Journal articles: 'Short stories, african, translations into english' – Grafiati (2024)

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract Described as one of the leading voices of her generation, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has become one of the many African authors who through their narratives have succeeded in challenging the literary canon both in Europe and North America while redefining African literature from the diaspora. Her specific use of the English language as well as transcultural writing strategies allow Adichie to skilfully represent what it means to live as a “translated being”. In her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and her latest novel, Americanah (2013), which were greatly influenced by her own experiences as what she has referred to as “an inhabitant of the periphery”, Adichie depicts the way in which different Nigerian characters live in-between Nigeria and America. In this regard, her characters’ transatlantic journeys imply a constant movement between several languages and cultural backgrounds which result in cultural and linguistic translation.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The Malay stories of Pelanduk yang Bijak, Peniup Seruling and Seuncang Padi were translated to English, and analysed to identify the translation problems. The procedures were also investigated to find solutions for the problems using translation procedures as the framework for data analysis. After the translation of the stories, the source and target texts were analysed to identify problems and procedures. The findings of the study indicated two types of problems in the Malay-English translations of the stories; structural or semantic problems, and problems arising from cultural differences. Among various translation procedures used in the translations, literal translation was the most common procedure in the translation of the Malay stories. The findings from translations and the analyses in this study could be utilised in translator and interpreter training classrooms. Finding solutions to the translation problems could improve translators’ ability to better theorise while translating, and thus produce “good” translations, particularly in the translation of literary works from Malay to English. This study could have pedagogical significance, as the Malay short stories contain moral lessons by which Malay culture could be further introduced and “exported” to the English-speaking audience through literature.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The article analyzes Louis Adamic's early translation phase that included, apart from his translations from Slovenian, also Croatian literature. His translations had a double function: to help him improve his English and to promote him as a writer. He randomly chose some Croatian short stories which he partly translated and partly adapted. He also did his best to introduce the authors to the American readers. The stories were published in American magazines but Adamic's repeated effort to publish a book of Yugoslav translations sadly failed. In spite of this, he was an important groundbreaker in the field paving the way for other translators who followed in his wake.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract The present paper reports on a translation-based teaching-oriented study of the expression of path and manner of motion (Talmy 1972) in English and Spanish. The aim is to explore contrastive differences by analysing translations, with special attention to crossed transposition (Molina and Hurtado Albir 2002), which implies a double shift of part-of-speech from the source text to the target text, and is the expected type of transfer between a satellite-framed language like English and a verb-framed language like Spanish. Two corpora have been used, a monolingual corpus of Children’s Short Stories, the CSS-corpus, and a parallel corpus English-Spanish, P-ACTRES 2.0. The results show a high tendency for implicitation of either path or manner and for compression in the translations into Spanish, whereas crossed transposition is preferred in the translations into English. Also, some pedagogical applications are suggested for including these motion expressions in TEFL to young learners through storytelling.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Using three fairly recently published South African texts – David B. Coplan’s In the Time of Cannibals – The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants (1994); A.H.M. Scholtz’s Vatmaar – ’n Lewendagge verhaal van ’n tyd wat nie meer is nie (1995) in its English translation, A Place Called Vatmaar (2000) and Mongane (Wally) Serote’s Come and Hope with Me (1994) – this essay looks at the role such texts can play to give public expression to the voices of formerly silenced communities. The essay contends that the deep fissures in South African society require intense efforts in order to make those isolated from one another mutually intelligible. All South Africans need to broaden their cultural vocabularies. This is where texts such as novels and those containing the oral art of neglected communities can function as ‘translations’, and have profound social importance. It can be predicted that rehistoricising writings and culturally recontextualising teaching practices will continue to be required in this country, but also texts that contain the vision of a shared South African future.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This study aims to investigate the use of deixis in a corpus of translations from twentieth century Romanian literature (novels and short stories) into English. Viewing deixis as an interactive feature of texts, it endeavours to find whether there are significant differences between the use of deixis in source texts and translations, and to see how systematic shifts as well as single occurrences can contribute to the shaping of a translated text which positions the reader in a different way from the source texts. It also explores ways in which the translators position themselves with respect to the text. The study finds that the main tendency is one of distancing, whereby proximal deictics tend to become distals, with the effect that readers will be presented with a translation which elicits less involvement on their part than the original text did in its context.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In the present article I seek to discuss, following a diachronic approach, the close-knit relationship that can be found between journalistic discourse and the genre of the short story in Anglophone South African literature over a time span of fifty years, between the late Twenties and the Eighties. In particular, I intend to explore this genre negotiation by close reading selected short stories and/or newspaper articles by four non-white South African writers: R. R. R. Dhlomo, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, and Miriam Tlali. The intersections between the two different genres and discourses in these hybrid texts can be identified at the level of both content and form. A close reading of selected short stories and/or articles may call for a revaluation of this “South African New Journalism” as a creative experimentation that challenges conventional generic categorisations.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

