Journal articles on the topic 'Translated bestsellers'

Toni Morrison, the first African American female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is certainly one of the modern artists whose novels have entered the world's modern literary canon. She is one of the most read novelists in the United States, where all of her novels have been bestsellers. However, only Song of Solomon and Beloved have so far been translated into Slovene. There have been several articles or essays written on Toni Morrison but most of them are simply translations of English articles; the only exception is a study by Jerneja Petrič. This paper presents the Slovene translation of Song ofSolomon by Jože Stabej and the articles written on Toni Morrison by Slovene critics. Jože Stabej is so far the only Slovene translator who has translated Toni Morrison. The author of this article uses some Slovene translations from the novel in comparison to the original to show the main differences appearing because of different grammatical structures of both languages and differences in the two cultures. The articles by Slovene critics are primarily resumes or translations of English originals and have been mainly published in magazines specializing in literature.

Abstract The awarding of the world’s best known literature prize to the controversial Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 triggered off worldwide hype in its reception. So far, Jelinek’s works have been translated into more than 40 languages. Chinese is one of them. Although the author’s first works had already been translated back in the 1990s, on the Chinese mainland all translations of her works were actually published only after the key event of the Nobel Prize. They immediately received immense attention from the Chinese public and unleashed what could even be termed a ‘Jelinek fever’. This paper is devoted to shedding light on the first introduction and the unexpected success of this controversial Austrian Nobel laureate in the Chinese book market. It will give an overview of the Chinese translations of Jelinek’s works and will try to reveal some of the dynamics that led to their actual selection, translation, publication, marketing and status as bestsellers. The challenges of the rapidly transforming Chinese publishing industry and the impact of these challenges on the reception of foreign literature will be discussed. Furthermore, the paper will outline the crucial role of the intermediaries, especially of the powerful literary agency involved, in this process of cultural transfer.

The authors present the characteristics of Jesuit libraries in the Kingdom of Hungary in terms of their content, with special focus on works by the most influential Jesuit authors, which were among the most numerous ones in Hungarian Jesuit libraries. The authors also draw attention to the most popular titles published by the Hungarian Jesuits in the 17th century, which can be considered bestsellers of Baroque Catholic literature not only in the Kingdom of Hungary, but also abroad. Many of them also found their readers in Poland and were translated into Polish. Furthermore, the authors point to the interconnection between Hungarian and Polish Jesuit book culture and the Jesuit Polonica in Hungarian Jesuit libraries and typographies of the 17th-18th century. The Hungarian book culture does not mean the book culture of contemporary Hungary, but of Kingdom of Hungary. This paper focus on the Jesuits from the Slovak territory, which was a part of Kingdom of Hungary for 800 years (from 11th century to 1918). The essential research sources are the international educational program Ratio Atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu and catalogues of Hungarian Jesuit libraries, located in Slovakia, from the years 1632–1782.

Andrei Ivanov (b. 1971) is the most well known Estonian Russianlanguage writer who has won many literary awards in Estonia and Russia. His prose and position in the literary field of Estonia has initiated the discussion about the exact definition of Estonian literature and the status of the Estonian Russian-language literature. Due to Ivanov’s prose, the world of Estonian Russians has become more visible for the Estonian audience. He also gives a piercing look into the modern society and offers a different perspective on the world; these are some of the reasons of his popularity. The article focuses on the analysis of the reception of Ivanov’s prose published in Estonian. The vast majority of Ivanov’s prose has been translated into Estonian: Путешествие Ханумана на Лолланд, Харбинские мотыльки, Бизар, Исповедь лунатика, Горсть праха, Печатный шар Расмуса Хансена, Мой датский дядюшка and Зола. The author has entered the Estonian cultural field through translations, it may be said that he has been found in translations. Ivanov’s books are bestsellers and widely discussed in newspapers, blogs and in the literary magazines. The position of Estonian Russian literature has shifted from the periphery into the spotlight and the works by Ivanov have played a decisive role in that process. The article focuses on the analysis of the reception of Ivanov’s prose published in Estonian. The articles published in the Estonian language and concentrating on his prose (both in newspapers and in the literary magazines) are under observation. What topics have been discussed? Which aspects of Ivanov’s prose have attracted the attention of the critics?

Coming of age and classification of adolescents In Salla Simukka’s YA-dystopias Jäljellä and Toisaalla
 Finnish YA-author Salla Simukka takes a current societal problem into the center of her novel pair Jäljellä (Left Over, not translated, 2012) and Toisaalla (Elsewhere, not translated, 2012). These novels criticize the current system, where even young children are forced to choose specialized studies and make decisions that affect their whole future. This is a consequence on a modern western information society, where branches of knowledge are differentiated. These theme Simukka’s novels handle with the methods off dystopic fiction.
 Both novels depict a dystopic world, where adolescents are classified into groups based on their personality and their talents. Both novels depict a world very much like our own, but the time of the story lies in the near future. As usual to the dystopic fiction the author pics up some existing progressions from the reality and then extends those conditions into a future, and this way the flaws of the current conditions are revealed. In my article I claim, that Simukka’s novels take under critical consideration the whole Western concept of coming of age. Especially crucial is the idea of growth as being something controllable. In western cultures the growing up of an individual is standardized and regulated by institutions and fields of science such us daycare, school, medicine, and psychology. In Simukka’s novels this idea is exaggerated but still recognizable. 
 The motif of classifications or sorting the adolescents has lately been popular in YA-fantasy and YA-dystopia. Simukka’s novels borrow from two bestsellers: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter -series (1997–2007), and Veronica Roth’s Divergent-series (2011–2013). These examples seem to prove, that the idea of adolescents of being sorted or being classified is important in contemporary genre fiction targeting young audiences. Sorting or classification as motifs seem to be connected to the contemporary understanding of youth and growing up.
 In this article I consider the classification motif in Simukka’s novel. I consentrate especially to the connections between the motif and the wider theme of growing up. I examine the motif beside the Western ideas of growth and coming of age. Besides that I also study the different genre frames Simukka’s novels use to discuss of growing up in contemporary society. These genre traditions include dystopic fiction, YA-literature and fairytale. In this article I propose, that the classification motif allegorizes the demands set to adolescents in contemporary society but also appeals to the young readers as a fantasy of belonging to the group.

This critical essay is an extensive commentary-analysis of the work of historian Niall Ferguson entitled The Square and the Tower. Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook translated and published in Spanish in 2018. The book is located, according to its author, on an intermediate path between dominant historiography, which has tended to underestimate the importance of networks, and conspiracy theorists, who usually exaggerate it. Its central purpose is to highlight the relevance that social networks have had and have in historical events and processes. The analysis carried out here is intended to unravel how this work is a good example, from the United States neoconservative field, of making a historic bestseller at the service of that ideology.

Abstract Following the publication and controversy surrounding American Dirt (2020) by Jeanine Cummins, this essay discusses the process by which American Dirt'™s bestseller status was manufactured in correlation with Flatiron☳ aim to capitalize on a growing Latinx market and on the political visibility of the questions of immigration. It argues that the misrepresentation and commodification of Mexico in the book's form and construction is a central feature of its marketability and success and studies the ways in which the book☳ errors align themselves with representations in Hollywood cinema and television that forward a negative view of Mexico aligned with anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican politics. Finally, the essay discusses the coexistence of these two factors with a growing infrastructure of Hispanophone and translated Latin American literature that competes with, and seeks to challenge, the existence of books like American Dirt.

AbstractThis article explores the continuing linguistic impact of the Mandarin Union Version by investigating and contrasting two Chinese translations of William Paul Young's global bestseller The Shack (2007): the Traditional Chinese version Xiaowu (《小屋》, 2009) and the Simplified Chinese version Pengwu (《棚屋》, 2010). Ever since its publication, the Mandarin Union Version has served as the predominant Bible within Mandarin-speaking Protestant communities across the world. This has brought about the standardisation of terminology in Chinese Protestantism. The Shack, though widely marked as a Christian novel, is also known for its unconventional fictional representations of Christianity that some Christians think depart from orthodoxy. Both Xiaowu and Pengwu were published by non-Christian publishing houses for a general readership. However, Xiaowu, translated by a Christian, exhibits a significant number of phrases that specifically belong to Chinese Christian terminology shaped by the Mandarin Union Version. Pengwu is a contrast in this regard. By comparing extracts from these two Chinese versions, this article highlights how far the Mandarin Union Version has contributed to the formation of the linguistic repertoire of Mandarin-speaking Christian translators as well as linguistic norms for translated Christian-themed texts into Chinese.

