Literatura académica sobre el tema "Red Hat Linux 7.3"

Due to the discontinuity of support for one of the database versions most used by organizations, Oracle Database 11g, it is important that companies that still use this version, pay attention to the next upgrade from Oracle. This work was elaborated by means of exploratory research, using as methods and research techniques the documentary and bibliographic analysis, with the purpose of providing steps with techniques and methods of how to proceed with two oracle projects, one of migration from the Linux operating system Red Hat 4.4.7-3 for Oracle Linux 7.7, and a version upgrade from Oracle Database 11g to Oracle Database 19c, presenting strategies using tools and following Oracle's recommendations. This study was built based on real demands that companies have been facing with this great dilemma, the discontinuity of support for the Oracle database 11g version. The observed results were, official support from Oracle, architectural change in order to be prepared for a supposed intervention with updating and migration of services to the cloud.

AbstractIn forensic science, signatures are identified by means of comparative handwriting analysis - not to be confused with graphological examination. To the authors' knowledge, no systematic investigation has hitherto taken place as to the effectiveness of subjecting signatures on old master paintings to such comparative analysis. Even when judgment is passed on signatures in art-historical publications, it is seldom based on an investigation which could stand up to the critical standards of handwriting experts. Partly due to insufficient knowledge of the relevant criteria, signature assessment therefore tends to be influenced in both a positive and a negative sense by opinions about the painting. (I.b.) This article describes the results of examinations of Rembrandt signatures on paintings from the period 1632-1642, conducted by a team of two forensic handwriting experts headed by the controller of the experiment. The Rembrandt Research Project team supplied a total of 123 photographs of signatures, 88 of which were deemed suitable for evaluation, 73 of them belonged to the 'Rembrandt' type, and 15 to the 'RHL van Rijn' type. Only aftcr our examination wcrc we able to confirm, on the basis of Vol umcs 11 and 111 of the Corpus, which of these signatures occur on paintings accepted by the RRP team as authentic Rembrandts, and which on de-attributed paintings. The monograms discussed in Volume I of the Corpus proved to be unsuitable for our investigation, due to the insufficient number of characteristics they yield. (I.d. and I.e.) In the examination of handwriting, the characteristics of a series of incontestably genuine signatures arc compared with the characteristics encountered in a series of signatures whose identity is to be established. This procedure was unfeasible for the examination in question, for, regardless of whether the usual methods of comparison can be applied to signatures rendered with a brush, the question arises as to which of the signatures on a paining are indisputably authentic. Reconnaissance of the signature problem shows that the art historian is unable, for various reasons, to quarantee that a painting established without a shadow of doubt as a Rembrandt actually bears the master's own signature. (I.c.) We therefore opted for a different procedure, but not until exploratory experiments had led us to expect that the usual methods of comparing handwriting would be feasible. (III.a.) Entirely ignorant of art-historical assessments of the paintings in question and their signatures, the hand writing experts analysed the available material on the basis of characteristics used in the comparison of normal signatures and handwriting (11.a.) The team's experiment-controller liaised with the art historians and evaluated the results statistically. (I.d.) The exploratory and statistical character of our investigation was one of the reasons for dispensing with a systematic enumeration of all the individual signature assessments. Working in this fashion, we selected a group of i 'Rembrandt'type signatures from the available material, signatures which formed a homogeneous group because of their shared characteristics. We called them the reference signatures. The homogeneous character of the reference group reflects, in our opinion, the recognizable and reproducible characteristics of Rembrandt's signature. The reference signatures are therefore assumed to have been executed by Rembrandt himself. With the aid of the group of reference signatures, the other material was further evaluated. The outcome was a list in which the signatures are graded as to their probable authenticity. In forensic handwriting comparison, probability gradations stem from the statistical character of the comparison process. (II.b.) They permit nuances to be made in the assessment of a signature. The extent to which identification criteria are satisfied, the consequences of restorations and other doubtful elements which are hard to assess, especially in the case of negative judgment (V.b.), are reflected in the individual probability gradations. Figures 1, 2 and 3 show three signatures from the reference group, accompanied by a number of shared characteristics occurring in the reference group. (IV.a) Figures 4 and 5 show signatures which have been assigned a lower probability gradation; one (figure 4) graded authentic, the other (figure 5) as not. (IV.b.) Only the first four letters of the signature in figure 7 are regarded as authentic; it is one of the seven examined signatures containing only a 't'. (V.b.) This procedure skirts the problem of non-guaranteed comparative signatures. Statistical evaluation of the results can also provide an insight into the question of whether the usual techniques for examining handwriting can be successfully applied to signatures on paintings. If the assessments thus obtained prove to be reliable, they may generate further valuable art-historical information. The results of the examination of the 73 'Rembrandt'-type signa tures are summarized in a table in which the signature assessments are related to the qualifications of the paintings as recorded in Volumes 11 and 111 of the Corpus. This table does not give the probability gradations, which arc however for the sake of convenience simply grouped into 'authentic' and 'non-authentic'. (V.a. and Table I) The table contains the most pertinent statistical data. In order to test thc reliability of the handwriting experts' assessment statistically, we employed a ratio based on signatures occurring on non-authentic paintings. Reliability proved to be almost 90%. Unfortunately, authentic paintings arc not suitable subjects for this kind of test. Evaluation of the results leads us to conclude that, under conditions to be described in greater detail, handwriting examination techniques arc in fact applicable to the assessment of signatures on paintings. The procedure described here only yields results when a large number of signatures with suflicient information content are available. The 73 'Rembrandt'-type signatures permitted the formation of a reference group, but the 15 'RHL van Rijn' specimens were not enough. (V.b.) On the assumption that the handwriting experts' judgment was reliable, only about 40% of the paintings established by the RRP team as authentic were actually signed by Rembrandt himself. It transpired that one of the reference signatures came from a pupil's work (figure 6), as did two others regarded as authentic, albeit with a lower probability gradation. The handwriting experts' results thus supply independent corroboration of the art-historical opinion that Rembrandt signed studio work. (V.b. and Table I) Comparison of the results of our investigation with corresponding assessments of 'Rembrandt'-type signatures by the RRP team yielded 11 controversial opinions: 8 among the 47 authentic paintings and 3 among the 26 unauthentic ones. (V.C.I.) Apart from the experience of the handwriting experts, controversies stem from the fundamentally different approaches of the two disciplines in forming their judgment by means of selecting reference signatures and evaluating characteristics. The fact that the handwriting experts reject more signatures on authentic paintings and accept more in the case of unauthentic ones than the art historians is due to the two disciplines' different kinds of knowledge about the relationship between signature and painting. (V.c.2.) Statistical evaluation of the collaboration of the two fields leads to the general conclusion that the intervention of the handwriting experts results in significantly more rejections of signatures on authentic paintings than has been previously established by the art historians. Moreover, on the basis of results obtained by the two disciplines in the case of the 47 authentic paintings, the statistical expectation is that of all the signed authentic paintings by Rembrandt, roughly half do not (any longer) bear his own signature. (V.c.3) It is to be expected that distinct photographic enlargements, in combination with in situ scientific examination of the material condition of the signature and its direct surroundings, will improve the reliability of signature assessment. Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives. Popular Imagery in the Keformation, (The University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London, 1989). 