Literatura académica sobre el tema "Emergence of Shona detective story"

The novelty of this study is in the fact that for the first time the characteristic features of the new detective subgenre, the philological detective, are described. The material for the study was the cycle of novels by the French author F. Vargas. The main reasons for the emergence of a philological detective story as a subgenre are revealed. They include a paradoxical combination of canonicity and variability, the ability to adapt to the reader’s expectations, the desire for originality and time features. It is proved that, unlike other detective subgenres, genre-forming components in the philological detective affect and change not the content, but the form, namely, the language material. The French philological detective by F. Vargas is compared with his chronological predecessor, the ironic detective by F. Dar. The idea is expressed that in ironic detectives the linguistic component does not affect the development of the plot and is secondary to it, while in the philological detective story the linguistic component is embedded in the plot and comes to the fore. A brief explanation of the characteristic features of the new subgenre is given: bilingualism, word-creation, author’s neologisms, barbarism, a rich vocabulary of heroes. The opinion is expressed that the above traits are enough to distinguish philological detectives into a separate category.

A moral theme in literature is not only unique to Zulu literature. Despite the relative youth of the modern branch of Zulu literature, any observer can make the interesting and important discovery that the moral theme is predominantly conveyed by the following three literary types: the folktale, the moral story, the detective story. The folktale, belonging to traditional literature, is a very well-developed form, that formed the principal means of teaching both children and adults about good and evil. The birth of modern Zulu literature in 1930 brought with it the emergence of the moral story, a literary type in which good triumphs over evil and in which justice prevails. Further development and changes have led to the appearance of the detective story in which crimes are solved and bad people are punished. This progression has developed due to ever-changing circumstances and a need for relevance.

AbstractThe advancement of medical treatments of HIV has given rise to the term undetectability, which has become synonymous with HIV survival and the promise of an otherwise normal life. This article explores the concept of undetectability as it relates to a theory of trans visibility as protection, epitomized by Time Magazine's 2014 declaration of a “trans tipping point.” Following critiques that trans visibility offers little guarantee of safety, the author traces the emergence of the term undetectability alongside calls for and against trans recognition. The author grounds arguments about undetectability's possibilities through a critique of the documentary Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), examining its framing as a detective story that seeks answers around Johnson's mysterious death. More specifically, the author analyzes how the murder-mystery form reinforces a carceral fantasy of individual culpability running adjacent to the privatization of HIV as a matter of personal management. The article concludes by turning to Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel's Happy Birthday, Marsha!, not just to pose a divergent narrative frame for Johnson's life but to also understand how undetectability might offer a resource in navigating the violence of exposure itself, toward a space of trans opacity.

The non-existence or deficiency in the production of popular genres in the history of Slovak cinema after the split from Czech Republic in 1993 has been a much discussed subject in the Slovak filmmaking community. It is a common belief among both filmmakers and film critics, that due to the lack of popular genre traditions and financial difficulties of film production, Slovak cinema is not able to attract domestic audiences and is primarily focused on the arthouse and festival circuit. This overt simplification, however, has in recent years been challenged by the emergence of several films that introduced generic novelties into Slovak cinema. The paper deals with two major representatives of this popular genre upheaval that were successful at the box office: the political thriller Candidate (2013) by Jonaš Karasek and the detective story The Red Captain (2016) by Michal Kollar. Both films are literary adaptations touching upon the subject of continuity of the communist regime after the democratic turn in 1989. Although not unanimously critically praised, they both gained considerable attention thanks to presenting an alternative to the realistic arthouse social drama trend of Slovak fiction film. The text examines innovations that these films introduced into popular genre discourse of Slovak cinema by concentrating on prominent storytelling and stylistic techniques derived mainly from mainstream popular cinema and offer some preliminary thoughts on reasons underlying their successful reception among domestic audiences.

I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine…they are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and the gowed-up runts who shoot you before you can say hello Raymond Chandler, Mandarin's Jade. It is in such a city, of the derelict and the displaced, that film-goers once encountered the private eye. And while we recognise the private eye as naturally urban, the 'hard-boiled' guys of Chandler, David Goodis and their imitators rarely appeal as urbane. Dictionary advice offers a neatly-plotted resolution to such a puzzle, informing us that 'urbane' is dependent on 'urban' in the manner that 'humane' is connected unavoidably to 'human'. As with much of the information scattered across a mystery narrative, such deduction may be too neat. The varying linkages of 'urban' and 'urbane' can be queried in that classic tale of the twentieth-century city, the detective story. In what sense is the detective, as urbane male hero, dependent on the urban world in which he moves? Some years before the emergence of Chandler's Philip Marlowe as the classic 'dick', the private detective inhabited an urban setting and was, in his set of personal attributes, urbane. Sherlock Holmes, the most filmed character in the history of cinema did set out for the moors to entrap the Baskerville hound, but kept coming back to his bolt-hole in central London, right in the heart of the world's great empire. From here he explored London in all its complexity, moving effortlessly between contrasting milieus. He brought with him a mastery of codes and a charm in dealing with especially, female, clients. So proficient was Holmes in reading the city, that he perfected almost any disguise, penetrating in at least one tale, the opium-smokers' flophouses of the East End. In his character, urbane style emerged as a privilege of the educated and wealthy male, a distinguishing mark which somehow seemed to justify all the evasions required in his detection. Holmes's urbanity is thoroughly of London, the huge imperial city. As is that of his law-breaking alter ego, Raffles. E.W. Hornung's character, a gentleman turned thief, who came to the screen in silent films and later under Sam Wood's direction in the 1940 Raffles, with the impeccably urbane David Niven as hero. It is not immediately clear that this urbanity survived displacement from London to Southern California. The first noir era in crime film, claimed Mike Davis, exposed 'the epic dereliction of Downtown's Bunker Hill, which symbolized the rot at the heart of the expanding metropolis' (1992, 41). Davis recognised the class-conscious construction of the 'hard-boiled' detective, in which the tropes of aristocratic style were passed down from Raffles to Philip Marlowe. The detective, a representative of the threatened post-Depression urban middle class, employed stylistic markers to hold himself aloof from the poor, the working class and the marginal. In defending himself from their 'epic dereliction', the private eye depended on traces of the urbane inherited from a cycle of movies, which intervened between the Holmes stories and those of wartime noir, especially the first Saint and Falcon movies with George Sanders as hero. Indeed, that most urbane of all male stars of the 1940s, George Sanders ousted Philip Marlowe from his own mystery in The Falcon takes over [1942], a Chandler adaptation for which director Irving Reis inserted the urbane Falcon [Sanders]. Yet as the Falcon series wore on, crimes had to be set in distant and cosmopolitan locations, as if the city of the 1930s and '40s could not sustain the urbanity of the detective. In the later Falcon movies, the detective resorts to globe-trotting around fashionably exotic locations, as if his urbanity can no longer be demonstrated by imaginative daring but requires the prop of the cosmopolitan backdrop. While the subsequent noir cycle relied on fears of personal entrapment, the detective as urbane, was able to overcome dislocation. The solution of the crime is in effect an exteriorisation of inner order. The detective's languidness and characteristic dress, the male formal attire dissembled slightly for the rain-slicked street, has