The article is a review of books by two foreign authors translated into Russian and published in 2020. The first of these is a popular science publication by Dutch fake researcher Annemarie Bohn. She uses the material of her national and foreign media to tell about the history of the emergence and nature of such a phenomenon of modern media culture as fake. At the same time, the author shows some bias in assessing a number of situations that have developed in recent years in the global information space. Nevertheless, this publication is quite adequate educational in nature, allowing you “to enter the topic” for those who want to learn more about fakes in journalism for the first time. The name of the author of the second peer-reviewed publication is already known to Russian readers. Robert Kiyosaki’s previous book Rich Dad Poor Dad, a world bestseller, was translated and published in Russia. In the new work, the Japanese-American continues a deep and comprehensive analysis of the modern American financial and monetary system. The author uses the concepts of fake and fake manipulation to expose, from his point of view, the imperfections of the existing US financial system.

Otto Hübner’s (1818–1877) international bestseller introduction to political economy, Der kleine Volkswirth, appeared in Turkish in 1869 in two different editions. Two Ottoman officials translated the book into Turkish with different linguistic styles and pedagogical objectives. Beyond being an exceptional case in Ottoman-Turkish economic literature in this respect, the Hübner translations heralded the dawn of popular political economy in the Ottoman Empire. Economic literature before 1869 consisted of works written exclusively for the elite to introduce this new science as an instrument of state administration. Starting with the Hübner translations, we observe the burgeoning of a popular economic literature in the empire aiming at changing the economic mentality and behavior of the masses. This study is a comparative examination of the two Ottoman-Turkish translations of Der kleine Volkswirth in historical context.

The 19th century American bestseller Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) ranks among those novels that have been translated several times into Slovenian. The translations appear to be of particular interest for research from the multicultural perspective since they do testify not only to the bridging of the gap between the Slovenian and American cultures from 1899 on but also to shifts in the familiarity of the targeted Slovenian audience with the cultures of the Near East and with the Judeo-Christian tradition. By highlighting the domestication and foreignization translation procedures, applied to make the adaptations of the novel accessible to the target audience, the study focuses on the changing translation zones and overlapping spaces created between the Slovenian culture and the cultures described in the novel. The article furthermore stresses the differences between the translations as far as the targeted readers are concerned, since the epic ranks among double audience books.

Abstract Whereas Buddhism’s profile is rising in the US, there are surprising ways that Buddhism recirculates in more secular guises in traditionally Buddhist cultures of East Asia. This essay explores an intriguing case. Chi Li’s razor-sharp, passionate poems are quirkily “personal,” but relate very well to a wide spectrum of Chinese readers who made the popular novelist’s surprise poetry debut a bestseller in China. By studying Chi’s extensive use of Buddhist references to tap into issues dear to her, this essay shows that the Chinese readers are receptive to Buddhist ideas more as philosophies, principles, and moral codes than as explicit religion, even though Buddhism has a 2,000-year history in China. It argues that understanding this coded receptiveness helps translate Chi’s personal musings, blasts, and defiance into dialogues that address social norms, environmental issues, and individual complicity in social problems.

Nobody doubts the importance of digital influencers when it comes to the selection and acquisition of new products and services. In the specific field of literary reading, literary blogs, booktubers and specialized websites that act as prescribers of reading stand out. This study presents a descriptive research model in which a multivariate analysis of the main sociodemographic characteristics, assessments, readings and activities developed by the 100 most important reading influencers in Spain was carried out. For this purpose, data were taken from the most widely used reading cataloguing platform, i.e. Goodreads. It was found to be mainly about women with a developed reading habit and with an effervescent and extensive experience in literary blogs, thematic social networks, etc. In addition, the results show that the more influencers evolve as readers the more demanding they become more in their assessments, which in turn translates into greater influence. Influencers’ recognition in the platform, therefore, is subject to their reading experience, critical capacity and personal criteria. Finally, it was learned that the canon of authors and works best valued by these relevant users is heterogeneous, although works and authors related to Young Adult Literature and bestsellers predominate to a certain extent.

Laura Esquivel's 1989 Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate, neither translated into English nor published in the United States until 1992, was both an American bestseller and the basis for an acclaimed motion picture. Interestingly, though, Esquivel's work also seems to be receiving glimmers of the type of critical attention generally reserved for less “popular” works. Two particular critical studies composed in English, one by Kathleen Glenn and the other by Cecelia Lawless, have been devoted entirely to Chocolate, and both of the scholar/authors grace the faculties of reputable American institutions of higher learning. As a student whose academic experience has been replete with elitist attitudes and expressions of disdain for anything that smacks of an appeal to the masses, I was intrigued by Chocolate for this very reason; in a world where scholarly boundaries seem unalterably fixed, a work that appears capable of crossing these rigid lines is, in my opinion, both rare and admirably refreshing. In my studies, I have often hoped for more communication between “popular” and “scholarly” literature; Esquivel's novel provides not only opportunities for this dialogue but for other cross-genre discussions as well.

One of the most popular and most widely cited books in the study of precolonial Africa, particularly of the forest region, is Jacob U. Egharevba's A Short History of Benin. It was first published in the Edo language as Ekhere vb Itan Edo in 1933, and due to its popularity and very high demand, it quickly sold out and was reprinted in 1934. It was then translated by the author and published in English as A Short History of Benin in 1936. This English-language edition has likewise been a bestseller with four editions—the first edition in 1936, the second in 1953, the third in 1960, and the fourth one in 1968, which in turn has had reprints in Ibadan (1991) and Benin City (1994).In 1959 Leoham Adam, Curator of the Ethnographical Collection of Melbourne University in Australia, who claimed to have first read the book in the 1930s, commended Short History for its useful contributions to the study and understanding of African societies. The late R.E. Bradbury, in writing the first foreword to the book's third edition in 1960, claimed that it”…has become something of a classic, known and relied upon not only in Nigeria, but by scholars all over the world, [as]… a valuable, indeed an indispensable, pioneering work.” In a more recent critique, Adiele Afigbo asserted that the book and its thesis has “much support from many respected historians and ethnographers… and figure prominently not only in undergraduate essays but also in Masters and Doctoral dissertations.”

Old age: socio-cultural anti-phenomenonin the literary works of Jiřina ŠiklováJiřina Šiklová is a Czech sociologist and writer. She published under different names, mainly abroad. In the times of the former regime she was persecuted and imprisoned. She wrote anumber of bestselling books: Deník staré paní 2003, Dopisy vnučce 2007, Matky po e-mailu 2009, Stoupenci proměn 2012, Vyhoštěná smrt 2013. Books of this Czech writer haven’t been translated yet into Polish. From the perspective of an old woman she presents old age as a specific moment in human life. Šiklová writes akind of adiary in which she speaks about the current situation brought to her by life. In her books, the writer solves problems between grandparents and grandchildren as well as the issues of asixty year old woman taking care of her octogenarian mother. Šiklová provides an independent reaction to the problems of aging society. She teaches her readers to accept old age, not only as loss of strength, but as atime belonging to the fullness of human life. At the same time in avery business like manner and with no sentiment she offers a number of steps that can help in old age.Stáří — sociálnĕ-kulturní antifenoménv literární tvorbĕ Jiřiny ŠiklovéJiřina Šiklová je česká socioložka apublicistka. Publikovala pod různými jmény, především v zahraničí. Za minulého režimu byla pronásledovaná avězněná. Napsala nĕkolik literárních bestsellerů: Deník staré paní 2003, Dopisy vnučce 2007, Matky po e-mailu 2009, Stoupenci proměn 2012, Vyhoštěná smrt 2013. Knihy české spisovatelky ještĕ nebyly přeložené do polštiny. Z pohledu staré ženy popisuje stáří jako specifický moment v životĕ človĕka. Šiklová píše svého druhu deník, ve kterém hovoří oaktuálních situacích, které jí život přináší. Spisovatelka v knihách řeší problémy mezi prarodiči avnoučaty nebo starosti šedesátileté ženy, která se musí postarat o svoji osmdesátiletou matku. Šiklová představuje svébytnou reakci na problém stárnutí populace. Učí čtenáře přijímat stáří nikoli jako pouhý úbytek sil, ale jako období náležející k plnosti lidského života. Zároveň přitom zcela věcně anesentimentálně upozorňuje na řadu kroků, které mohou stáří usnadnit.