165 Seiten mit 57 Schwarz-welß-Abbildungen. In den USA ist in den letzten Jahren eine zunehmende Aufmerksamkeit für die deutsche Kunst der Dürerzeit und speziell der Reichsstadt Nürnberg zu verzeichnen. Die bedeutenden Ausstellungen 'Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300-1550' (1986) und 'The World in Miniature. Engravings by the German Little Masters' (1988/89) sowie eine Reihe von Dissertationen manifestieren dieses Interesse, dem auch das vorliegende Buch zu verdanken ist. Der Autor hat sich seit seiner Dissertation über Pieter Aertsen und Joachim Beuckelaer (1977) der Erforschung der profanen und populären Bildwclt des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland und den Niederlanden gewidmet und dabei die Frage nach den gesellschaftlichen Funktionen und Intentionen solcher Darstellungen im Medium der Druckgraphik in den Mittelpunkt gerückt. Der vorliegende Band präsentiert drei Studien zu thematischen Schwerpunkten des Nürnberger Einblattholzschnitts im Zeitalter der Reformation, verbunden durch weitere Kapitel über die historische Situation Nürnbergs und über die medialen Charakteristika von Holzschnitt und Einblattdruck. Der wissenschaftliche Apparat belegt, daß Moxey die reiche deutschsprachige Literatur zur Nürnberger Kunst- und Lokalgeschichte gründlich studiert hat. Seine Übersetzungen der Texte der Einblattdrucke (in den Anmerkungen nach den Originalen transkribiert und zitiert) sind akzeptabel. Das Buch wird mit einer hermeneutischen Standorthestimmung eingeleitet, was angesichts des gegenwärtigen Pluralismus der Kunstbegriffe und Methodenansätze zunehmend zum Erfordernis wissenschaftlichen Verantwortungsbewußtseins wird. Der Versuch, Bedeutung und Funktion populärer Bildmedien der Vergangenheit und ihrer Darstellungen zu ermitteln, darf sich weder auf einen ästhetisch definierten Kunstbegriff verpflichten, noch sich auf Methoden verlassen, die an diesem Kunstbegriff ausgerichtet sind. Während zum Beispiel die Ikonologie Bilder als Dokumente weltanschaulicher Einstellungen betrachtet und ihre Bedeutung an die gcistesgeschichtliche Stellung ihrer inhaltlichen Aussagen bindet, stellt sich bei den populären Bildmedien der Reformationszeit die Frage nach ihrer nicht nur reflektierenden, sondern aktiv gestaltenden Rolle als Kommunikationsmittel bei der Artikulierung gesellschaftlicher Interessen und politischer Absichten. Damit gewinnen für den Kunsthistoriker Fragestellungen der Soziologie und der Semiotik vorrangige Bedeutung. Es ergibt sich aber das Problem, daß moderne Begriffe wie 'Klasse' oder 'Ideologie' die Rekonstruktion historischer Vcrständnishorizonte behindern können. Moxey sicht dieses Problem, neigt aber dazu, ihm in Richtung auf cincn meines Erachtens oberflächlichen Pragmatismus auszuweichen, wenn er mit Hayden White postuliert, der Historiker könne nur die Fragen stellen, die ihm seine eigene Zeit aufgibt. Es wird sich zeigen, daß diese Einstellung problematische Konsequenzen hat. Der Überblick über die historische Situation Nürnbergs (Kapitel i) hebt folgende Faktoren hervor: die oligarchische Herrschaft des Handelspatriziats mit rigider Kontrolle über alle Aktivitäten der unteren Bevölkerungsschichten; die Propagierung einer vom Patriziat definierten kulturellen Identität des Nürnberger Bürgertums durch öffentliche Darbietungen (Schembartlauf, Fastnachtsspiele), bei denen die Abgrenzung von unbürgerlichen Lebensformen, personifiziert durch Narren und Bauern, eine wesentliche Rolle spielt; die Verbundenheit des herrschenden Patriziats mit der kaiserlichen Sache trotz Religonskriegen und konfessionellen Gegensätzen; der Beitrag der nationalistischen Ideen der Nürnberger Humanisten zum rcichsstädtischcn Selbstverständnis ; die Lösung des Konflilzts zwischen protestantischem Bekenntnis und Kaisertreue mit Hilfe von Luthers Lehre der 'zwei Welten'. Kapitel 2 ('The Media: Woodcuts and Broadsheets') behandelt die Aufgaben des Holzschnitts, die Bedingungen seiner Herstellung und Verbreitung im Zusammenhang mit dem rasanten Auf-stieg des Buch- und Flugblattdrucks und einer auf Aktualität zielenden Publizistik, sowie die Stellung der Künstler als Vorlagenzeichner, die von den Druckern und Verlegern weitgehend abhängig waren. Bisherige Versuche, Holzschnitte und Illustrationen als Ausdruck persönlicher Überzeugungen der Vorlagen zeichner zu deuten, mußten daher in die Irre führen, wie Moxey am Beispiel der Brüder Beham belegt. Zu den Rahmenbedingungen der medialen Funktion Nürnberger Holzschnitte gehört aber noch ein weiterer Faktor, den Moxey nicht berücksichtigt: der deutliche Gegensatz zwischen Holzschnitt und Kupferstich im Hinblick auf Verbreitung, Themenwahl, Darstellungsweise, Verhältnis Bild-Text und Rezeptionsweise, der unter anderem dazu führt, daß an übereinstimmende Themen bei gleichen Künstlern unterschiedliche formale und inhaltliche Anforderungen gestellt werden, und daß sogar Motive bei der Übernahme aus einem Medium in das andere ihre Bedeutung ändern können. Dieser Gegensatz ist charakteristisch für die Nürnberger Graphik und ist weder in der Augsburger noch in der niederländischen Graphik dieser Zeit annähernd vergleichbar deutlich ausgeprägt. Kapitel 3 ('Festive Peasants and Social Order') ist die überarbeitete Fassung eines Aufsatzes, der in 'Simiolus' 12, 1981/2 unter dem Titel 'Sebald Beham's Church Anniversary Holidays: Festive Peasants as Instruments of Repressive Humour' erschienen ist. In die damals aktuelle, von Hessel Miedema und Svetlana Alpers ausgelöste Debatte über die Deutung von Bauernfest-Darstellungen und die Funktion des Komischen in Kunst und Dichtung des 16. Jahrhunderts hatte dieser Aufsatz wegweisende Argumente eingeführt, die mir bei meinen eigenen Forschungen über die 'Bauernsatiren' sehr nützlich und klärend waren. Abgesehen von einem knappen Hinweis Konrad Rengers (Sitzungsberichte der Kunstgeschichtlichen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, neue Folge, 20, 1971/72, 9-16) hatte Moxey als erster auf den Zusammenhang der Bauernfest-Holzschnitte mit der literarischen Tradition der Bauernsatire aufmerksam gemacht, welche durch die Behams in der Verbindung von Bild und Text und der Nähe zu Dichtungen des Hans Sachs für Nürnberg aktualisicrt wurde. Diese 'Bauernfeste' sind folglich keine Zeugnisse eines folkloristischen Realismus, sondern komplexe Übertragungen literarischer Stereotype in Bilder. Die Bauern und ihre Kirmessen und Hochzeiten sind weniger Gegenstände und Ziele dieser Darstellungen, sondern fungieren als Mittel der Stände- und Moralsatire. Lediglich in einem Punkt haben mich Moxey's Argumente nicht überzeugt: für ihn scheinen die feiernden Bauern der Behams tatsächlich die Dorf-bewohner des Nürnberger Umlandes aus der ideologischen Sicht der Patrizier darzustellen. Dies deutet er an, wenn er die Holzschnitte als 'visual vehicle for the expression of class ridicule' betrachtet und im - neu formulierten - Schluß des Kapitels bei Betrachtern aus dem Nürnberger Handwerkerstand sentimentale Erinnerungen an das 'freiere' Leben ihrer bäuerlichen Vorfahren vermutet. Zu Beginn des Kapitels setzt er sich mit zwei Richtungen der traditionellen Interpretation auseinander, welche diese Holzschnitte als unmittelbare oder mittelbare, d.h. ideologische Reflexe gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit betrachteten. Aber auch er löst sich nicht ganz von dieser Prämisse, wie der neuformuliertc Titel 'Festive Peasants and Social Order' bekräftigt. Dagegen habe ich einzuwenden, daß die literarische Tradition der Bauern-und Bauernfestsatire in keinem unmittelbaren Zusammenhang mit der Ständelehre steht, welche die Rechte und Pflichten des Bauernstandes festlegt. Deren Gegenstand ist vielmehr der Bauer als Ernährer der Gesellschaft, der arbeitet und Abgaben leistet oder sich dieser ihm von Gott zugewiesenen Rolle verweigert. Darauf nehmen die Bauernfest-Holzschnitte nur insofern Bezug, als Ausschweifungen, Luxus und bewaffneter Streit die Einhaltung dieser bäuerlichen Pflichten gefährden. Im Vordergrund steht aber die Funktion dieser Holzschnitte als satirischer Spiegel 'bäurischer' Unsitten, so daß der Titel besser lauten sollte 'Festive Peasants and Social Behaviour'. Hier rächt es sich, daß Moxey den modernen soziologischen Bcgriff 'Klasse' anstelle des historisch angemessenen Begriffs 'Stand' verwendet. 'Stand' impliziert eine Reihe theologischer und moralischer Wertsetzungen, die dem politisch-ökonomisch definierten Begriff 'Klasse' fehlen. Aber gerade mit diesen 'argumentieren' die Holzschnitte und die ihnen entsprechenden Texte, und auf dieser Ebene des Arguments nehmen sie auch Stellung zur politischen und konfessionellen Aktualität. Eine andere Frage ist, welche Aspekte der Bedeutung der zeitgenössische Betrachter wahrnahm: politische, moralische, konfessionelle, literarische, brauchtumsmäßige usw. Dies dürfte von seiner eigenen jeweiligen Position als Bürger von Nürnberg oder einer anderen Stadt, Humanist, Lutheraner, Grundbesitzer mitbestimmt worden sein. Die 'Multifunhtionalität' der Baucrnsatire, auf die vor mir schon Hessel Miedema und Paul Vandenbroeck hingewiesen haben,2 d.h. die gesellschaftliche Differenziertheit der Rezeptionsweise, der die Holzschnitte sichtlich Rechnung tragen, darf nicht außer Betracht bleiben. In Kapitel 4 legt Moxey die erste kunsthistorische Untersuchung der zahlreichen Darstellungen von Landsknechten im Nürnberger Holzschnitt vor. Ausgangspunkt ist Erhard Schöns großformatiger 'Zug der Landsknechte' (um 1532, Geisberg 1226-1234), den Moxey als Heroisierung der kaiserlichen Militärmacht und damit als Nümberger Propaganda für die kaiserliche Politik deutet. Aktueller Anlaß ist die Türkengefahr mit der Belagerung Wiens 1532. Dies ist eine begründete, aber nicht in jeder Hinsicht überzeugende Hypothese. In den Serien einzelner Landsknechts-Figurcn van Schön (Geisberg 1981ff) und Hans Sebald Beham (Geisberg 273ff) weisen beigegebene Texte wiederholt darauf hin, daß es sich um Teilnehmer an kaiserlichen Feldzügen handelt. Im 'Zug der Landsknechte' wird zwar eine burgundischhabsburgische Fahne entrollt, aber der Text von Hans Sachs läßt den Hauptmann an der Spitze des Zuges ausdrücklich sagen: 'Die Landsknecht ich byn nemcn an/Eynem Herren hie ungemelt', was angesichts der von Moxey