to male suitors. Merida is preened, dressed, and shown how to behave to increase her value to her family, and whilst she manages to persuade them to set aside their patriarchal ideologies in the end, it is clear what is expected from Merida in order to gain male attention. Similarly, Cinderella, Aurora, and Snow White are found to be of high ‘worth’ by the princes on account of their beauty and form. We contend, therefore, that the impression often cast on audiences by Disney princesses emphasises that beauty = worth, no matter how transgressive Disney appears to be on the surface. These princesses are flawlessly beautiful, capable of winning the heart of the prince by triumphing over their less attractive rivals – who are often sisters or other family members. This creates the illusion among young audiences that physical attractiveness is enough to achieve success, and emphasises beauty as the priority above all else. Therefore, the Disney ‘princess bubble’ is highly problematic. It presents a narrow range of acceptability for female characters, offers a distorted view of gender, and serves to further engrain into popular culture a flawed stereotype on how to look and behave that negates a fuller representation of female characters. In addition, Armando Maggi argues that since fairy tales have been passed down through generations, they have become an intrinsic part of many people’s upbringing and are part of a kind of universal imaginary and repository of cultural values. This means that these iconic cultural stories are “unlikely to ever be discarded because they possess both a sentimental value and a moral ‘soundness’” (Rutherford 33), albeit that the lessons to be learnt are at times antiquated and exclusionary in contemporary society. The marketing and promotion of the Disney princess line has resulted in these characters becoming an extremely popular form of media and merchandise for young girls (Coyne et al. 2), and Disney has received great financial benefit from the success of its long history of popular films and merchandise. As a global corporation with influence across multiple entertainment platforms, from its streaming channel to merchandise and theme parks, the gender portrayals therefore impact on culture and, in particular, on how young audiences view gender representation. Therefore, it could be argued that Disney has a social responsibility to ensure that its messages and characters do not skew or become damaging to the psyche of its young audiences who are highly impressionable. When the representation of gender is examined, however, Disney tends to create highly gendered performances in both the early and modern iterations of fairy tales, and the princess characters remain within a narrow range of physical portrayals and agency. The Princess Bubble Although there are twelve official characters within the Disney princess umbrella, plus Elsa and Anna from the Disney Frozen franchise, this article examines the eleven characters who are either born or become royalty through marriage, and exhibit characteristics that could be argued to be the epitome of feminine representation in fairy tales. The characters within this ‘princess bubble’ are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, Elsa, and Anna. The physical appearance of those in the princess bubble also connects to displays around the physical aspects of ethnicity. Nine out of eleven are white skinned, with Jasmine having lightened in skin tone over time, and Tiana now having a tanned look rather than the original dark African American complexion seen in 2009 (Brucculieri). This reinforces an ideology that being white is superior. Every princess in our sample has thick and healthy long hair, the predominant colour being blonde. Their eyes are mostly blue, with only three possessing a dark colour, a factor which reinforces the characteristics and representation of white ethnic groups. Their eyes are also big and bulbous in shape, with large irises and pupils, and extraordinarily long eyelashes that create an almost child-like look of innocence that matches their young age. These princesses have an average age of sixteen years and are always naïve, most without formal education or worldly experience, and they have additional distinctive traits which include poise, elegance and other desired feminine characteristics – like kindness and purity. Ehrenreich and Orenstein note that the physical attributes of the Disney princesses are so evident that the creators have drawn criticism for over-glamorising them, and for their general passiveness and reliance on men for their happiness. Essentially, these women are created in the image of the ultimate male fantasy, where an increased value is placed on the virginal look, followed by a perfect tiny body and an ability to follow basic instructions. The slim bodies of these princesses are disproportionate, and include long necks, demure shoulders, medium- to large-sized perky breasts, with tiny waists, wrists, ankles and feet. Thus, it can be argued that the main theme for those within the princess bubble is their physical body and beauty, and the importance of being attractive to achieve success. The importance of the physical form is so valued that the first blessing given by the fairies to Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is the gift of physical beauty (Rutherford). Furthermore, Tanner et al. argue that the "images of love at first sight in the films encourage the belief that physical appearance is the most important thing", and these fairy tales often reflect a pattern that the prince cannot help but to instantly fall in love with these women because they are so striking. In some instances, like the stories of Cinderella and Snow White, these princesses have not uttered a single word to their prince before these men fall unconditionally and hopelessly in love. Cinderella need only to turn up at the ball as the best dressed (Parks), while Snow White must merely “wait prettily, because someday her prince will come" (Inge) to reestablish her as royalty. Disney emphasises that these princesses win their man solely on the basis that they are the most beautiful girls in the land. In Sleeping Beauty, the prince overhears Aurora’s singing and that sets his heart aflame to the point of refusing to wed the woman chosen for him at birth by the king. Fortunately, she is one and the same person, so the patriarchy survives, but this idea of beauty, and of 'love at first sight', continues to be a central part of Disney movies today, and shows that “Disney Films are vehicles of powerful gender ideologies” (Hairianto). These princesses within the bubble of perfection have priority placed on their physical and sexual beauty (Dietz), formulating a kind of ‘beauty contest motif’. Examples include Gaston, who does not love Belle in Beauty and the Beast, but simply wants her as his trophy wife because he deems her to be the most beautiful girl in the town. Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, looks as if she "was modeled after a slightly anorexic Barbie doll with thin waist and prominent bust. This representation portrays a dangerous model for young women" (Zarranz). The sexualisation of the characters continues as Jasmine has “a delicate nose and small mouth" (Lacroix), with a dress that can be considered as highly sexualised and unsuitable for a girl of sixteen (Lacroix). In Tangled, Rapunzel is held hostage in the tower by Mother Gothel because she is ‘as fragile as a flower’ and needs to be ‘kept safe’ from the harms in the world. But it is her beauty that scares the witch the most, because losing Rapunzel would leave the old woman without her magical anti-aging hair. She uses scare tactics to ensure that Rapunzel remains unseen to the world. These examples are all variations of the beauty theme, as the princesses all fall within narrow and predictable tropes of love at first sight where the woman is rescued and initiated into womanhood by being chosen by a man. Disney’s Progressive Representation? At times Disney’s portrayal of princesses appears illusively progressive, by introducing new and different variations of princesses into the fold – such as Merida in the 2012 film Brave. Unfortunately, this is merely an illusion as the ‘body-perfect’ image remains an all-important ideal to snare a prince. Merida, the young and spirited teenage princess, begins her tale determined not to conform to the desired standards set for a woman of her standing; however, when the time comes for her to be married, there is no negotiating with her mother, the queen, on dress compliance. Merida is clothed against her will to re-identify her in the manner which her parents deem appropriate. Her ability to express her identity and individuality removed, now replaced by a masked version, and thus with the true Merida lost in this transformation, her parents consider Merida to be of renewed merit and benefit to the family. This shows that Disney remains unchanged in its depiction of who may ‘fit’ within the princess bubble, because the rubric is unchanged on how to win the heart of the man. In fact, this film is possibly more troublesome than the rest because it clearly depicts her parents to deem her to be of more value only after her mother has altered her physical appearance. It is only after the total collapse of the royal family that King Fergus has a change of patriarchal heart, and in fact Disney does not portray this rumpled, ripped-sleeved version of the princess in its merchandising campaign. While the fantasy of fairy tales provides enthralling adventures that always end in happiness for the pretty princesses that encounter them, consideration must be given to all those women who have not met the standard and are left in their wake. If women do not conform to the standards of representation, they are presented as outcasts, and happiness eludes them. Cinderella, for example, has two ugly stepsisters, who, no matter how hard they might try, are unable to match her in attractiveness, kindness, or grace. Disney has embraced and not shunned Perrault’s original retelling of the tale, by ensuring that these stepsisters are ugly. They have not been blessed with any attributes whatsoever, and cannot sing, dance, or play music; nor can they sew, cook, clean, or behave respectably. These girls will never find a suitor, let alone a prince, no matter how eager they are to do so. On the physical comparison, Anastasia and Drizella have bodies that are far more rounded and voluptuous, with feet, for example, that are more than double the size of Cinderella’s magical slipper. These women clearly miss the parameters of our princess bubble, emphasising that Disney is continuing to promote dangerous narratives that could potentially harm young audience conceptions of femininity at an important period in their development. Therefore, despite the ‘progressive’ strides made by Disney in response to the vast criticism of their earlier films, the agency afforded to their new generation of princesses does not alter the fact that success comes to those who are beautiful. These beautiful people continue to win every time. Furthermore, Hairianto has found that it is not uncommon for the media to directly or indirectly promote “mental models of how a woman should look, speak and interact with others”, and that Disney uses its pervasive princess influence “to shape perceptions of female identity and desirability. Females are made to measure themselves against the set of values that are meted out by the films” (Hairianto). In the 2017 film Beauty and the Beast, those outside of the princess bubble are seen in the characters of the three maidens from the village who are always trying to look their very best in the hope of attracting Gaston (Rutherford). Gaston is not only disinterested but shows borderline contempt at their glances by permitting his horse to spray mud and dirt all over their fine clothing. They do not meet the beauty standard set, and instead of questioning his cruelty, the audience is left laughing at the horse’s antics. Interestingly, the earlier version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast portrays these maidens as blonde, slim, and sexy, closely fitting the model of beauty displayed in our princess bubble; however, none match the beauty of Belle, and are therefore deemed inferior. In this manner, Disney is being irresponsible, placing little interest in the psychological ‘safety’ or affect the messages have upon young girls who will never meet these expectations (Ehrenreich; Best and Lowney; Orenstein). Furthermore, bodies are shaped and created by culture. They are central to self-identity, becoming a projection of how we see ourselves. Grosz (xii) argues that our notions of our bodies begin in physicality but are forever shaped by our interactions with social realities and cultural norms. The media are constantly filled with images that “glorify and highlight some kinds of bodies (for example, the young, able-bodied and beautiful) while ignoring or condemning others” (Jones 193), and these influences on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, and religion within popular culture therefore play a huge part in identity creation. In Disney films, the princess bubble constantly sings the same song, and “children view these stereotypical roles as the right and only way to behave” (Ewert). In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana’s friend Charlotte is so desperate to ‘catch’ a prince that "she humorously over-applies her makeup and adjusts her ball gown to emphasize her cleavage" (Breaux), but the point is not lost. Additionally, “making sure that girls become worthy of love seems central to Disney’s fairy tale films” (Rutherford 76), and because their fairy tales are so pervasive and popular, young viewers receive a consistent message that being beautiful and having a tiny doll-like body type is paramount. “This can be destructive for developing girls’ views and images of their own bodies, which are not proportioned the way that they see on screen” (Cordwell 21). “The strongly gendered messages present in the resolutions of the movies help to reinforce the desirability of traditional gender conformity” (England et al. 565). Conclusion The princess bubble is a phenomenon that has been seen in Disney’s representation of female characters for decades. Within this bubble there is a narrow range of representation permitted, and attempts to make the characters more progressive have instead resulted in narrow and restrictive constraints, reinforcing dangerous female stereotypes. Kilmer suggests that ultimately these representations fail to break away from “hegemonic assumptions about gender norms, class boundaries, and Caucasian privileging”. Ultimately this presents audiences with strong and persuasive messages about gender performance. Audiences conform their bodies to societal ‘rules’: “as to how we ‘wear’ and ‘use’ our bodies” (Richardson and Locks x), including for example how we should dress, what we should weigh, and how to become popular. In our global hypermediated society, viewers are constantly exposed to princesses and other appropriate bodies. These become internalised ideals and aid in positive and negative thoughts and self-identity, which in turn creates additional pressure on the female body in particular. The seemingly innocent stories with happy outcomes are therefore unrealistic and ultimately excluding of those who cannot or will not ‘fit into the princess bubble’. The princess bubble, we argue, is therefore predictable and restrictive, promoting female passiveness and a reliance of physical traits over intelligence. The dominance of beauty over all else remains the road to female success in the Disney fairy tale film. References Beauty and the Beast. Dirs. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Walt Disney Productions, 1991. Film. Beauty and the Beast. Dir. Bill Condon. Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Film. Best, Joel, and Kathleen S. Lowney. “The Disadvantage of a Good Reputation: Disney as a Target for Social Problems Claims.” The Sociological Quarterly 50 (2009): 431–449. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01147.x. Brave. Dirs. Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman. Walt Disney Pictures, 2012. Film. Breaux, Richard, M. “After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes in on Its Racist Past.” Journal of African American Studies 14 (2010): 398-416. Cinderella. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. Walt Disney Productions, 1950. Film. Collins, Rebecca L. “Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Go?” Sex Roles 64 (2011): 290–298. doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9929-5. Cordwell, Caila Leigh. The Shattered Slipper Project: The Impact of the Disney Princess Franchise on Girls Ages 6-12. Honours thesis, Southeastern University, 2016. Coyne, Sarah M., Jennifer Ruh Linder, Eric E. Rasmussen, David A. Nelson, and Victoria Birkbeck. “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem, and Prosocial Behavior in Children.” Child Development 87.6 (2016): 1–17. Dietz, Tracey, L. “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior.” Sex Roles 38 (1998): 425–442. doi:10.1023/a:1018709905920. England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. "Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses." Sex Roles 64 (2011): 555-567. Ewert, Jolene. “A Tale as Old as Time – an Analysis of Negative Stereotypes in Disney Princess Movies.” Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences 13 (2014). Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. London, Routledge, 1994. Inge, M. Thomas. “Art, Adaptation, and Ideology: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32.3 (2004): 132-142. Jones, Meredith. “The Body in Popular Culture.” Being Cultural. Ed. Bruce M.Z. Cohen. Auckland University, 2012. 193-210. Kilmer, Alyson. Moving Forward? Problematic Ideology in Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films. Central Washington University, 2015. Lacroix, Celeste. “Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Popular Communications 2.4 (2004): 213-229. Little Mermaid, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Film. Maggi, Armando. Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Parks, Kari. Mirror, Mirror: A Look at Self-Esteem & Disney Princesses. Honours thesis. Ball State University, 2012. Pinocchio. Dirs. Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Norm Ferguson, Bill Roberts, and T. Lee. Walt Disney Productions, 1940. Film. Princess and the Frog, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 2009. Film. Richardson, Niall, and Adam Locks. Body Studies: The Basics. Routledge, 2014. Rutherford, Amanda M. Happily Ever After? A Critical Examination of the Gothic in Disney Fairy Tale Films. Auckland University of Technology, 2020. Sleeping Beauty. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Les Clark. Walt Disney Productions, 1959. Film. Smith, Stacey L., Katherine M. Pieper, Amy Granados, and Mark Choueite. “Assessing Gender-Related Portrayals in Topgrossing G-Rated Films.” Sex Roles 62 (2010): 774–786. Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Dirs. David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, William Cottrell, Perce Pearce, and Larry Morey. Walt Disney Productions, 1937. Film. Tangled. Dirs. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Walt Disney Pictures, 2010. Film. Tanner, Litsa RenÉe, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund. “Images of Couples and Families in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31 (2003): 355-373. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds. London: Oxford UP, 2002. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Polity Press, 2001. Wohlwend, Karen E. “Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts through Disney Princess Play.” Reading Research Quarterly 44.1 (2009): 57-83. Zarranaz, L. Garcia. “Diswomen Strike Back? The Evolution of Disney's Femmes in the 1990s.” Atenea 27.2 (2007) 55-65.

I A sense of in-between shapes contemporary theoretical perspectives on identity through concepts such as fluidity, hybridity and diaspora. These concepts have traction when theorising global social and cultural orders characterised by ‘a delocalized transnation’. In this formation, Appadurai argues, ‘the formula of hyphenation (as in Italian-Americans, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans) is reaching the point of saturation, and the right-hand side of the hyphen can barely contain the unruliness of the left-hand side’ (803). Yet in the relatively monocultural space of Anglo-Celtic rural Australia, delocalised and hyphenated transnational identities tend to make their presence felt most strongly on television. Rather than fluidity, rigidity appears to be a more appropriate metaphor for reading the divisions in rural settler-Australian identity that function as ‘uneven, local attempts to make sense of the world’ (Gilroy 98). In Lismore on the north coast of NSW, for example, the relatively fixed notion of being “a local” maintains its power. Since returning to my home-town of Lismore in 1999 I have become particularly fascinated by the constant use of the word “local” in everyday conversation and in the local newspapers. When I share my fascination with students and colleagues, I am struck by the emotive engagement, both positive and negative, that the idea of being “a local” stimulates. That these students and colleagues have local knowledge of what it means to be “a local” is no doubt a factor in this emotion and engagement: being “a local” marks a divide in belonging and in the local social order. While there is ample literature regarding “the local” within the context of globalisation, “the local” in place-based and regional research, “local knowledges” in anthropology, or “the local” as metaphor for issues of subjectivity and self in feminism and postcolonial theory, literature on being “a local” is curiously sparse. A strong thread of scholarship comes from Hawai’i (for an example see Ohnuma). Conversely, in the Australian context I am aware of only one publication dealing specifically with the idea of being a local. In Ronnie’s Story, Richard Woolley analyses the performance of being a local at a pub in the Sydney suburb of Redfern. By telling first-person anecdotes about a long-term Redfern local, Ronnie, more recent arrivals position themselves in a local order of being local. Woolley’s analysis indicates the power and significance that the idea of being a local has in Australian society, even in places where populations are relatively fluid. Yet while performance may be one strategy for creating a local order, the key to a successful performance in Woolley’s analysis is a relation with an “authentic” local who has qualities not of fluidity, but of routine and rootedness. It is this latter sense of being local that has salience in Lismore. It functions as a benchmark for authenticity and acceptance. This sense of being “a local” deserves scrutiny because it carries the full weight of traditional settler belonging. In addition, being “a local” deserves careful unpacking because it is a category that excludes. Concealed within the idea is a racial and colonial discourse. An analysis of being local in Lismore reveals that not everyone can be a local and the conditions of acceptance are obscured. One criterion is, however, clear and discussable: if there is a question of one’s status as a local, conversation typically and quickly moves to duration of personal and ancestral residence. II “When I first came to Lismore twenty-five years ago, people told me it takes 25 years to become a local […]. My time’s up. I think I can safely say I’ve made it.” (Nora Vidler-Blanksby qtd. in Satherley) “All [the people I just mentioned were] born and bred in the area, plus John Chant, who has been here for 40 years, which makes him a local.” (Baxter) “[…W]hat I’ve come to understand is that you are never a local unless you are born here. […] I mean even after twenty-odd years people say [to me], well, you’re not a local.” (Irwin) Becoming local takes time: routine every day time spent on the ground. There is a notion here of connection between identity and a “patch of dirt”, of authenticity through autochthony, of a seed planted, of being a child of the soil, of coming from a place as distinct from a womb. Being local weaves identity and place together in this most intimate fashion. A local’s sense of identity emerges through time from a developing everyday personal relationship to place through a meld of history, community and geography (Miller 217). To come from outside Lismore, and move beyond being “just a blow-in” — an unannounced stranger blown off-course — the honorific must be earned through an infusion of soil into one’s blood. The period required for this metamorphosis is clearly open to question: 25 years, 40 years, forever. In a sense, locals were never not there. History begins with their arrival. III The stability of this reading of the local order rests on the concealment of an anxiety: an anxiety that settler autochthony is a fiction. Diffusion of settlers and dispersal of Aborigines was the reality of locals’ “settling”. Aborigines upset the signifying chain of local settler belonging at its source because a straightforward appeal to duration of residence is quickly undermined by 40,000 years of Indigenous tenure. This challenge to autochthony initiates a pre-emptive strategy of avoidance and concealment. The language of the settler “local”, articulated through history, community and geography of necessity excludes Aborigines. In de Certeau’s words “locals” define themselves within a ‘proper place’ — ‘a place appropriated as one’s own’ — ‘in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other’ (1984: 36). An analysis of the use of the word “local” reveals how the idea of being “a local” stabilises local settler belonging through concealment. Local, in this usage, is an adjective doing the work of a noun. By becoming a substitute for the noun, the actual noun which “local” modifies is understood, elided, concealed. ‘So you’re “a local”, huh? A local what?’ we might ask. Turning to local newspapers reveals what the concealed noun is not. Within everyday settler discourse Aborigines cannot be noun-locals. To do so would pollute the proper place of “the local” with the Other. Instead, Aborigines are adjective-locals. In The Northern Star, Lismore’s daily paper, Digby Moran is described as a ‘local […] indigenous artist’ (Redmond). Bill Walker, the co-ordinator of the Bundjalung Nation Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Committee, is a ‘respected local identity’ (“Co-ordinator named”). These instances are illustrative of the repeated use of the term “local” as a regular adjective in reference to Aborigines. Local is a modifier of the nouns “artist” and “identity”, indeed a modifier that refers to an imagined boundary rather than to the land itself. Now and then there is a subversion of this order and someone will refer to an Aborigine as a ‘fair dinkum local’ (Opit). Nevertheless, a qualifier is required. Supporting evidence is needed for the Aboriginal claim to status as “a local” – a fair-dinkum local as opposed to a no-need-to-explain local. If there was a class of nouns to which “local” belonged, we would be justified in labelling them “dispossessives”. IV Being a local is a valued aspect of Australian culture and identity — an embodiment of care for community and place for the long term. In the contemporary moment, characterised in the media by accelerating cultural change and personal and national threat, the local represents tradition through apparently unchanging repetition that tourists, sea-changers and tree-changers seek as a refuge and solace. The locals might be said to offer a community of resistance and trust. The local stands within a clearing in a cluttered and threatening world. As I have attempted to argue, however, the local that is revealed in the light of the clearing contains concealment. As an adjective masquerading as a noun, “local” silences talk of the clearing of Aborigines and in the Aborigines’ place it silently installs the settler as original and autochthonous. As Heidegger writes, the ‘clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment. […C]oncealment […] occurs within what is lighted. One being places itself in front of another being, the one helps to hide the other, the former obscures the latter, a few obstruct many, one denies all. […A] being […] presents itself as other than it is.’ (Heidegger 54) While there is much to value in being local, as an everyday contemporary practice of colonialism and exclusion it deserves careful attention and transformation. The transformation is clearly more than a task of defining and reinstating the noun that follows the adjective “local,” and instead requires an ontological earthquake of sorts for settler locals. How could the local order in Australia be otherwise than colonial? How might settler Australians be able to imagine the clearing they inhabit in a way that does not clear the land of Aborigines? Within these questions lies a possible ethics of location for settler Australians. References Appadurai, Arjun. “The Heart of Whiteness.” Callaloo 16 (1993): 796-807. Baxter, Reg. “Six Pack Not So Bad”. The Northern Star 17 Mar. 2004: 11. “Co-ordinator Named”. The Northern Star 18 Feb. 2004: 3. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gilroy, Paul. Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Irwin, Ros. Personal communication with author [transcript from tape]. 26 Aug. 2003. Miller, Linn. “Belonging to Country — A Philosophical Anthropology.” Voicing Dissent, New Talents 21C: Next Generation Australian Studies 76 (2003): 215-23, 257-8. Ohnuma, Keiko. “Local Haole – A Contradiction in Terms? The Dilemma of Being White, Born and Raised in Hawai’i.” Cultural Values 6 (2002): 273-85. Opit, G. “Stand Up for the Fair Dinkum Local.” Byron Shire Echo 18 Nov. 2003: 9. Redmond, Renee. “The Perfect Backdrop for Local Artist.” The Northern Star 11 Jul. 2003: 5. Satherley, Zoe “Look Who Wants to Be Mayor.” The Northern Star 30 Jan. 2004: 3. Woolley, Richard. “Ronnie’s Story: Narrative and Belonging to Place.” TASA 2003 Conference. The Australian Sociological Association. University of New England, Armidale. 4-6 December 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Garbutt, Rob. "Local Order." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/08-garbutt.php>. APA Style Garbutt, R. (Jan. 2005) "Local Order," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/08-garbutt.php>.

Wandering the aisles of my local Woolworths in April this year, I noticed a large number of chocolate bilbies replacing chocolate rabbits. In these harsh economic times it seems that even the Easter bunny is in danger of losing his Easter job. While the changing shape of Easter chocolate may seem to be a harmless affair, the expulsion of the rabbit from Easter celebrations has a darker side. In this paper I look at the campaign to replace the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby, and the implications this mediated conservation move has for living rabbits in the Australian ecosystem. Essential to this discussion is the premise that studies of ecology must take into account the impact of media and culture on environmental issues. Of particular interest is the role of narrative, and the way the stories we tell about rabbits determine how they are treated in real life. While I recognise that the Australian bilby’s struggle for survival is a tale which should be told, I also argue that the vilification of the European-Australian rabbit is part of the native/invasive dualism which has ceased to be helpful, and has instead become a motivator of unproductive violence. In place of this simplified dichotomous narrative, I propose an ethic of "ecological remembrance" to combat the totalising eradication of the European rabbit from the Australian environment and culture. The Bilby vs the Bunny: A Case Study in "Media Selection" Easter Bunny says, ‘Bilby, I want you to have my job.You know about sharing and taking care.I think Australia should have an Easter Bilby.We rabbits have become too greedy and careless.Rabbits must learn from bilbies and other bush creatures’. The lines above are taken from Ali Garnett and Kaye Kessing’s children’s story, Easter Bilby, co-published by the Australian Anti-Rabbit Research Foundation as part of the campaign to replace the Easter bunny with the eco-politically correct Easter bilby. The first chocolate bilbies were made in 1982, but the concept really took off when major chocolate retailer Darrell Lea became involved in 2002. Since this time Haigh’s chocolate, Cadbury, and Pink Lady have also released delicious cocoa natives for consumption, and both Darrell Lea and Haigh’s use their profits to support bilby assistance programs, creating the “pleasant Easter sensation” that “eating a chocolate bilby is helping save the real thing” (Phillips). The Easter bilby campaign is a highly mediated approach to conservation which demonstrates the new biological principle Phil Bagust has recognised as “media selection.” Bagust observes that in our “hybridised global society” it is impossible to separate “the world of genetic selection from the world of human symbolic and material diversity as if they exist in different universes” (8). The Australian rabbit thrives in “natural selection,” having adapted to the Australian environment so successfully it threatens native species and the economic productivity of farmers. But the rabbit loses out in “cultural selection” where it is vilified in the media for its role in environmental degradation. The campaign to conserve the bilby depends, in a large part, on the rabbit’s failures in “media selection”. On Good Friday 2012 Sky News Australia quoted Mike Drinkwater of Wild Life Sydney’s support of the Easter bilby campaign: Look, the reason that we want to highlight the bilby as an iconic Easter animal is, number one, rabbits are a pest in Australia. Secondly, the bilby has these lovely endearing rabbit-like qualities. And thirdly, the bilby is a beautiful, iconic, native animal that is struggling. It is endangered so it’s important that we do all we can to support that. Drinkwater’s appeal to the bilby’s “endearing rabbit-like qualities” demonstrates that it is not the Australian rabbit’s individual embodiment which detracts from its charisma in Australian society. In this paper I will argue that the stories we tell about the European-Australian rabbit’s alienation from Indigenous country diminish the species cultural appeal. These stories are told with passionate conviction to save and protect native flora and fauna, but, too often, this promotion of the native relies on the devaluation of non-native life, to the point where individual rabbits are no longer morally considerable. Such a hierarchical approach to conservation is not only ethically problematic, but can also be ineffective because the native/invasive approach to ecology is overly simplistic. A History of Rabbit Stories In the Easter Bilby children’s book the illustrated rabbit offers to make itself disappear from the “Easter job.” The reason for this act of self-destruction is a despairing recognition of its “greedy and careless” nature, and at the same time, its selfless offer to be replaced by the ecologically conscious Bilby. In this sacrificial gesture is the implicit offering of all rabbit life for the salvation of native ecosystems and animal life. This plot line slots into a much larger series of stories we have been telling about the Australian environment. Libby Robin has observed that settler Australians have always had a love-hate relationship with the native flora and fauna of the continent (6), either devaluing native plants, animals, and ecosystems, or launching into an “overcompensating patriotic strut about the Australian biota” (Robin 9). The colonising dynamic of early Australian society was built on the devaluation of animals such as the bilby. This was reflected in the introduction of feral animals by “acclimatisation societies” and the privileging of “pets” such as cats and dogs over native animals (Plumwood). Alfred Crosby has made the persuasive argument that the invasion of Australia, and other “neo-European” countries, was, necessarily, more-than-human. In his work, Ecological Imperialism, Crosby charts the historical partnership between human European colonisers in Indigenous lands and the “grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche” (194) of introduced life that they brought with them. In response to this “guilt by association” Australians have reversed the values in the dichotomous colonial dynamic to devalue the introduced and so “empower” the colonised native. In this new “anti-colonial” story, rabbits signify a wound of colonisation which has spread across and infected indigenous country. J. M. Arthur’s (130) analysis of language in relation to colonisation highlights some of the important lexical characteristics in the rabbit stories we now tell. He observes that the rabbits’ impact on the county is described using a vocabulary of contamination: “It is a ‘menace’, a ‘problem’, an ‘infestation’, a ‘nuisance’, a ‘plague’” (170). This narrative of disease encourages a redemptive violence against living rabbits to “cure” the rabbit problem in order to atone for human mistakes in a colonial past. Redemptive Violence in Action Rabbits in Australia have been subject to a wide range of eradication measures over the past century including shooting, the destruction of burrows, poisoning, ferreting, trapping, and the well-known rabbit proof fence in Western Australia. Particularly noteworthy in this slaughter has been the introduction of biological control measures with the release of the savage and painful disease Myxomatosis in late December 1950, followed by the release of the Calicivirus (Rabbit Haemorrhage Disease, or RHD) in 1996. As recently as March 2012 the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries announced a 1.5 million dollar program called “RHD Boost” which is attempting to develop a more effective biological control agent for rabbits who have become immune to the Calicivirus. In this perverse narrative, disease becomes a cure for the rabbit’s contamination of Australian environments. Calicivirus is highly infectious, spreads rapidly, and kills rabbits en masse. Following the release of Calicivirus in 1995 it killed 10 million rabbits in eight weeks (Ponsonby Veterinary Centre). While Calicivirus appears to be more humane than the earlier biological control, Myxomatosis, there are indications that it causes rabbits pain and stress. Victims are described as becoming very quiet, refusing to eat, straining for breath, losing coordination, becoming feverish, and excreting bloody nasal discharge (Heishman, 2011). Post-mortem dissection generally reveals a “pale and mottled liver, many small streaks or blotches on the lungs and an enlarged spleen... small thrombi or blood clots” (Coman 173). Public criticism of the cruel methods involved in killing rabbits is often assuaged with appeals to the greater good of the ecosystem. The Anti-Rabbit research foundation state on their Website, Rabbit-Free Australia, that: though killing rabbits may sound inhumane, wild rabbits are affecting the survival of native Australian plants and animals. It is our responsibility to control them. We brought the European rabbit here in the first place — they are an invasive pest. This assumption of personal and communal responsibility for the rabbit “problem” has a fundamental blind-spot. Arthur (130) observes that the progress of rabbits across the continent is often described as though they form a coordinated army: The rabbit extends its ‘dominion’, ‘dispossesses’ the indigenous bilby, causes sheep runs to be ‘abandoned’ and country ‘forfeited’, leaving the land in ‘ecological tatters’. While this language of battle pervades rabbit stories, humans rarely refer to themselves as invaders into Aboriginal lands. Arthur notes that, by taking responsibility for the rabbit’s introduction and eradication, the coloniser assumes an indigenous status as they defend the country against the exotic invader (134). The apprehension of moral responsibility can, in this sense, be understood as the assumption of settler indigeneity. This does not negate the fact that assuming human responsibility for the native environment can be an act of genuine care. In a country scarred by a history of ecocide, movements like the Easter Bilby campaign seek to rectify the negligent mistakes of the past. The problem is that reactive responses to the colonial devaluation of native life can be unproductive because they preserve the basic structure of the native/invasive dichotomy by simplistically reversing its values, and fail to respond to more complex ecological contexts and requirements (Plumwood). This is also socially problematic because the native/invasive divide of nonhuman life overlays more complex human politics of colonisation in Australia. The Native/Invasive Dualism The bilby is currently listed as an “endangered” species in Queensland and as “vulnerable” nationally. Bilbies once inhabited 70% of the Australian landscape, but now inhabit less than 15% of the country (Save the Bilby Fund). This dramatic reduction in bilby numbers has multiple causes, but the European rabbit has played a significant role in threatening the bilby species by competing for burrows and food. Other threats come from the predation of introduced species, such as feral cats and foxes, and the impact of farmed introduced species, such as sheep and cattle, which also destroy bilby habitats. Because the rabbit directly competes with the bilby for food and shelter in the Australian environment, the bilby can be classed as the underdog native, appealing to that larger Australian story