produced its own markers of the urbane, even if drawn from Casablanca rather than Los Angeles. The stylish detective, through dress, movement, and words, was able to remain aloof from the sufferings of the Hotel Tremaine. As Frank Kutnik pointed out, 'the impact of the American private-eye as a culturally iconized fantasy male derives from his role as a perpetually liminal self who can move freely among the diverse social worlds thrown up by the city, while existing on their margins' (1997, 90). What of the city in which the private eye resolves crime? In the transition from novel to movie, cities are regularly collapsed into a sequence of standard settings: night club, lounge, bar, office and most frequently, interior of the automobile. The city itself in its dissipation and disorder recedes into abstraction. A familiar range of shots and lighting, characteristic of noir, oblique angles, formalist patterning, low-key lights and extreme close-up, displaces the city of the written stories. In this first noir cycle, the detective-hero traverses an emerging urban disorder which, although he finds it despicable and degraded, remains a place in which he is at home. The urbanity of Holmes and the Saint has its terminal reflection in this command of localised and underworld codes and space. The private eye is defending a sense of self and self-worth from the degradation of urban life. Many of the noir films exaggerated this apartness by their use of low-key lighting to create an abstract order, redolent of psychological imbalance but nonetheless masking the jumbled city of the written detective fiction. To observe Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes in Polanski's Chinatown [1974] is to see simultaneously the dissolving of the urbane self-containment of the detective and the fakery of his city. In Chinatown, Gittes is sleazy and foul mouthed and his attempts at wit fall short. He can't understand the crime narrative into which he has stumbled. Symbolically his nose is slit by a villain [he can't sniff out crime] and the mnemonic Chinatown is a model of the city as beyond knowledge; in which there are bad memories but no grasp of how the future might unfold. Perhaps even more removed from the urban and urbane is Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby, private eye as victim, in Arthur Penn's Night Moves [1975]. Like Jake he fails to rescue the female victim, his wit is rough rather than urbane, he dresses badly and has an unsuave background as professional sportsman . The old public school brigade in which the Saint, Raffles, the Falcon and indeed Chandler himself were all conjoined, had foresworn professional games in defence of the gifted amateur. Moseby drifts from the city to the Florida coast and then out to sea, the detective well and truly out of his depth. The first detectives took from the city an urbaneness parallel to the genteel detection of a country house whodunnit. In the neo-noir, the city is, despite Polanski's too careful reproduction [a simulacrum in itself] essentially uncoded and emptied. There is no milieu into which the detective can insinuate himself. Reservoir Dogs [1992] has characters with no names and is set in vacant industrial storage blocks. The best the characters can do for urbane conversation is to deconstruct Madonna. In Pulp Fiction, [1994] Tarantino's characters from the outset are presented to us as even more unsuave. They eat, crudely, in tinny diners and their understanding of the cosmopolitan is limited to European translations of 'Big Mac'. The urban world in which the languidly suave detective moved with ease and wit has degenerated into predictability. There are no codes to understand, no subject to remain self-contained. The detecting figure has in consequence come to be shaped more by Harry Callahan than by Holmes. No longer a knight errant struggling to maintain morality, Dirty Harry is barely distinguishable from the murderers he guns down. He hates urban diversity and the setting of the first film, in the monumental civic locations and tourism landscapes of San Francisco, ridicules any notion of architectural urbanity. In Dirty Harry [1971] the detective's nemesis is not the killer but the Mayor, who plays with urbanity, but in his foppish dress, over-tidy room and gold-embossed phone is a culpably weak fool. Harry in contrast is deliberately far from urbane. In the final scenes he even leaves the city itself for a Western-style setting of creek and antiquated machinery. With the urbane detective now a rarity on the screen, Los Angeles can be resurrected in urban theory as a crass land of simulacra, of theme parks and drive-in diners. Such hyper-reality would drive Marlowe to cynical disgust and Harry Callahan to wreak bloody revenge on both property developers and cultural theorists. Urbane, even cool, have come down it seems to, at best, 'street smart'. In the process, the urbanity inherited from a turn-of-the century aristocracy and passed down in cruder form to the declining middle class of Marlowe's California, has no significance. The people of the Hotel Tremaine have outlasted the detective. We don't have to see Los Angeles as the prototype of the 21st century city, even though a few geographers continue to insist that this is the case. But in the film story of detection, the urban of the twentieth- century city is a vacuum and urbane style means little. The male detective hero has dropped his guard. As dictionary detectives might have suspected, in these movies, humane is now absent from the human. References Davis, Mike (1992) City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles. Vintage. Krutnik, Frank (1997) 'Something more than night: tales of the noir city', in David B Clarke, ed., The cinematic city, Routledge. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McConville, Chris. "The private eye as urbane" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/private_eye.php>. Chicago Style McConville, Chris, "The private eye as urbane" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/private_eye.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style McConville, Chris. (2002) The private eye as urbane. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/private_eye.php> ([your date of access]).

J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is appalled to learn that his lover is a victim of incest in Robert Towne and Roman Polanski’s definitive, yet subversive film Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Similarly, Ethan Mars (Pascale Langdale), the hero of the electronic game Heavy Rain (David Cage, 2010), is equally devastated to find his child has been abducted. One a cinema classic of the detective genre, the other a sophisticated electronic game: both ground-breaking, both compelling, but delivered in contrasting media. So, what do Chinatown and Heavy Rain have in common from the writer’s point of view? Can the writer of games learn from the legacy of film storytelling yet find alternative rules for new media? This article attempts to answer these questions making reference to the two works above to illuminate the gap between games writing and traditional screenwriting scholarship.Western commercial cinema has evolved to place story centrally and Chinatown is an example of a story’s potential as film art and entertainment concurrently. Media convention derives from the lessons of previous relatable art forms such as pictorial art, literature and architecture in the case of film; board games and centuries of physical gaming in the case of games design. Therefore, the invention of new media such as online and electronic gaming relies, in part, on the rules of film. However, game play has reassessed screenwriting and its applicability to this new media rendering many of these rules redundant. If Marshall McLuhan’s adage “the medium is the message” is correct, then despite the reliance of one medium on the traditions of its predecessor, gaming is simply not cinema. This article considers writing for games as axiomatically unconventional and calls for radical reinventions of storytelling within the new media.In order to investigate games writing, I will first revisit some of the rules of cinematic construction as inherited from an original Aristotelian source (Cleary). These rules require: a single focussed protagonist driving the plot; a consistent story form with narrative drive or story engine; the writer to avoid the repeated dramatic beat and; a reassessment of thematic concerns for the new technology. We should also investigate game-centric terminology such as “immersion” and “agency” to see how electronic gaming as an essentially postmodern phenomenon reciprocates, yet contrasts to, its cinematic predecessor (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Must the maker of games subscribe to the filmmaker’s toolbox when the field is so very different? In order to answer this question, I will consider some concepts unique to games technology, firstly, the enduring debate known as ludology versus narratology. Gaming rhetoric since the late 1990s has questioned the efficacy of the traditional film narrative when adapted to game play. Players are still divided between the narratologists’ view, which holds that story within games is inevitable and the ludologists’ opinion, which suggests that traditional narrative has no place within the