vermuteten pro-kaiserlichen Propaganda zumindest erklärungsbedürftig ist. Den werbenden und heroisierenden Drucken stellt Moxey eine größere Zahl von Holzschnitten gegenüber, die nicht von den Leistungen, Ansprüchen und Verdiensten der Söldner, sondern von den negativen Aspekten des Landsknechtslebens und -charakters handeln. Todesbedrohung, Sittenlosigkeit, Aggressivität und Abkehr von ehrlichem Erwerb aus Gier nach schnellem Geld werden teils anklagend teils satirisch thematisiert. Diese Gespaltenheit des Bildes vom Landsknecht in verschiedenen Drucken derselben Verleger nach Vorlagen derselben Zeichner wird mit einer widersprüchlichen Einstellung zum Krieg und mit Luthers eschatologischer Deutung der Türkengefahr als 'Gottesgeißel' in Verbindung gebracht. Der Landsknecht erscheint einerseits als 'Mittel der Bekräftigung kaiserlicher Macht angesichts einer nationalen Bedrohung', anderseits als 'Mittel der Ermahnung, daß die Türkeninvasion eher eine moralische als eine militärische Notlage darstellt, und daß physische Gewalt das ungeeignete und unangemessene Mittel der Auseinandersetzung mit einer Züchtigung Gottes ist.' Den entscheidenden Beleg für diese Deutung findet Moxey in Erhard Schöns 'Landsknechtstroß vom Tod begleitet'. Die Hure am Arm des Fähnrichs und der Hahn auf dem Trainwagen bezeichnen die sexuelle Zügellosigkeit der Landsknechte, gefangene Türken und straffällige Söldner marschieren gefesselt hintereinander. Der neben dem Trainwagen reitende Tod mit erhobenem Stundenglas wird von zwei Skeletten begleitet, von denen eines als Landsknecht, das andere als Türke gekleidet ist. Moxey: 'Durch das Auslöschen der Unterschiede zwischen Türkc und Landsknecht leugnet der Tod die heroischen Eigenschaften, die dem Söldner in Werken wie 'Der Zug der Landshnechte' zugeschrieben werden. In diesem Zusammenhang erscheint die kaiserliche Sache nicht wertvoller als die der Feinde.' Einer Verallgemeinerung dieser Deutung und ihrer Übertragung auf die anderen negativen Landsknechtsdarstellungen ist cntgegenzuhalten, daß es in diesen keinerlei Anspielungen auf die Türken gibt. Das gilt insbesondere für einen 'Troß'-Holzschnitt des Hans Sebald Beham (Geisberg 269-272), der um 1530, d.h. vor Schöns 'Troß vom Tod begleitet' entstanden sein dürfte und mit diesem das Vorbild von Albrecht Altdorfers 'Troß' aus dem 'Triumphzug Kaiser Maximilians I.' teilt. Behams 'Troß' steht unter dem Kommando eines 'Hurnbawel' (Hurenwaibel), der den von einem Boten überbrachten Befehl zum Halten angesichts einer kommenden Schlacht weitergibt. Der Troß aus Karren und Weibern, begleitet von unheroischen, degeneriert aussehenden Landsknechten oder Troßbuben, führt vor allem Fässer, Flaschen und Geflügel mit. Die Fahne wird von einem Hahn als dem bedeutungsträchtigen Feldzeichen dieses zuchtlosen und lächerlichem Haufens überragt. Moxey hat diesen Holzschnitt nicht berücksichtigt. Mein Eindruck ist, daß eine religiös oder ethisch motivierte ambivalente Einstellung zur Kriegführung im Allgemeinen oder zum Türkenkrieg im Besonderen nicht die Gegensätzlichkeit des Landsknechtsbildes erklären kann. Ich sehe vielmehr eine Parallele zu dem ähnlich gespaltenen Bild vom Bauern in positive Ständevertreter und satirische Vertreter 'grober' bäurischer Sitten. Bei den Landsknechtsdarstellungen kann man zwischen werbenden und propagandistischen Bildern heroischer Streiter für die kaiserliche Sache und kritisch-satirischen Darstellungen der sittlichen Verkommenheit der Soldateska und der sozial schädlichen Attraktivität des Söldnerwesens für arme Handwerker unterscheiden. Kapitel 5 ('The Battle of the Sexes and the World Upside Down') behandelt eine Reihe von Drucken, welche die Herrschaft des Mannes über die Frau und die Pflicht des Mannes, diese Herrschaft durchzusetzen, zum Gegenstand haben. Die Fülle solcher Drucke im Nürnberg der Reformationszeit und die Brutalität, die den Männern empfohlen wird, erlauben es nicht, hier bloß eine Fortsetzung mittelalterlicher Traditionen frauenfeindlicher Satire zu sehen. Moxey erkennt die Ursachen für die besondere Aktualität und Schärfe dieser Bilder in den demographischen und sozialen Verhältnissen Nürnbergs (Verdrängung der Frauen aus dem Erwerbsleben im Zuge verschärfter Konkurrenzbedingungen) und im Einfluß der lutherischen Ehelehre. Die Familie wird als Keimzelle des Staates aufgefaßt, die Sicherung familiärer Herrschaftsstrukturen gilt als Voraussetzung für das Funktionieren staatlicher Autorität und ist daher Christenpflicht. Dieser Beitrag ist eine wertvolle Ergänzung der Untersuchungen zur Ikonologie des bürgerlichen Familienlebens in reformierten Ländern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, die sich bisher auf die Niederlande konzentriert hatten.3 Die abschließenden 'Conclusions' versuchen, aus diesen Ergebnissen eine präzisere Charakterisierung der medialen Qualitäten Nürnberger Holzschnitte zu gewinnen. Ihr 'schlichter Stil' oder 'Modus' folgt aus einer bewußten Reduzierung der formalen Mittel der Graphik und ermöglicht eine Unterordnung des Bildes unter den Text. Einblattdrucke und Flugblätter stehen den Inkunabelillustrationen nahe, bei denen die 'Lesbarkeit' des Bildes die dominierende Form von Anschaulichkeit ist. Mit Norman Bryson spricht Moxey von 'diskursiven' Bildern, die keinen Anspruch auf künstlerischen Eigenwert machen und deren Informationsgehalt einseitig auf den Text bezogen ist. Die Reduktionen der formalen Mittel, d.h. die Verkürzung der Information verlangt von Betrachter die Auffüllung mit Bedeutungen, die dem Text oder - in dessen Abwesenheit - 'Zeichensvstemen anderer Ordnung', z.B. Fastnachtspielen zu entnehmen sind. Eine charakteristische Sonderform ist die Rcihung von einzelnen, relativ gleichförmigen Bildern zu Serien, zu einer friesartigen Gesamtkomposition. Moxey erklärt dieses Prinzip mit der Vorbildhaftigkeit der Riesenholzschnitte für Kaiser Maxmilian I., in denen Redundanz als Mittel propagandistischer Wirkungssteigerung fungiert. Dies scheint mir zu kurz gegriffen, den gcrade in Nürnberg dürfte die literarische und dramatische Form des 'Reihenspiels' (die einzelnen Darsteller treten wie in einer Rev ue nacheinander vor und sprechen ihren Text) ein noch wiehtigerer Ausgangspunkt gewesen sein, zumal diese literarische Form auch in den Texten vieler Einblattdrucke angewendet wird, vor allem von Hans Sachs. Der 'schlichte Stil' oder Modus läßt viel mehr Abstufungen und Variationen zu, als Moxey's 'Conclusions' zu erkennen geben. In Holzschnitten wie Hans Sebald Behams 'Großes Bauernfest' liegt eine komplexe Darstellungsweise vor, die die Bezeichnung 'schlicht' kaum mehr verdient. Moxey's Unterscheidung in einen lesbaren Vordergrund und einen 'malerischen' Hintergrund ist unangemessen. Ich gebe zu bedenken, daß durch das Wirken Dürers dem Nürnberger Holzschnitt auch spezifisch künstlerische Maßstäbe eröffnet worden sind. Dürer schreibt in seiner 'seltzame red' ausdrücklich, 'das manicher etwas mit der federn in eine tag auff ein halben bogen papirs reyst oder mit seim eyrsellein etwas in ein klein hoeltzlein versticht, daz wuert kuenstlicher und besser dann eins ändern grosses werck.'4 Unter Dürers Einfluß hat der Nürnberger Holzschnitt sich die Möglichkeiten des perspektivisch organisierten Bildraumes erschlossen. Das bedeutet, daß neben das herkömmliche Anschaulichkeitprinzip der 'Lesbarkeit' von Motiven, die auf einer Bildebene aufgereiht sind, das neue Anschaulichkeitprinzip der Perspektivität tritt, die nach den Begriffen der humanistischen Kunstlehre dem rhetorischen Ideal der 'perspicuitas' entspricht. Auch wenn die Einblattholzschnitte nur zu einem Teil und sichtlich unentschieden von dieser neuen Bildform Gebrauch machen, so steht doch fest: der 'schlichte Stil' läßt Veränderungen und Entwicklungen zu, in denen Raum für spezifisch künstlerische Faktoren ist. Moxey's Verzicht auf spezifisch kunsthistorische Fragestellungen enthält die Gefahr einer Verengung des Blickwinkels. Auch seine Einschätzung der bloß dienenden Rolle des Bildes gegenüber dem Text erscheint differenzierungsbedürftig. Indem die knappen und reduzierten Angaben des Bildes den Betrachter dazu veranlassen, sie mit Textinformationen aufzufüllen und zu ergänzen, wächst dem Bild eine aktive Rolle zu: es organisiert und strukturiert die Lektüre des Texts. Im Einblattdruck 'Zwölf Eigenschaften eines boshaften und verruchten Weibes' (Moxey Abb.5.16) zählt der Text von Hans Sachs auf: Vernachlässigung von Haushalt und Kindern, Naschhaftigkeit, Verlogenheit, Putz-sucht, Stolz, Streitsucht, Ungehorsam, Gewalt gegen den Ehe-mann, Verweigerung der ehelichen Pflicht, Ehebruch und schließlich Verleumdung des Ehemannes bei Gericht. Erhard Schöns Holzschnitt zeigt in der Öffnung der beiden Häuser die Punkte I und 12 der Anklage, unordentlichen Haushalt und Verleumdung vor Gericht. Im Vordergrund ist der gewalttätige Streit dargestellt, der das Zerbrechen der ehelichen Gemeinschaft und der familiären Ordnung offenbar eindeutiger zeigt als etwa der Ehebruch. Das Bild illustriert folglich nicht nur, es interpretiert und akzentuiert. Diese aktive Rolle des Bildes gegenüber dem Text ist eine bedeutende Funktionserweiterung des illustrativen Holzschnitts, als deren Erfinder wohl Sebastian Brant zu gelten hat.5 Nach Moxey's Überzeugung 'artilculiert' das in den Nürnberger Holzschnitten entwichelte 'kulturelle Zeichensystem' Vorstellungcn von gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen und Wertmaßstäben, die zutiefst von Luthers Soziallehre geprägt sind und als Maßgaben eines göttlichen Gebotes unverrückbar festgeschrieben und verteidigt werden. Es war im Interesse des Patriziats, diese Stabilität bei allen Bevölkerungsschichten durchzusetzen, und dabei spielten die Einblattdrucke und Holzschnitte eine aktive, gestaltende Rolle. Trotz mancher Einwände im Einzelnen glaube ich, daß diese Deutung grundsätzliche Zustimmung verdient.