about “the fair go”. It seems that the Easter bilby campaign is intended to level out the threat posed by the highly successful and adaptive rabbit through promoting the bilby in the “cultural selection” stakes. This involves encouraging bilby-love, while actively discouraging love and care for the introduced rabbits which threaten the bilby’s survival. On the Rabbit Free Australia Website, the campaign rationale to replace the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby claims that: Very young children are indoctrinated with the concept that bunnies are nice soft fluffy creatures whereas in reality they are Australia’s greatest environmental feral pest and cause enormous damage to the arid zone. In this statement the lived corporeal presence of individual rabbits is denied as the “soft, fluffy” body disappears behind the environmentally problematic species’ behaviour. The assertion that children are “indoctrinated” to find rabbits love-able, and that this conflicts with the “reality” of the rabbit as environmentally destructive, denies the complexity of the living animal and the multiple possible responses to it. That children find rabbits “fluffy” is not the result of pro-rabbit propaganda, but because rabbits are fluffy! That Rabbit Free Australia could construe this to be some kind of elaborate falsehood demonstrates the disappearance of the individual rabbit in the native/invasive tale of colonisation. Rabbit-Free Australia seeks to eradicate the animal not only from Australian ecosystems, but from the hearts and minds of children who are told to replace the rabbit with the more fitting native bilby. There is no acceptance here of the rabbit as a complex animal that evokes ambivalent responses, being both worthy of moral consideration, care and love, and also an introduced and environmentally destructive species. The native/invasive dualism is a subject of sustained critique in environmental philosophy because it depends on a disjunctive temporal division drawn at the point of European settlement—1788. Environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren points out that the divide between animals who belong and animals who should be eradicated is “fundamentally premised on the reification of a specific historical moment that ignores the changing and dynamic nature of ecologies” (11). Mark Davis et al. explain that the practical value of the native/invasive dichotomy in conservation programs is seriously diminished and in some cases is becoming counterproductive (153). They note that “classifying biota according to their adherence to cultural standards of belonging, citizenship, fair play and morality does not advance our understanding of ecology” (153). Instead, they promote a more inclusive approach to conservation which accepts non-native species as part of Australia’s “new nature” (Low). Recent research into wildlife conservation indicates a striking lack of evidence for the case that pest control protects native diversity (see Bergstromn et al., Davis et al., Ewel & Putz, Reddiex & Forsyth). The problematic justification of “killing for conservation” becomes untenable when conservation outcomes are fundamentally uncertain. The mass slaughter which rabbits have been subjected to in Australia has been enacted with the goal of fostering life. This pursuit of creation through destruction, of re-birth through violent death, enacts a disturbing twist where death comes to signal the presence of life. This means, perversely, that a rabbit’s dead body becomes a valuable sign of environmental health. Conservation researchers Ben Reddiex and David M. Forsyth observe that this leads to a situation where environmental managers are “more interested in estimating how many pests they killed rather than the status of biodiversity they claimed to be able to protect” (715). What Other Stories Can We Tell about the Rabbit? With an ecological narrative that is failing, producing damage and death instead of fostering love and life, we are left with the question—what other stories can we tell about the place of the European rabbit in the Australian environment? How can the meaning ecologies of media and culture work in harmony with an ecological consciousness that promotes compassion for nonhuman life? Ignoring the native/invasive distinction entirely is deeply problematic because it registers the ecological history of Australia as continuity, and fails to acknowledge the colonising impact of European settlement on the environment. At the same time, continually reinforcing that divide through pro-invasive or pro-native stories drastically simplifies complex and interconnected ecological systems. Instead of the unproductive native/invasive dualism, ecologists and philosophers alike are suggesting “reconciliatory” approaches to the inhabitants of our shared environments which emphasise ecology as relational rather than classificatory. Evolutionary ecologist Scott P. Carroll uses the term “conciliation biology” as an alternative to invasion biology which focuses on the eradication of invasive species. “Conciliation biology recognises that many non-native species are permanent, that outcomes of native-nonnative interactions will vary depending on the scale of assessment and the values assigned to the biotic system, and that many non-native species will perform positive functions in one or more contexts” (186). This hospitable approach aligns with what Michael Rosensweig has termed “reconciliation ecology”—the modification and diversification of anthropogenic habitats to harbour a wider variety of species (201). Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Mark Bekoff encourages a “compassionate conservation” which avoids the “numbers game” of species thinking where certain taxonomies are valued above others and promotes approaches which “respect all life; treat individuals with respect and dignity; and tread lightly when stepping into the lives of animals”(24). In a similar vein environmental philosopher Deborah Bird Rose offers the term “Eco-reconciliation”, to describe a mode of “living generously with others, singing up relationships so that we all flourish” (Wild Dog 59). It may be that the rabbit cannot live in harmony with the bilby, and in this situation I am unsure of what a conciliation approach to ecology might look like in terms of managing both of these competing species. But I am sure what it should not look like if we are to promote approaches to ecology and conservation which avoid the simplistic dualism of native/invasive. The devaluation of rabbit life to the point of moral inconsiderability is fundamentally unethical. By classifying certain lives as “inappropriate,” and therefore expendable, the process of rabbit slaughter is simply too easy. The idea that the rabbit should disappear is disturbing in its abstract approach to these living, sentient creatures who share with us both place and history. A dynamic understanding of ecology dissipates the notion of a whole or static “nature.” This means that there can be no simple or comprehensive directives for how humans should interact with their environments. One of the most insidious aspects of the native/invasive divide is the way it makes violent death appear inevitable, as though rabbits must be culled. This obscures the many complex and contingent choices which determine the fate of nonhuman life. Understanding the dynamism of ecology requires an acceptance that nature does not provide simple prescriptive responses to problems, and instead “people are forced to choose the kind of environment they want” (189) and then take actions to engender it. This involves difficult decisions, one of which is culling to maintain rabbit numbers and facilitate environmental resilience. Living within a world of “discordant harmonies”, as Daniel Botkin evocatively describes it, environmental decisions are necessarily complex. The entanglement of ecological systems demands that we reject simplistic dualisms which offer illusory absolution from the consequences of the difficult choices humans make about life, ecologies, and how to manage them. Ecological Remembrance The vision of a rabbit-free Australia is unrealistic. As organisation like the Anti-Rabbit Research Foundation pursue this future ideal, they eradicate rabbits from the present, and seek to remove them from the past by replacing them culturally with the more suitable bilby. Culled rabbits lie rotting en masse in fields, food for no one, and even their cultural impact in human society is sought to be annihilated and replaced with more appropriate native creatures. The rabbits’ deaths do not turn back to life in transformative and regenerative processes that are ecological and cultural, but rather that death becomes “an event with no future” (Rose, Wild Dog 25). This is true oblivion, as the rabbit is entirely removed from the world. In this paper I have made a case for the importance of stories in ecology. I have argued that the kinds of stories we tell about rabbits determines how we treat them, and so have positioned stories as an essential part of an ecological system which takes “cultural selection” seriously. In keeping with this emphasis on story I offer to the conciliation push in ecological thinking the term “ecological remembrance” to capture an ethic of sharing time while sharing space. This spatio-temporal hospitality is focused on maintaining heterogeneous memories and histories of all beings who have impacted on the environment. In Deborah Bird Rose’s terms this is a “recuperative work” which commits to direct dialogical engagement with the past that is embedded in the present (Wild Country 23). In this sense it is a form of recuperation that promotes temporal and ecological continuity. Eco-remembrance aligns with dynamic understandings of ecology because it is counter-linear. Instead of approaching the past as a static idyll, preserved and archived, ecological remembrance celebrates the past as an ongoing, affective presence which is lived and performed. Ecological remembrance, applied to the European rabbit in Australia, would involve rejecting attempts to extricate the rabbit from Australian environments and cultures. It would seek acceptance of the rabbit as part of Australia’s “new nature” (Low), and aim for recognition of the rabbit’s impact on human society as part of dynamic multi-species ecologies. In this sense ecological remembrance of the rabbit directly opposes the goal of the Foundation for Rabbit Free Australia to eradicate the European rabbit from Australian environment and culture. On the Rabbit Free Australia website, the section on biological controls states that “the point is not how many rabbits are killed, but how many are left behind”. The implication is that the millions upon millions of rabbit lives extinguished have vanished from the earth, and need not be remembered or considered. However, as Deborah Rose argues, “all deaths matter” (Wild Dog 21) and “no death is a mere death” (Wild Dog 22). Every single rabbit is an individual being with its own unique life. To deny this is tantamount to claiming that each rabbit that dies from shooting or poisoning is the same rabbit dying again and again. Rose has written that “death makes claims upon all of us” (Wild Dog 19). These are claims of ethics and compassion, a claim that “we look into the eyes of the dying and not flinch, that we reach out to hold and to help” (Wild Dog 20). This claim is a duty of remembrance, a duty to “bear witness” (Wiesel 160) to life and death. The Nobel Peace Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, argued that memory is a reconciliatory force that creates bonds as mass annihilation seeks to destroy them. Memory ensures that no life becomes truly life-less as it wrests the victims of mass slaughter from “oblivion” and allows the dead to “vanquish death” (21). In a continent inhabited by dead rabbits—a community of the dead—remembering these lost individuals and their lost lives is an important task for making sure that no death is a mere death. An ethic of ecological remembrance follows this recuperative aim. References Arthur, Jay M. The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth-Century Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Bagust, Phil. “Cuddly Koalas, Beautiful Brumbies, Exotic Olives: Fighting for Media Selection in the Attention Economy.” “Imaging Natures”: University of Tasmania Conference Proceedings (2004). 25 April 2012 ‹www.utas.edu.au/arts/imaging/bagust.pdf› Bekoff, Marc. “First Do No Harm.” New Scientist (28 August 2010): 24 – 25. Bergstrom, Dana M., Arko Lucieer, Kate Kiefer, Jane Wasley, Lee Belbin, Tore K. Pederson, and Steven L. Chown. “Indirect Effects of Invasive Species Removal Devastate World Heritage Island.” Journal of Applied Ecology 46 (2009): 73– 81. Botkin, Daniel. B. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Carroll, Scott. P. “Conciliation Biology: The Eco-Evolutionary Management of Permanently Invaded Biotic Systems.” Evolutionary Applications 4.2 (2011): 184 – 99. Coman, Brian. Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1999. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 – 1900. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Davis, Mark., Matthew Chew, Richard Hobbs, Ariel Lugo, John Ewel, Geerat Vermeij, James Brown, Michael Rosenzweig, Mark Gardener, Scott Carroll, Ken Thompson, Steward Pickett, Juliet Stromberg, Peter Del Tredici, Katharine Suding, Joan Ehrenfield, J. Philip Grime, Joseph Mascaro and John Briggs. “Don’t Judge Species on their Origins.” Nature 474 (2011): 152 – 54. Ewel, John J. and Francis E. Putz. “A Place for Alien Species in Ecosystem Restoration.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2.7 (2004): 354-60. Forsyth, David M. and Ben Reddiex. “Control of Pest Mammals for Biodiversity Protection in Australia.” Wildlife Research 33 (2006): 711–17. Garnett, Ali, and Kaye Kessing. Easter Bilby. Department of Environment and Heritage: Kaye Kessing Productions, 2006. Heishman, Darice. “VHD Factsheet.” House Rabbit Network (2011). 