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to establish and analyse the cases of synesthesia metaphors retention in English-Ukrainian translations, in which “less embodied” hearing, smell and taste sensations are mapped on “more embodied” touch sensations.Methods.Synesthesia is understood as a kind of conceptual metaphor within cognitive linguistics. Research methods applied in the article are based on the achievements of cognitive linguistics and the methodology introduced and developed by L. Kovalenko and A. Martyniuk (Kovalenko, Martynyuk, 2018), which allows us to study mental models underlying metaphorical descriptions and establish the type of cognitive operation employed by the translator. We define the cognitive operation of retention following Shuttleworth’s classification (Shuttleworth, 2017) as “translation that is essentially unchanged”. The degree of conventionality and rootedness of metaphorical models in English-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking linguistic cultures is determined within the theory of probability and statistical data obtained from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the General Regional Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (ГРАК). The research material for the article encounters 100 English synesthetic metaphoric descriptions, extracted from Celeste Ng’s bestseller novels “Everything I Never Told You” (Ng, 2014) and “Little Fires Everywhere” (Ng, 2017) and retained in their Ukrainian translations (Інг, 2016; 2018).Results. The study resultsare presented by the detailed analysis of synesthetic metaphorical models’ retention examples, such as HEARING / SMELL / TASTE IS TOUCHING SOFT / SHARP / HOT SURFACE. In our article, the study of synesthetic metaphoric descriptions relative frequencies showed the semantic features, which are common and divergent in their meanings for the representatives of English and Ukrainian linguacultures.Conclusions. The conducted analysis showed that synesthetic metaphoric models are retained when the difficulties faced by the translator are minimal or absent. In this case, the translator resorts to translation with a direct dictionary equivalent. Synesthetic metaphoric models with similar conventionality degrees are retained.Key words: cognitive operation, language corpus, metaphoric model, synesthetic metaphoric description, conventionality degree. Мета статті полягає у встановленні та описі випадків відтворення синестезійних метафор в англо-українських перекладах, у яких «менш втілені» слухові, нюхові та смакові відчуття проєктуються на «більш втілені» дотикові відчуття.Методи. З позицій когнітивної лінгвістики синестезію розуміємо як поширений у мові різновид концептуальної метафори. Методологічне підґрунтя дослідження становить доробок когнітивної лінгвістики та методика Л. Коваленко та А. Мартинюк (Kovalenko, Martynyuk, 2018), що уможливлює вивчення когнітивних моделей, які лежать у підґрунті метафоричних дескрипцій, і встановлення типу когнітивної операції, що застосована перекладачем. Згідно з класифікацією М. Шуттлеворфа когнітивна операція відтворення (Shuttleworth, 2017) – це «переклад, що майже не змінений». Ступінь конвенційності і вкоріненості метафоричних моделей у представників англомовної та україномовної лінгвокультур визначаємо із застосуванням теорії вірогідності та статистичних даних, отриманих із Корпусу сучасної американської англійської мови (COCA) і Генерального регіонального анотованого корпусу української мови (ГРАК). Матеріалом дослі-дження є 100 англомовних синестезійних метафор, вилучених з англомовних текстів романів-бестселерів Celeste Ng “Everything I Never Told You” (Ng, 2014) і “Little Fires Everywhere” (Ng, 2017) та відтворених в українських перекладах цих творів («Несказане» (Інг, 2016) та «Усюди жевріють пожежі» (Інг, 2018)).Результати дослідження представлені детальним аналізом прикладів відтворення синестезійних метафоричних моделей СЛУХОВІ / НЮХОВІ / СМАКОВІ ВІДЧУТТЯ Є ВІДЧУТТЯ ДОТИКУ ДО М’ЯКОЇ / ГОСТРОЇ / ГАРЯЧОЇ ПОВЕРХНІ. Проведений аналіз відносних частот вживання синестезійних метафоричних дескрипцій показав спільні та відмінні семантичні ознаки у значеннях дескрипцій, що вкорінені у свідомості представників англомовної та україномовної лінгво-культур.Висновки. Проведений аналіз показав, що синестезійні метафоричні моделі відтворюються за умови, що труднощі, з якими стикається перекладач, є мінімальними або взагалі відсутні. Водночас перекладач вдається до перекладу за допомогою прямого словникового відповідника. Відтворюються такі моделі синестезійних метафор, у яких ступінь конвенційності в англійській та українській мовах однаковий.Ключові слова: когнітивна операція, корпус мови, метафорична модель, синестезійнаметафорична дескрипція, ступінь конвенційності.

Based on the bibliography method (mainly Bibliografia literatury dla dzieci i młodzieży 1918-1939. Literatura polska i przekłady, by B. Krassowska i A. Grefkowicz, Warszawa, 1995), the article presents the extent of foreign literature for young people translated into Polish, edited in Poland in 1918-1939. The most popular languages, literary genres, bestseller authors and titles, the intensity of publishing in periods, the biggest publishers, and the most popular series are analyzed. Besides classics, many foreign light titles were published, because of the lack of such literature in the Polish book market. They were attacked by literary critics and educators, but very widely-read in fact. The abundance and variety of foreign literature for children and young adults in 1918-1939 are emphasized. Language mosaic and author-subject diversity of these books had never been repeated after World War II, mainly due to political reasons.
 
 

AbstractIn the years immediately following the Second World War, three books written by German professors of Romance Philology were published in Switzerland: Mimesis by Erich Auerbach in 1946, European literature and the Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1948, and Montaigne by Hugo Friedrich in 1949. Even if the subjects of these studies and the approaches of their authors are different, their aim is nevertheless the same: They want to contribute to the idea of continuity in European literature. It is certainly logical to conclude that Auerbach, banished from Germany by the Nazi authorities because of his Jewish heritage, Curtius, surviving the years from 1933 to 1945 in »inner emigration«, and Friedrich, serving as interpreter in the German army, learned the lessons of the past and evoke the heritage of literature as an antidote to ideological blindness and fanaticism. Friedrich, whose study of Montaigne’s Les Essais forms the center of the following article, is internationally known first and foremost for his bestseller Structure of modern poetry (1957), translated into thirteen languages, but also his work Montaigne, which is the first comprehensive study of Montaigne’s personality and work in German and, even today, far from being outdated. Strangely enough, the book is actually only available in the English translation by Dawn Eng. It helps the modern reader to understand not only the complex composition of Montaigne’s essays, but also their epoch-making place in French moralistic literature.