English is international language which everyone should understand even a little. In this research, the researcher deals about translation shift especially in the bilingual children books. Indonesian is the source language while English as the target language. The objective of this research are to find out kinds of translations shift and to know how are the translation shift applied in translating two of short stories there are “Cerita Si Lebah and Cerita Si kupu-kupu”. This book very interesting, many children like to read this book, because this book makes children easy to learn English. In book Cerita Si Lebah and Si Kupu-Kupu translating Indonesian into English there are a shifting. Shift is departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from SL into the TL. There are two types Translation shift they are Level Shift and Category Shift. The method of this research uses descriptive qualitative method. The data analysis used by the researcher is content analysis. The researcher read and compares both Indonesian as the source language and English as the target language. The researcher took the entire sentence from the Indonesian text and English text, check whether there are shifts in translations which are taken the valid data. Then, analyze the types of translation shifts occurred and draw conclusion based on the analysis. The objects being analyzed are books entitle Cerita Si Lebah and Cerita Si Kupu-Kupu. The researcher takes the data from that’s book found 22 data there are 1 data is Level Shift and 21 data is category shift. Then, from Cerita si Lebah was found 9 data, they are level shift and category shift. The category shifts found are unit shift, structure shift and class shift. From Cerita Si Kupu-Kupu book found 13 data they are category shift, they are structure shift and Intra system shift. So, it can be concluded that the translation shift found in two short are mostly category shift.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract This paper investigates the use of existential presuppositions in a corpus of literary translations from Romanian into English (novels and short stories). In particular, we are interested in ascertaining whether there are any differences between the ways in which definiteness and indefiniteness are used in translations compared to source texts, and whether any pattern can be found to be in operation; the aim is to explore presuppositions in terms of what they can tell us about translators’ assumptions about their readers. The main finding is the presence of a [- definite] trend in the corpus, whereby definite references tend to be translated by indefinite references. The study suggests that this is linked to distancing; i.e., target readers are presented with texts which position them as distant observers, rather than in-the-know in-group members.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

<p class="8Abstractcontent">The goals of this paper are to seek the readers’ reactions, having gone through the two versions of English-to-Indonesian translations of children’s short story, and to explain the readers’ reactions to the two versions of the translations. The interview questions focus on the loanword or borrowing translation strategies employed by the student translators. Ten parents with children volunteered to read and respond to translation reading. The results show that the readers thought it would be better for the translators not to apply the borrowing procedure in translating children’s stories as it will hinder the meanings resulting in an uneasy feeling of reading the story to their children.</p><p> </p><strong>Keywords:</strong> reader reaction, children story translation, borrowing, equivalence.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AbstractThis article focuses on Georges Balandier's autobiographical essayAfrique ambiguë(1957). Its translation into English,Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision(1966), provides the basis for an examination of the concept of translation in its linguistic but also, and above all, transcultural dimensions. As a text,Ambiguous Africadoes not quite render the subtlety of the French original but beyond its translational shortcomings, Balandier's book is also shown to conduct an in-depth analysis of late colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. This era is characterized by a high degree of cultural anxiety on the part of the colonizers and the colonized. Echoing other anti-colonial thinkers of the period – Balandier was a regular contributor toPrésence Africaine– he records the environmental, artistic, psychological,andlinguistic devastation generated by the colonial process in this part of the world. Balandier's assessment is pessimistic, but he identifies the ability of some unassimilated African intellectuals and members of messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism to challenge the hegemonic status of the colonial Ur-Text. This emancipative move relies on vernacular intellectual and cultural resources and is driven by an attempt to re-write and translate biblical stories anew. It is argued here that this process of indigenous re-appropriation, however ambiguous it might have been assessed by Balandier, is postcolonial for it bears witness to a partial de-canonization of the colonial source text.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AbstractThe present short study examines the problems encountered in the translation in England of Ottoman documents addressed from the Porte or from the North African Regencies to the English Crown in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In particular it studies in some detail the translations undertaken, and the problems faced by, the polymath scholar Thomas Hyde (1636-1702/3), Librarian of the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxford and translator of Oriental documents to the Crown, but reference is also made to translations undertaken by William Seaman (1606/7-1680) and his son, and by the Rev. William Hayley (c.1657-1715).