15 June 2012 ‹http://www.rabbitnetwork.org/articles/vhd.shtml› Low, Tim. New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. Melbourne: Penguin, 2002. Phillips, Sara. “How Eating Easter Chocolate Can Save Endangered Animals.” ABC Environment (1 April 2010). 15 June 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/04/01/2862039.htm› Plumwood, Val. “Decolonising Australian Gardens: Gardening and the Ethics of Place.” Australian Humanities Review 36 (2005). 15 June 2012 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-July-2005/09Plumwood.html› Ponsonby Veterinary Centre. “Rabbit Viral Hemorrhagic Disease (VHD).” Small Pets. 26 May 2012 ‹http://www.petvet.co.nz/small_pets.cfm?content_id=85› Robin, Libby. How a Continent Created a Nation. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007. Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports From a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004. ——-. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Rosenzweig, Michael. L. “Reconciliation Ecology and the Future of Species Diversity.” Oryx 37.2 (2003): 194 – 205. Save the Bilby Fund. “Bilby Fact Sheet.” Easterbilby.com.au (2003). 26 May 2012 ‹http://www.easterbilby.com.au/Project_material/factsheet.asp› Van Dooren, Thom. “Invasive Species in Penguin Worlds: An Ethical Taxonomy of Killing for Conservation.” Conservation and Society 9.4 (2011): 286 – 98. Wiesel, Elie. From the Kingdom of Memory. New York: Summit Books, 1990.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Introduction Many social media tools and services are free to use. This fact often leads users to the mistaken presumption that the associated data generated whilst utilising these tools and services is without value. Users often focus on the social and presumed ephemeral nature of communication – imagining something that happens but then has no further record or value, akin to a telephone call – while corporations behind these tools tend to focus on the media side, the lasting value of these traces which can be combined, mined and analysed for new insight and revenue generation. This paper seeks to explore this social media contradiction in two ways. Firstly, a cursory examination of Google and Facebook will demonstrate how data mining and analysis are core practices for these corporate giants, central to their functioning, development and expansion. Yet the public rhetoric of these companies is not about the exchange of personal information for services, but rather the more utopian notions of organising the world’s information, or bringing everyone together through sharing. The second section of this paper examines some of the core ramifications of death in terms of social media, asking what happens when a user suddenly exists only as recorded media fragments, at least in digital terms. Death, at first glance, renders users (or post-users) without agency or, implicitly, value to companies which data-mine ongoing social practices. Yet the emergence of digital legacy management highlights the value of the data generated using social media, a value which persists even after death. The question of a digital estate thus illustrates the cumulative value of social media as media, even on an individual level. The ways Facebook and Google approach digital death are examined, demonstrating policies which enshrine the agency and rights of living users, but become far less coherent posthumously. Finally, along with digital legacy management, I will examine the potential for posthumous digital legacies which may, in some macabre ways, actually reanimate some aspects of a deceased user’s presence, such as the Lives On service which touts the slogan “when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting”. Cumulatively, mapping digital legacy management by large online corporations, and the affordances of more focussed services dealing with digital death, illustrates the value of data generated by social media users, and the continued importance of the data even beyond the grave. Google While Google is universally synonymous with search, and is the world’s dominant search engine, it is less widely understood that one of the core elements keeping Google’s search results relevant is a complex operation mining user data. Different tools in Google’s array of services mine data in different ways (Zimmer, “Gaze”). Gmail, for example, uses algorithms to analyse an individual’s email in order to display the most relevant related advertising. This form of data mining is comparatively well known, with most Gmail users knowingly and willingly accepting more personalised advertising in order to use Google’s email service. However, the majority of people using Google’s search engine are unaware that search, too, is increasingly driven by the tracking, analysis and refining of results on the basis of user activity (Zimmer, “Externalities”). As Alexander Halavais (160–180) quite rightly argues, recent focus on the idea of social search – the deeper integration of social network information in gauging search results – is oxymoronic; all search, at least for Google, is driven by deep analysis of personal and aggregated social data. Indeed, the success of Google’s mining of user data has led to concerns that often invisible processes of customisation and personalisation will mean that the supposedly independent or objective algorithms producing Google’s search results will actually yield a different result for every person. As Siva Vaidhyanathan laments: “as users in a diverse array of countries train Google’s algorithms to respond to specialized queries with localised results, each place in the world will have a different list of what is important, true, or ‘relevant’ in response to any query” (138). Personalisation and customisation are not inherently problematic, and frequently do enhance the relevance of search results, but the main objection raised by critics is not Google’s data mining, but the lack of transparency in the way data are recorded, stored and utilised. Eli Pariser, for example, laments the development of a ubiquitous “filter bubble” wherein all search results are personalised and subjective but are hidden behind the rhetoric of computer-driven algorithmic objectivity (Pariser). While data mining informs and drives many of Google’s tools and services, the cumulative value of these captured fragments of information is best demonstrated by the new service Google Now. Google Now is a mobile app which delivers an ongoing stream of search results but without the need for user input. Google Now extrapolates the rhythms of a person’s life, their interests and their routines in order to algorithmically determine what information will be needed next, and automatically displays it on a user’s mobile device. Clearly Google Now is an extremely valuable and clever tool, and the more information a user shares, the better the ongoing customised results will be, demonstrating the direct exchange value of personal data: total personalisation requires total transparency. Each individual user will need to judge whether they wish to share with Google the considerable amount of personal information needed to make Google Now work. The pressing ethical question that remains is whether Google will ensure that users are sufficiently aware of the amount of data and personal privacy they are exchanging in order to utilise such a service. Facebook Facebook began as a closed network, open only to students at American universities, but has transformed over time to a much wider and more open network, with over a billion registered users. Facebook has continually reinvented their interface, protocols and design, often altering both privacy policies and users’ experience of privacy, and often meeting significant and vocal resistance in the process (boyd). The data mining performed by social networking service Facebook is also extensive, although primarily aimed at refining the way that targeted advertising appears on the platform. In 2007 Facebook partnered with various retail loyalty services and combined these records with Facebook’s user data. This information was used to power Facebook’s Beacon service, which added details of users’ retail history to their Facebook news feed (for example, “Tama just purchased a HTC One”). The impact of all of these seemingly unrelated purchases turning up in many people’s feeds suddenly revealed the complex surveillance, data mining and sharing of these data that was taking place (Doyle and Fraser). However, as Beacon was turned on, without consultation, for all Facebook users, there was a sizable backlash that meant that Facebook had to initially switch the service to opt-in, and then discontinue it altogether. While Beacon has been long since erased, it is notable that in early 2013 Facebook announced that they have strengthened partnerships with data mining and profiling companies, including Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, which harness customer information from a range of loyalty cards, to further refine the targeting ability offered to advertisers using Facebook (Hof). Facebook’s data mining, surveillance and integration across companies is thus still going on, but no longer directly visible to Facebook users, except in terms of the targeted advertisements which appear on the service. Facebook is also a platform, providing a scaffolding and gateway to many other tools and services. In order to use social games such as Zynga’s Farmville, Facebook users agree to allow Zynga to access their profile information, and use Facebook to authenticate their identity. Zynga has been unashamedly at the forefront of user analytics and data mining, attempting to algorithmically determine the best way to make virtual goods within their games attractive enough for users to pay for them with real money. Indeed, during a conference presentation, Zynga Vice President Ken Rudin stated outright that Zynga is “an analytics company masquerading as a games company” (Rudin). I would contend that this masquerade succeeds, as few Farmville players are likely to consider how their every choice and activity is being algorithmically scrutinised in order to determine what virtual goods they might actually buy. As an instance of what is widely being called ‘big data’, the data miing operations of Facebook, Zynga and similar services lead to a range of ethical questions (boyd and Crawford). While users may have ostensibly agreed to this data mining after clicking on Facebook’s Terms of Use agreement, the fact that almost no one reads these agreements when signing up for a service is the Internet’s worst kept secret. Similarly, the extension of these terms when Facebook operates as a platform for other applications is a far from transparent process. While examining the recording of user data leads to questions of privacy and surveillance, it is important to note that many users are often aware of the exchange to which they have agreed. Anders Albrechtslund deploys the term ‘social surveillance’ to usefully emphasise the knowing, playful and at times subversive approach some users take to the surveillance and data mining practices of online service providers. Similarly, E.J. Westlake notes that performances of self online are often not only knowing but deliberately false or misleading with the aim of exploiting the ways online activities are tracked. However, even users well aware of Facebook’s data mining on the site itself may be less informed about the social networking company’s mining of offsite activity. The introduction of ‘like’ buttons on many other Websites extends Facebook’s reach considerably. The various social plugins and ‘like’ buttons expand both active recording of user activity (where the like button is actually clicked) and passive data mining (since a cookie is installed or updated regardless of whether a button is actually pressed) (Gerlitz and Helmond). Indeed, because cookies – tiny packets of data exchanged and updated invisibly in browsers – assign each user a unique identifier, Facebook can either combine these data with an existing user’s profile or create profiles about non-users. If that person even joins Facebook, their account is connected with the existing, data-mined record of their Web activities (Roosendaal). As with Google, the significant issue here is not users knowingly sharing their data with Facebook, but the often complete lack of transparency in terms of the ways Facebook extracts and mines user data, both on Facebook itself and increasingly across applications using Facebook as a platform and across the Web through social plugins. Google after Death While data mining is clearly a core element in the operation of Facebook and Google, the ability to scrutinise the activities of users depends on those users being active; when someone dies, the question of the value and ownership of their digital assets becomes complicated, as does the way companies manage posthumous user information. For Google, the Gmail account of a deceased person becomes inactive; the stored email still takes up space on Google’s servers, but with no one using the account, no advertising is displayed and thus Google can earn no revenue from the account. However, the process of accessing the Gmail account of a deceased relative is an incredibly laborious one. In order to even begin the process, Google asks that someone physically mails a series of documents including a photocopy of a government-issued ID, the death certificate of the deceased person, evidence of an email the requester received from the deceased, along with other personal information. After Google have received and verified this information, they state that they might proceed to a second stage where further documents are required. Moreover, if at any stage Google decide that they cannot proceed in releasing a deceased relative’s Gmail account, they will not reveal their rationale. As their support documentation states: “because of our concerns for user privacy, if we determine