What we wear signals our membership within groups, be theyorganised by gender, class, ethnicity or religion. Simultaneously our clothing signifies hierarchies and power relations that sustain dominant power structures. How we dress is an expression of our identity. For Veblen, how we dress expresses wealth and social stratification. In imitating the fashion of the wealthy, claims Simmel, we seek social equality. For Barthes, clothing is embedded with systems of meaning. For Hebdige, clothing has modalities of meaning depending on the wearer, as do clothes for gender (Davis) and for the body (Entwistle). For Maynard, “dress is a significant material practice we use to signal our cultural boundaries, social separations, continuities and, for the present purposes, political dissidences” (103). Clothing has played a central role in historical and contemporary forms of political dissent. During the French Revolution dress signified political allegiance. The “mandated costumes, the gold-braided coat, white silk stockings, lace stock, plumed hat and sword of the nobility and the sober black suit and stockings” were rejected as part of the revolutionary struggle (Fairchilds 423). After the storming of the Bastille the government of Paris introduced the wearing of the tricolour cockade, a round emblem made of red, blue and white ribbons, which was a potent icon of the revolution, and a central motif in building France’s “revolutionary community”. But in the aftermath of the revolution divided loyalties sparked power struggles in the new Republic (Heuer 29). In 1793 for example anyone not wearing the cockade was arrested. Specific laws were introduced for women not wearing the cockade or for wearing it in a profane manner, resulting in six years in jail. This triggered a major struggle over women’s abilities to exercise their political rights (Heuer 31).Clothing was also central to women’s political struggles in America. In the mid-nineteenth century, women began wearing the “reform dress”—pants with shortened, lightweight skirts in place of burdensome and restrictive dresses (Mas 35). The wearing of pants, or bloomers, challenged gender norms and demonstrated women’s agency. Women’s clothes of the period were an "identity kit" (Ladd Nelson 22), which reinforced “society's distinctions between men and women by symbolizing their natures, roles, and responsibilities” (Ladd Nelson 22, Roberts 555). Men were positioned in society as “serious, active, strong and aggressive”. They wore dark clothing that “allowed movement, emphasized broad chests and shoulders and presented sharp, definite lines” (Ladd Nelson 22). Conversely, women, regarded as “frivolous, inactive, delicate and submissive, dressed in decorative, light pastel coloured clothing which inhibited movement, accentuated tiny waists and sloping shoulders and presented an indefinite silhouette” (Ladd Nelson 22, Roberts 555). Women who challenged these dress codes by wearing pants were “unnatural, and a perversion of the “true” woman” (Ladd Nelson 22). For Crane, the adoption of men’s clothing by women challenged dominant values and norms, changing how women were seen in public and how they saw themselves. The wearing of pants came to “symbolize the movement for women's rights” (Ladd Nelson 24) and as with women in France, Victorian society was forced to consider “women's rights, including their right to choose their own style of dress” (Ladd Nelson 23). As Yangzom (623) puts it, clothing allows groups to negotiate boundaries. How the “embodiment of dress itself alters political space and civic discourse is imperative to understanding how resistance is performed in creating social change” (Yangzom 623). Fig. 1: 1850s fashion bloomersIn a different turn is presented in Mahatma Gandhi’s Khadi movement. Khadi is a term used for fabrics made on a spinning wheel (or charkha) or hand-spun and handwoven, usually from cotton fibre. Khadi is considered the “fabric of Indian independence” (Jain). Gandhi recognised the potential of the fabric to a self-reliant, independent India. Gandhi made the struggle for independence synonymous with khadi. He promoted the materials “simplicity as a social equalizer and made it the nation’s fabric” (Sinha). As Jain notes, clothing and in this case fabric, is a “potent sign of resistance and change”. The material also reflects consciousness and agency. Khadi was Gandhi’s “own sartorial choices of transformation from that of an Englishman to that of one representing India” (Jain). For Jain the “key to Khadi becoming a successful tool for the freedom struggle” was that it was a “material embodiment of an ideal” that “represented freedom from colonialism on the one hand and a feeling of self-reliance and economic self-sufficiency on the other”. Fig. 2: Gandhi on charkha The reappropriating of Khadi as a fabric of political dissent echoes the wearing of blue denim by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the 1963 National Mall Washington march where 250,000 people gather to hear Martin Luther King speak. The SNCC formed in 1960 and from then until the 1963 March on Washington they developed a “style aesthetic that celebrated the clothing of African American sharecroppers” (Ford 626). A critical aspect civil rights activism by African America women who were members of the SNCC was the “performance of respectability”. With the moral character of African American women under attack (as a way of delegitimising their political activities), the female activists “emphasized the outward display of their respectability in order to withstand attacks against their characters”. Their modest, neat “as if you were going to church” (Chappell 96) clothing choices helped them perform respectability and this “played an important performative role in the black freedom struggle” (Ford 626). By 1963 however African American female civil rights activists “abandoned their respectable clothes and processed hairstyles in order to adopt jeans, denim skirts, bib-and-brace overalls”. The adoption of bib-and-brace overalls reflected the sharecropper's blue denim overalls of America’s slave past.For Komar the blue denim overalls “dramatize[d] how little had been accomplished since Reconstruction” and the overalls were practical to fix from attack dog tears and high-pressure police hoses. The blue denim overalls, according to Komar, were also considered to be ‘Negro clothes’ purchased by “slave owners bought denim for their enslaved workers, partly because the material was sturdy, and partly because it helped contrast them against the linen suits and lace parasols of plantation families”. The clothing choice was both practical and symbolic. While the ‘sharecropper’ narrative is problematic as ‘traditional’ clothing (something not evident in the case of Ghandi’s Khandi Movement, there is an emotion associated with the clothing. As Barthes (6-7) has shown, what makes ‘traditional clothing,’ traditional is that it is part of a normative system where not only does clothing have its historical place, but it is governed by its rules and regimentation. Therefore, there is a dialectical exchange between the normative system and the act of dressing where as a link between the two, clothing becomes the conveyer of its meanings (7). Barthes calls this system, langue and the act of dressing parole (8). As Ford does, a reading of African American women wearing what she calls a “SNCC Skin” “the uniform [acts] consciously to transgress a black middle-class worldview that marginalised certain types of women and particular displays of blackness and black culture”. Hence, the SNCC women’s clothing represented an “ideological metamorphosis articulated through the embrace and projection of real and imagined southern, working-class, and African American cultures. Central to this was the wearing of the blue denim overalls. The clothing did more than protect, cover or adorn the body it was a conscious “cultural and political tool” deployed to maintain a movement and build solidarity with the aim of “inversing the hegemonic norms” via “collective representations of sartorial embodiment” (Yangzom 622).Fig. 3: Mississippi SNCC March Coordinator Joyce Ladner during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom political rally in Washington, DC, on 28 Aug. 1963Clothing in each of these historical examples performs an ideological function that can bridge, that is bring diverse members of society together for a cause, or community cohesion or clothing can act as a fence to keep identities separate (Barnard). This use of clothing is evident in two indigenous examples. For Maynard (110) the clothes worn at the 1988 Aboriginal ‘Long March of Freedom, Justice and Hope’ held in Australia signalled a “visible strength denoted by coherence in dress” (Maynard 112). Most noted was the wearing of colours – black, red and yellow, first thought to be adopted during protest marches organised by the Black Protest Committee during the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane (Watson 40). Maynard (110) describes the colour and clothing as follows:the daytime protest march was dominated by the colours of the Aboriginal people—red, yellow and black on flags, huge banners and clothing. There were logo-inscribed T-shirts, red, yellow and black hatband around black Akubra’s, as well as red headbands. Some T-shirts were yellow, with images of the Australian continent in red, others had inscriptions like 'White Australia has a Black History' and 'Our Land Our Life'. Still others were inscribed 'Mourn 88'. Participants were also in customary dress with body paint. Older Indigenous people wore head bands inscribed with the words 'Our Land', and tribal elders from the Northern Territory, in loin cloths, carried spears and clapping sticks, their bodies marked with feathers, white clay and red ochres. Without question, at this most significant event for Aboriginal peoples, their dress was a highly visible and cohesive aspect.Similar is the Tibetan Freedom Movement, a nonviolent grassroots movement in Tibet and among Tibet diaspora that emerged in 2008 to protest colonisation of Tibet. It is also known as the ‘White Wednesday Movement’. Every Wednesday, Tibetans wear traditional clothes. They pledge: “I am Tibetan, from today I will wear only Tibetan traditional dress, chuba, every Wednesday”. A chuba is a colourful warm ankle-length robe that is bound around the waist by a long sash. For the Tibetan Freedom Movement clothing “symbolically functions as a nonverbal mechanism of communication” to “materialise consciousness of the movement” and functions to shape its political aims (Yangzom 622). Yet, in both cases – Aboriginal and Tibet protests – the dress may “not speak to single cultural audience”. This is because the clothing is “decoded by those of different political persuasions, and [is] certainly further reinterpreted or reframed by the media” (Maynard 103). Nevertheless, there is “cultural work in creating a coherent narrative” (Yangzom 623). The narratives and discourse embedded in the wearing of a red, blue and white cockade, dark reform dress pants, cotton coloured Khadi fabric or blue denim overalls is likely a key feature of significant periods of political upheaval and dissent with the clothing “indispensable” even if the meaning of the clothing is “implied rather than something to be explicated” (Yangzom 623). On 21 January 2017, 250,000 women marched in Washington and more than two million protesters around the world wearing pink knitted pussy hats in response to the remarks made by President Donald Trump who bragged of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’. The knitted pink hats became the “embodiment of solidarity” (Wrenn 1). For Wrenn (2), protests such as this one in 2017 complete with “protest visuals” which build solidarity while “masking or excluding difference in the process” indicates “a tactical sophistication in the social movement space with its strategic negotiation of politics of difference. In formulating a flexible solidarity, the movement has been able to accommodate a variety of races, classes, genders, sexualities, abilities, and cultural backgrounds” (Wrenn 4). In doing so they presented a “collective bodily presence made publicly visible” to protest racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic white masculine power (Gokariksel & Smith 631). The 2017 Washington Pussy Hat March was more than an “embodiment tactic” it was an “image event” with its “swarms of women donning adroit posters and pink pussy hats filling the public sphere and impacting visual culture”. It both constructs social issues and forms public opinion hence it is an “argumentative practice” (Wrenn 6). Drawing on wider cultural contexts, as other acts of dissent note here do, in this protest with its social media coverage, the “master frame” of the sea of pink hats and bodies posited to audiences the enormity of the anger felt in the community over attacks on the female body – real or verbal. This reflects Goffman’s theory of framing to describe the ways in which “protestors actively seek to shape meanings such that they spark the public’s support and encourage political openings” (Wrenn 6). The hats served as “visual tropes” (Goodnow 166) to raise social consciousness and demonstrate opposition. Protest “signage” – as the pussy hats can be considered – are a visual representation and validation of shared “invisible thoughts and emotions” (Buck-Coleman 66) affirming Georg Simmel’s ideas about conflict; “it helps individuals define their differences, establish to which group(s) they belong, and determine the degrees to which groups are different from each other” (Buck-Coleman 66). The pink pussy hat helped define and determine membership and solidarity. Further embedding this was the hand-made nature of the hat. The pattern for the hat was available free online at https://www.pussyhatproject.com/knit/. The idea began as one of practicality, as it did for the reform dress movement. This is from the Pussy Hat Project website:Krista was planning to attend the Women’s March in Washington DC that January of 2017 and needed a cap to keep her head warm in the chill winter air. Jayna, due to her injury, would not be able to attend any of the marches, but wanted to find a way to have her voice heard in absentia and somehow physically “be” there. Together, a marcher and a non-marcher, they conceived the idea of creating a sea of pink hats at Women’s Marches everywhere that would make both a bold and powerful visual statement of solidarity, and also allow people who could not participate themselves – whether for medical, financial, or scheduling reasons — a visible way to demonstrate their support for women’s rights. (Pussy Hat Project)In the tradition of “craftivism” – the use of traditional handcrafts such as knitting, assisted by technology (in this case a website with the pattern and how to knit instructions), as a means of community building, skill-sharing and action directed towards “political and social causes” (Buszek & Robertson 197) –, the hand-knitted pink pussy hats avoided the need to purchase clothing to show solidarity resisting the corporatisation of protest clothing as cautioned by Naomi Klein (428). More so by wearing something that could be re-used sustained solidarity. The pink pussy hats provided a counter to the “incoherent montage of mass-produced clothing” often seen at other protests (Maynard 107). Everyday clothing however does have a place in political dissent. In late 2018, French working class and middle-class protestors donned yellow jackets to protest against the government of French President Emmanuel Macron. It began with a Facebook appeal launched by two fed-up truck drivers calling for a “national blockade” of France’s road network in protest against rising fuel prices was followed two weeks later with a post urging motorist to display their hi-vis yellow vests behind their windscreens in solidarity. Four million viewed the post (Henley). Weekly protests continued into 2019. The yellow his-vis vests are compulsorily carried in all motor cars in France. They are “cheap, readily available, easily identifiable and above all representing an obligation imposed by the state”. The yellow high-vis vest has “proved an inspired choice of symbol and has plainly played a big part in the movement’s rapid spread” (Henley). More so, the wearers of the yellow vests in France, with the movement spreading globally, are winning in “the war of cultural representation. Working-class and lower middle-class people are visible again” (Henley). Subcultural clothing has always played a role as heroic resistance (Evans), but the coloured dissent dressing associated with the red, blue and white ribboned cockades, the dark bloomers of early American feminists, the cotton coloured natural fabrics of Ghandi’s embodiment of resistance and independence, the blue denim sharecropper overalls worn by African American women in their struggles for civil rights, the black, red and orange of Aboriginal protestors in Australia and the White Wednesday performances of resistance undertaken by Tibetans against Chinese colonisation, the Washington Pink Pussy Hat marches for gender respect and equality and the donning of every yellow hi-vis vests by French protestors all posit the important role of fabric and colour in protest meaning making and solidarity building. It is in our rage we consciously wear the colours and fabrics of dissent dress. ReferencesBarnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. New York: Routledge, 1996. Barthes, Roland. “History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations.” The Language of Fashion. Eds. Michael Carter and Alan Stafford. UK: Berg, 2006. 