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This paper focused on the development and evaluation of a mobile application in which children could interact, be entertained, and especially be educated at the same time. It was mainly designed for children, parents/guardians, and teachers as well. The interactive storybook which was created was different from those available in the market. Kwentong Pambata is a children’s storybook application designed for Android devices that features Filipino legends, fables, parables and short stories designed for Filipino children and children all over the world. It portrays Filipino values, traditions and character which contains moral lesson at the end of each story that would educate children’s view in life, their characters, moral uprightness, and values. It is a storybook which contains fun pictures, texts, and sounds that kids will truly enjoy. The goal of the study is to develop an Android application that children could interact, learn, read, be entertained, improve and develop children’s imagination and comprehension skills at an early age, and to promote Filipino stories and moral values. Kwentong Pambata application was developed using ActionScript 3.0. and Adobe Flash CS5.5. The application has 3 different language translations such as Filipino, English, and Mandarin. The proponents used ADDIE model for the development of the application. After the development, the application was evaluated. The total number of 40 respondents which were selected through probability sampling is used for the evaluation process. The application was evaluated according to its Usability, Reliability, Efficiency and Graphical User Interface (GUI). The evaluation questionnaire showed that the application was rated as very satisfactory with the help of the respondents and was improved throughout its revisions.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AbstractFutabatei Shimei (1864-1909) was an early modern Japanese novelist, translator, and critic. He wrote what is now generally conceived of as the first Japanese ‘modern’ novel, Drifting Clouds (1887-89). He translated works by Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Garshin, Gorky, and others. He also published a number of critical essays, treatises on literary theory, political papers, and so forth. His early translation of Turgenev’s short stories: Aibiki (Rendevous, 1888) and Meguriai (Three Trysts, 1889) were extremely influential on the contemporary literati, who were amazed at the fresh, poetic prose used in stark contrast to the traditional Japanese fiction in the pre-Reformation period. These translations, seen in the light of the present-day readers, were unique in what we might term today ‘foreignizing translation’. Lawrence Venuti in Invisibility of the Translator argues that the ideal of (English) translation has been to conceal itself as a translation, i.e. to present itself as an original text (chap I and passim). In that sense, Futabatei’s translations, scandalously presenting itself as a translation, that is to say, as an alien text, is extremely ‘foreignizing’.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract For many years in ELT methodology the questions of teaching writing in ELT coursebooks have been given much attention in terms of its nature, differences between written and spoken speech, ELT objectives and approaches to teaching writing, types of writing genres, writing assessment. But one rather neglected area in that regard is a graded teaching of creative writing to FL learners. The fifteen-year experience with organizing language-and-culture competitions launched by the Research Centre “Euroschool” for foreign language /FL/ students across Russia have proved that even intermediate FL learners, not to speak about advanced students are quite capable of writing in a FL: a) poems and songs expressing their ideas about teenagers’ lifestyle & visions of contemporary world; b) short stories describing family and school life experiences of their own or their peers; c) essays based on their comparative study of native and foreign cultures; d) presentations of Russian culture & other cultures of the Russian Federation in an English environment while being on exchange visits; e) translations of English poetry, short stories, excerpts from humours books, stripes of comics. The paper compares teaching creative writing in Russian and English, discusses the questions arisen from the outcomes of the language-and-culture competitions, arguing that effective teaching of creative writing presupposes: 1) teaching a FL in the context of the dialogue of cultures and civilizations, 2) introducing creative writing into a FL curriculum, 3) designing a package of thought-provoking teaching materials aiming at developing communicative, intellectual & mediating learners’ powers, 4) applying appropriate assessment scales for observing the dynamics of learners’ development as creative writers, 5) marrying students’ bilingual and crosscultural/ pluricultural classroom activities stimulating their participation in language-and-culture competitions.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract This is the first Italian translation of some selections from the Ëddoštho* “Reminiscences” of Sadriddin Ajnī (Bukhara 1878—Dushanbe 1954), the author commonly regarded as the leading representative of modern Tajik literature. Ajnī’s Reminiscences, divided into four parts and published between 1948 and 1954, are a collection of lively short-stories where the author described his childhood spent in two villages near Bukhara, as well as his youth and schooldays at the madrasa in the last two decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Parts I and II were more often translated into many languages, both in the Republics of the former Soviet Union and in other countries. Translations in Russian (parts I-IV), German and French (parts I-II) have appeared in the 1950s. In English, separate chapters from the work have been published in academic journals from the 1950s onward; the most recent English translation (part I) is The sands of Oxus. Boyhood reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini, tr. by J.R. Perry and R. Lehr (Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 1998).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The recent years have witnessed an increasing importance of machine translation systems due to the prolific production on online texts in different disciplines and furthermore, the inability of traditional translation methods in addressing translation needs all over the world. It is even argued that training on translation tools should be integrated into translation pedagogies and ultimately, courses should be provided for students and professionals. In spite of the effectiveness of translation tools and systems in providing solutions in relation to different disciplines and text genres, the usability and reliability of such systems in terms of literary texts, however, is still highly controversial. Many critics and educators still underestimate the usefulness of the machine translation systems in literature, which could be partially attributed to the unique nature of the language of the literary texts. The issue has its pedagogical implications to translation instruction due to the needs to integrate emerging technologies in teaching and learning practices. For proper use of translation technologies in educational contexts, these need to be well evaluated. For this purpose, this study evaluates the usefulness of applying machine translation systems to literature with the purpose of identifying the challenges that may have negative impacts on the reliability of machine translation systems. In order to do this this, two translation systems are selected, namely, Google Translate and Q Translate. By way of illustration, the study is based on a corpus of two English short stories. The study is based on two prose fiction texts. The first is J. K. Rowling’s novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The second is Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Black Cat. Automatic translations generated by the two machine translation systems were compared to human made Arabic translations with the purpose of identifying the problems within these translations. Results indicate that different lexical, structural, and pragmatic errors are encountered by users which negatively impact the reliability of these translations. Educators and translation instructors need to reflect on the challenges of machine translation systems in relation to literature. Software developers need also to address the problems faced by users and students in the translation from and into the Arabic language.