that we cannot provide the Gmail content, we will not be able to share further details about the account or discuss our decision” (Google, “Accessing”). Thus, Google appears to enshrine the rights and privacy of individual users, even posthumously; the ownership or transfer of individual digital assets after death is neither a given, nor enshrined in Google’s policies. Yet, ironically, the economic value of that email to Google is likely zero, but the value of the email history of a loved one or business partner may be of substantial financial and emotional value, probably more so than when that person was alive. For those left behind, the value of email accounts as media, as a lasting record of social communication, is heightened. The question of how Google manages posthumous user data has been further complicated by the company’s March 2012 rationalisation of over seventy separate privacy policies for various tools and services they operate under the umbrella of a single privacy policy accessed using a single unified Google account. While this move was ostensibly to make privacy more understandable and transparent at Google, it had other impacts. For example, one of the side effects of a singular privacy policy and single Google identity is that deleting one of a recently deceased person’s services may inadvertently delete them all. Given that Google’s services include Gmail, YouTube and Picasa, this means that deleting an email account inadvertently erases all of the Google-hosted videos and photographs that individual posted during their lifetime. As Google warns, for example: “if you delete the Google Account to which your YouTube account is linked, you will delete both the Google Account AND your YouTube account, including all videos and account data” (Google, “What Happens”). A relative having gained access to a deceased person’s Gmail might sensibly delete the email account once the desired information is exported. However, it seems less likely that this executor would realise that in doing so all of the private and public videos that person had posted on YouTube would also permanently disappear. While material possessions can be carefully dispersed to specific individuals following the instructions in someone’s will, such affordances are not yet available for Google users. While it is entirely understandable that the ramification of policy changes are aimed at living users, as more and more online users pass away, the question of their digital assets becomes increasingly important. Google, for example, might allow a deceased person’s executor to elect which of their Google services should be kept online (perhaps their YouTube videos), which traces can be exported (perhaps their email), and which services can be deleted. At present, the lack of fine-grained controls over a user’s digital estate at Google makes this almost impossible. While it violates Google’s policies to transfer ownership of an account to another person, if someone does leave their passwords behind, this provides their loved ones with the best options in managing their digital legacy with Google. When someone dies and their online legacy is a collection of media fragments, the value of those media is far more apparent to the loved ones left behind rather than the companies housing those media. Facebook Memorialisation In response to users complaining that Facebook was suggesting they reconnect with deceased friends who had left Facebook profiles behind, in 2009 the company instituted an official policy of turning the Facebook profiles of departed users into memorial pages (Kelly). Technically, loved ones can choose between memorialisation and erasing an account altogether, but memorialisation is the default. This entails setting the account so that no one can log into it, and that no new friends (connections) can be made. Existing friends can access the page in line with the user’s final privacy settings, meaning that most friends will be able to post on the memorialised profile to remember that person in various ways (Facebook). Memorialised profiles (now Timelines, after Facebook’s redesign) thus become potential mourning spaces for existing connections. Since memorialised pages cannot make new connections, public memorial pages are increasingly popular on Facebook, frequently set up after a high-profile death, often involving young people, accidents or murder. Recent studies suggest that both of these Facebook spaces are allowing new online forms of mourning to emerge (Marwick and Ellison; Carroll and Landry; Kern, Forman, and Gil-Egui), although public pages have the downside of potentially inappropriate commentary and outright trolling (Phillips). Given Facebook has over a billion registered users, estimates already suggest that the platform houses 30 million profiles of deceased people, and this number will, of course, continue to grow (Kaleem). For Facebook, while posthumous users do not generate data themselves, the fact that they were part of a network means that their connections may interact with a memorialised account, or memorial page, and this activity, like all Facebook activities, allows the platform to display advertising and further track user interactions. However, at present Facebook’s options – to memorialise or delete accounts of deceased people – are fairly blunt. Once Facebook is aware that a user has died, no one is allowed to edit that person’s Facebook account or Timeline, so Facebook literally offers an all (memorialisation) or nothing (deletion) option. Given that Facebook is essentially a platform for performing identities, it seems a little short-sighted that executors cannot clean up or otherwise edit the final, lasting profile of a deceased Facebook user. As social networking services and social media become more ingrained in contemporary mourning practices, it may be that Facebook will allow more fine-grained control, positioning a digital executor also as a posthumous curator, making the final decision about what does and does not get kept in the memorialisation process. Since Facebook is continually mining user activity, the popularity of mourning as an activity on Facebook will likely mean that more attention is paid to the question of digital legacies. While the user themselves can no longer be social, the social practices of mourning, and the recording of a user as a media entity highlights the fact that social media can be about interactions which in significant ways include deceased users. Digital Legacy Services While the largest online corporations have fairly blunt tools for addressing digital death, there are a number of new tools and niche services emerging in this area which are attempting to offer nuanced control over digital legacies. Legacy Locker, for example, offers to store the passwords to all of a user’s online services and accounts, from Facebook to Paypal, and to store important documents and other digital material. Users designate beneficiaries who will receive this information after the account holder passes away, and this is confirmed by preselected “verifiers” who can attest to the account holder’s death. Death Switch similarly provides the ability to store and send information to users after the account holder dies, but tests whether someone is alive by sending verification emails; fail to respond to several prompts and Death Switch will determine a user has died, or is incapacitated, and executes the user’s final instructions. Perpetu goes a step further and offers the same tools as Legacy Locker but also automates existing options from social media services, allowing users to specify, for example, that their Facebook, Twitter or Gmail data should be downloaded and this archive should be sent to a designated recipient when the Perpetu user dies. These tools attempt to provide a more complex array of choices in terms of managing a user’s digital legacy, providing similar choices to those currently available when addressing material possessions in a formal will. At a broader level, the growing demand for these services attests to the ongoing value of online accounts and social media traces after a user’s death. Bequeathing passwords may not strictly follow the Terms of Use of the online services in question, but it is extremely hard to track or intervene when a user has the legitimate password, even if used by someone else. More to the point, this finely-grained legacy management allows far more flexibility in the utilisation and curation of digital assets posthumously. In the process of signing up for one of these services, or digital legacy management more broadly, the ongoing value and longevity of social media traces becomes more obvious to both the user planning their estate and those who ultimately have to manage it. The Social Media Afterlife The value of social media beyond the grave is also evident in the range of services which allow users to communicate in some fashion after they have passed away. Dead Social, for example, allows users to schedule posthumous social media activity, including the posting of tweets, sending of email, Facebook messages, or the release of online photos and videos. The service relies on a trusted executor confirming someone’s death, and after that releases these final messages effectively from beyond the grave. If I Die is a similar service, which also has an integrated Facebook application which ensures a user’s final message is directly displayed on their Timeline. In a bizarre promotional campaign around a service called If I Die First, the company is promising that the first user of the service to pass away will have their posthumous message delivered to a huge online audience, via popular blogs and mainstream press coverage. While this is not likely to appeal to everyone, the notion of a popular posthumous performance of self further complicates that question of what social media can mean after death. Illustrating the value of social media legacies in a quite different but equally powerful way, the Lives On service purports to algorithmically learn how a person uses Twitter while they are live, and then continue to tweet in their name after death. Internet critic Evgeny Morozov argues that Lives On is part of a Silicon Valley ideology of ‘solutionism’ which casts every facet of society as a problem in need of a digital solution (Morozov). In this instance, Lives On provides some semblance of a solution to the problem of death. While far from defeating death, the very fact that it might be possible to produce any meaningful approximation of a living person’s social media after they die is powerful testimony to the value of data mining and the importance of recognising that value. While Lives On is an experimental service in its infancy, it is worth wondering what sort of posthumous approximation might be built using the robust data profiles held by Facebook or Google. If Google Now can extrapolate what a user wants to see without any additional input, how hard would it be to retool this service to post what a user would have wanted after their death? Could there, in effect, be a Google After(life)? Conclusion Users of social media services have differing levels of awareness regarding the exchange they are agreeing to when signing up for services provided by Google or Facebook, and often value the social affordances without necessarily considering the ongoing media they are creating. Online corporations, by contrast, recognise and harness the informatic traces users generate through complex data mining and analysis. However, the death of a social media user provides a moment of rupture which highlights the significant value of the media traces a user leaves behind. More to the point, the value of these media becomes most evident to those left behind precisely because that individual can no longer be social. While beginning to address the issue of posthumous user data, Google and Facebook both have very blunt tools; Google might offer executors access while Facebook provides the option of locking a deceased user’s account as a memorial or removing it altogether. Neither of these responses do justice to the value that these media traces hold for the living, but emerging digital legacy management tools are increasingly providing a richer set of options for digital executors. While the differences between material and digital assets provoke an array of legal, spiritual and moral issues, digital traces nevertheless clearly hold significant and demonstrable value. For social media users, the death of someone they know is often the moment where the media side of social media – their lasting, infinitely replicable nature – becomes more important, more visible, and casts the value of the social media accounts of the living in a new light. For the larger online corporations and service providers, the inevitable increase in deceased users will likely provoke more fine-grained controls and responses to the question of digital legacies and posthumous profiles. 