spatially orientated freedom of game play. Originally espousing the benefits of ludology, Janet H Murray argues that the essential formalism of gaming separates it from narrative, which Aarseth describes as representing “'colonialist' intrusions” on game play (46). Mimetic aspects inherited from narrative principles should remain incidental rather than forming an overarching hegemony within the game (Murray, "Last Word"). In this way, the ludologists suggest that game development has been undermined by the persistence of the narrative debate and Murray describes game studies as a “multi-dimensional, open-ended puzzle” worth solving on its own terms (indeed, cinema of attractions compelled viewers for thirty years before narrative cinema became dominant in the early twentieth century.Gaming history has proved this argument overblown and Murray herself questions the validity of this spurious debate within game play. She now includes the disclaimer that, ironically, most ludologists are trained in narratology and thus debate a “phantom of their own creation” (Murray, "Last Word"). This implies a contemporary opposition to ludology’s original meaning and impacts upon screenwriting principles in game making. Two further key concepts, which divide the medium of game entirely from the art of cinema are “immersion” and “agency” (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Murray likens immersion to the physical sensation of being “submerged in water” pointing out that players enjoy the psychologically immersive phenomenon of delving into an undiscovered reality (Murray, Hamlet 98). Although distinct from the passive experience of cinema viewing, this immersion is like the experience of leaving the ordinary world and diving into the special world as Christopher Vogler’s screenwriting theory suggests. The cinema audience is encouraged to immerse themselves in the new world of Gittes’s Chinatown from the comfort of their familiar one. Similarly, the light-hearted world of the summer home contrasts Heavy Rain’s decent into urban, neo-noir corruption. Contrary to its cinematic cousin, the immediacy and subjectivity of the new media experience is more tangible and controllable, which renders immersion in games more significant and brings us to the next gaming concept, agency.To describe agency, Murray uses the complex metaphor of participatory dance, with its predetermined structures, “social formulas” and limited opportunities to change the overall “plot” of the dance: “The slender story is designed to unfold in the same way no matter what individual audience members may do to join the fun” (Hamlet 126-27). In electronic gaming, time-honoured gaming traditions from chess and board games serve as worthy predecessors. In this way, sophisticated permutations of outcome based on the player’s choice create agency, which is “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray, Hamlet 126). Bearing this in mind, when narrative enters game play, a world of possibility opens up (Murray, Hamlet).So where do the old rules of cinema apply within gaming and where is the maker of games able to find alternatives based on their understanding of agency and immersion? McLuhan’s unconventional scholarship leads the way, by pointing out the alternativity of the newer media. I consider that the rules of cinematic construction are also often disregarded by the casual viewer/player, but of utmost importance to the professional screenwriter.Amongst these rules is the screenwriting convention of having a single protagonist. This is a being fuelled with desire and a clear, visually rendered, actively negotiated goal. This principle persists in cinema according to Aristotle’s precepts (Cleary). The protagonist is a single entity making decisions and taking actions, even if that entity is a collection of individuals acting as one (Dethridge). The exploits of this main character (facing an opposing force of antagonism) determine the path of the story and for that reason a clear, single-minded narrative line is echoed in a single story form (McKee). For example, the baffling depth of meaning in Chinatown still emanates from protagonist J.J. Gittes’s central determination: to solve the crime suggested by the Los Angeles water shortage. The audience’s ability to identify and empathise with Gittes is paramount when he discovers the awful perversion his love interest, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), has been subjected to. However, the world of Chinatown remains intriguing as a string of corruption is revealed though a detective plot fuelled by our hero’s steadfast need to know the truth. In this way, a single protagonist’s desire line creates a solid story form. Conversely, in computer games (and despite the insistence of Draconian screenwriting lecturers who insist on replicating cinematic rules) the effect of a multiple protagonist plot still allows for the essential immersion in an imaginative world. In Heavy Rain, for example, the search for clues through the eyes of several related characters including a hapless father, a hangdog, ageing detective and a hyper-athletic single mother still allows for immersion. The player/interactor’s actions still create agency even as they change avatars from scene to scene. The player also negotiates for mastery of their character’s actions in order to investigate their situation, facts and world. However, each time the player switches their character allegiance, they revert to square one of their potential identification with that character. Indeed, in Heavy Rain, the player keenly aware of the chilling effect generated by the father losing his child in a busy shopping mall, but then another avatar steps forward, then another and the player must learn about new and unfamiliar characters on a scene-by-scene basis. The accumulative identification with a hero like Chinatown’s Gittes, begins with an admiration for his streetwise charm, then strengthens through his unfolding disillusionment and is cemented with Polanski’s brilliant invention: the death of Evelyn Mulwray replete with its politico-sexual implications (Polanski). However, does this mean cinematic identification is superior to game play’s immersion and agency? McLuhan might argue it is not and that the question is meaningless given that the “message” of games is axiomatically different. Traditional screenwriting scholarship therefore falters in the new medium. Further, Heavy Rain’s multi-protagonist miasma conforms to a new breed of structure: the mosaic plot, which according to Murray mirrors the internet’s click and drag mentality. In this sense, a kaleidoscopic world opens in pockets of revelation before the player. This satisfies the interactor in a postmodernist sense: an essential equality of incoming information in random, nonlinear connections. Indeed electronic games of this nature are a triumph of postmodernism and of ludology’s influence on the narratologist’s perspective. Although a story form including clues and detection still drives the narrative, the mosaic realisation of character and situation (which in a film’s plot might seem meandering and nonsensical) is given life by the agency and immersion provided by gaming (Truby).Back in traditional screenwriting principles, there is still the need for a consistent and singular story form providing a constant narrative drive (McKee). As mentioned, this arises from the protagonist’s need. For example a revenge plot relies on the hero’s need for vengeance; a revelation plot like Chinatown hinges on detection. However, first time screenwriting students’ tendency to visualise a story based unconsciously on films they have previously seen (as a bricolage of character moments arranged loosely around a collection of received ideas) tends to undermine the potential effectiveness of their story form. This lack of singularity in filmic writing indicates a misunderstanding of story logic. This propensity in young screenwriters derives from a belief that if the rendered filmic experience means something to them, it will necessarily mean something to an audience. Not so: an abandoned story drive or replaced central character diminishes the audience’s enjoyment and even destroys suspension of disbelief. Consequently, the story becomes bland and confusing. On investigation, it appears the young screenwriter does not realise that they are playing out an idea in their head, which is essentially a bricolage in the postmodern sense. Although this might lead to some titillating visual displays it fails to engage the audience as the result of their participation in an emotional continuum (Hayward). In contradistinction to film, games thrive on such irregularities in story, assuming radically different effects. For example, in cinema, the emotional response of a mass audience is a major draw card: if the filmic story is an accumulation of cause and effect responses, which steadily drive the stakes up until resolution, then it is the emotional “cathexis” as by-product of conflict that the audience resonates with (Freud 75; Chekhov). Does this transfer to games? Do notions such as feeling and empathy actually figure in game play at all? Or is this simply an activity rewarding the interactor with agency in lieu of deeper, emotive experiences? This final question could be perceived as anti-gaming sentiment given that games such as Heavy Rain suggest just