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Books are one of the learning media for children, in this case, specifically, bilingual books were discussed. Bilingual books are used to introduce children to the world of Indonesian and English as well, where the book is used by teachers or parents to read stories for children. Bilingual books are numerous and easily found in various bookstores and online stores. However, the quality of the books is questionable whether the English translation used in the book is correct. In this short article, the author takes the example of 7 children's bilingual story books with 376 sentences in them. The author found that the majority of translations used were word-by-word translation and with complex translation because of the use of sentences that are too long and the vocabulary was not appropriate to use in that context. In fact, story books should be books that were easily read and understood by both those who read and those who listen. With the complexity of these books, it will be difficult for teachers and parents to read and understand, let alone convey them to children. The author suggested publishers and the government to pay more attention to the quality of books by selecting competent writers in their fields.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Apart from referring to a geographical or physical border, the notion of frontera has also become a metaphorical or psychological construct which represents any situation of contrast, such as belonging to two different national, cultural or linguistic communities. Latino writers in the United States live and write on the frontera. The coming together of two cultures forges a new hybrid identity which fights against essentialism and hom*ogenization. This hybrid identity is reflected in these writers’ language, a border tongue constantly switching from English to Spanish. Sandra Cisneros is one of those Latina writers who resort to code-switching as an identity hallmark. By introducing Spanish words, phrases or syntactic constructions into her English texts, Cisneros tries to evoke the feeling of inhabiting two worlds which can be conflicting and complementary at the same time. Departing from the notion of frontera, several translations of Cisneros’s works are analysed, paying special attention to those aspects related to identity and language. Particularly, I focus on the Mexican Spanish, Galician and Catalan versions of The House on Mango Street, the translation of Woman Hollering Creek into Mexican Spanish, the Catalan versions of several short stories from Woman Hollering Creek and the Galician translation of Loose Woman. In all the analysed versions, the translators use strategies which reflect the border identity present in the source text, such as the resource to code-switching and typographical markers or the use of calques and other borrowings, dialectalisms, and non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AbstractIn South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological partitions into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that theDictionary of South African English on Historical Principlesreveals that in South African English the wordmaiddenotes both “black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary art about domestic labor by Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In their art, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction, including Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collectionLiving, Loving and Lying Awake at Night(1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novelPlaying in the Light(2006), in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The panel entitled “Arab Diasporic Writing: Figurations of Space andIdentity” was held on Friday, February 27, at the 2004 Twentieth CenturyLiterature conference at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Organized by Carol Fadda-Conrey, the panel featured presentations by Professor SyrineHout and Lisa A. Weiss on two Arab diasporic writers, Rabih Alameddineand Leïla Sebbar, respectively.Syrine Hout, an associate professor of English at the AmericanUniversity of Beirut, presented a paper entitled “Lebanon ‘Revisited’:Memory, Self, and Other in Rabih Alameddine’s The Perv.” Singling outAlameddine as an example of Anglophone novelists of the Lebanese diaspora,Hout’s presentation handled complex themes of memory, nostalgia,the homeland, and relationships that generate binding ties in her analysis ofthe short stories featured in The Perv. Published in July 1999, this isAlameddine’s second work of fiction. Comprising eight short stories, ThePerv presents in-depth portrayals of characters in various states of exile anddisplacement, both mental and physical, cultural and psychological.In her analysis, Hout presented the cogent case that Alamaddine shows,by way of his characters, all of whom have been affected by the Lebanesecivil war, how homesickness is more of a “sickness of home,” manifested bywhat Hout defines as “critical memory of the immediate past of the civilwar.” The presentation’s overriding argument, systematically upheld byHout, shows how the notion of “being at home,” as represented in this work,“is not about belonging to a piece of land but about having a peace of mindwhich can be enjoyed anywhere.” In her reading of the first story, “ThePerv,” and the subsequent stories, Hout arrived at an interesting conclusion:Sammy, the title story’s main character, is actually the creator of the othercharacters in the collection to such an extent that he and Alameddine becomeone and the same person. Hout’s analysis of “being at home” in The Perv asbeing engendered “by an emotional reality [more] than a spatial one” bringsto the forefront significant concerns in the study of diasporic literature.Such thematic concerns were also addressed and probed by Lisa Weissin her presentation entitled “‘Arab’ Paris: Reinterpreting the City-Centerthrough the Writings of Leïla Sebbar.” Weiss, a Ph.D. candidate in Frenchand Francophone literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz,lived in Paris during 2003, teaching at the UC Paris Study Center andresearching “Beur” cultural production. She identifies “Beur” as a “colloquialidentification-term from the 1980s used for second- and third-generationFrench citizens born in France to North African immigrant parents.” ...