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Cute pictures of animals feature as an inoffensive and adorable background to the contemporary online experience with cute content regularly shared on social media platforms. Indeed the demand for cuteness is so strong in the current cultural milieu that some animals become recognisable animal celebrities in the process (Hepola). However, despite the existence of this professionalisation in some sections of the cute economy, amateurs produce the majority of cute content that circulates online. This is largely because one of the central contributors to this steady stream of cute animal pictures is the subforum Aww, hosted on the online community Reddit. Aww is wholly dedicated to pictures of cute things and allows users to directly submit cute content directly to the site. Aww is one of the default subforums that new Reddit users are automatically subscribed to and is immensely popular, featuring over 4.2 million dedicated subscribers as well as untold casual visits. The section is self-described as: “Things that make you go AWW! -- like puppies, and bunnies, and so on...Feel free to post pictures, videos and stories of cute things” ("The cutest things on the internet!"). Users upload cute animal photos that they have taken and wait for the Reddit community to vote on their favourite pictures. The voting mechanism helps users to acknowledge their favourite posts, with the most popular featured on the front page of Aww (for a detailed critique of this process see van der Nagel 2013). The user-generated model of the site means that instead of visitors being confronted with a formally curated selection of cute animal photos, Aww offers a constantly changing mixture of amateur, semi-pro and professional content. Aww - and Reddit more generally - stand as an emblematic example of participatory culture (Jenkins 2006), with users playing an active role in the production and curation of online content. However, given the commercial nature of many user-generated content sites, this amateur media activity is becoming increasingly subject to intellectual property claims and conflicts (see Burgess; Kennedy). Across the internet there are growing tensions between website operators and amateur producers. As Jenny Kennedy (132) notes, while these platforms promote a public rhetoric of “sharing”, these corporate narratives “downplay their economic power” and imply “that they do not control the practices contained within their sites”. Subsequently, the expectations of users regarding how content is managed and organised can differ substantially from the corporate goals of social media companies. This paper contributes to the growing body of literature interested in the politics of amateur media production (see Hunter and Lastowka; Benkler; Burgess; Kennedy) by exploring the emergence of attribution norms and informal enforcement measures in and around the Aww online community. In contrast to professional content creators, amateurs often have fewer resources on hand to protect their copyrighted work and are also challenged by a pervasive online rhetoric that suggests that popular content essentially “belongs to the Internet” (Douglas). A number of communities on Reddit have questioned the company’s handling of amateur content with users suggesting that Reddit actively seeks to de-contextualise original content and not attribute original creators. By examining how amateur creators and online communities regulate content online, I interrogate the power relations that exist between social media platforms and users and explore how the corporate rhetoric of participatory culture interacts with the legal framework of copyright law. This article also contributes to existing legal scholarship on communities of practice and norms-based intellectual property systems. This literature has explored how social norms effectively regulate the protection of, among other things, recipes (Fauchart and Von Hippel), fashion design (Raustiala and Sprigman) and stand-up comedy routines (Oliar and Sprigman), in situations where copyright law does not function as an effective regulatory mechanism. Often these norms are in line with copyright law protections, but in other cases they diverge from these legal principles. In this paper I suggest that particular sections of Reddit function in a similar way, with their own set of self-governing norms, and that these norms largely align with the philosophical aims of copyright law. The paper begins by outlining a series of recent debates that have occurred between amateur media creators and Reddit, before exploring how norms are regulated on Reddit subforums Aww and Karma Court. I then offer some brief conclusions on the value of paying attention to how social norms structure forms of “sharing” (see Kennedy) and provide a useful way for amateur media producers to protect their content without going through formal legal processes. Introducing Reddit and the Confused Politics of Amateur Content Reddit is a social news site, a vibrant community and one of the most popular websites online. It stands as the most visible iteration of a long-standing tradition of user-generated and managed news, one that goes back to websites like Slashdot, which operated in the mid to late-90s. Founded in 2005 Reddit was launched after only one funding round of venture capital, receiving $100k in seed funding from Y Combinatory (Miller). Despite some early rivalry between Reddit and competitor site Digg, Reddit had enough potential to be purchased by Condé Nast for an estimated $20 million (Carr). Reddit’s audience numbers have grown exponentially in the last few years, with the site currently receiving over 5 billion page views and 114 million unique visitors per month (“About Reddit”). It has also changed focus significantly in the last few years with the site now “as much about posting interesting or funny pictures as it is about news” (Sepponen). Reddit hosts a number of individual subforums (called subreddits), which focus on a particular topic and function essentially like online bulletin boards. The front-page of Reddit showcases the most popular content from across the whole website, and user-generated content features heavily here. Amateur media cannot spread without the structural support of social media platforms, but this support is qualified in particular ways. Reddit stands as a paradigmatic case. Users on Reddit are “incentivized to submit direct links to images, because viewers can get to them more easily” (Douglas) and the website encourages amateur creators to use a preferred content server – Imgur – to host images. The Imgur service provides a direct public link to an image – even bypassing the Reddit discussion page – and with its free hosting and limited ads it has become a popular service and is used by most Reddit users (Slater-Robins). For the majority of Reddit users this is an unproblematic partnership. Imgur is free, effective and fast. However, a vocal minority of Reddit users and amateur creators claim that the partnership between Reddit and Imgur has created the equivalent of an online ghetto (Douglas).As Nick Douglas explains, when using services like Imgur there is no requirement to either provide an external link to a creators website or to attribute the creator, limiting the ability for an amateur creator to gain exposure. It also bypasses existing revenue streams that may have been set up by creators, including ad-supported websites or online stores offering merchandise. As a result creators have little opportunity to benefit either economically or reputationally from this system. This occurs to such an extent that “there are actually warnings against submitting your own [original] work” to particular subforums on Reddit (Douglas). For example, some forum moderators require submissions to either “link directly to a specific image file or to a website with minimal ads” (“Reddit Pics”). It is in this context, that the posting of original content without attribution is not actively policed. There are a number of complaints circulating within the Reddit community about these practices (see “Ok, look people. I know you heart Imgur, but webcomics? Just link to the freaking site”; “The problem with reddit”). Many creators have directly protested against this aspect of Reddit’s structural organisation. Blogger Benjamin Grelle (a.k.a The Frogman) and writer Chris Menning are two notable examples. Grelle’s protest was witty and dramatic. He wrote a blog post featuring a picture of an email he sent to Imgur offering the company a choice: send him a huge novelty check for $10,000 or alternatively, add a proper attribution system that allows artists, photographers and content creators to properly credit their work. Grelle estimates that his work generated around $20,000 in ad revenue for Imgur; however the structure of Reddit and Imgur meant he earned little income from the “viral” success of his content. Grelle claimed he was happy for his work to be shared, but attribution meant that it was more likely a fan would follow the link to his website and provide him with some financial recompense for his work. Unsurprisingly, Grelle didn’t receive a paycheck and so in response has developed a unique way to gain exposure. He has started to insert himself into his work, “[s]o when you see a stolen Frogman piece, you still see Ben Grelle’s face” (Douglas). Chris Menning posted a blog about being banned from Reddit, hoping to bring to light some of the inequalities that persist around Reddit’s current structure. He began by noting that he had received a significant amount of traffic from them in the past. He had responded in kind by looking to create original content for particular subforums, knowing what a particular community would enjoy. However, his habit of providing the link to his own website along with the content he posted saw him get labelled as a spammer and banned by administrators. Menning chose not to fight the ban:It seems that the only way I could avoid [getting banned] is if I were to relinquish any rights to my original content and post it exclusively to Imgur. In effect, reddit punishes the creation of original content, and rewards content theft (Menning). Instead he decided to quit Reddit, claiming that Reddit’s approach would carry long-term consequences as the platform provided little incentive for creators to produce wholly original content. It is worth noting that neither Menning nor Grelle turned to legal avenues in order to gain financial restitution. Considering the nature of the practices they were complaining about, compensation in the form of an injunction or damages would have certainly been possible. In Benjamin’s case, a user had combined a number of his copyrighted works into one image and posted the image to Imgur without attribution --this infringed Grelle’s copyright in his work as well as his moral right to be attributed as the creator of the work. However, the public comments of both creators suggest that despite the possibility of legal success, their issue was not so much to do with their individual cases but rather the broader structural issues at play within Reddit. While they might gain individually from a successful legal challenge, over the long term Reddit would continue to be a fraught place for amateur and semi-professional content creators. Certain parts of the Reddit community appear to be sympathetic to these issues, and the complaints of dissenting users like Menning and Grelle have received active support from some users and moderators on the site. This has led to changes in the way content is being posted and managed on Aww, and has also driven the emergence of a satirical user-run court entitled Karma Court. In these spaces moderators and members establish community norms, regularly police the correct attribution of works and challenge the de-contextualisation of content overtly encouraged by Reddit, Imgur and other subforums. In the following section I will examine both Aww and Karma Court in order to explore how these norms are established and negotiated by both moderators and users alike. reddit.com/r/aww: The Online Hub of Cute Animal Pictures As we have seen, the design of Reddit and Imgur creates a number of problems for amateur creators who wish to protect their intellectual property. To address these shortcomings, the Aww community has created its own informal regulatory systems. Volunteer moderators play a crucial role: they establish informal codes of conduct for the Aww community and enforce various rules about how the site should be used. One of these rules relates to attribution. Users are asked to to “post original content whenever possible or attribute original content creators” ("The cutest things on the internet!"). Due to the volunteer nature of the work and the size of the Aww sub-reddit, moderator enforcement is haphazard. Consequently, responsibility falls on the wider user community to self-police. Despite its informal nature, this process manages to facilitate a fairly consistent standard of attribution. In this way it functions as an informal method of intellectual property protection. It is worth noting however that this commitment to original content is not solely due to the moral character of Aww users. A significant motivation is the distribution of karma points amongst Reddit users. Karma, which represents your good standing within the Reddit community, can be earned through user likes and votes – these push the most popular content to the front page of each subforum. Thus karma stands as a numerical representation of a user’s value to Reddit. This ostensibly democratic system has the paradoxical effect of fuelling intellectual property violations on the site. Users often repost other users’ jpegs, animated gifs, and other content, in order to reap the social and cultural capital that comes with posting a popular picture. In some cases they claim authorship of the content; in other cases they simply re-post content that they feel “belongs to the internet” (Douglas). Some content is so popular or pervasive online (this content that is often described as “viral”) that users feel there is little reason or need to attribute content. This helps to explain the persistence of ownership and attribution conflicts on Reddit. In the eyes of some users and moderators the management of these rights and the correct distribution of karma are seen to be vital to the long-term functioning of site. The karma system offers a numerical representation of each contributor’s value. Re-posting already successful content and claiming it as your own challenges the proper functioning of the karma system and potentially ‘inhibits the innovative potential of contributions (Richterich). On Aww the re-posting of original content is viewed as a taboo act that breaches these norms. The poster is seen to have engaged in deceptive conduct in order to gain karma for their user profile. In addition there is a strong ethic that runs through these comment threads that the original creator deserves attribution. There