3-19. Buck-Coleman, Audra. “Anger, Profanity, and Hatred.” Contexts 17.1 (2018): 66-73.Buszek, Maria Elena, and Kirsty Robertson. “Introduction.” Utopian Studies 22.1 (2011): 197-202. Chappell, Marisa, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward. “‘Dress Modestly, Neatly ... As If You Were Going to Church’: Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Gender and the Civil Rights Movement. Eds. Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith. New Brunswick, N.J., 2004. 69-100.Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.Evans, Caroline. “Dreams That Only Money Can Buy ... Or the Shy Tribe in Flight from Discourse.” Fashion Theory 1.2 (1997): 169-88.Fairchilds, Cissie. “Fashion and Freedom in the French Revolution.” Continuity and Change 15.3 (2000): 419-33.Ford, Tanisha C. “SNCC Women, Denim, and the Politics of Dress.” The Journal of Southern History 79.3 (2013): 625-58.Gökarıksel, Banu, and Sara Smith. “Intersectional Feminism beyond U.S. Flag, Hijab and Pussy Hats in Trump’s America.” Gender, Place & Culture 24.5 (2017): 628-44.Goodnow, Trischa. “On Black Panthers, Blue Ribbons, & Peace Signs: The Function of Symbols in Social Campaigns.” Visual Communication Quarterly 13 (2006): 166-79.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 2002. Henley, Jon. “How Hi-Vis Yellow Vest Became Symbol of Protest beyond France: From Brussels to Basra, Gilets Jaunes Have Brought Visibility to People and Their Grievances.” The Guardian 21 Dec. 2018. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yellow-vest-became-symbol-of-protest-beyond-france-gilets-jaunes>.Heuer, Jennifer. “Hats On for the Nation! Women, Servants, Soldiers and the ‘Sign of the French’.” French History 16.1 (2002): 28-52.Jain, Ektaa. “Khadi: A Cloth and Beyond.” Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal & Gandhi Research Foundation. ND. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/khadi-a-cloth-and-beyond.html>. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, London, 2000. Komar, Marlen. “What the Civil Rights Movement Has to Do with Denim: The History of Blue Jeans Has Been Whitewashed.” 30 Oct. 2017. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.racked.com/2017/10/30/16496866/denim-civil-rights-movement-blue-jeans-history>.Ladd Nelson, Jennifer. “Dress Reform and the Bloomer.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.1 (2002): 21-25.Maynard, Margaret. “Dress for Dissent: Reading the Almost Unreadable.” Journal of Australian Studies 30.89 (2006): 103-12. Pussy Hat Project. “Design Interventions for Social Change.” 20 Dec. 2018. <https://www.pussyhatproject.com/knit/>.Roberts, Helene E. “The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman.” Signs (1977): 554-69.Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 541–58.Sinha, Sangita. “The Story of Khadi, India's Signature Fabric.” Culture Trip 2018. 18 Jan. 2019 <https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/the-story-of-khadi-indias-fabric/>.Yangzom, Dicky. “Clothing and Social Movements: Tibet and the Politics of Dress.” Social Movement Studies 15.6 (2016): 622-33. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Dover Thrift, 1899. Watson, Lilla. “The Commonwealth Games in Brisbane 1982: Analysis of Aboriginal Protests.” Social Alternatives 7.1 (1988): 1-19.Wrenn, Corey. “Pussy Grabs Back: Bestialized Sexual Politics and Intersectional Failure in Protest Posters for the 2017 Women’s March.” Feminist Media Studies (2018): 1-19.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57.” The New York Times 15 Dec. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html>.Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word: An Interview with WG Sebald.” The Guardian 22 Sep. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation>.Karp, Masha. “An Interview with Irina Flige.” RightsinRussia.com 11 Apr. 2012. 2 Aug. 2019 <http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/irina-flige/masha-karp>.Lewis, Tess. “WG Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20 (2001).MacDonald, Anna. “‘Pictures in a Rebus’: Puzzling Out W.G. Sebald’s Monstrous Geographies.” In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier. Eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013. 115–25.Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin. London: Harvill Secker, 2014.Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselsberger. Rochester New York: Camden House, 2010. 37–62. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26: (Spring 1989): 7–24.Polster, Heike. The Aesthetics of Passage: The Imag(in)ed Experience of Time in Thomas Lehr, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Handke. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2009.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002.Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Today, tomorrow, the dead, the unborn, the sick and dying. And me, can you see me? The thirty-five-year-old man, cross-legged in the large white tent where we speak of the dead? Another face in the hundred other faces. The walls are thick with thankas, pastel pinks and icy hells, skulls cups and lotus flowers. Mothers are rocking babies, fathers creak like old bones. We all inch forward to hear the large monk in yellow robes who says how forty-nine days after death we seek material form, see a range of lights, a chimera of colours. We drift to where our parents are making love and take form in the womb. To be reborn a human, he reminds us, is very, very rare. Breath in, breath out. Meaning of life through a contemplation on death. He says we need to remember to remember, but right now I wish I could forget. Me, on a midwinter night, in Christchurch. Twelve years old, naked and deep in the bath as a yellow cloud of piss bleeds out around my white and skinny knees. Downstairs, there are noises, milk bottles chinking, a coal shovel scraping, Pink Floyd and a maunder of women's voices. Back from a conference, they laugh and fret. Cars arrive, the door bell rings, and someone is met with cajoling welcome. Tonight it is busy, when for the last three days the house had been dead of life; just my brother in his room, my stepfather, Earl, fixing shelves in the bathroom, and me continually thinking about the conference, all those women, overseas speakers, delegates and workshops. Three thousand. To me it may as well have been the world. Everyone had gone. My mother, her friends, my sister. Even my gran had managed an afternoon on Sunday. "Yes darling," she said, mightily impressed, "all those girls rah-rah-rahing. Your mother up on stage. It was all quite a show." When they came in, I was sitting on the bench, picking a scab on my elbow. I remember, my mother, searching in her pockets for cigarettes and wrestling off her jacket. Her face had been tired and her eyes were sullen. Smoke eddied past her forehead as she reached up and unfastened her long tail of hair. Berwyn Sallychurch, six foot, pale and bony, was boasting about her workshop, 'Women and Guilt'. She was hunched over her hands, fixing herself a cracker and cheese when Earl came in from outside. He had his cotton work hat on, baggy corduroys and his hands looked cold and were splattered with paint. He stood in the middle of the room of women, cardboard roll, several brushes and a scrunched up sheet of paper in his hand. He bid them all a sheepish hello, to which my mother quickly smiled back, I examined my shoe, before he moved to the fire, tossed the rubbish into the red mouth of the fire and stabbed it with the poker. Berwyn was explaining how a woman broke down in the middle of her workshop. "The bit where I had them all writing down their childhoods, she starts up, wailing like an siren." "What did you do?" My mother rid her cigarette of ash with a quick flick of her finger. "Do!" Berwyn raised her hand. "What can you do? I said to her, 'Darling, you've got a lifetime of patriarchal conditioning to live down. It's gunna take a while.'" Berwyn went on saying how she asked the crying woman if she masturbated and how well the woman had responded to her question. Heads nodded, tea was poured, Earl skulked out the door. Another winter night, how I remember, all those noises, my mother's tired face, me in bath later on, trying to figure out this thing about asking someone if they masturbated, and really, who on earth would want to know? Footsteps up the stairs, then back down again, the door opening to myriad of sounds, cut through by my mother's indelible voice, just before the door slams. "Fuckin' silly bitch. When will she learn?" Who is the silly bitch? I lie back and consider. Patricia Hickey, the smut protector? She always gets a hiss and spit when she comes on the tellie. Or Lady Drayton, ex-mayoress, who has a thing for councillors and other women's husbands? One of the pro-life Spuckies, rabbit-breeding Catholic. It is hard to tell. There are so many silly bitches to choose from. The wall is tiled and chipped. It is peppered with splash marks and finger prints. On the shelf a tube of toothpaste is uncapped and oozing. Tooth brushes are scattered like pick-up sticks. There are two pictures tacked to the tiles. One is of a chart of all the kings and queens of England. The other picture, a real picture, is torn out of a magazine and its edges are frayed and have turned a shade of yellow. This is the one I look at. It isn't like the other pictures downstairs though, the ones in the hippy guides to mud huts and home births. There are no doctors with masks on, mothers grunting, hands being held, babies being squeezed out the lady's hole. I wouldn't show my friends. It's no fun. No fun at all. She is dead and flat on her face, arms out with her dress around her large, white buttocks. Blood is running out between her legs and at the bottom, beneath a twist of plastic tube, black letters say 'ABORTION -- A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE. KEEP IT OFF THE STREETS'. Everyday I see her, brushing my teeth, wiping my face, sitting on the loo. She is a reminder of how lucky I am, that she could be my mum or my sister, the lady who sent us a turkey at Christmas because she was religious and there was nothing else she could do; or maybe the one from last night when I answered the phone and she said 'Is your mum there darling?' distant and weepy. 'Please! Please! Can I speak to your mother?' From my wet, white toes to her grim, grainy print and world of lonely silence, my eyes and imagination move. How could they? The boyfriend, the husband, the doctors, Patricia Hickey, the stupid Catholics? How could they let her die? The tent flukes in the afternoon breeze. I can hear the sound of the waves and the occasional car. Figures pass by, feet on the sandy soil as I sit here aware that it has taken me three days; three days up the grassy slope, past the brazier wafting juniper and incense, past this shrine for the dead, three days looking down at my bare feet, their pale weave of bones, their callused heels upon the litter of green blades, the oak needles, ants and earth? Before me is a box containing many names, a masonite board and many different photos. The monk said he would give prayers for the unborn as well as the dead, and now the box is full and I must wedge my paper in. It contains a small offering, my mother's name, date of birth, date of death and a reason. As if we need a reason. My mother had her reasons. They were wrapped around her life like a shawl. At the National Archive that day, they were all that was left of a forty-seven-year-old life. In scribbles and scraps, cutouts and clippings, she was 'a notorious pioneer in New Zealand women's health, a fighter for justice, a heroine of reform', neatly assembled into two concertina folders. I sat at a neat desk in a large room with a head full of questions and a book full of scribbles. Proud? Of course I was proud. But when certain words fell off certain people's tongues, my skin crept and toes cramped. No. That woman they chorussed, the 'wonderful' 'strong' and 'gutsy' mother of mine, wasn't mine at all. She was theirs, sewn into their political imagination with the thread of nostalgia, traces of jealousy and fear. Hundred of pages attesting to her work: the back-breaking tedium of abortion politics, accounts, tax files, divvying up of funds, the 1977 Women's Conference, speakers to attend, registrations, flight details for women going to Australia, hotels booked, operating doctors. Q tried to get into Christchurch Women's Hospital. Refused. Found back street abortionist. Used catheter. Told to leave it in for a week -- bled badly. Emergency case Ch'ch Women's. Nearly died. Mrs M is a 44-year-old Maori woman, solo mother of 9. Husband left after service and never returned. She said herself that her children were a 'bit out of hand'. Just suffered a disc protrusion in her last pregnancy and spent six months in hospital severely depressed. In all the woman saw 7 doctors in order to obtain termination. The delays in appointments resulted in her being 16 weeks pregnant at the time of operation. Done for $250. I looked out the window at a seagull battling in the Wellington wind and could imagine my mother, labouring over a pad of paper and ashtray late at night. I wanted to hold her hand, share the load, tell her not to cry. I removed the file marked 'Personal' and was pulled out of my lament. It was brimming with letters, cringeful, naïve, mock militant letters that were bleedingly written and poorly spelt out. For me, they signalled a journey from boy to man along a fraught and fractured path. Letters from my mother's best friend to my mother, around the time they met, drunk in adoration, political vision and parochial feminist forecasts of 'Sisterhood' and 'Herstory'. From the halcyon high to inimical low, deceipt, and brokenheartedness, I could pin-point the letter written to my mother at the time of my seduction. "Dear Elizabeth," my new lover wrote. "You unmitigated bitch." Dozens of letters I stuffed in my sock, sick at the thought, feeling the camera in the corner, as if it were the eye of the world, laughing, goading and snickering at me, the feminist's son. 'Mine! Mine!' I want to shout. 'These letters are mine. No-one else's. Ya hear me. Got it!' And though I wanted it, no librarian's hand appeared on my shoulder, no one tried to stop me stealing. It was just me in that large room, and a small camera no one was even watching. From out of my shirt pocket I remove the photo and pin it to the masonite board. My mother, beside all the other photos of the dead, the polaroids and black and whites, has her hand on her chin and looks towards the early night sky. She wanted to see the Kauri trees before she died and her boyfriend drove them north. Her hand supports her chin and her face is alabaster in a red silhouette of sunset and trees. She wears a light-blue jumper and her black hair has not yet fallen out. That hair, once raven black and key to her bold symetry and audacious manner, dropped out in feathery lumps and left her like a small girl with frail shoulders and yellow skin. So many dead to ponder. My mother haunted by her past, was frightened to die. But for now at least, despite her driven face and questioning eyes, I see peace and a moment of closure. I breathe in, I breathe out. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Hamish Kaden. "The Interminable Son." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/son.php>. Chicago style: Hamish Kaden, "The Interminable Son," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/son.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Hamish Kaden. (1999) The interminable son. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/son.php> ([your date of access]).