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

I Was Born in Spain to a Spanish Mother and a Nigerian Father. I Moved to Nigeria on the Day That I Turned Seven and remained in the country for nine years. The interplay between my cultural liminality and an early aestheticism has determined my experience of literature—first as a precocious reader and later as a teacher and scholar.My first literary diet, like that of many children, consisted of fairy tales and abridged classics. At primary school in Nigeria, our English textbooks featured passages from African novels to teach reading comprehension. While I found the short storylines interesting, their pedagogical use meant that I did not perceive them as “literature”—a word that I associated with stories to wonder at, get lost in, and daydream about. At the age of nine I graduated to unabridged Dickens novels and Shakespeare plays alongside Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, supplementing my diet with Spanish chivalric romances such as Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadís de Gaula (1508) and Francisco Vázquez's Palmerín de Oliva (1511). Apart from a sense of intrigue, these two works gave me respite from an unrelenting sense of otherness. They provided vicarious adventure, and their settings reminded me of the Castilian castles that formed part of my early-childhood landscape.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Статтю присвячено вивченню впливу чинника статі мовного посередника на застосовувані ним пріоритетні стратегії під час створення цільового тексту. Емпіричним матеріалом дослідження слугували тексти англомовної художньої прози та їхні українські переклади у виконанні чоловіків та жінок. Застосований у праці психолінгвістичний підхід до аналізу двомовного корпусу дав змогу встановити деякі ‘S-універсалії’ (Chesterman, 2011) вибору різностатевими посередниками тих чи тих мовних структур, що дає підстави погодитися з іншими дослідниками в питанні існування значущих відмінностей у гендерних пріоритетах структурування перекладного дискурсу. Серед найпомітніших “жіночих” універсалій в перекладі українською – метакогнітивна гнучкість, що кваліфікуємо як синтетичний когнітивний стиль. Крім того, простежено застосування перекладачками стратегії статусної нейтралізації в діалозі між персонажами під час відтворення статусно-маркованих і дифузних ситуацій; вищі показники лексичного розмаїття, експліцитації й номіналізації, ніж у цільових версіях перекладачів чоловічої статі. Останні виявляють більшу обережність у перекладі, вдаючись до ‘семантичного методу’ (Newmark, 1988) перекладу, виявляючи відтак аналітичний когнітивний стиль поведінки, а також демонструючи стратегію негативної ввічливості під час відтворення діалогів персонажів у статусно-маркованих і статусно-дифузних комунікативних ситуаціях. Література References Бендас Т. В. Гендерная психология. – СПб.: Питер, 2007.Bendas, T. (2007). Gendernaya Psikhologiya [Gender Psychology]. St. Petersburg: Piter. Карасик В. И. Социальный статус человека в лингвистическом аспекте // “Я”, “Субъект”,“Индивид” в парадигмах современного языкознания. – М. : ИЯ РАН, 1992. – С. 47–74.Karasik, V. I. (1992). Sotsialnyi status cheloveka v lingvisticheskom aspekte [Human socialstatus in linguistic aspect] ‘Ya’, ‘Subjekt’, ‘Individ’ v Paradigmakh SovremennogoYazykoznania, 47–74. Кутузов А. Переводы мужские и женские: есть ли разница? (на материале Корпусанесовершенных переводов)/А. Кутузов // Проблемы перевода, лингвистики илитературы. – 2012. – Вып. 15, № 1. – С. 97-104.Kutuzov, A. (2012). Perevody muzhskiye i zhenskiye: yest li raznitsa? [Male and femaletranslations: Any difference?]. Problemy Perevoda, Lingvistiki i Literatury, 15(1), 97-104. Сорокин Ю. А. Переводоведение: статус переводчика и психогерменевтическиепроцедуры. – М. : МТДК «Гнозис», 2003. – 160 с.Sorokin, Yu. A. (2003). Perevodovedeniye: Status Perevodchika i PsikhogermenevticheskiyeProcedury [Translation Studies: Translator’s Status and Psychohermeneutic Procedures].Moscow: Gnozis.5. Холод А. М. Речевые картины мира мужчин и женщин. – Днепропетровск : Пороги, 1997.– 229 с. Kholod, A. M. (1997). Rechevye kartiny mira muzhchin i zhenshchyn [Speech world view ofmen and women]. Dnepropetrovsk: Porogi. Холодная М. А. Когнитивные стили: О природе индивидуального ума. – М. : ПЕР СЭ,2002. – 304 с.Kholodnaya М. А. (2002). Kognitivnye Stili: O Prirode Individualnogo Uma [Cognitive Styles:On the Nature of Individual Mind]. Мoscow: PERSE. Arabski, J. (2013). Psycholinguistic and neurobiological differences between males andfemales. Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of the ISAPL (423). Baker, M. (1999). The role of corpora in investigating the linguistic behaviour of translators.International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 4(2), 281–298. Berman, A. (1990). La retraduction comme espace de traduction. Palimpsestes, 4, 1–7. Blum-Kulka, S. (1986). Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation. In: Interlingual andIntercultural Communication (pp. 17–35). J. House, S. Blum-Kulka, (Eds). Tübingen: Narr. Brown, P., Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. Chesterman, A. (2000). A causal model for Translation Studies. In: Intercultural Faultlines:Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects (pp. 15–27).M. Olohan, (Ed). Manchester: St. Jerome. Denturck, K. (2012). Explicitation vs. implicitation: a bidirectional corpus-based analysis ofcausal connectives in french and dutch translations. Across Languages and Cultures, 13(2),211–227. Desmidt, I. (2009). (Re)translation revisited. Meta: Translators’ Journal, 54(4), 669–683. Leonardi, V. (2007). Gender and Ideology in Translation. Do Women and Men TranslateDifferently? A Contrastive Analysis from Italian into English. Bern: Peter Lang AG. Laviosa, S. (2002). Corpus-based Translation Studies. Theory, Finding, Applications.Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi. Newmark, P. (1988). Approaches to Translation. London: Prentice Hall. Olohan, M. (2002). Leave it out! Using a comparable corpus to investigate aspects ofexplicitation in translation. Cadernos de Tradução, 9, 153–169. Vinay, J. & Darbelnet, J. (1995). Comparative Stylistics of French and English. Translated byJ. C. Sager and M. J. Hamel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zasiekin, S. (2016). Understanding translation universals. Babel: International Journal ofTranslation, 62(1), 122–134. Sources Bradbury, R. The Smile. Retrieved from: http://raybradbury.ru/library/ story/52/9/1/ Bradbury, R. (1983). Fahrenheit. Short Stories. Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1983. – 382 p. Бредбері Р. Усмішка / пер. з англ. Л. Коломієць // Всесвітня література в середніхнавчальних закладах України. К.: Педагогічна преса, 1999. № 3 (227). С. 11–12.Bradbury, R. (1999). Ousmishka [The Smile] / translated by L. Kolomiyets. VsesvitniaLiteratura v Serednikh Navchalnykh Zakladakh Ukrainy, 3(227), 11–12. Бредбері Р. Усмішка / пер. з англ. А. Веприняка // Зарубіжна література. 6 клас.Посібник-хрестоматія. Тернопіль: Навчальна книга – Богдан, 1999а. С. 296–300.Bradbury, R. (1999). Ousmishka [The Smile] / translated by Yaroslav Vepryniak. ZarubizhnaLiteratura. 6th Form, 296–300. Бредбері Р. Усмішка / пер. з англ. А. Євси // Світова література. 6 клас. Хрестоматія /Упорядник Гарбуз В. М. ; наук. ред. Таранік-Ткачук К. В. – Харків : ФОП Співак В. Л.,2011. – С. 374–381.Bradbury, R. (2011). Ousmishka [The Smile] / translated by Andrii Ievsa. Svitova Literatura.6th Form. Textbook, 374–381. Браун Д. Код да Вінчі. – Х.: Клуб сімейного дозвілля, 2006.Brown, D. (2006). Kod da Vinchi [The Da Vinci Code] / translated by A. Kamianets’.Kharkiv: Club Simeinoho Dozvillia. Браун Д. Код да Вінчі. // Всесвіт. – 2006. – № 1–4, 11–12. – К. : Всесвіт.Brown, D. (2006). Kod da Vinchi [The Da Vinci Code] / translated by V. Shovkun. Vsesvit,1–4, 11–12. КТУМ: Корпус текстів української мови / [Електронний ресурс]. Режим доступу:http://www.mova.info/corpus.aspx?l1=209Korpus Tekstiv Ukrains’koyi Movy [The Corpus of the Ukrainian Language] / [ElectronicResource]. Retrieved from: http://www.mova.info/corpus.aspx?l1=209 Slovnyk Ukrainskoyi Movy [Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language] / I. K. Bilodid, ed. –Vol. 5. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka. – P. 36, 100. Tolkien J. R. R. (1954). The Fellowship of the Ring. L.: George Allen & Unwin. Толкін Дж. Р. Р. Володар Перснів: Хранителі Персня / пер. з англ. А. Немірової. Харків:Фоліо, 2003. Толкін Дж. Р. Р. Старий ліс: Уривок з епопеї «Володар Перснів» / пер. з англ.А. Веселовського // Всесвіт. 2006. №№ 11–12, 124–135. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1981). The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again. L. : Unwin. Толкін Дж. Р. Р. Гобіт, або Туди і Звідти / пер. з англ. О. О’Лір. – Львів: Астролябія,2012.Tolkien, J. R. R. (2012). Hobit abo Tudy i Zvidty [The Hobbit, or There and Back] / translated byОlena О’Lear. Lviv: Astroliabia. Толкін Дж. Р. Р. Гобіт, або Мандрівка за Імлисті гори / пер. з англ. О. Мокровольського.– К. : Веселка, 1985.Tolkien, J. R. R. (1985). Hobit abo Mandrivka za Imlysti Hory [The Hobbit, or a Trip Beyond theMisty Mountains] / translated by Оlexandr Mokrovols’kyi. Кyiv: Veselka.6. Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci Code. L. : Corgi Books.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract This paper presents cognitive poetics as an agent in overcoming difficulties in translating bible stories for young children in the multi-lingual and multi-cultural South African environment. The translated picture book texts typically involve the integration of words with pictures. For the purposes of this article, the Genesis 28 narrative of Jacob’s dream in the Hebrew source text is compared in various South African translations. Religious literature was chosen as subject matter because of the relative certainty of comparative translations in most of the eleven official languages of South Africa, but the present article is limited mainly to English and Afrikaans translations. The analysis is done within the fairly new framework of cognitive poetics, which combines psychological and cognitive linguistic approaches to the study of literature. The focus is on the contribution of cognitive linguistics to the translation of children’s literature, in the spirit of proactive translatology.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Bruno Schulz is not particularly well known in Greece. For the first time, his short stories were translated into Greek in the early 1980s, when Spiros Tsaknias, a poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator from Athens, translated for the To Dentro literary monthly “The Street of Crocodiles” (1980) and “The Gale” (1982). Most likely, both texts were translated not from Polish, but from English. More translations of Schulz into Greek appeared in the late 1980s, and since then many have been published. The problems faced by the Greek translators of Schulz deserve a separate study.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AbstractThis paper addresses the English translation of specific Sundanese cultural references in the English Translation of selected Sundanese short stories. The issue of translatability is highlighted as the paper explores the nuances of possible meanings from the selected words. The content analysis on Watson’s English translations of selected Sundanese short stories in “Neng Maya” is framed by theoretical propositions from Molina & Albir’s translation techniques and Nababan’s translation quality assessment. Using the methods of Spradley procedure, it is revealed that the language units found in the source texts re words and phrases, while in the target texts, clauses are also found. The types of cultural words exist in the short stories are: words of emphasis, verbs, nouns, and adverbs. The translation techniques mostly used are deletion, equivalence, modulation, reinforcement, literal, and amplification. The techniques used by the translator have led to lack of translation quality, specifically the accuracy aspect.Key words: cultural references, translatability, translation techniques, translation qualityAbstrakPaper ini menyampaikan hasil penelitian tentang penerjemahan ungkapan bermuatan budaya dari beberapa cerita pendek berbahasa Sunda dalam bahasa Inggris. Masalah ‘intranslatability’ disoroti berdasarkan eksplorasi kemungkinan nuansa makna dari kata-kata yang dipilih. Analisis konten terhadap terjemahan cerita pendek dari kumpulan cerita pendek ‘Neng Maya’ yang dikerjakan oleh C.W. Watson merujuk pada teori teknik penerjemahan yang diusulkan Molina&Albir dan teori Asesmen kualitas terjemahan dari Nababn dkk. Dengan menggunakan tahapan prosedur Spradley, dalam cerita pendek yang dipilih, terdapat beberapa tipe ungkapan bermuatan budaya, yaitu: kata penegas, kata kerja, kata benda, dan kata keterangan. sem*ntara unit Bahasa yang digunakan dalam teks sumber adalah kata dan frasa dan dalam teks sasaran kata, frasa dan klausas. Teknik penerjemahan yang dominan digunakan adalah deletion, equivalence, modulation, reinforcement, literal, dan amplification. Penggunaan teknik yang didominasi dengan deletion menyebabkan kurangnya kualitas terjemahan, khususnya keakuratan.Kata Kunci: ungkapan bermuatan budaya, translabilitas, teknik penerjemahan, kualitas terjemahan.