such an emotional by-product. Indeed, the mechanics of gaming have the ability to push the stakes even higher than their cinematic counterparts, creating more complex emotionality in the player. In this way, the intentional psychological malaise of Heavy Rain solicits even greater emotion from players due to their inherent act of will. Where cinema renders the audience emotional by virtue of its passivity, no such claim is possible in the game. For example, where in Chinatown, Gittes tortures his lover by repeatedly slapping her, in Heavy Rain the character must actively perform torture on themself in order to solve the mystery. Further, the potential for engagement is extended given there are fourteen possible endings to Heavy Rain. In this way, although the film viewer’s emotional response is tempered by guessing the singular outcome, the multiple endings of this electronic game prevent such prescience (films can have multiple endings, but game mechanics lend the new media more readily to this function, therefore, game books with dice-rolling options are a stronger precedent then cinema).Also effective for the construction of cinema is Aristotle’s warning that the repetition of story and expositional information without rising stakes or any qualification of meaning creates a sense of “dramatic stall” for the audience (Aristotle). This is known as a repeated dramatic story beat and it is the stumbling block of many first time screenwriters. The screenplay should be an inventive effort to overcome escalating obstacles and an accumulative cause and effect chain on the part of the protagonist (Truby). The modern screenwriter for film needs to recognise any repeated beat in their early drafting and delete or alter the repetitive material. What then are the implications of repeated dramatic beats for the game writer? The game form known as “first person shooter” (FPS) depends on the appearance of an eternally regenerating (indeed re-spawning) enemy. In an apocalyptic zombie shooter game, for example, many hordes of zombies die unequivocally without threatening the interactor’s intrigue. Presumably, the antagonists are not intended to pose intellectual opposition for the gamer. Rather, the putrefying zombies present themselves for the gamer’s pugilistic satisfaction, again and again. For the game, therefore, the repeated beat is a distinct advantage. They may come harder and faster, but they are still zombies to be dispatched and the stakes have not necessarily risen. Who cares if this is a succession of repeated beats? It is just good clean fun, right? This is where the ludologists hold sway: to impose principles such as non-repeated beats and rising stakes on the emergence of a world based on pure game play offers no consequence for the FPS game. Nevertheless, the problem is exacerbated in “role play games” (RPG) of which Heavy Rain is an example. Admittedly, the gamer derives effective horror as our hero negotiates his way amongst a sea of disassociated shoppers searching for his lost child. The very fact of gamer agency should abnegate the problem, but does not, it merely heightens the sense of existential hopelessness: turning face after face not finding the child he is searching for is a devastating experience exacerbated by active agency (as opposed to the accepting passivity of cinema spectatorship). The rising panic in the game and the repetition of the faces of impassive shoppers also supports the player’s ongoing disorientation. The iconic appearance of the gruff clown handing out balloons further heightens the panic the gamer/protagonist experiences here. These are examples of repeated beats, yet effective due to player agency. The shoppers only persist until the gamer masters the situation and is able to locate the missing child. Thus, it is the capacity of the gamer to circumvent such repetition, which actually propels the game forward. If the gamer is adept, they will overcome the situation easily; if they are inexperienced, the repetition will continue. So, why apply traditional narrative constrictions on game play within a narrative game?Another crucial aspect of story is theme, which in the young writer reflects a postmodernist fetishisation of plot over story. In fact, theme is one of the first concepts to be ignored when a film student puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) when designing their game. In this way, the themes students choose to ignore resurface despite their lack of conscious application of them. They write plot, and plot in abundance (imperative for the modern writer (Truby)), which the mosaic structure of games accommodates for seamlessly. However, plot is causative and postmodern interpretations do not necessarily require the work of art to “say” anything beyond the “message” trapped in the clichés of their chosen genre (McLuhan). In concentrating on plot, therefore, the young writer says what they are unaware they are saying. At its most innocuous level this creates cliché. At its worst, it erases history and celebrates an attitude of unexamined ignorance toward the written material (Hayward). In extreme cases, student writers of both media support fascism, celebrate female masochism, justify rape (with or without awareness), or create nihilistic and derivative art, which sensationalises violence to a degree not possible within film technology. This is ironic given that postmodernism is defined, in part, by a canny reaction to modernist generation of meaning and cynicism toward the technology of violence. In all this postmodernism, that illusive chestnut known as “originality” (a questionable imperative still haunting the conventional screenplay despite the postmodernist declamation that there is no such thing) should also be considered. Although the game writer can learn from the lessons of the screenwriter, the problems of game structure and expression are unique to the new medium and therefore alternative to film. Adhering to traditional understandings of screenwriting in games is counterproductive to the development of the form and demands new assessment. If gaming students are liberated from narratologist impositions of cinematic story structures, will this result in better or more thoughtful games? Further to the ludologists’ original protestation against the ““colonialist” intrusions” of narrative on game play, film writing must recede where appropriate (Aarseth). Then again, if a ludologist approach to game creation renders the student writer free of filmic dogma, why do they impose the same stories repetitively? What gain comes from ignoring the Aristotelian traditions of storytelling–especially as derived from screen culture? I suggest that storytelling, to echo McLuhan’s statement, must necessarily change with the new medium: the differences are illuminating. The younger, nonlinear form embodies the player as protagonist and therefore should not need to impose the single protagonist regime from film. Story engine has been replaced by player agency and game mechanics, which also allows for inventive usage of the repeated beat. Indeed, postmodern and ludological concerns embedded within mosaic plots almost entirely replace the need for any consistency of story form while still subverting the expectations of modernism? Genre rules are partly reinvented by the form and therefore genre conventions in gaming are still in their infancy. Indeed, the very amorality of nihilistic game designers opens a space for burgeoning post-postmodernist concerns regarding ethics and faith within art. In any case, the game designer may choose the lessons of film writing’s modernist legacy if story is to be effective within the new medium. However, as meaning derives from traditional form, it might be wiser to allow the new medium its own reinvention of writing rules. Given Heavy Rain’s considerable contribution to detective genre in game play by virtue of its applying story within new media, I anticipate further developments that might build on Chinatown’s legacy in the future of gaming, but on the game play’s own terms.ReferencesAarseth, Espen. Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. Aristotle. Poetics. Australia: Penguin Classics, 1997.Chekhov, Michael. Lessons for the Professional Actor. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1985.Chinatown. Roman Polanski. Paramount Golden Classics, 2011.Cleary, Stephen. “'What Would Aristotle Do?' Ancient Wisdom for Modern Screenwriters.” Stephen Cleary Lecture Series, 1 May 2011. Melbourne, Vic.: Victorian College of the Arts.Dethridge, Lisa. Writing Your Screenplay. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2003.Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Middlesex: Pelican, 1984. 65-97.Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2006.Heavy Rain. David Cage. Quantic Dream, 2010.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. UK: Methuen, 1999. McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium Is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994. 1-18.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster / Free Press, 1997.Murray, Janet H. “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies.” Keynote Address. DiGRA, Vancouver, 17 June 2005.Polanski, Roman, dir. DVD Commentary. Chinatown. Paramount Golden Classics, 2011.Truby, John. The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. London: Boxtree, 1996.