Teesid: Artiklis uuritakse Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumis asuvat mahukat, ligi 800 lk tõlkekäsikirja „Norem Robinson“, mida võib pidada esimeseks eesti kirjanduse täiemahuliseks robinsonaadiks. Selle valmistas Pärnu koolmeister Heinrich Gottlieb Lorenzsonn saksa pedagoogi ja koolikirjaniku Joachim Heinrich Campe menukast noorsooromaanist „Robinson der Jüngere“ (1779–1780). Tõlge valmis 1822.–1823. aastal, kuid jõudis trükki alles 1842. aastal tugevasti kärbitud ja mugandatud kujul. Toetudes deskriptiivse tõlkeuurimuse analüüsikategooriatele, vaadeldakse artiklis, millised tegurid tõlkeprotsessi suunasid ja milline oli kultuuriruum, kuhu tõlge omal ajal paigutus.SU M M A R YThis article discusses a voluminous manuscript translation of almost 800 pages entitled Norem Robinson (Engl. Robinson the Younger), from the collections of the Estonian Literary Museum. This manuscript can be considered as the first complete Robinsonade in Estonian literature. Its author is a schoolteacher from Pärnu, Heinrich Gottlieb Lorenzsonn (1803–1847), who translated it from the youth novel Robinson der Jüngere(1779–1780, Engl. Robinson the Younger), a bestseller by the educator, writer and a major representative of German Enlightenment, Heinrich Joachim Campe. Lorenzsonn’s translation was completed in 1822–1823, but not printed until 1842 in a strongly adapted version titled Norema Robinsoni ello ja juhtumised ühhe tühja sare peäl (Engl. The Life and Adventures of Robinson the Younger on a deserted island). The print version of the Robinsonade lacks a pedagogical frame story, where the father tells children about the adventures of Robinson and takes the opportunity to discuss and imitate with children all the actions taken by Robinson the Younger. Due to this and other extirpated parts, the possible target audience was enlarged – besides children and youth, the text was now addressed to adults as well.In accordance with the Descriptive Translation Studies, this article focused on the one hand on the Lorenzsonn's Campe-translation, and on the other hand, on the context of the target culture, arriving at conclusions concerning the factors influencing the translation process. The article uses Gideon Toury’s treatment of translation norms to discuss ideosyncrasies of the participants of the translation process (translator, mentor, censor), as well as the relevance of other norms. First preliminary norms regarding translation policy are analysed. Secondly, initial norms determine whether the translation is oriented to the source text and culture (the goal is adequacy) or to the target text and culture (the goal is acceptance). Thirdly, operational norms direct particular translation decisions. Operational translation norms can be divided further into matricial norms that concern the fullness of the translated text and textual-linguistic norms that concern the questions of grammar, syntax, style etc.The article focuses on the presumed decisions of Heinrich Gottlieb Lorenzsonn and his teacher and mentor, well-known Baltic German Estophile Johann Heinrich Rosenplänter, in the translation process. In addition, the article discusses the educational circumstances in primary schools for peasants in Estonia in the first half of the 19th century and the reading skills of potential Estonian-speaking readers at that time. Clearly, at the beginning of the 19th century, the Estonian-speaking audience was too small and not yet ready for such voluminous, demanding aesthetic and scientific reading materials. The comparative analysis of the translation manuscript and the printed text focuses on the lexical, semantic and grammatical levels, concluding that the manuscript aspires to adequacy with respect to Campe’s Robinsonade, but the printed version appeals to the Estonian-speaking reader and the Estonian cultural context. This can be explained by the fact that the aim of the manuscript was language study, while with the printed book Lorenzsonn wanted to bring the huge translation work from his early years to the literary market.Although both texts are linguistically clumsy, and the printed text has lost value because of the extirpations, it is still a translation gem dating from the very beginnings of Estonian literature, one that has not received sufficient recognition in Estonian literary history. The translation work of Heinrich Gottlieb Lorenzsonn, carried out at a time when the Estonian language was not yet fully developed is also a fact that has not been acknowledged as it well deserves to be. Further, this article undertakes to rectify two misunderstandings of Estonian literary history. First, Lorenzsonn’s Campe-translation is not a chapbook, although Estonian literary history has always defined it as such. It is demanding reading material which aims to enlarge the horizon of the Estonian-speaking reader in fields such as exotic flora and fauna, morals and ethics, and different methods of work, while simultaneously entertaining the reader and offering aesthetic pleasure. The second misunderstanding concerns the fact that the first Robinsonade of Estonian literature is considered to be Weikisi Hanso luggu tühja sare peal, (1839, Engl. A Story of the Little Hans on an deserted island) an adaptation by Johann Thomasson from Gottfried der Einsiedler (1829, Engl. Gottfried, the hermit), a youth story by German Pietist and children’s and youth writer Christoph von Schmid. Even though Thomasson’s Robinsonade, which can without hesitation be defined as a chapbook, was printed a few years earlier than Lorenzsonn’s Campe adaptation, Lorenzsonn accomplished his translation twenty years earlier. Also, in terms of artistic quality and translation techniques, Lorenzsonn’s huge work is on a much higher level than Thomasson’s adaptation.

This paper rests on how the two bestseller horror novels chosen to compare actually connect to each other. It reviews twin interspecies relationships. The first one is a young adult debut novel The Silver Kiss (2009) by English born American author Annette Curtis Klause. It was published in 1990 and republished in 2009 with two additional short stories, “The Summer of Love” and “The Christmas Cat.” Michigan Library Association picked it as the ‘Best Book of the Year Honor Book‘ in 1990. School Library Journal too gave it place among the Best Books in the same year and American Library Association, in 1991, considered it among the Best Books for Young Adults. The other is also a debut work Let the Right One In (original Swedish: Lat denratteKomma in), also known as Let Me In (2004). It is a vampire fiction novel written by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist and translated by Ebba Segerberg into English (2008).The subject of both the works taken into consideration here is loss, relationships and vampires. ‘Species’ means type or class of individuals sharing common characteristics, whereas inter-species means taking place between species. The Silver Kiss unfolds the tale of the teenager heroine Zoe’s life, taking into account her mother’s battle with cancer and death. She is very courageous, but all alone. She is in need of someone who can hold her in sleepless nights. Late one night, she takes a walk around the garden where she meets the dashing and silver haired Simon. He realizes the agony of desolation and death and Zoe’s pensive contemplation of her sinking mother. Both of them become reconciled to emotional loss via their budding inter-relation and are strongly concerned for each other. Let the Right One In revolves around the affinity betwixt Oskar Eriksson, who is twelve years of age and an age-old vampire in the figure of Eli who also happens to be a child. Oskar is all the time teased in school by a bunch of bullies, who take pleasure in inflicting severe pain and shame upon him. With Eli’s support, he is able to retaliate against his cuss harassers. A distinctive impression of vampirism has been created by both Klause and Lindqvist together. Connectively, the inferno strikes one with all the returning warmth. Details of the figures’ everyday lives have been shared with the readers appealingly. Initially, the whole lot of selves give the impression of being unattached, after all they come to be interrelated before long. By-and-large, the novels under discussion in this place are manifold and come up with the matters in question for the reviewers to ponder over.
 