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In the ‘Foreword’ to his collection Uhuru Street, Vassanji observes that ‘Uhuru’ means ‘independence’. The Kichwele Street of Dar es Salaam – later renamed as Uhuru street nurtures the spirit of independence irrespective of the continual changes that the street experienced from the sheltered innocence of colonial rule in the 1950s to the shattered world of the 1980s. This collection of short stories – as many of Vassanji’s works is characterized by “a complex ethno-cultural identity” that incorporates multiple countries (Kenya, Tanzania, India, Canada, U.S.A.), religions (crucially, the syncretic bhakti tradition he was raised in), languages (Gujarati, English, Swahili, Hindi). , The stories in Uhuru Street explore political and social change in the city of Dar es Salaam in the East African country of Tanganyika. They follow a historical arc which begins in the years leading up to independence (in 1961) and concludes in the decade or so. This paper analyzes the microcosm of an immigrant world as portrayed by Vassanji in his Uhuru Street through its eccentric characters giving us a portrait of a place and a people losing their innocence. The stories come together as a story of generations new and old, the former searching for a new identity, the latter, fiercely holding onto the past. We share with these people the moment of moving on, of leaving the place where we have roots, knowing that things will never be the same.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor and Former Head, Dept of English and Ex- Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University, teaches English and American literature along with New Literatures in English. She is a poet, critic and translator, and her articles, poems, short stories and translations have been published in journals of distinction in India and abroad.Her inner sphere overlaps the outer on the speculative and the shadowy. There is a sublime inwardness in her poems. Her recent signal books include Snapshots, Dilemma, First Language, More Light, and Lakshmi Unbound. She co-authored Radical Rabindranath: Nation, Family, Gender: Post-colonial Readings of Tagore’s Fiction and Film, and she is the Managing Editor of Families: A Journal of Representations.She has received many grants and awards, including Fulbright fellowships and residencies and an Australia India Council Fellowship. Now she is the Convener, English Board, Shaitya Akademi. Professor Dasgupta has visited Nepal and Bangladesh as a member of the SAARC Writers Delegation, and has served as a co-judge and Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region). She has visited Melbourne and Malta to serve on the pan-Commonwealth jury panel. She is now an e-member of the advisory committee of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, UK. She is Visiting Professor, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, and she is the President of the Executive Committee, Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library in Kolkata.The interview was conducted via email in December 2018.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Melissa Castillo-Garsow is a Mexican-American writer, journalist, and scholar currently pursuing a PhD in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Her short stories and poetry have been published in various journals including The Acentos Review, La Bloga, Hispanic Culture Review, and Hinchas de Poesia. Her first novel, Pure Bronx, co-written with Fordham Professor Mark Naison, is due for release Oct. 2013 from Augustus Publishing. Melissa completed her Master’s degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at Fordham University in 2011. Prior to that she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts from New York University summa cum laude with a double major in Journalism and Latin American Studies. A former employee of NBC News, El Diario/ La Prensa and Launch Radio Networks, Melissa has had articles and reviews published in a wide variety of forums including CNN.com, Latin Beat Magazine, University Wire, El Diario/La Prensa, Women’s Studies, Words. Beats. Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, and The Bilingual Review. Melissa is an active scholar in the fields of English literature, American Studies, African American Studies and Latin American/Latino Studies. At Yale, she focuses on the study of Afro-Latino history and culture in the 20th Century.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Sharing this article, the act of writing and then having it read, legitimises the point of it – that is, we (and we speak on behalf of each other here) managed to negotiate western academic expectations and norms from a just-as-legitimate-but-not-always-heard female Buginese perspective written in Standard Australian English (not my first choice-of-language and I speak on behalf of myself). At times we transgressed roles, guiding and following each other through different academic, cultural, social, and linguistic domains until we stumbled upon ways of legitimating our entanglement of experiences, when we heard the similar, faint, drum beat across boundaries and journeys.This article is one storying of the results of this four year relationship between a Buginese PhD candidate and an Indigenous Australian supervisor – both in the writing of the article and the processes that we are writing about. This is our process of knowing and validating