It is widely acknowledged among film scholars that Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir Mulholland Drive is richly infused with intertextual references and homages — most notably to Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). What is less recognised is the extent to which J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella Carmilla has also influenced Mulholland Drive. This article focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive, particularly the formation of femme fatale Camilla Rhodes (played by Laura Elena Harring), with the aim of establishing how the Gothic shapes the viewing experience of the film. I argue that not only are there striking narrative similarities between the texts, but lying at the heart of both Carmilla and Mulholland Drive is the uncanny. By drawing on this elusive and eerie feeling, Lynch successfully introduces an archetypal quality both to Camilla and Mulholland Drive as a whole, which in turn contributes to powerful sensations of desire, dread, nostalgia, and “noirness” that are aroused by the film. As such Mulholland Drive emerges not only as a compelling work of art, but also a deeply evocative cinematic experience. I begin by providing a brief overview of Le Fanu’s Gothic tale and establish its formative influence on later cinematic texts. I then present a synopsis of Mulholland Drive before exploring the rich interrelationship the film has with Carmilla. Carmilla and the Lesbian Vampire Carmilla is narrated from the perspective of a sheltered nineteen-year-old girl called Laura, who lives in an isolated Styrian castle with her father. After a bizarre event involving a carriage accident, a young woman named Carmilla is left in the care of Laura’s father. Carmilla is beautiful and charming, but she is an enigma; her origins and even her surname remain a mystery. Though Laura identifies a number of peculiarities about her new friend’s behaviour (such as her strange, intense moods, languid body movements, and other irregular habits), the two women are captivated with each other, quickly falling in love. However, despite Carmilla’s harmless and fragile appearance, she is not what she seems. She is a one hundred and fifty year old vampire called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (also known as Millarca — both anagrams of Carmilla), who preys on adolescent women, seducing them while feeding off their blood as they sleep. In spite of the deep affection she claims to have for Laura, Carmilla is compelled to slowly bleed her dry. This takes its physical toll on Laura who becomes progressively pallid and lethargic, before Carmilla’s true identity is revealed and she is slain. Le Fanu’s Carmilla is monumental, not only for popularising the female vampire, but for producing a sexually alluring creature that actively seeks out and seduces other women. Cinematically, the myth of the lesbian vampire has been drawn on extensively by film makers. One of the earliest female centred vampire movies to contain connotations of same-sex desire is Lambert Hilyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936). However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the spectre of the lesbian vampire exploded on screen. In part a response to the abolishment of Motion Picture Code strictures (Baker 554) and fuelled by latent anxieties about second wave feminist activism (Zimmerman 23–4), films of this cycle blended horror with erotica, reworking the lesbian vampire as a “male pornographic fantasy” (Weiss 87). These productions draw on Carmilla in varying degrees. In most, the resemblance is purely thematic; others draw on Le Fanu’s novella slightly more directly. In Roger Vadim’s Et Mourir de Plaisir (1960) an aristocratic woman called Carmilla becomes possessed by her vampire ancestor Millarca von Karnstein. In Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) Carmilla kills Laura before seducing a girl named Emma whom she encounters after a mysterious carriage breakdown. However, the undead Gothic lady has not only made a transition from literature to screen. The figure also transcends the realm of horror, venturing into other cinematic styles and genres as a mortal vampire whose sexuality is a source of malevolence (Weiss 96–7). A well-known early example is Frank Powell’s A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Barra as “The Vampire,” an alluring seductress who targets wealthy men, draining them of both their money and dignity (as opposed to their blood), reducing them to madness, alcoholism, and suicide. Other famous “vamps,” as these deadly women came to be known, include the characters played by Marlene Dietrich such as Concha Pérez in Joseph von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935). With the emergence of film noir in the early 1940s, the vamp metamorphosed into the femme fatale, who like her predecessors, takes the form of a human vampire who uses her sexuality to seduce her unwitting victims before destroying them. The deadly woman of this era functions as a prototype for neo-noir incarnations of the sexually alluring fatale figure, whose popularity resurged in the early 1980s with productions such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a film commonly regarded as a remake of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity (Bould et al. 4; Tasker 118). Like the lesbian vampires of 1960s–1970s horror, the neo-noir femme fatale is commonly aligned with themes of same-sex desire, as she is in Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive Like Sunset Boulevard before it, Mulholland Drive tells the tragic tale of Hollywood dreams turned to dust, jealousy, madness, escapist fantasy, and murder (Andrews 26). The narrative is played out from the perspective of failed aspiring actress Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) and centres on her bitter sexual obsession with former lover Camilla. The film is divided into three sections, described by Lynch as: “Part one: She found herself inside a perfect mystery. Part two: A sad illusion. Part three: Love” (Rodley 54). The first and second segments of the movie are Diane’s wishful dream, which functions as an escape from the unbearable reality that, after being humiliated and spurned by Camilla, Diane hires a hit man to have her murdered. Part three reveals the events that have led up to Diane’s fateful action. In Diane’s dream she is sweet, naïve, Betty who arrives at her wealthy aunt’s Hollywood home to find a beautiful woman in the bathroom. Earlier we witness a scene where the woman survives a violent car crash and, suffering a head injury, stumbles unnoticed into the apartment. Initially the woman introduces herself as Rita (after seeing a Gilda poster on the wall), but later confesses that she doesn’t know who she is. Undeterred by the strange circumstances surrounding Rita’s presence, Betty takes the frightened, vulnerable woman (actually Camilla) under her wing, enthusiastically assuming the role of detective in trying to discover her real identity. As Rita, Camilla is passive, dependent, and grateful. Importantly, she also fondly reciprocates the love Betty feels for her. But in reality, from Diane’s perspective at least, Camilla is a narcissistic, manipulative femme fatale (like the character portrayed by the famous star whose name she adopts in Diane’s dream) who takes sadistic delight in toying with the emotions of others. Just as Rita is Diane’s ideal lover in her fantasy, pretty Betty is Diane’s ego ideal. She is vibrant, wholesome, and has a glowing future ahead of her. This is a far cry from reality where Diane is sullen, pathetic, and haggard with no prospects. Bitterly, she blames Camilla for her failings as an actress (Camilla wins a lead role that Diane badly wanted by sleeping with the director). Ultimately, Diane also blames Camilla for her own suicide. This is implied in the dream sequence when the two women disguise Rita’s appearance after the discovery of a bloated corpse in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. The parallels between Mulholland Drive and Carmilla are numerous to the extent that it could be argued that Lynch’s film is a contemporary noir infused re-telling of Le Fanu’s novella. Both stories take the point-of-view of the blonde haired, blue eyed “victim.” Both include a vehicle accident followed by the mysterious arrival of an elusive dark haired stranger, who appears vulnerable and helpless, but whose beauty masks the fact that she is really a monster. Both narratives hinge on same-sex desire and involve the gradual emotional and physical destruction of the quarry, as she suffers at the hands of her newly found love interest. Whereas Carmilla literally sucks her victims dry before moving on to another target, Camilla metaphorically drains the life out of Diane, callously taunting her with her other lovers before dumping her. While Camilla is not a vampire per se, she is framed in a distinctly vampirish manner, her pale skin contrasted by lavish red lipstick and fingernails, and though she is not literally the living dead, the latter part of the film indicates that the only place Camilla remains alive is in Diane’s fantasy. But in the Lynchian universe, where conventional forms of narrative coherence, with their demand for logic and legibility are of little interest (Rodley ix), intertextual alignment with Carmilla extends beyond plot structure to capture the “mood,” or “feel” of the novella that is best described in terms of the uncanny — something that also lies at the very core of Lynch’s work (Rodley xi). The Gothic and the Uncanny Though Gothic literature is grounded in horror, the type of fear elicited in the works of writers that form part of this movement, such as Le Fanu (along with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelly, and Bram Stoker to name a few), aligns more with the uncanny than with outright terror. The uncanny is an elusive quality that is difficult to pinpoint yet distinct. First and foremost it is a sense, or emotion that is related to dread and horror, but it is more complex than simply a reaction to fear. Rather, feelings of trepidation are accompanied by a peculiar, dream-like quality of something