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Engagement in any capacity with mainstream media since mid-2001 has meant immersion in the cross-platform, multimedia phenomenon of Harry Potter: Muggle outcast; boy wizard; corporate franchise. Consumers even casually perusing contemporary popular culture could be forgiven for suspecting they have entered a MÃbius loop in which Harry Potter-related media products and merchandise are ubiquitous: books; magazine cover stories; newspaper articles; websites; television specials; hastily assembled author biographies; advertisements on broadcast and pay television; children's merchandising; and theme park attractions. Each of these media commodities has been anchored in and cross-promoted by America Online-Time Warner's (AOL-TW) first instalment in a projected seven-film sequence—Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.1 The marketing campaign has gradually escalated in the three years elapsing between AOL-TW subsidiary Warner Bros' purchase from J.K. Rowling of the film and merchandising rights to the first two Harry Potter books, and the November 2001 world premiere of the film (Sherber 55). As current AOL-TW CEO Richard Parsons accurately forecast, "You're not going to be able to go anywhere without knowing about it. This could be a bigger franchise than Star Wars" (Auletta 50). Yet, AOL-TW's promotional strategy did not limit itself to creating mere awareness of the film's release. Rather, its tactic was to create an all-encompassing environment structured around the immense value of the Harry Potter brand—a "brand cocoon" which consumers do not so much enter and exit as choose to exist within (Klein 2002). In twenty-first-century mass marketing, the art is to target affluent consumers willing to direct their informational, entertainment, and consumption practices increasingly within the "walled garden" of a single conglomerate's content offerings (Auletta 55). Such an idealised modern consumer avidly samples the diversified product range of the parent conglomerate, but does so specifically by consuming multiple products derived from essentially the same content reservoir. Provided a match between consumer desire and brand can be achieved with sufficient accuracy and demographic breadth, the commercial returns are obvious: branded consumers pay multiple times for only marginally differentiated products. The Brand-Conglomerate Nexus Recyclable content has always been embraced by media industries, as cultural commodities such as early films of stage variety acts, Hollywood studio-era literary adaptations, and movie soundtrack LPs attest. For much of the twentieth century, the governing dynamic of content recycling was sequential, in that a content package (be it a novel, stage production or film) would succeed in its home medium and then, depending upon its success and potential for translation across formats, could be repackaged in a subsequent medium. Successful content repackaging may re-energise demand for earlier formatting of the same content (as film adaptations of literary bestsellers reliably increase sales of the originating novel). Yet the cultural industries providing risk capital to back content repackaging formerly required solid evidence that content had achieved immense success in its first medium before contemplating reformulations into new media. The cultural industries radically restructured in the last decades of the twentieth century to produce the multi-format phenomenon of which Harry Potter is the current apotheosis: multiple product lines in numerous corporate divisions are promoted simultaneously, the synchronicity of product release being crucial to the success of the franchise as a whole. The release of individual products may be staggered, but the goal is for products to be available simultaneously so that they work in aggregate to drive consumer awareness of the umbrella brand. Such streaming of content across parallel media formats is in many ways the logical culmination of broader late-twentieth-century developments. Digital technology has functionally integrated what were once discrete media operating platforms, and major media conglomerates have acquired subsidiaries in virtually all media formats on a global scale. Nevertheless, it remains true that the commercial risks inherent in producing, distributing and promoting a cross-format media phenomenon are vastly greater than the formerly dominant sequential approach, massively escalating financial losses should the elusive consumer-brand fit fail to materialise. A key to media corporations' seemingly quixotic willingness to expose themselves to such risk is perhaps best provided by Michael Harkavy, Warner Bros' vice-president of worldwide licensing, in his comments on Warner Music Group's soundtrack for the first Harry Potter film: It will be music for the child in us all, something we hope to take around the world that will take us to the next level of synergy between consumer products, the [AOL-TW cable channel] Cartoon Network, our music, film, and home video groups—building a longtime franchise for Harry as a team effort. (Traiman 51) The relationship between AOL-TW and the superbrand Harry Potter is essentially symbiotic. AOL-TW, as the world's largest media conglomerate, has the resources to exploit fully economies of scale in production and distribution of products in the vast Harry Potter franchise. Similarly, AOL-TW is pre-eminently placed to exploit the economies of scope afforded by its substantial holdings in every form of content delivery, allowing cross-subsidisation of the various divisions and, crucially, cross-promotion of the Harry Potter brand in an endless web of corporate self-referentiality. Yet it is less frequently acknowledged that AOL-TW needs the Harry Potter brand as much as the global commercialisation of Harry Potter requires AOL-TW. The conglomerate seeks a commercially protean megabrand capable of streaming across all its media formats to drive operating synergies between what have historically been distinct commercial divisions ("Welcome"; Pulley; Auletta 55). In light of AOL-TW's record US$54.2b losses in the first quarter of 2002, the long-term viability of the Harry Potter franchise is, if anything, still more crucial to the conglomerate's health than was envisaged at the time of its dot.com-fuelled January 2000 merger (Goldberg 23; "AOL" 35). AOL-TW's Richard Parsons conceptualises Harry Potter specifically as an asset "driving synergy both ways", neatly encapsulating the symbiotic interdependence between AOL-TW and its star franchise: "we use the different platforms to drive the movie, and the movie to drive business across the platforms" ("Harry Potter" 61). Characteristics of the Harry Potter Brand AOL-TW's enthusiasm to mesh its corporate identity with the Harry Potter brand stems in the first instance from demonstrated consumer loyalty to the Harry Potter character: J.K. Rowling's four books have sold in excess of 100m copies in 47 countries and have been translated into 47 languages.2 In addition, the brand has shown a promising tendency towards demographic bracket-creep, attracting loyal adult readers in sufficient numbers to prompt UK publisher Bloomsbury to diversify into adult-targeted editions. As alluring for AOL-TW as this synchronic brand growth is, the real goldmine inheres in the brand's potential for diachronic growth. From her first outlines of the concept, Rowling conceived of the Potter story as a seven-part series, which from a marketing perspective ensures the broadscale re-promotion of the Harry Potter brand on an almost annual basis throughout the current decade. This moreover assists re-release of the first film on an approximately five-year basis to new audiences previously too young to fall within its demographic catchment—the exact strategy of "classic" rebranding which has underwritten rival studio Disney's fortunes.3 Complementing this brand extension is the potential to grow child consumers through the brand as Harry Potter sequels are produced. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone director Chris Columbus spruiks enthusiastically that "the beauty of making these books into films is that with each one, Harry is a year older, so [child actor] Daniel [Radcliffe] can remain Harry as long as we keep making them" (Manelis 111). Such comments suggest the benefits of luring child consumers through the brand as they mature, harnessing their intense loyalty to the child cast and, through the cast, to the brand itself. The over-riding need to be everything to everyone—exciting to new consumers entering the brand for the first time, comfortingly familiar to already seasoned consumers returning for a repeat hit—helps explain the retro-futuristic feel of the first film's production design. Part 1950s suburban Hitchcock, Part Dickensian London, part Cluny-tapestry medievalism, part public school high-Victorianism, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone strives for a commercially serviceable timelessness, in so doing reinforcing just how very twenty-first-century its conception actually is. In franchise terms, this conscious drive towards retro-futurism fuels Harry Potter's "toyetic potential" (Siegel, "Toys" 19). The ease with which the books' complex plots and mise-en-scene lend themselves to subsidiary rights sales and licensed merchandising in part explains Harry Potter's appeal to commercial media. AOL-TW executives in their public comments have consistently stayed on-message in emphasising "magic" as the brand's key aspirational characteristic, and certainly scenes such as the arrival at Hogwarts, the Quidditch match, the hatching of Hagrid's dragon and the final hunt through the school's dungeons serve as brilliant advertisements for AOL-TW's visual effects