The Harry Potter (HP) Fan Fiction (FF) phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the nature of fame and the work of fans (including the second author, a participant observer) in creating and circulating cultural products within fan communities. Matt Hills comments (xi) that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work”. This paper explores the cultural work of fandom in relation to FF and fame. The global HP phenomenon – in which FF lists are a small part – has made creator J K Rowling richer than the Queen of England, according to the 2003 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. The books (five so far) and the films (three) continue to accelerate the growth in Rowling’s fortune, which quadrupled from 2001-3: an incredible success for an author unknown before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Even the on-screen HP lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is now Britain’s second wealthiest teenager (after England’s Prince Harry). There are other globally successful books, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia collection, but neither of these series has experienced the momentum of the HP rise to fame. (See Endnote for an indication of the scale of fan involvement with HP FF, compared with Lord of the Rings.) Contemporary ‘Fame’ has been critically defined in relation to the western mass media’s requirement for ‘entertaining’ content, and the production and circulation of celebrity as opposed to ‘hard news’(Turner, Bonner and Marshall). The current perception is that an army of publicists and spin doctors are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to create and nurture global fame. Yet the HP phenomenon started out with no greater publicity investment than that garnered by any other promising first novelist: and given the status of HP as children’s publishing, it was probably less hyped than equivalent adult-audience publications. So are there particular characteristics of HP and his creator that predisposed the series and its author to become famous? And how does the fame status relate to fans’ incorporation of these cultural materials into their lives? Accepting that it is no more possible to predict the future fame of an author or (fictional) character than it is to predict the future financial success of a book, film or album, there is a range of features of the HP phenomenon that, in hindsight, helped accelerate the fame momentum, creating what has become in hindsight an unparalleled global media property. J K Rowling’s personal story – in the hands of her publicity machine – itself constituted a magical myth: the struggling single mother writing away (in longhand) in a Scottish café, snatching odd moments to construct the first book while her infant daughter slept. (Comparatively little attention was paid by the marketers to the author’s professional training and status as a teacher, or to Rowling’s own admission that the first book, and the outline for the series, took five years to write.) Rowling’s name itself, with no self-evident gender attribution, was also indicative of ambiguity and mystery. The back-story to HP, therefore, became one of a quintessentially romantic endeavour – the struggle to write against the odds. Publicity relating to the ‘starving in a garret’ background is not sufficient to explain the HP/Rowling grip on the popular imagination, however. Instead it is arguable that the growth of HP fame and fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and to the middle class readers’ Internet access. If the production of celebrity is a major project of the conventional mass media, the HP phenomenon is a harbinger of the hyper-fame that can be generated through the combined efforts of the mass media and online fan communities. The implication of this – evident in new online viral marketing techniques (Kirby), is that publicists need to pique cyber-interest as well as work with the mass media in the construction of celebrity. As the cheer-leaders for online viral marketing make the argument, the technique “provides the missing link between the [bottom-up] word-of-mouth approach and the top-down, advertainment approach”. Which is not to say that the initial HP success was a function of online viral marketing: rather, the marketers learned their trade by analysing the magnifier impact that the online fan communities had upon the exponential growth of the HP phenomenon. This cyber-impact is based both on enhanced connectivity – the bottom-up, word-of-mouth dynamic, and on the individual’s need to assume an identity (albeit fluid) to participate effectively in online community. Critiquing the notion that the computer is an identity machine, Streeter focuses upon (649) “identities that people have brought to computers from the culture at large”. He does not deal in any depth with FF, but suggests (651) that “what the Internet is and will come to be, then, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it”. What happens when fans sit down to use the Internet, and is there a particular reason why the Internet should be of importance to the rise and rise of HP fame? From the point of view of one of us, HP was born at more or less the same time as she was. Eleven years old in the first book, published in 1997, Potter’s putative birth year might be set in 1986 – in line with many of the original HP readership, and the publisher’s target market. At the point that this cohort was first spellbound by Potter, 1998-9, they were also on the brink of discovering the Internet. In Australia and many western nations, over half of (two-parent) families with school-aged children were online by the end of 2000 (ABS). Potter would notionally have been 14: his fans a little younger but well primed for the ‘teeny-bopper’ years. Arguably, the only thing more famous than HP for that age-group, at that time, was the Internet itself. As knowledge of the Internet grew stories about it constituted both news and entertainment and circulated widely in the mass media: the uncertainty concerning new media, and their impact upon existing social structures, has – over time – precipitated a succession of moral panics … Established commercial media are not noted for their generosity to competitors, and it is unsurprising that many of the moral panics circulating about pornography on the Net, Internet stalking, Web addiction, hate sites etc are promulgated in the older media. (Green xxvii) Although the mass media may have successfully scared the impressionable, the Internet was not solely constructed as a site of moral panic. Prior to the general pervasiveness of the Internet in domestic space, P. David Marshall discusses multiple constructions of the computer – seen by parents as an educational tool which could help future-proof their children; but which their children were more like to conceptualise as a games machine, or (this was the greater fear) use for hacking. As the computer was to become a site for the battle ground between education, entertainment and power, so too the Internet was poised to be colonised by teenagers for a variety of purposes their parents would have preferred to prevent: chat, pornography, game-playing (among others). Fan communities thrive on the power of the individual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation. Further, in constructing the reasons behind what has happened in the HP narrative, and in speculating what is to come, fans are presenting themselves as identities with whom others might agree (positive affirmation) or disagree (offering the chance for engagement through exchange). The genuinely insightful fans, who apparently predict the plots before they’re published, may even be credited in their communities with inspiring J K Rowling’s muse. (The FF mythology is that J K Rowling dare not look at the FF sites in case she finds herself influenced.) Nancy Baym, commenting on a soap opera fan Usenet group (Usenet was an early 1990s precursor to discussion groups) notes that: The viewers’ relationship with characters, the viewers’ understanding of socioemotional experience, and soap opera’s narrative structure, in which moments of maximal suspense are always followed by temporal gaps, work together to ensure that fans will use the gaps during and between shows to discuss with one another possible outcomes and possible interpretations of what has been seen. (143) In HP terms the The Philosopher’s Stone constructed a fan knowledge that J K Rowling’s project entailed at least seven books (one for each year at Hogwarts School) and this offered plentiful opportunities to speculate upon the future direction and evolution of the HP characters. With each speculation, each posting, the individual fan can refine and extend their identity as a member of the FF community. The temporal gaps between the books and the films – coupled with the expanding possibilities of Internet communication – mean that fans can feel both creative and connected while circulating the cultural materials derived from their engagement with the HP ‘canon’. Canon is used to describe the HP oeuvre as approved by Rowling, her publishers, and her copyright assignees (for example, Warner Bros). In contrast, ‘fanon’ is the name used by fans to refer the body of work that results from their creative/subversive interactions with the core texts, such as “slash” (homo-erotic/romance) fiction. Differentiation between the two terms acknowledges the likelihood that J K Rowling or her assignees might not approve of fanon. The constructed identities of fans who deal solely with canon differ significantly from those who are engaged in fanon. The implicit (romantic) or explicit (full-action descriptions) sexualisation of HP FF is part of a complex identity play on behalf of both the writers and readers of FF. Further, given that the online communities are often nurtured and enriched by offline face to face exchanges with other participants, what an individual is prepared to read or not to read, or write or not write, says as much about that person’s public persona as does another’s overt consumption of pornography; or diet of art house films, in contrast to someone else’s enthusiasm for Friends. Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony argue that a “central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption” (106), and few would disagree with them: herein lies the power of the brand. Noting that consumer culture centrally focuses upon harnessing ‘the desire to desire’, Streeter’s work (654, on the opening up of Internet connectivity) suggests a continuum from ‘desire provoked’; through anticipation, ‘excitement based on what people imagined would happen’; to a sense of ‘possibility’. All this was made more tantalising in terms of the ‘unpredictability’ of how cyberspace would eventually resolve itself (657). Thus a progression is posited from desire through to the thrill of comparing future possibilities with eventual outcomes. These forces clearly influence the HP FF phenomenon, where a section of HP fans have become impatient with the pace of the ‘official’/canon HP text. J K Rowling’s writing has slowed down to the point that Harry’s initial readership has overtaken him by several years. He’s about to enter his sixth year (of seven) at secondary school – his erstwhile-contemporaries have already left school or are about to graduate to University. HP is yet to have ‘a relationship’: his fans are engaged in some well-informed speculation as to a range of sexual possibilities which would likely take J K Rowling some light years from her marketers’ core readership. So the story is progressing more slowly than many fans would choose and with less spice than many would like (from the evidence of the web, at least). As indicated in the Endnote, the productivity of the fans, as they ‘fill in the gaps’ while waiting for the official narrative to resume, is prodigious. It may be that as the fans outstrip HP in their own social and emotional development they find his reactions in later books increasingly unbelievable, and/or out of character with the HP they felt they knew. Thus they develop an alternative ‘Harry’ in fanon. Some FF authors identify in advance which books they accept as canon, and which they have decided to ignore. For example, popular FF author Midnight Blue gives the setting of her evolving FF The Mirror of Maybe as “after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as an alternative to the events detailed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, [this] is a Slash story involving Harry Potter and Severus Snape”. Some fans, tired of waiting for Rowling to get Harry grown up, ‘are doin’ it for themselves’. Alternatively, it may be that as they get older the first groups of HP fans are unwilling to relinquish their investment in the HP phenomenon, but are equally unwilling to align themselves uncritically with the anodyne story of the canon. Harry Potter, as Warner Bros licensed him, may be OK for pre-teens, but less cool for the older adolescent. The range of identities that can be constructed using the many online HP FF genres, however, permits wide scope for FF members to identify with dissident constructions of the HP narrative and helps to add to the momentum with which his fame increases. Latterly there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making subtle overtures to creators of fanon. Here, the viral marketers have a particular challenge – to embrace the huge market represented by fanon, while not disturbing those whose HP fandom is based upon the purity of canon. Some elements of fanon feel their discourses have been recognised within the evolving approved narrative . This sense within the fan community – that the holders of the canon have complimented them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds the momentum of the fame engagement (as has been demonstrated by Watson, with respect to the band ‘phish’). Specifically, Harry/Draco slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a