is a presumption that this attribution is vital in order to increasing the possible marketability of the posted content and to recognise and courage creators within the community. This sort of community-driven regulation contrasts with the aforementioned site design of Reddit and Imgur, which frustrates effective authorship attribution practices. Aww users, in contrast, have shown a willingness to defend what they see as the intellectual property rights of content creators.A series of recent examples outline how this process works in practice. User “moonlikeme123” posted a picture of a cat with its hands on the steering wheel of a car. The picture was entitled “we don’t need to ask for directions, Helen”. During the same day, three separate users had identified the picture as a repost, with one noting that the same picture was already on the front page of Aww. “moonlikeme123” received no karma points for the picture. In a second example, the user “nibblur” posted a photo of a kitten “hunting” a toy mouse. Within a day, one enterprising user had identified the original photographer – “torode”, an amateur photographer – and linked to his Reddit profile (see fig. 2) ("ferocious cat hunting its prey: aww."). One further example: on 15 July 2013 “Cuzacelmare” posted a picture of two dogs comforting each other – an image which had originally been posted by “lauface”. Again, users were quick to point out the lack of attribution and the attempt to claim someone else’s content as their own (“Comforting her sister during a storm: aww). It is worth noting that some Reddit users consider attributing content to be entirely without benefit. Some deride karma as “meaningless” and suggest that as a significant amount of content online is regularly reposted elsewhere, there is little harm done in re-posting what is essentially amateur content destined to be lost in the bowels of the internet. For example, the comments that follow Cuzacelmare’s reflect an ambivalence about reposting, suggesting that users weigh up the benefits of exposure gained by the re-posting against the lack of attribution granted and the increasingly decontextualized nature of the photo itself:Why does everyone get so bitchy about reposts. Not everyone is on ALL the time or has been on Rreddit since it was created. I mean if you've seen it already ignore it. It's just picture you aren't forced to click the link. [sic] (“Comforting her sister during a storm: aww”)We're arguing semantics, but any content that gets attention can benefit the creator, whether it's reddit or Youtube (“Comforting her sister during a storm: aww”) Such discussions are common on comment threads following re-posts by other users. They underline the conflicted status of this ephemeral media and the underlying frictions that are part of these processes. These discussions underline the fact that on Reddit the “sharing” (Kennedy) and “spreading” (Jenkins et al.) of content is not seen as an unquestioned positive but rather as a contestable structural feature that needs to be constantly negotiated and discussed. These informal methods of identification, post-hoc attribution and criticism in comment threads have been the long-standing method used to redress questions of attribution and ownership of content on Reddit. However in recent times, Reddit users have turned to satirical methods of formal adjudication for particularly egregious cases. A sub-reddit, Karma Court, now functions as an informal tribunal in which punishment is meted out for “the abuse of karma and general contemptible actions heretofore identified as wrongdoing” (“Constitution and F.A.Q of the Karma Court”). Due to its double function as both an adjudicator and satire of users overly-invested in online debates, there is no limit to the possible “crimes” a user may be charged with. The following charges are only presented as guidelines and speak to common negative experiences on online: (1). Douchebaggery - When one is being a douche.(2). Defamation - Tarnishing another redditor's [user’s] username.(3). Public Indecency - When a user flexes his or her 'e-peen' with the intent to shame other users.(4). OhShit.exe - Intentional reposting that results in reddit Gold.(5). GrandTheft.jpg - Reposting while claiming credit for the post.(6). Obstruction of Justice - Impeding or interfering with an investigation, such as submitting false screenshots, deleting evidence, or providing false evidence to the court.(7). Other - Literally anything else you want. We like creative names for charges.(“Constitution and F.A.Q of the Karma Court”) In Karma Court, legal representation can be sourced from a list of attorneys and judges, populated by users who volunteer to help adjudicate the case. They are required to have been a Reddit member for over six months. The only punishment is a public shaming. Interestingly Karma Court has developed a fair reposting clause that attempts to manage the complex debates around reposting and attribution. Under the non-binding satirical clause, users are able to repost content if it has not featured on the front page of a sub-reddit for seven or more days, if the re-poster acknowledges in the title or description that they are re-posting or if the original poster has less than 30,000 link karma (which means that the original poster has not substantially contributed to the Reddit community). If a re-poster does not adhere by these rules and claims a re-post as their own original content (or “OC”), they can be charged with “grandtheft.jpg” and brought to trial by another Reddit user. As one of the most popular subforums, a number of cases have emerged from Aww. The aforementioned re-poster “Cuzacelmare” (“I am bringing /U/ Cuzacelmare to trial …”) was “charged” through this process and served with a summons after denying “cute and innocent animals of that subreddit of their much deserved karma”. Similar cases to do with re-posting without attribution on Aww involve “FreshCorio” (“Reddit vs. U/FreshCorio …”) and “ninjacollin” (“People of Reddit vs. /U/ ninjacollin”) who were also brought to karma court. In each case prosecutors were adamant that false authorship claims needed to be punished. With these mock trials run by volunteers it takes time for arguments to be heard and judgment to occur; however “ninjacollin” expedited the legal process by offering a full confession. As a new user, “ninjacollin” was reprimanded severely for his actions and the users on Karma Court underlined the consequences of not identifying original content creators when re-posting content. Ownership and Attribution: Amateur Media, Distribution and Law The practices outlined above offer a number of alternate ways to think about amateur media and how it is distributed. An increasingly complex picture of content attribution and circulation emerges once we take into account the structural operation of Reddit, the intellectual property norms of users, and the various formal and informal systems of regulation that are appearing on the site. Such practices require users to negotiate complex questions of ownership between each other and in relation to corporate bodies. These negotiations often lead to informal agreements around a set of norms to regulate the spread of content within a particular community, suggesting that the lack of a formal legal process in these debates does not mean that there is an absence of regulation. As noted throughout this paper, the spread of online content often involves progressive de-contextualisation. Website design features often support this process in the hopes of encouraging content to spread in a fashion amenable to their corporate goals. Considering this tendency for content to be decontextualized online, the presence of attribution norms on subforums like Aww is significant. Instead of remixing, spreading and re-purposing content indiscriminately, users retain a concept of ownership and attribution that tracks closely to the basic principles of copyright law. Rather than users radically redefining concepts of attribution and ownership, as prefigured in some of the more utopian accounts of participatory media, the dominant norms of the Reddit community extend a discourse of copyright and ownership. As well as providing a greater level of detail to contemporary debates around amateur media and its viral or spreadable nature (Burgess; Jenkins; Jenkins et al), this analysis offers some lessons for copyright law. The emergence of norms in particular Reddit subforums which govern the use of copyrighted content and the use of a mock court structure suggests that online communities have the capacity to engage in forms of redress for amateur creators. These organic forms of copyright management operate adjacent to formal legal structures of copyright law. However, they are more accessible and practical for amateur creators, who do not always have the money to hire lawyers, especially when the market value of their content might be negligible. The informal regulatory systems outlined above may not operate perfectly but they reveal communities who are willing to engage foundational conversations around the importance of attribution and ownership. Following the existing literature (Fauchart and Von Hippel; Raustiala and Sprigman; Schultz; Oliar and Sprigman), I suggest that these online social norms provide a useful form of alternative protection for amateur creators. Acknowledgements Thanks to Ramon Lobato and Emily van der Nagel for comments and productive discussions around these issues. I am also grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their assistance in developing this argument. References “About Reddit.” Reddit, 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/about/›. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Burgess, Jean. “YouTube and the Formalisation of Amateur Media.” Amateur Media: Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives. In Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson, and Julian Thomas, eds. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Carr, Nicholas. “Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars.” The New York Times: Business, 2 Sep. 2012. “Comforting Her Sister during a Storm: aww.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 15 July 2013. “Constitution and F.A.Q of the Karma Court.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 2014. Douglas, Nick. “Everything on the Internet Gets Stolen: Here’s How You Should Feel about That.” Slacktory, 8 Sep. 2009. Fauchart, Emmanual, and Eric von Hippel. “Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs.” Organization Science 19.2 (2008): 187 - 201 "Ferocious Cat Hunting Its Prey: aww." reddit: the front page of the internet, 4 April 2013. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.rreddit.com/r/aww/comments/1bobcp/ferocious_cat_hunting_its_prey/›. Hepola, Sarah. “The Internet is Made of Kittens.” Salon.com, 11 Feb. 2009. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/›. Hunter, Dan, and Greg Lastowka. “Amateur-to-Amateur.” William & Mary Law Review 46 (2004): 951 - 1030. “I Am Bringing /U/ Cuzacelmare to Trial on the Basis of Being One of the Biggest _______ I’ve Ever Seen, by Reposting Cute Animal Pictures to /R/Awww. Feels.Jpg.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 21 March 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Menning, Chris. "So I Got Banned from Reddit" Modern Primate, 23 Aug. 2012. Miller, Keery. “How Y Combinator Helped Shape Reddit.” Bloomberg Businessweek, 26 Sep. 2007. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-09-26/how-y-combinator-helped-shape-redditbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice›. “Ok, Look People. I Know You Heart Imgur, But Webcomics? Just Link to the Freaking Site.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 22 Aug. 2011. Oliar, Dotan, and Christopher Sprigman. “There’s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy.” Virginia Law Review 94.8 (2009): 1787 – 1867. “People of reddit vs. /U/Ninjacollin for Grandtheft.jpg.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 30 Jan. 2013. Raustiala, Kal, and Christopher Sprigman. “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design”. Virginia Law Review 92.8 (2006): 1687-1777. “Reddit v. U/FreshCorio. User Uploads Popular Repost Picture of R/AWW and Claims It Is His Sister’s Cat. Falsely Claims It Is His Cakeday for Good Measure.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 12 Apr. 2013. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/KarmaCourt/comments/1c7vxz/reddit_vs_ufreshcorio_user_uploads_popular_repost/›. “Reddit Pics.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/›. Richterich, Annika. “’Karma, Precious Karma!’ Karmawhoring on Reddit and the Front Page’s Econometrisation.” Journal of Peer Production 4 (2014). 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-4-value-and-currency/peer-reviewed-articles/karma-precious-karma/›. Schultz, Mark. “Fear and Norms and Rock & Roll: What Jambands Can Teach Us about Persuading People to Obey Copyright Law.” Berkley Technology Law Journal 21.2 (2006): 651 – 728. Sepponen, Bemmu. “Why Redditors Gave Imgur a Chance.” Social Media Today, 20 July 2011. Slater-Robins, Max. “From Rags to Riches: The Story of Imgur.” Neowin, 21 Apr. 2013. "The Cutest Things on the Internet!" reddit: the front page of the internet, n.d. “The Problem with reddit.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 23 Aug. 2012. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.rreddit.com/r/technology/comments/ypbe2/the_problem_with_rreddit/›. Van der Nagel, Emily. “Faceless Bodies: Negotiating Technological and Cultural Codes on reddit gonewild.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 10.2 (2013). "We Don’t Need to Ask for Directions, Helen: aww." reddit: the front page of the internet, 30 June 2013. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.rreddit.com/r/aww/comments/1heut6/we_dont_need_to_ask_for_directions_helen/›.

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.