divisions. Yet the film exploits many of these "magic" scenes to introduce key tropes of its merchandising programme—Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, chocolate frogs, Hogwarts house colours, the sorting hat, Scabbers the rat, Hedwig, the Remembrall—such that it resembles a series of home shopping advertisements with unusually high production values. It is this railroading of the film's narrative into opportunities for consumerist display which leads film critic Cynthia Fuchs to dub the Diagon Alley shopping scene "the film's cagiest moment, at once a familiar activity for school kid viewers and an apt metaphor for what this movie is all about—consumption, of everything in sight." More telling than the normalising of shopping as filmic activity in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the eclipse of the book's checks on commodity fetishism: its very British sensitivity to class snubs for the large and impecunious Weasley family; the puzzled contempt Hogwarts initiates display for Muggle money; the gentle ribbing at children's obsession with branded sports goods. The casual browser in the Warner Bros store confronted with a plastic, light-up version of the Nimbus 2000 Quidditch broomstick understands that even the most avid authorial commitment to delimiting spin-off merchandise can try the media conglomerate's hand only so far. Constructing the Harry Potter Franchise The film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone constitutes the indispensable brand anchor for AOL-TW's intricate publicity and sales strategy around Harry Potter. Because content recycling within global media conglomerates is increasingly lead by film studio divisions, the opening weekend box office taking for a brand-anchoring film is crucial to the success of the broader franchise and, by extension, to the corporation as a whole. Critic Thomas Schatz's observation that the film's opening serves as "the "launch site" for its franchise development, establishing its value in all other media markets" (83) highlights the precariousness of such multi-party financial investment all hinging upon first weekend takings. The fact that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone broke (then standing) box office records with its 16 November 2001 three-day weekend openings in the US and the UK, garnering US$93.2m and GBP16m respectively, constituted the crucial first stage in AOL-TW's brand strategy (Collins 9; Fierman and Jensen 26). But it formed only an initial phase, as subsequent content recycling and cross-promotion was then structured to radiate outwards from this commercial epicentre. Three categories of recycled AOL-TW Harry Potter content are discernible, although they are frequently overlapping and not necessarily sequential. The first category, most closely tied to the film itself, are instances of reused digital content, specifically in the advance publicity trailer viewable on the official website, and downloads of movie clips, film stills and music samples from the film and its soundtrack.4 Secondly, at one remove from the film itself, is AOL-TW's licensing of film "characters, names and related indicia" to secondary manufacturers, creating tie-in merchandise designed to cross-promote the Harry Potter brand and stoke consumer investment (both emotional and financial) in the phenomenon.5 This campaign phase was itself tactically designed with two waves of merchandising release: a September 2000 launch of book-related merchandise (with no use of film-related Harry Potter indicia permitted); and a second, better selling February 2001 release of ancillary products sporting Harry Potter film logos and visual branding which coincided with and reinforced the marketing push specifically around the film's forthcoming release (Sherber 55; Siegel, "From Hype" 24; Lyman and Barnes C1; Martin 5). Finally, and most crucial to the long-term strategy of the parent conglomerate, Harry Potter branding was used to drive consumer take up of AOL-TW products not generally associated with the Harry Potter brand, as a means of luring consumers out of their established technological or informational comfort zones. Hence, the official Harry Potter website is laced with far from accidental offers to trial Internet service provider AOL; TimeWarner magazines Entertainment Weekly, People, and Time ran extensive taster stories about the film and its loyal fan culture (Jensen 56-57; Fierman and Jensen 26-28; "Magic Kingdom" 132-36; Corliss 136; Dickinson 115); AOL-TW's Moviefone bookings service advertised pre-release Harry Potter tickets on its website; and Warner Bros Movie World theme park on the Gold Coast in Australia heavily promoted its Harry Potter Movie Magic Experience. Investment in a content brand on the scale of AOL-TW's outlay of US$1.4m for Harry Potter must not only drive substantial business across every platform of the converged media conglomerate by providing premium content (Grover 66). It must, crucially for the long run, also drive take up and on-going subscriptions to the delivery services owned by the parent corporation. Energising such all-encompassing strategising is the corporate nirvana of seamless synergy: between content and distribution; between the Harry Potter and AOL-TW brands; between conglomerate and consumer. Notes 1. The film, like the first of J.K. Rowling's books, is titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the "metaphysics-averse" US ("Harry Potter" 61). 2. Publishing statistics sourced from Horn and Jones (59), Manelis (110) and Bloomsbury Publishing's Harry Potter website: http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harryp.... 3. Interestingly, Disney tangentially acknowledged the extent to which AOL-TW has appropriated Disney's own content recycling strategies. In a film trailer for the Pixar/Disney animated collaboration Monsters, Inc. which screened in Australia and the US before Harry Potter sessions, two monsters play a game of charades to which the answer is transparently "Harry Potter." In the way of such homages from one media giant to another, it nevertheless subtly directs the audience to the Disney product screening in an adjacent cinema. 4. The official Harry Potter film website is http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com. The official site for the soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone is: http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com. 5. J.K. Rowling." A page and a half of non-negotiable "Harry Potter Terms of Use" further spells out prohibitions on use or modification of site content without the explicit (and unlikely) consent of AOL-TW (refer: http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/te...). References "AOL losses 'sort of a deep disappointment'." Weekend Australian 18-19 May 2002: 35. Auletta, Ken. "Leviathan." New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001: 50-56, 58-61. Collins, Luke. "Harry Potter's Magical $178m Opening." Australian Financial Review 20 Nov. 2001: 9. Corliss, Richard. "Wizardry without Magic." Time 19 Nov. 2001: 136. Dickinson, Amy. "Why Movies make Readers." Time 10 Dec. 2001: 115. Fierman, Daniel, and Jeff Jensen. "Potter of Gold: J.K. Rowling's Beloved Wiz Kid hits Screensand Breaks Records." Entertainment Weekly 30 Nov. 2001: 26-28. Fuchs, Cynthia. "The Harry Hype." PopPolitics.com 19 Nov. 2001: n.pag. Online. Internet. 8 Mar. 2002. Available <http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml>. Goldberg, Andy. "Time Will Tell." Sydney Morning Herald 27-28 Apr. 2002: 23. Grover, Ronald. "Harry Potter and the Marketer's Millstone." Business Week 15 Oct. 2001: 66. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Dir. Chris Columbus. Screenplay by Steve Kloves. Warner Bros, 2001. "Harry Potter and the Synergy Test." Economist 10 Nov. 2001: 61-62. Herman, Edward S., and Robert W. McChesney. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell, 1997. Horn, John, and Malcolm Jones. "The Bubble with Harry." The Bulletin/Newsweek 13 Nov. 2001: 58-59. Jensen, Jeff. "Holiday Movie Preview: Potter's Field." Entertainment Weekly 16 Nov. 2001: 56-57. Klein, Naomi. "Naomi KleinNo Logo." The Media Report. ABC Radio National webtranscript. Broadcast in Sydney, 17 Jan. 2002. Online. Internet. 19 Feb. 2002. Available <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm>. Lyman, Rick, and Julian E. Barnes. "The Toy War for Holiday Movies is a Battle Among 3 Heavyweights." New York Times 12 Nov. 2001: C1. "Magic Kingdom." People Weekly 14 Jan. 2002: 132-36. Manelis, Michele. "Potter Gold." Bulletin 27 Nov. 2001: 110-11. Martin, Peter. "Rowling Stock." Weekend Australian 24-25 Nov. 2001: Review, 1, 4-5. Pulley, Brett. "Morning After." Forbes 7 Feb. 2000: 54-56. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Schatz, Thomas. "The Return of the Hollywood Studio System." Conglomerates and the Media. Erik Barnouw et al. New York: New Press, 1997. 73-106. Sherber, Anne. "Licensing 2000 Showcases Harry Potter, Rudolph for Kids." Billboard 8 Jul. 2000: 55. Siegel, Seth M. "Toys & Movies: Always? Never? Sometimes!" Brandweek 12 Feb. 2001: 19. ---. "From Hype to Hope." Brandweek 11 Jun. 2001: 24. Traiman, Steve. "Harry Potter, Powerpuff Girls on A-list at Licensing 2000." Billboard 1 Jul. 2000: 51, 53. "Welcome to the 21st Century." Business Week 24 Jan. 2000: 32-34, 36-38. Links http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harrypotter/muggles http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/terms.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Murray, Simone. "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php>. Chicago Style Murray, Simone, "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Murray, Simone. (2002) Harry Potter, Inc.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]).