Defence against the Dark Arts Class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution to the development of the HP phenomenon. Streeter credits Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as offering a model for the incorporation of voluntary labour into the marketplace. Although Streeter’s example concerns the Open Source movement, derived from hacker culture, it has parallels with the prodigious creativity (and productivity) of the HP FF communities. Discussing the decision by Netscape to throw open the source code of its software in 1998, allowing those who use it to modify and improve it, Streeter comments that (659) “the core trope is to portray Linux-style software development like a bazaar, a real-life competitive marketplace”. The bazaar features a world of competing, yet complementary, small traders each displaying their skills and their wares for evaluation in terms of the product on offer. In contrast, “Microsoft-style software production is portrayed as hierarchical and centralised – and thus inefficient – like a cathedral”. Raymond identifies “ego satisfaction and reputation among other [peers]” as a specific socio-emotional benefit for volunteer participants (in Open Source development), going on to note: “Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon [… for example] science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ‘egoboo’ (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity”. This may also be a prime mover for FF engagement. Where fans have outgrown the anodyne canon they get added value through using the raw materials of the HP stories to construct fanon: establishing and building individual identities and communities through HP consumption practices in parallel with, but different from, those deemed acceptable for younger, more innocent, fans. The fame implicit in HP fandom is not only that of HP, the HP lead actor Daniel Radcliffe and HP’s creator J K Rowling; for some fans the famed ‘state or quality of being widely honoured and acclaimed’ can be realised through their participation in online fan culture – fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others. The cultural capital circulated on the FF sites is both canon and fanon, a matter of some anxiety for the corporations that typically buy into and foster these mega-media products. As Jim Ward, Vice-President of Marketing for Lucasfilm comments about Star Wars fans (cited in Murray 11): “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” Slash fans would beg to differ, and for many FF readers and writers, the joy of engagement, and a significant engine for the growth of HP fame, is partly located in the creativity offered for readers and writers to fill in the gaps. Endnote HP FF ranges from posts on general FF sites (such as fanfiction.net >> books, where HP has 147,067 stories [on 4,490 pages of hotlinks] posted, compared with its nearest ‘rival’ Lord of the rings: with 33,189 FF stories). General FF sites exclude adult content, much of which is corralled into 18+ FF sites, such as Restrictedsection.org, set up when core material was expelled from general sites. As an example of one adult site, the Potter Slash Archive is selective (unlike fanfiction.net, for example) which means that only stories liked by the site team are displayed. Authors submitting work are asked to abide by a list of ‘compulsory parameters’, but ‘warnings’ fall under the category of ‘optional parameters’: “Please put a warning if your story contains content that may be offensive to some authors [sic], such as m/m sex, graphic sex or violence, violent sex, character death, major angst, BDSM, non-con (rape) etc”. Adult-content FF readers/writers embrace a range of unexpected genres – such as Twincest (incest within either of the two sets of twin characters in HP) and Weasleycest (incest within the Weasley clan) – in addition to mainstream romance/homo-erotica pairings, such as that between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (NB: within the time frame 16 August – 4 October, Harry Potter FF writers had posted an additional 9,196 stories on the fanfiction.net site alone.) References ABS. 8147.0 Use of the Internet by Householders, Australia. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ e8ae5488b598839cca25682000131612/ ae8e67619446db22ca2568a9001393f8!OpenDocument, 2001, 2001>. Baym, Nancy. “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Blue, Midnight. “The Mirror of Maybe.” http://www.greyblue.net/MidnightBlue/Mirror/default.htm>. Coates, Laura. “Muggle Kids Battle for Domain Name Rights. Irish Computer. http://www.irishcomputer.com/domaingame2.html>. Fanfiction.net. “Category: Books” http://www.fanfiction.net/cat/202/>. Green, Lelia. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Houghton Mifflin. “Potlatch.” Encyclopedia of North American Indians. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/ na_030900_potlatch.htm>. Kirby, Justin. “Brand Papers: Getting the Bug.” Brand Strategy July-August 2004. http://www.dmc.co.uk/pdf/BrandStrategy07-0804.pdf>. Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (Nov. 1997): 70-8. Murray, Simone. “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom.” Continuum 18.1 (2004): 7-25. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 2000. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html>. Streeter, Thomas. The Romantic Self and the Politics of Internet Commercialization. Cultural Studies 17.5 (2003): 648-68. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP. Watson, Nessim. “Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community.” Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Ed. Steven G. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 102-32. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, and Carmen Guinery. "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>. APA Style Green, L., and C. Guinery. (Nov. 2004) "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>.

While exploring the virtual world Second Life one day, I received a group message across the in-world communication system – “there’s a griefer on the beach. Stay away from the beach till we catch him.” There was no need to explain; everyone receiving the message knew what a griefer was and had a general idea of the kinds of things that could be happening. We’d all seen griefers at work before – someone monopolising the chat channel so no one else can communicate, people being “caged” at random, or even weapons fire causing so much “overhead” that all activity in the area slows to a crawl. These kinds of attacks are not limited to virtual worlds. Most people have experienced griefing in their everyday lives, which might best be defined as having fun at someone else’s expense. More commonly seen examples of this in the real world include teasing, bullying, and harassment; playground bullies have long made other children’s free time miserable. More destructive griefing includes arson and theft. Griefing activities happen in all kinds of games and virtual worlds. Griefers who laugh at new users and “yell” (so that all players can hear) that they stink, have followed new users of Disney’s tween-popular ToonTown. Griefers pose as friendly, helpful players who offer to show new users a path through difficult parts of a game, but then who abandon the new user in a spot where he or she does not have the skills to proceed. In World of Warcraft, a popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) created by Blizzard with more than seven million registered, if not active, users, griefers engage in what is known as corpse camping; they sit by a corpse, killing it over and over every time the player tries to get back into the game. The griefer gets a small number of experience points; the player being killed gets aggravated and has to wait out the griefing to play the game again (Warner & Raiter). Griefing in World of Warcraft was featured in an award nominated episode of the television program South Park, in which one character killed every other player he met. This paper considers different types of griefing, both in online games and virtual worlds, and then looks at the actions other players, those being griefed, take against griefers. A variety of examples from Second Life are considered because of the open-structure of the world and its developing nature. Definitions and Types Griefing in online environments such as video games and virtual worlds has been defined as “purposefully engaging in activities to disrupt the gaming experience of other players” (Mulligan & Patrovsky 250). The “purposeful” part of the definition means that accidental bumping and pushing, behaviours often exhibited by new users, are not griefing (Warner & Raiter). Rossingol defines a griefer as, “a player of malign intentions. They will hurt, humiliate and dishevel the average gamer through bending and breaking the rules of online games. ...They want glory, gain or just to partake in a malignant joy at the misfortune of others.” Davis, who maintains a gaming blog, describes Second Life as being populated by “those who build things and those who like to tear them down,” with the latter being the griefers who may be drawn to the unstructured anything-goes nature of the virtual world (qtd. in Girard). Definitions of griefing differ based on context. For instance, griefing has been examined in a variety of multi-player online games. These games often feature missions where players have to kill other players (PvP), behaviour that in other contexts such as virtual worlds would be considered griefing. Putting a monster on the trail of a player considered rude or unskilled might be a way to teach a lesson, but also an example of griefing (Taylor). Foo and Koivisto define griefing in MMORPGs as “play styles that disrupt another player’s gaming experience, usually with specific intention. When the act is not specifically intended to disrupt and yet the actor is the sole beneficiary, it is greed play, a subtle form of grief play” (11). Greed play usually involves actions that disrupt the game play of others but without technically breaking any game rules. A different way of looking at griefing is that it is a sign that the player understands the game or virtual world deeply enough to take advantage of ambiguities in the rules by changing the game to something new (Koster). Many games have a follow option; griefers pick a victim, stand near them, get as naked as possible, and then just follow them around without talking or explaining their actions (Walker). Another example is the memorial service in World of Warcraft for a player who died in real life. The service was interrupted by an attack from another clan; everyone at the memorial service was killed. It is not clear cut who the griefers actually were in this case – the mourners who chose to have their peaceful service in an area marked for player combat or the attackers following the rules for that area and working to earn points and progress in the game. In the case of the mourners, they were changing the rules of the game to suit them, to create something unique – a shared space to mourn a common friend. But they were definitely not playing by the rules. The attackers, considered griefers by many both in and outside of the game, did nothing that broke any rules of the game, though perhaps they broke rules of common decency (“World”); what they did does not fit into the definition of griefing, as much as do the actions of the mourners (Kotaku). Reshaping the game can be done to embed a new, sometimes political, message into the game. A group named Velvet Strike formed to protest US military action. They went into Counter Strike to bring a “message of peace, love and happiness to online shooters by any means necessary” (King). They placed spray painted graphics containing anti-war messages into the game; when confronted with people from other teams the Velvet Strike members refused to shoot (King). The group website contains “recipes” for non-violent game play. One “recipe” involved the Velvet Strike member hiding at the beginning of a mission and not moving for the rest of the game. The other players would shoot each other and then be forced to spend the rest of the game looking for the last survivor in order to get credit for the win. Similar behaviour has been tried inside the game America’s Army. Beginning March, 2006, deLappe, an artist who opposes the U.S. government’s involvement in Iraq, engaged in griefing behaviour by filling (spamming) the in-game text channel with the names of the people killed in the war; no one else can communicate on that channel. Even his character name, dead-in-Iraq, is an anti-war protest (deLappe). “I do not participate in the proscribed mayhem. Rather, I stand in position and type until I am killed. After death, I hover over my dead avatar’s body and continue to type. Upon being re-incarnated in the next round, I continue the cycle” (deLappe n.p.). What about these games and virtual worlds might lead people to even consider griefing? For one thing, they seem anonymous, which can lead to irresponsible behaviour. Players use fake names. Characters on the screen do not seem real. Another reason may be that rules can be broken in videogames and virtual worlds with few consequences, and in fact the premise of the game often seems to encourage such rule breaking. The rules are not always clearly laid out. Each game or world has a Terms of Service agreement that set out basic acceptable behaviour. Second Life defines griefing in terms of the Terms of Service that all users agree to when opening accounts. Abuse is when someone consciously and with malicious intent violates those terms. On top of that limited set of guidelines, each landowner in a virtual world such as Second Life can also set rules for their own property, from dress code, to use of weapons, to allowable conversation topics. To better understand griefing, it is necessary to consider the motivations of the