fleetingly recognisable in what is evidently unknown, conjuring up a mysterious impression of déjà vu. The uncanny has to do with uncertainty, particularly in relation to names (including one’s own name), places and what is being experienced; that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity. Though it can be frightening, at the same time it can involve a sensation that is compelling and beautiful (Royle 1–2; Punter 131). The inventory of motifs, fantasies, and phenomena that have been attributed to the uncanny are extensive. These can extend from the sight of dead bodies, skeletons, severed heads, dismembered limbs, and female sex organs, to the thought of being buried alive; from conditions such as epilepsy and madness, to haunted houses/castles and ghostly apparitions. Themes of doubling, anthropomorphism, doubt over whether an apparently living object is really animate and conversely if a lifeless object, such as a doll or machinery, is in fact alive also fall under the broad range of what constitutes the uncanny (see Jentsch 221–7; Freud 232–45; Royle 1–2). Socio-culturally, the uncanny can be traced back to the historical epoch of Enlightenment. It is the transformations of this eighteenth century “age of reason,” with its rejection of transcendental explanations, valorisation of reason over superstition, aggressively rationalist imperatives, and compulsive quests for knowledge that are argued to have first caused human experiences associated with the uncanny (Castle 8–10). In this sense, as literary scholar Terry Castle argues, the eighteenth century “invented the uncanny” (8). In relation to the psychological underpinnings of this disquieting emotion, psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch was the first to explore the subject in his 1906 document “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” though Sigmund Freud and his 1919 paper “The Uncanny” is most popularly associated with the term. According to Jentsch, the uncanny, or the unheimlich in German (meaning “unhomely”), emerges when the “new/foreign/hostile” corresponds to the psychical association of “old/known/familiar.” The unheimlich, which sits in direct opposition to the heimlich (homely) equates to a situation where someone feels not quite “at home” or “at ease” (217–9). Jentsch attributes sensations of the unheimlich to psychical resistances that emerge in relation to the mistrust of the innovative and unusual — “to the intellectual mystery of a new thing” (218) — such as technological revolution for example. Freud builds on the concept of the unheimlich by focusing on the heimlich, arguing that the term incorporates two sets of ideas. It can refer to what is familiar and agreeable, or it can mean “what is concealed and kept out of sight” (234–5). In the context of the latter notion, the unheimlich connotes “that which ought to have remained secret or hidden but has come to light” (Freud 225). Hence for Freud, who was primarily concerned with the latent content of the psyche, feelings of uncanniness emerge when dark, disturbing truths that have been repressed and relegated to the realm of the unconscious resurface, making their way abstractly into the consciousness, creating an odd impression of the known in the unknown. Though it is the works of E.T.A. Hoffman that are most commonly associated with the unheimlich, Freud describing the author as the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (233), Carmilla is equally bound up in dialectics between the known and the unknown; the homely and the unhomely. Themes centring on doubles, the undead, haunted gardens, conflicting emotions fuelled by desire and disgust — of “adoration and also of abhorrence” (Le Fanu 264), and dream-like nocturnal encounters with sinister, shape-shifting creatures predominate. With Carmilla’s arrival the boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich become blurred. Though Carmilla is a stranger, her presence triggers buried childhood memories for Laura of a frightening and surreal experience where Carmilla appears in Laura’s nursery during the night, climbing into bed with her before seemingly vanishing into thin air. In this sense, Laura’s remote castle home has never been homely. Disturbing truths have always lurked in its dark recesses, the return of the dead bringing them to light. The Uncanny in Mulholland Drive The elusive qualities of the uncanny also weave their way extensively through Mulholland Drive, permeating all facets of the cinematic experience — cinematography, sound score, mise en scène, and narrative structure. As film maker and writer Chris Rodley argues, Lynch mobilises every aspect of the motion picture making process in seeking to express a sense of uncanniness in his productions: “His sensitivity to textures of sound and image, to the rhythms of speech and movement, to space, colour, and the intrinsic power of music mark him as unique in this respect.” (Rodley ix–xi). From the opening scenes of Mulholland Drive, the audience is plunged into the surreal, unheimlich realm of Diane’s dream world. The use of rich saturated colours, soft focus lenses, unconventional camera movements, stilted dialogue, and a hauntingly beautiful sound score composed by Angelo Badalamenti, generates a cumulative effect of heightened artifice. This in turn produces an impression of hyper-realism — a Baudrillardean simulacrum where the real is beyond real, taking on a form of its own that has an artificial relation to actuality (Baudrillard 6–7). Distorting the “real” in this manner produces an effect of defamiliarisation — a term first employed by critic Viktor Shklovsky (2–3) to describe the artistic process involved in making familiar objects seem strange and unfamiliar (or unheimlich). These techniques are something Lynch employs in other works. Film and literary scholar Greg Hainge (137) discusses the way colour intensification and slow motion camera tracking are used in the opening scene of Blue Velvet (1984) to destabilise the aesthetic realm of the homely, revealing it to be artifice concealing sinister truths that have so far been hidden, but that are about to come to light. Similar themes are central to Mulholland Drive; the simulacra of Diane’s fantasy creating a synthetic form of real that conceals the dark and terrible veracities of her waking life. However, the artificial dream place of Diane’s disturbed mind is disjointed and fractured, therefore, just as the uncanny gives rise to an elusive sense of mystery and uncertainty, offering a fleeting glimpse of the tangible in something otherwise inexplicable, so too is the full intelligibility of Mulholland Drive kept at an obscure distance. Though the film offers a succession of clues to meaning, the key to any form of complete understanding lingers just beyond the grasp of certainty. Names, places, and identities are infused with doubt. Not only in relation to Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla, but regarding a succession of other strange, inexplicable characters and events, one example being the recurrent presence of a terrifying looking vagrant (Bonnie Aarons). Figures such as this are clearly poignant to the narrative, but they are also impossibly enigmatic, inviting the audience to play detective in deciphering what they signify. Themes of doubling and mirroring are also used extensively. While these motifs serve to denote the split between waking and dream states, they also destabilise the narrative in relation to what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, further grounding Mulholland Drive in the uncanny. Since its publication in 1872, Carmilla has had a significant formative influence on the construct of the seductive yet deadly woman in her various manifestations. However, rarely has the novella been paid homage to as intricately as it is in Mulholland Drive. Lynch draws on Le Fanu’s archetypal Gothic horror story, combining it with the aesthetic conventions of film noir, in order to create what is ostensibly a contemporary, poststructuralist critique of the Hollywood dream-factory. Narratively and thematically, the similarities between the two texts are numerous. However, intertextual configuration is considerably more complex, extending beyond the plot and character structure to capture the essence of the Gothic, which is grounded in the uncanny — an evocative emotion involving feelings of dread, accompanied by a dream-like impression of familiar and unfamiliar commingling. Carmilla and Mulholland Drive bypass the heimlich, delving directly into the unheimlich, where boundaries between waking and dream states are destabilised, any sense of certainty about what is real is undermined, and feelings of desire are paradoxically conjoined with loathing. Moreover, Lynch mobilises all fundamental elements of cinema in order to capture and express the elusive qualities of the Unheimlich. In this sense, the uncanny lies at the very heart of the film. What emerges as a result is an enigmatic work of art that is as profoundly alluring as it is disconcerting. References Andrews, David. “An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive.” Journal of Film and Video 56 (2004): 25–40. Baker, David. “Seduced and Abandoned: Lesbian Vampires on Screen 1968–74.” Continuum 26 (2012): 553–63. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: U Michigan P, 1994. Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck. Neo-Noir. New York: Wallflower, 2009. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth, 2001. 217–256. Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. Carmilla. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 243–319. Hainge, Greg. “Weird or Loopy? Spectacular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation.” The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davidson. London: Wallflower, 2004. 136–50. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. 216–28. Punter, David. “The Uncanny.” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic. Ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2007. 129–36. Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber, 2005. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Theory of Prose. Illinois: Dalkey, 1991. Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Cinema. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness Lesbian Vampires.” Jump Cut 24.5 (2005): 23–4.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.Steven Bruhm has argued that a psychoanalytic model of trauma has become the “best [way to] understand the contemporary Gothic and why we crave it” (268), because the repressions and repetitions of trauma offer a means of playing out the anxieties of our contemporary nation, its fraught histories, its conceptualisations of identity, and its fears for the future. Indeed, as Bruhm states, it is precisely because of the way in which “the Gothic continually confronts us with real, historical traumas that we in the west have created” that they “also continue to control how we think about ourselves as a nation” (271). Jerrold E. Hogle agrees, noting that “Gothic fiction has always begun with trauma” (72). But it is not only that Gothic narratives are best understood as traumatic narratives; rather, Hogle posits that the Gothic is uniquely situated as a genre for dealing with the trauma of our personal and national histories because it enables us to approach the contradictions and conflicts of traumatic experience:I find that the best of the post-9/11 uses of Gothic in fiction achieve that purpose for attentive readers by using the conflicted un-naturalness basic to the Gothic itself to help us concurrently grasp and conceal how profoundly conflicted we are about the most immediate and pervasive cultural “woundings” of our western world as it has come to be. (75)Hogle’s point is critical for its attention to the different ways trauma can be dealt with in texts and by readers, returning in part to Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: where mourning is the ‘healthy’ process of working through or narrativising trauma. However, melancholia coalesces into a denial or repression of the traumatic event, and thus, as Freud suggests, its unresolved status reappears during nightmares and flashbacks, for example (Rall 171). Hogle’s praise for the Gothic, however, lies in its ability to move away from that binary, to “concurrently grasp and conceal” trauma: in other words, to respond simultaneously with mourning and with melancholy.Hogle adds to this classic perspective of melancholia through careful attention to the way in which rage inflects these affective responses. Under a psychoanalytic model, rage can be seen “as an infantile response to separation and loss” (Kahane 127). The emotional free-rein of rage, Claire Kahane points out, “disempowers us as subjects, making us subject to its regressive vicissitudes” (127; original emphasis). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explicates this in more detail, making clear that this disempowerment, this inability to clearly express oneself, is what leads to melancholia. Melancholia, then, can be seen as a loss or repression of the identifiable cause of the original rage: this overwhelming emotion has masked its original target. “Insofar as grief remains unspeakable”, Butler posits, “the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that very rage over loss is publicly proscribed, the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal proportions” (212). The only way to “survive” rage in this mutated form of melancholia is to create what Butler terms “collective institutions for grieving”; these enablethe reassembling of community, the reworking of kinship, the reweaving of sustaining relations. And insofar as they involve the publicisation and dramatisation of death, they call to be read as life-affirming rejoinders to the dire psychic consequences of a grieving process culturally thwarted and proscribed. (212-13)Butler’s reading thus aligns with Hogle’s, suggesting that it is in our careful attendance to the horrific experience of grief (however difficult) that we could navigate towards something like resolution – not a simplified narrative of working through, to be sure, but a more ethical recognition of the trauma which diverts it from its repressive impossibilities. To further the argument, it is only by transforming melancholic rage into outrage, to respond with an affect that puts shame to work, that rage will become politically effective. So, outrage is “a socialised and mediated form of rage … directed toward identifiable and bounded others in the external world” (Kahane 127-28). Melancholia and shame might then be seen to be directly opposed to one another: the former a failure of rage, the latter its socially productive incarnation.The Australian Gothic and its repetition of a “Weird Melancholy” exhibit this affective model. Ken Gelder has emphasised the historical coincidences: since Australia was colonised around the same time as the emergence of the Gothic as a genre (115), it has always been infused with what he terms a “colonial melancholia” (119). In contemporary Gothic narratives, this is presented through the repetition of the trauma of loss and injustice, so that the colonial “history of brutal violence and exploitation” (121) is played out, over and over again, desperate for resolution. Indeed, Gelder goes so far as to claim that this is the primary fuel for the Gothic as it manifests in Australian literature and film, arguing that since it is “built upon its dispossession and killings of Aboriginal people and its foundational systems of punishment and incarceration, the colonial scene … continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive” (121).That these two recent television series depict the ways in which rage and outrage appear in a primal ‘colonial scene’ which fixes the Australian Gothic within a political narrative. Both Wake in Fright and Mystery Road are television adaptations of earlier works. Wake in Fright is adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name (1961), and its film adaptation (1971, dir. Ted Kotcheff). Mystery Road is a continuation of the film narrative of the same name (2013, dir. Ivan Sen), and its sequel, Goldstone (2016, dir. Ivan Sen). Both narratives illustrate the shift – where the films were first viewed by a high-culture audience attracted to arthouse cinema and modernist fiction – to the re-makes that are viewed in the domestic space of the television screen and/or other devices. Likewise, the television productions were not seen as single episodes, but also linked to each network’s online on-demand streaming viewers, significantly broadening the audience for both works. In this respect, these series both domesticate and democratise the Gothic. The televised series become situated publicly, recalling the broad scale popularity of the Gothic genre, what Helen Wheatley terms “the most domestic of genres on the most domestic of media” (25). In fact, Deborah Cartmell argues that “adaptation is, indeed, the art form of democracy … a ‘freeing’ of a text from the confined territory of its author and of its readers” (8; emphasis added). Likewise, André Bazin echoes this notion that the adaptation is a kind of “digest” of the original work, “a literature that has been made more accessible through cinematic adaptation” (26; emphasis added). In this way, adaptations serve to ‘democratise’ their concerns, focussing these narratives and their themes as more publically accessible, and thus provoking the potential for a broader cultural discussion. Wake in FrightWake in Fright describes the depraved long weekend of schoolteacher John Grant, who is stuck in the rural town of Bundinyabba (“The Yabba”) after he loses all of his money in an ill-advised game of “Two Up.” Modernising the concerns of the original film, in this adaptation John is further endangered by a debt to local loan sharks, and troubled by his frequent flashbacks to his lost lover. The narrative does display drug- and alcohol-induced rage in its infamous pig-shooting (originally roo-shooting) scene, as well as the cold and threatening rage of the loan shark who suspects she will not be paid, both of which are depicted as a specifically white aggression. Overall, its primary depiction of rage is directed inward, rather than outward, and in this way becomes narrowed down to emphasise a more individual, traumatic shame. That is, John’s petulant rage after his girlfriend’s rejection of his marriage proposal manifests in his determination to stolidly drink alone while she swims in the ocean. When she drowns while he is drunk and incapable to rescue her, his inaction becomes the primary source of his shame and exacerbates his self-focused, but repressed rage. The subsequent cycles of drinking (residents of The Yabba only drink beer, and plenty of it) and gambling (as he loses over and over at Two-Up) constitute a repetition of his original trauma over her drowning, and trigger the release of his repressed rage. While accompanying some locals during their drunken pig-shooting expedition, his rage finds an outlet, resulting in the death of his new acquaintance, Doc Tydon. Like John, Doc is the victim of a self-focused rage and shame at the death of his young child and the abdication of his responsibilities as the town’s doctor. Both John and Doc depict the collapse of authority and social order in the “Weird Melancholy” of the outback (Rayner 27), but this “subversion of the stereotype of capable, confident Australian masculinity” (37) and the decay of community and social structure remains static. However, the series does not push forward towards a moral outcome or a suggestion of better actions to inspire the viewer. Even his desperate suicide attempt, what he envisions as the only ‘ethical’ way out of his nightmare, ends in failure and is covered up by the local police. The narrative becomes circular: for John is returned to The Yabba every time he tries to leave, and even in the final scene he is back in Tiboonda, returned to where he started, standing at the front of his classroom. But importantly, this cycle mimics John’s cycle of unresolved shame, suggests an inability to ‘wake’ from this nightmare of repetition, with no acknowledgement of his individual history and his complicity in the traumatic events. Although John has outlived his suicide attempt, this does not validate his