 
 
 On May 18, 2003, the Australian Minister for Education, Brendon Nelson, appeared on the Channel Nine Sunday programme. The Yoda of political journalism, Laurie Oakes, attacked him personally and professionally. He disclosed to viewers that the Minister for Education, Science and Training had suffered a false start in his education, enrolling in one semester of an economics degree that was never completed. The following year, he commenced a medical qualification and went on to become a practicing doctor. He did not pay fees for any of his University courses. When reminded of these events, Dr Nelson became agitated, and revealed information not included in the public presentation of the budget of that year, including a ‘cap’ on HECS-funded places of five years for each student. He justified such a decision with the cliché that Australia’s taxpayers do not want “professional students completing degree after degree.” The Minister confirmed that the primary – and perhaps the only – task for university academics was to ‘train’ young people for the workforce. The fact that nearly 50% of students in some Australian Universities are over the age of twenty five has not entered his vision. He wanted young people to complete a rapid degree and enter the workforce, to commence paying taxes and the debt or loan required to fund a full fee-paying place. Now – nearly two years after this interview and with the Howard government blessed with a new mandate – it is time to ask how this administration will order education and value teaching and learning. The curbing of the time available to complete undergraduate courses during their last term in office makes plain the Australian Liberal Government’s stance on formal, publicly-funded lifelong learning. The notion that a student/worker can attain all required competencies, skills, attributes, motivations and ambitions from a single degree is an assumption of the new funding model. It is also significant to note that while attention is placed on the changing sources of income for universities, there have also been major shifts in the pattern of expenditure within universities, focusing on branding, marketing, recruitment, ‘regional’ campuses and off-shore courses. Similarly, the short-term funding goals of university research agendas encourage projects required by industry, rather than socially inflected concerns. There is little inevitable about teaching, research and education in Australia, except that the Federal Government will not create a fully-funded model for lifelong learning. The task for those of us involved in – and committed to – education in this environment is to probe the form and rationale for a (post) publicly funded University. This short paper for the ‘order’ issue of M/C explores learning and teaching within our current political and economic order. Particularly, I place attention on the synergies to such an order via phrases like the knowledge economy and the creative industries. To move beyond the empty promises of just-in-time learning, on-the-job training, graduate attributes and generic skills, we must reorder our assumptions and ask difficult questions of those who frame the context in which education takes place. For the term of your natural life Learning is a big business. Whether discussing the University of the Third Age, personal development courses, self help bestsellers or hard-edged vocational qualifications, definitions of learning – let alone education – are expanding. Concurrent with this growth, governments are reducing centralized funding and promoting alternative revenue streams. The diversity of student interests – or to use the language of the time, client’s learning goals – is transforming higher education into more than the provision of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. The expansion of the student body beyond the 18-25 age group and the desire to ‘service industry’ has reordered the form and purpose of formal education. The number of potential students has expanded extraordinarily. As Lee Bash realized Today, some estimates suggest that as many as 47 percent of all students enrolled in higher education are over 25 years old. In the future, as lifelong learning becomes more integrated into the fabric of our culture, the proportion of adult students is expected to increase. And while we may not yet realize it, the academy is already being transformed as a result. (35) Lifelong learning is the major phrase and trope that initiates and justifies these changes. Such expansive economic opportunities trigger the entrepreneurial directives within universities. If lifelong learning is taken seriously, then the goals, entry standards, curriculum, information management policies and assessments need to be challenged and changed. Attention must be placed on words and phrases like ‘access’ and ‘alternative entry.’ Even more consideration must be placed on ‘outcomes’ and ‘accountability.’ Lifelong learning is a catchphrase for a change in purpose and agenda. Courses are developed from a wide range of education providers so that citizens can function in, or at least survive, the agitation of the post-work world. Both neo-liberal and third way models of capitalism require the labeling and development of an aspirational class, a group who desires to move ‘above’ their current context. Such an ambiguous economic and social goal always involves more than the vocational education and training sector or universities, with the aim being to seamlessly slot education into a ‘lifestyle.’ The difficulties with this discourse are two-fold. Firstly, how effectively can these aspirational notions be applied and translated into a real family and a real workplace? Secondly, does this scheme increase the information divide between rich and poor? There are many characteristics of an effective lifelong learner including great personal motivation, self esteem, confidence and intellectual curiosity. In a double shifting, change-fatigued population, the enthusiasm for perpetual learning may be difficult to summon. With the casualization of the post-Fordist workplace, it is no surprise that policy makers and employers are placing the economic and personal responsibility for retraining on individual workers. Instead of funding a training scheme in the workplace, there has been a devolving of skill acquisition and personal development. Through the twentieth century, and particularly after 1945, education was the track to social mobility. The difficulty now – with degree inflation and the loss of stable, secure, long-term employment – is that new modes of exclusion and disempowerment are being perpetuated through the education system. Field recognized that “the new adult education has been embraced most enthusiastically by those who are already relatively well qualified.” (105) This is a significant realization. Motivation, meta-learning skills and curiosity are increasingly being rewarded when found in the already credentialed, empowered workforce. Those already in work undertake lifelong learning. Adult education operates well for members of the middle class who are doing well and wish to do better. If success is individualized, then failure is also cast on the self, not the social system or policy. The disempowered are blamed for their own conditions and ‘failures.’ The concern, through the internationalization of the workforce, technological change and privatization of national assets, is that failure in formal education results in social exclusion and immobility. Besides being forced into classrooms, there are few options for those who do not wish to learn, in a learning society. Those who ‘choose’ not be a part of the national project of individual improvement, increased market share, company competitiveness and international standards are not relevant to the economy. But there is a personal benefit – that may have long term political consequences – from being ‘outside’ society. Perhaps the best theorist of the excluded is not sourced from a University, but from the realm of fictional writing. Irvine Welsh, author of the landmark Trainspotting, has stated that What we really need is freedom from choice … People who are in work have no time for anything else but work. They have no mental space to accommodate anything else but work. Whereas people who are outside the system will always find ways of amusing themselves. Even if they are materially disadvantaged they’ll still find ways of coping, getting by and making their own entertainment. (145-6) A blurring of work and learning, and work and leisure, may seem to create a borderless education, a learning framework uninhibited by curriculum, assessment or power structures. But lifelong learning aims to place as many (national) citizens as possible in ‘the system,’ striving for success or at least a pay increase which will facilitate the purchase of more consumer goods. Through any discussion of work-place training and vocationalism, it is important to remember those who choose not to choose life, who choose something else, who will not follow orders. Everybody wants to work The great imponderable for complex economic systems is how to manage fluctuations in labour and the market. The unstable relationship between need and supply necessitates flexibility in staffing solutions, and short-term supplementary labour options. When productivity and profit are the primary variables through which to judge successful management, then the alignments of education and employment are viewed and skewed through specific ideological imperatives. The library profession is an obvious occupation that has confronted these contradictions. It is ironic that the occupation that orders knowledge is experiencing a volatile and disordered workplace. In the past, it had been assumed that librarians hold a degree while technicians do not, and that technicians would not be asked to perform – unsupervised – the same duties as librarians. Obviously, such distinctions are increasingly redundant. Training packages, structured through competency-based training principles, have ensured technicians and librarians share knowledge systems which are taught through incremental stages. Mary Carroll recognized the primary questions raised through this change. If it is now the case that these distinctions have disappeared do we need to continue to draw them between professional and para-professional education? Does this mean that all sectors of the education community are in fact learning/teaching the same skills but at different levels so that no unique set of skills exist? (122) With education reduced to skills, thereby discrediting generalist degrees, the needs of industry have corroded the professional standards and stature of librarians. Certainly, the abilities of library technicians are finally being valued, but it is too convenient that one of the few professions dominated by women has suffered a demeaning of knowledge into competency. Lifelong learning, in this context, has collapsed high level abilities in information management into bite sized chunks of ‘skills.’ The ideology of lifelong learning – which is rarely discussed – is that it serves to devalue prior abilities and knowledges into an ever-expanding imperative for ‘new’ skills and software competencies. For example, ponder the consequences of Hitendra Pillay and Robert Elliott’s words: The expectations inherent in new roles, confounded by uncertainty of the environment and the explosion of information technology, now challenge us to reconceptualise human cognition and develop education and training in a way that resonates with current knowledge and skills. (95) Neophilliacal urges jut from their prose. The stress on ‘new roles,’ and ‘uncertain environments,’ the ‘explosion of information technology,’ ‘challenges,’ ‘reconceptualisations,’ and ‘current knowledge’ all affirms the present, the contemporary, and the now. Knowledge and expertise that have taken years to develop, nurture and apply are not validated through this educational brief. The demands of family, work, leisure, lifestyle, class and sexuality stretch the skin taut over economic and social contradictions. To ease these paradoxes, lifelong learning should stress pedagogy rather than applications, and context rather than content. Put another way, instead of stressing the link between (gee wizz) technological change and (inevitable) workplace restructuring and redundancies, emphasis needs to be placed on the relationship between professional development and verifiable technological outcomes, rather than spruiks and promises. Short term vocationalism in educational policy speaks to the ordering of our public culture, requiring immediate profits and a tight dialogue between education and work. Furthering this logic, if education ‘creates’ employment, then it also ‘creates’ unemployment. Ironically, in an environment that focuses on the multiple identities and roles of citizens, students are reduced to one label – ‘future workers.’ Obviously education has always been marinated in the political directives of the day. The industrial revolution introduced a range of technical complexities to the workforce. Fordism necessitated that a worker complete a task with precision and speed, requiring a high tolerance of stress and boredom. Now, more skills are ‘assumed’ by employers at the time that workplaces are off-loading their training expectations to the post-compulsory education sector. Therefore ‘lifelong learning’ is a political mask to empower the already empowered and create a low-level skill base for low paid workers, with the promise of competency-based training. Such ideologies never need to be stated overtly. A celebration of ‘the new’ masks this task. Not surprisingly therefore, lifelong learning has a rich new life in ordering creative industries strategies and frameworks. Codifying the creative The last twenty years have witnessed an expanding jurisdiction and justification of the market. As part of Tony Blair’s third way, the creative industries and the knowledge economy became catchwords to demonstrate that cultural concerns are not only economically viable but a necessity in the digital, post-Fordist, information age. Concerns with intellectual property rights, copyright, patents, and ownership of creative productions predominate in such a discourse. Described by Charles Leadbeater as Living on Thin Air, this new economy is “driven by new actors of production and sources of competitive advantage – innovation, design, branding, know-how – which are at work on all industries.” (10) Such market imperatives offer both challenges and opportunity for educationalists and students. Lifelong learning is a necessary accoutrement to the creative industries project. Learning cities and communities are the foundations for design, music, architecture and journalism. In British policy, and increasingly in Queensland, attention is placed on industry-based research funding to address this changing environment. In 2000, Stuart Cunningham and others listed the eight trends that order education, teaching and learning in this new environment. The Changes to the Provision of Education Globalization The arrival of new information and communication technologies The development of a knowledge economy, shortening the time between the development of new ideas and their application. The formation of learning organizations User-pays education The distribution of knowledge through interactive communication technologies (ICT) Increasing demand for education and training Scarcity of an experienced and trained workforce Source: S. Cunningham, Y. Ryan, L. Stedman, S. Tapsall, K. Bagdon, T. Flew and P. Coaldrake. The Business of Borderless Education. Canberra: DETYA Evaluation and Investigations Program [EIP], 2000. This table reverberates with the current challenges confronting education. Mobilizing such changes requires the lubrication of lifelong learning tropes in university mission statements and the promotion of a learning culture, while also acknowledging the limited financial conditions in which the educational sector is placed. For university scholars facilitating the creative industries approach, education is “supplying high value-added inputs to other enterprises,” (Hartley and Cunningham 5) rather than having value or purpose beyond the immediately and applicably economic. The assumption behind this table is that the areas of expansion in the workforce are the creative and service industries. In fact, the creative industries are the new service sector. This new economy makes specific demands of education. Education in the ‘old economy’ and the ‘new economy’ Old Economy New Economy Four-year degree Forty-year degree Training as a cost Training as a source of competitive advantage Learner mobility Content mobility Distance education Distributed learning Correspondence materials with video Multimedia centre Fordist training – one size fits all Tailored programmes Geographically fixed institutions Brand named universities and celebrity professors Just-in-case Just-in-time Isolated learners Virtual learning communities Source: T. Flew. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 20. There are myriad assumptions lurking in Flew’s fascinating table. The imperative is short courses on the web, servicing the needs of industry. He described the product of this system as a “learner-earner.” (50) This ‘forty year degree’ is based on lifelong learning ideologies. However Flew’s ideas are undermined by the current government higher education agenda, through the capping – through time – of courses. The effect on the ‘learner-earner’ in having to earn more to privately fund a continuance of learning – to ensure that they keep on earning – needs to be addressed. There will be consequences to the housing market, family structures and leisure time. The costs of education will impact on other sectors of the economy and private lives. Also, there is little attention to the groups who are outside this taken-for-granted commitment to learning. Flew noted that barriers to greater participation in education and training at all levels, which is a fundamental requirement of lifelong learning in the knowledge economy, arise in part out of the lack of provision of quality technology-mediated learning, and also from inequalities of access to ICTs, or the ‘digital divide.’ (51) In such a statement, there is a misreading of teaching and learning. Such confusion is fuelled by the untheorised gap between ‘student’ and ‘consumer.’ The notion that technology (which in this context too often means computer-mediated platforms) is a barrier to education does not explain why conventional distance education courses, utilizing paper, ink and postage, were also unable to welcome or encourage groups disengaged from formal learning. Flew and others do not confront the issue of motivation, or the reason why citizens choose to add or remove the label of ‘student’ from their bag of identity labels. The stress on technology as both a panacea and problem for lifelong learning may justify theories of convergence and the integration of financial, retail, community, health and education provision into a services sector, but does not explain why students desire to learn, beyond economic necessity and employer expectations. Based on these assumptions of expanding creative industries and lifelong learning, the shape of education is warping. An ageing population requires educational expenditure to be reallocated from primary and secondary schooling and towards post-compulsory learning and training. This cost will also be privatized. When coupled with immigration flows, technological changes and alterations to market and labour structures, lifelong learning presents a profound and personal cost. An instrument for economic and social progress has been individualized, customized and privatized. The consequence of the ageing population in many nations including Australia is that there will be fewer young people in schools or employment. Such a shift will have consequences for the workplace and the taxation system. Similarly, those young workers who remain will be far more entrepreneurial and less loyal to their employers. Public education is now publically-assisted education. Jane Jenson and Denis Saint-Martin realized the impact of this change. The 1980s ideological shift in economic and social policy thinking towards policies and programmes inspired by neo-liberalism provoked serious social strains, especially income polarization and persistent poverty. An increasing reliance on market forces and the family for generating life-chances, a discourse of ‘responsibility,’ an enthusiasm for off-loading to the voluntary sector and other altered visions of the welfare architecture inspired by neo-liberalism have prompted a reaction. There has been a wide-ranging conversation in the 1990s and the first years of the new century in policy communities in Europe as in Canada, among policy makers who fear the high political, social and economic costs of failing to tend to social cohesion. (78) There are dense social reorderings initiated by neo-liberalism and changing the notions of learning, teaching and education. There are yet to be tracked costs to citizenship. The legacy of the 1980s and 1990s is that all organizations must behave like businesses. In such an environment, there are problems establishing social cohesion, let alone social justice. To stress the product – and not the process – of education contradicts the point of lifelong learning. Compliance and complicity replace critique. (Post) learning The Cold War has ended. The great ideological battle between communism and Western liberal democracy is over. Most countries believe both in markets and in a necessary role for Government. There will be thunderous debates inside nations about the balance, but the struggle for world hegemony by political ideology is gone. What preoccupies decision-makers now is a different danger. It is extremism driven by fanaticism, personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states. Tony Blair (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) Tony Blair, summoning his best Francis Fukuyama impersonation, signaled the triumph of liberal democracy over other political and economic systems. His third way is unrecognizable from the Labour party ideals of Clement Attlee. Probably his policies need to be. Yet in his second term, he is not focused on probing the specificities of the market-orientation of education, health and social welfare. Instead, decision makers are preoccupied with a war on terror. Such a conflict seemingly justifies large defense budgets which must be at the expense of social programmes. There is no recognition by Prime Ministers Blair or Howard that ‘high-tech’ armory and warfare is generally impotent to the terrorist’s weaponry of cars, bodies and bombs. This obvious lesson is present for them to see. After the rapid and successful ‘shock and awe’ tactics of Iraq War II, terrorism was neither annihilated nor slowed by the Coalition’s victory. Instead, suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia and Israel snuck have through defenses, requiring little more than a car and explosives. More Americans have been killed since the war ended than during the conflict. Wars are useful when establishing a political order. They sort out good and evil, the just and the unjust. Education policy will never provide the ‘big win’ or the visible success of toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue. The victories of retraining, literacy, competency and knowledge can never succeed on this scale. As Blair offered, “these are new times. New threats need new measures.” (ht tp://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) These new measures include – by default – a user pays education system. In such an environment, lifelong learning cannot succeed. It requires a dense financial commitment in the long term. A learning society requires a new sort of war, using ideas not bullets. References Bash, Lee. “What Serving Adult Learners Can Teach Us: The Entrepreneurial Response.” Change January/February 2003: 32-7. Blair, Tony. “Full Text of the Prime Minister’s Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet.” November 12, 2002. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp. Carroll, Mary. “The Well-Worn Path.” The Australian Library Journal May 2002: 117-22. Field, J. Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2000. Flew, Terry. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 47-60. Hartley, John, and Cunningham, Stuart. “Creative Industries – from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes.” Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia (2002). Jenson, Jane, and Saint-Martin, Denis. “New Routes to Social Cohesion? Citizenship and the Social Investment State.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28.1 (2003): 77-99. Leadbeater, Charles. Living on Thin Air. London: Viking, 1999. Pillay, Hitendra, and Elliott, Robert. “Distributed Learning: Understanding the Emerging Workplace Knowledge.” Journal of Interactive Learning Research 13.1-2 (2002): 93-107. Welsh, Irvine, from Redhead, Steve. “Post-Punk Junk.” Repetitive Beat Generation. Glasgow: Rebel Inc, 2000: 138-50. 
 
 
 
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