people involved. Early work on categorising player types was completed by Bartle, who studied users of virtual worlds, specifically MUDs, and identified four player types: killers, achievers, socialisers, and explorers. Killers and achievers seem most relevant in a discussion about griefing. Killers enjoy using other players to get ahead. They want to do things to other people (not for or with others), and they get the most pleasure if they can act without the consent of the other player. Knowing about a game or a virtual world gives no power unless that knowledge can be used to gain some advantage over others and to enhance your standing in the game. Achievers want power and dominance in a game so they can do things to the game and master it. Griefing could help them feel a sense of power if they got people to do their will to stop the griefing behavior. Yee studied the motivations of people who play MMORPGs. He found that people who engage in griefing actually scored high in being motivated to play by both achieving and competition (“Facets”). Griefers often want attention. They may want to show off their scripting skills in the hope of earning respect among other coders and possibly be hired to program for others. But many players are motivated by a desire to compete and to win; these categories do not seem to be adequate for understanding the different types of griefing (Yee, “Faces of Grief”). The research on griefing in games has also suggested ways to categorise griefers in virtual worlds. Suler divides griefers into two types (qtd. in Becker). The first is those who grief in order to make trouble for authority figures, including the people who create the worlds. A few of the more spectacular griefing incidents seem designed to cause trouble for Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. Groups attacked the servers that run Second Life, known as the grid, in October of 2005; this became known as the “gray goo attack” (Second Life; Wallace). Servers were flooded with objects and Second Life had to be taken off line to be restored from backups. More organised groups, such as the W-hats, the SL Liberation Army, and Patriotic Nigas engage in more large scale and public griefing. Some groups hope to draw attention to the group’s goals. The SL Liberation Army wants Linden Lab to open up the governance of the virtual world so that users can vote on changes and policies being implemented and limit corporate movement into Second Life (MarketingVox). Patriotic Nigas, with about 35 active members, want to slow the entry of corporations into Second Life (Cabron, “Who are Second Life’s”). One often discussed griefer attack in Second Life included a flood of pink flying penises directed against land owner and the first person to have made a profit of more than one million United States dollars in a virtual world, Anshe Chung, during a well-publicised and attended interview in world with technology news outlet CNET (Walsh, “Second Life Millionaire” ). The second type proposed by Suler is the griefer who wants to hurt and victimise others (qtd. in Becker). Individual players often go naked into PG-rated areas to cause trouble. Weapons are used in areas where weapons are banned. Second Life publishes a police blotter, which lists examples of minor griefing and assigned punishment, including incidents of disturbing the peace and violating community standards for which warnings and short bans have been issued. These are the actions of individuals for the most part, as were the people who exploited security holes to enter the property uninvited during the grand opening of Endemol’s Big Brother island in Second Life; guests to the opening were firebombed and caged. One of the griefers explained her involvement: Well I’m from The Netherlands, and as you might know the tv concept of big brother was invented here, and it was in all the newspapers in Holland. So I thought It would be this huge event with lots of media. Then I kinda got the idea ‘hey I could ruin this and it might make the newspaper or tv. So that’s what set me off, lol. (qtd. in Sklar) Some groups do grief just to annoy. The Patriotic Nigas claim to have attacked the John Edwards headquarters inside SL wearing Bush ‘08 buttons (Cabron, “John Edwards Attackers”), but it was not a political attack. The group’s founder, Mudkips Acronym (the name of his avatar in SL) said, “I’m currently rooting for Obama, but that doesn’t mean we won’t raid him or anything. We’ll hit anyone if it’s funny, and if the guy I want to be president in 2008’s campaign provides the lulz, we’ll certainly not cross him off our list” (qtd. in Cabron, “John Edwards Attackers”). If they disrupt a high profile event or site, the attack will be covered by media that can amplify the thrill of the attack, enhance their reputation among other griefers, and add to their enjoyment of the griefing. Part of the definition of griefing is that the griefer enjoys causing other players pain and disrupting their game. One resident posted on the SL blog, “Griefers, for the most part, have no other agenda other than the thrill of sneaking one past and causing a big noise. Until a spokesperson comes forward with a manifesto, we can safely assume that this is the work of the “Jackass” generation, out to disrupt things to show that they can“ (Scarborough). Usually to have fun, griefers go after individuals, rather than the owners and administrators of the virtual world and so fit into Suler’s second type of griefing. These griefers enjoy seeing others get angry and frustrated. As one griefer said: Understanding the griefer mindset begins with this: We don’t take the game seriously at all. It continues with this: It’s fun because you react. Lastly: We do it because we’re jerks and like to laugh at you. I am the fly that kamikazes into your soup. I am the reason you can’t have nice things … . If I make you cry, you’ve made my day. (Drake) They have fun by making the other players mad. “Causing grief is the name of his game. His objective is simple: Make life hell for anyone unlucky enough to be playing with him. He’s a griefer. A griefer is a player bent on purposely frustrating others during a multiplayer game” (G4). “I’m a griefer. It’s what I do,” the griefer says. “And, man, people get so pissed off. It’s great” (G4). Taking Action against Griefers Understanding griefing from the griefer point of view leads us to examine the actions of those being griefed. Suler suggests several pairs of opposing actions that can be taken against griefers, based on his experience in an early social environment called Palace. Many of the steps still being used fit into these types. He first describes preventative versus remedial action. Preventative steps include design features to minimise griefing. The Second Life interface includes the ability to build 3D models and to create software; it also includes a menu for land owners to block those features at will, a design feature that helps prevent much griefing. Remedial actions are those taken by the administrators to deal with the effects of griefing; Linden Lab administrators can shut down whole islands to keep griefer activities from spreading to nearby islands. The second pair is interpersonal versus technical; interpersonal steps involve talking to the griefers to get them to stop ruining the game for others, while technical steps prevent griefers from re-entering the world. The elven community in Second Life strongly supports interpersonal steps; they have a category of members in their community known as guardians who receive special training in how to talk to people bent on destroying the peacefulness of the community or disturbing an event. The creators of Camp Darfur on Better World island also created a force of supporters to fend off griefer attacks after the island was destroyed twice in a week in 2006 (Kenzo). Linden Lab also makes use of technical methods; they cancel accounts so known griefers can not reenter. There were even reports that they had created a prison island where griefers whose antics were not bad enough to be totally banned would be sent via a one-way teleporter (Walsh, “Hidden Virtual World Prison”). Some users of Second Life favour technical steps; they believe that new users should be held a fixed amount of time on the Orientation island which would stop banned users from coming back into the world immediately. The third is to create tools for average users or super users (administrators); both involve software features, some of which are available to all users to help them make the game good for them while others are available only to people with administrator privileges. Average users who own land have a variety of tools available to limit griefing behaviour on their own property. In Second Life, the land owner is often blamed because he or she did not use the tools provided to landowners by Linden Lab; they can ban individual users, remove users from the land, mute their conversation, return items left on the property, and prevent people from building or running scripts. As one landowner said, “With the newbies coming in there, I’ve seen their properties just littered with crap because they don’t know protective measures you need to take as far as understanding land control and access rights” (qtd. in Girard). Super users, those who work for Linden Lab, can remove a player from the game for a various lengths of time based on their behaviour patterns. Responses to griefers can also be examined as either individual or joint actions. Individual actions include those that land owners can take against individual griefers. Individual users, regardless of account type, can file abuse reports against other individuals; Linden Lab investigates these reports and takes appropriate action. Quick and consistent reporting of all griefing, no matter how small, is advocated by most game companies and user groups as fairly successful. Strangely, some types of joint actions have been not so successful. Landowners have tried to form the Second Life Anti-Griefing Guild, but it folded because of lack of involvement. Groups providing security services have formed; many event organisers use this kind of service. (Hoffman). More successful efforts have included the creation of software, such as SLBanLink.com, Karma, and TrustNet that read lists of banned users into the banned list on all participating property. A last category of actions to be taken against griefers, and a category used by most residents of virtual worlds, is to leave them alone—to ignore them, to tolerate their actions. The thinking is that, as with many bullies in real life, griefers want attention; when deprived of that, they will move on to find other amusements. Yelling and screaming at griefers just reinforces their bad behaviour. Users simply teleport to other locations or log off. They warn others of the griefing behaviour using the various in-world communication tools so they too can stay away from the griefers. Most of the actions described above are not useful against griefers for whom a bad reputation is part of their credibility in the griefer community. The users of Second Life who staged the Gray Goo denial of service attack in October, 2005 fit into that category. They did nothing to hide the fact that they wanted to cause massive trouble; they named the self-replicating object that they created Grief Spawn and discussed ways to bring down the world on griefer forums (Wallace) Conclusion The most effective griefing usually involves an individual or small group who are only looking to have fun at someone else’s expense. It’s a small goal, and as long as there are any other users, it is easy to obtain the desired effect. In fact, as word spreads of the griefing and users feel compelled to change their behaviour to stave off future griefer attacks, the griefers have fun and achieve their goal. The key point here is that everyone has the same goal – have fun. Unfortunately, for one group – the griefers – achieving their goal precludes other users from reaching theirs. Political griefers are less successful in achieving their goals. Political creative play as griefing, like other kinds of griefing, is not particularly effective, which is another aspect of griefing as error. Other players react with frustration and violence to the actions of griefers such as deLappe and Velvet-Strike. If griefing activity makes people upset, they are less open to considering the political or economic motives of the griefers. Some complaints are relatively mild; “I’m all for creative protest and what not, but this is stupid. It’s not meaningful art or speaking out or anything of the type, its just annoying people who are never going to change their minds about how awesome they think war is” (Borkingchikapa). Others are more negative: “Somebody really needs to go find where that asshole lives and beat the shit out of him. Yeah, it’s a free country and he can legally pull this crap, but that same freedom extends to some patriot kicking the living shit out of him” (Reynolds). In this type of griefing no one’s goals for using the game are satisfied. The regular users can not have fun, but neither do they seem to be open to or accepting of the political griefer’s message. This pattern of success and failure may explain why there are so many examples of griefing to disrupt rather then the politically motivated kind. It may also suggest why efforts to curb griefing have been so ineffective in the past. Griefers who seek to disrupt for fun would see it as a personal triumph if others organised against them. Even if they found themselves banned from one area, they could quickly move somewhere else to have their fun since whom or where they harass does not really matter. Perhaps not all griefing is in error, rather, only those griefing activities motivated by any other goal than have fun. People invest their time and energy in creating their characters and developing skills. 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