survival as a rebirth. Rather, John’s refusal of responsibility and the accompanying complicity of local authorities suggests the inevitability of further self-damaging rage, shame, and violence. Outback NoirBoth Wake in Fright and Mystery Road have been described as “outback noir” (Dolgopolov 12), combining characteristics of the Gothic, the Western, and film noir in their depictions of suffering and the realisation (or abdication) of justice. Greg Dolgopolov explains that while traditional “film noir explores the moral trauma of crime on its protagonists, who are often escaping personal suffering or harrowing incidents from their pasts” (12), these examples of Australian (outback) noir are primarily concerned with “ancestral trauma – that of both Indigenous and settler. Outback noir challenges official versions of events that glide over historical massacres and current injustices” (12-13).Wake in Fright’s focus on John’s personal suffering even as his crimes could become allegories for national trauma, aligns this story with traditional film noir. Mystery Road is caught up with a more collectivised form of trauma, and with the ‘colonialism’ of outback noir means this adaptation is more effective in locating self-rage and melancholia as integral to social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary Australia. Each series takes a different path to the treatment of race relations in Australia within a small and isolated rural context. Wake in Fright chooses to ignore this historical context, setting up the cycle of John’s repression of trauma as an individual fate, and he is trapped to repeat it. On the other hand, Mystery Road, just like its cinematic precursors (Mystery Road and Goldstone), deals with race as a specific theme. Mystery Road’s nod to the noir and the Western is emphasised by the character of Detective Jay Swan: “a lone gunslinger attempting to uphold law and order” (Ward 111), he swaggers around the small township in his cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, stoically searching for clues to the disappearance of two local teenagers. Since Swan is himself Aboriginal, this transforms the representation of authority and its failures depicted in Wake in Fright. While the police in Wake in Fright uphold the law only when convenient to their own goals, and further, to undertake criminal activities themselves, in Mystery Road the authority figures – Jay himself, and his counterpart, Senior Sergeant Emma James, are prominent in the community and dedicated to the pursuit of justice. It is highly significant that this sense of justice reaches beyond the present situation. Emma’s family, the Ballantynes, have been prominent landowners and farmers in the region for over one hundred years, and have always prided themselves on their benevolence towards the local Indigenous population. However, when Emma discovers that her great-grandfather was responsible for the massacre of several young Aboriginal men at the local waterhole, she is overcome by shame. In her horrified tears we see how the legacy of trauma, ever present for the Aboriginal population, is brought home to Emma herself. As the figurehead for justice in the town, Emma is determined to label the murders accurately as a “crime” which must “be answered.” In this acknowledgement and her subsequent apology to Dot, she finds some release from this ancient shame.The only Aboriginal characters in Wake in Fright are marginal to the narrative – taxi drivers who remain peripheral to the traumas within the small town, and thus remain positioned as innocent bystanders to its depravity. However, Mystery Road is careful to avoid such reductionist binaries. Just as Emma discovers the truth about her own family’s violence, Uncle Keith, the current Aboriginal patriarch, is exposed as a sexual predator. In both cases the men, leaders in the past and the present, consider themselves as ‘righteous’ in order to mask their enraged and violent behaviour. The moral issue here is more than a simplistic exposition on race, rather it demonstrates that complexity surrounds those who achieve power. When Dot ultimately ‘inherits’ responsibility for the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission this indicates that Mystery Road concludes with two female figures of authority, both looking out for the welfare of the community as a whole. Likewise, they are involved in seeking the young woman, Shevorne, who becomes the focus of abuse and grief, and her daughter. Although Jay is ultimately responsible for solving the crime at the heart of the series, Mystery Road strives to position futurity and responsibility in the hands of its female characters and their shared sense of community.In conclusion, both television adaptations of classic movies located in Australian outback noir have problematised rage within two vastly different contexts. The adaptations Wake in Fright and Mystery Road do share similar themes and concerns in their responses to past traumas and how that shapes Gothic representation of the outback in present day Australia. However, it is in their treatment of rage, shame, and violence that they diverge. Wake in Fright’s failure to convert rage beyond melancholia means that it fails to offer any hope of resolution, only an ongoing cycle of shame and violence. But rage, as a driver for injustice, can evolve into something more positive. In Mystery Road, the anger of both individuals and the community as a whole moves beyond good/bad and black/white stereotypes of outrage towards a more productive form of shame. In doing so, rage itself can elicit a new model for a more responsible contemporary Australian Gothic narrative.References Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Film Adaptation. 1948. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2000. 19-27.Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 259-76.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993.Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012. 1-13.Dolgopolov, Greg. “Balancing Acts: Ivan Sen’s Goldstone and ‘Outback Noir.’” Metro 190 (2016): 8-13.Gelder, Ken. “Australian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007. 115-23.Hogle, Jerrold E. “History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions.” The Gothic World. Eds. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2014. 72-81.Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage.” States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change. Eds. Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison. New York: New York UP, 1996. 126-45.Perkins, Rachel, dir. Mystery Road. ABC, 2018.Rall, Denise N. “‘Shock and Awe’ and Memory: The Evocation(s) of Trauma in post-9/11 Artworks.” Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 163-82.Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Stenders, Kriv, dir. Wake in Fright. Roadshow Entertainment, 2017.Ward, Sarah. “Shadows of a Sunburnt Country: Mystery Road, the Western and the Conflicts of Contemporary Australia.” Screen Education 81 (2016): 110-15.Wheatley, Helen. “Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Women, Domesticity and the Gothic Adaptation on Television.” Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. 149-65.

This study b·aces the development of the Shona clctective story as a genre different from rhe mainstream Shona novel. The Shona detective story emerges from the non-detective traditional folktale and develops into rhree types, namely, the rudimentary form. the pure 'whoduniC, and the detectivethriller. An attempt is made to show that when the Shona detective story first appeared it was quite elementary and showed signs of me influence of Shona traditional folklore. But later on authors developed the detective narrative into pure 'whodunits' and detective-mrillers which showed influence of Western ftlms and English detective stories. The study ends with the argument that although at its highest level of development the Shona detective story manifests characteristics that make it a unique genre different from other Shona novels its treatment of female characters is not very different from their treatment in the mainstream Shona novel.
African Languages
M.A. (African Languages)

This book is about the prehistoric archaeology of Europe—the lives and deaths of peoples and cultures—about how we became human; the rise of hunters; the birth and growth of society; the emergence of art; the beginnings of agriculture, villages, towns and cities, wars and conquest, peace and trade—the plans and ideas, achievements and failures, of our ancestors across hundreds of thousands of years. It is a story of humanity on planet Earth. It’s also about the study of the past—how archaeologists have dug into the ground, uncovered the remaining traces of these ancient peoples, and begun to make sense of that past through painstaking detective work. This book is about prehistoric societies from the Stone Age into the Iron Age. The story of European prehistory is one of spectacular growth and change. It begins more than a million years ago with the first inhabitants. The endpoint of this journey through the continent’s past is marked by the emergence of the literate societies of classical Greece and Rome. Because of a long history of archaeological research and the richness of the prehistoric remains, we know more about the past of Europe than almost anywhere else. The prehistory of Europe is, in fact, one model of the evolution of society, from small groups of early human ancestors to bands of huntergatherers, through the arrival of the first farmers to the emergence of hierarchical societies and powerful states in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The chapters of our story are the major ages of prehistoric time (Stone, Bronze, and Iron). The content involves the places, events, and changes of those ages from ancient to more recent times. The focus of the chapters is on exceptional archaeological sites that provide the background for much of this story. Before we can begin, however, it is essential to review the larger context in which these developments took place. This chapter is concerned with the time and space setting of the archaeology of Europe.