knowledge through sharing, collaboration and cultural exchange. Neither the successful PhD thesis nor this article draw from authoethnography but they are outcomes of a lived, research standpoint that fiercely fought to centre a Muslim-Buginese perspective as much as possible, due to the nature of a postgraduate program. In the effort to find a way to not privilege Western ways of knowing to the detriment of my standpoint and position, we had to find a way to at times privilege my way of knowing the world alongside a Western one. There had to be a beat that transgressed cultural and linguistic differences and that allowed for a legitimised dialogic, intersubjective dance.The PhD research focused on potential dialogue between Australian culture and Buginese culture in terms of feminism and its resulting cultural hybridity where some Australian feminist thoughts are applicable to Buginese culture but some are not. Therefore, the PhD study centred a Buginese standpoint while moving back and forth amongst Australian feminist discourses and the dominant expectations of a western academic process. The PhD research was part of a greater Indonesian tertiary movement to include, study, challenge and extend feminist literary programs and how this could be respectfully and culturally appropriately achieved. This article is written by both of us but the core knowledge comes from a Buginese standpoint, that is, the principal supervisor learned from the PhD candidate and then applied her understanding of Indigenous standpoint theory, Tuhiwahi Smith’s decolonising methodologies and Spivakian self-reflexivity to aid the candidate’s development of her dancing methodology. For this reason, the rest of this article is written from the first-person perspective of Dr Abbas.The PhD study was a literary analysis on five stories from Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers (1985). My work translated these five stories from English into Indonesian and discussed some challenges that occurred in the process of translation. By using Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s metaphor of the subaltern dancing, I, the embodied learner and the cultural translator, moved back and forth between Buginese culture and Australian culture to consider how Australian women and men are represented and how mainstream Australian society engages with, or challenges, discourses of patriarchy and power. This movement back and forth was theorised as ‘dancing’. Ultimately, another dance was performed at the end of the thesis waltz between the work which centred my Buginese standpoint and academia as a Western tertiary institution.I have been dancing with Australian feminism for over four years. My use of the word ‘dancing’ signified my challenge to articulate and engage with Australian culture, literature, and feminism by viewing it from a Buginese perspective as opposed to a ‘Non-Western’ perspective. As a Buginese woman and scholar, I centred my specific cultural standpoints instead of accepting them generally and therefore dismissed the altering label of ‘Non-Western’. Juxtaposing Australian feminism with Buginese culture was not easy. However, as my research progressed I saw interesting cultural differences between Australian and Buginese cultures that could result in a hybridized way of engaging feminist issues. At times, my cultural standpoint took the lead in directing the research or the point, at other times a Western beat was more prominent, for example, using the English language to voice my work.The Buginese, also known as the Bugis, along with the Makassar, the Mandar, and the Toraja, are one of the four main ethnic groups of the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. The population of the Buginese in South Sulawesi spreads into major states (Bone, Wajo, Soppeng, and Sidenreng) and some minor states (Pare-Pare, Suppa, and Sinjai). Like other ethnic groups living in other islands of Indonesia such as the Javanese, the Sundanese, the Minang, the Batak, the Balinese, and the Ambonese, the Buginese have their own culture and traditions. The Buginese, especially those who live in the villages, are still bounded strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). This concept of ade’ provides living guidelines for Buginese and consists of five components including ade’, bicara, rapang, wari’, and sara’. Pelras clarifies that pangadereng is ‘adat-hood’, a corpus of interlinked ruling principles which, besides ade’ (custom), includes also bicara (jurisprudence), rapang (models of good behaviour which ensure the proper functioning of society), wari’ (rules of descent and hierarchy) and sara’ (Islamic law and institution, derived from the Arabic shari’a) (190). So, pangadereng is an overall norm which includes advice on how Buginese should behave towards fellow human beings and social institutions on a reciprocal basis. In addition, the Buginese together with Makassarese, mind what is called siri’ (honour and shame), that is the sense of honour and shame. In the life of the Buginese-Makassar people, the most basic element is siri’. For them, no other value merits to be more detected and preserved. Siri’ is their life, their self-respect and their dignity. This is why, in order to uphold and to defend it when it has been stained or they consider it has been stained by somebody, the Bugis-Makassar people are ready to sacrifice everything, including their most precious life, for the sake of its restoration. So goes the saying.... ‘When one’s honour is at stake, without any afterthought one fights’ (Pelras 206).Buginese is one of Indonesia’s ethnic groups where men and women are intended to perform equal roles in society, especially those who live in the Buginese states of South Sulawesi where they are still bound strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). These two basic concepts are guidelines for daily life, both in the family and the work place. Buginese also praise what is called siri’, a sense of honour and shame. It is because of this sense of honour and shame that we have a saying, siri’ emmi ri onroang ri lino (people live only for siri’) which means one lives only for honour and prestige. Siri’ had to remain a guiding principle in my theoretical and methodological approach to my PhD research. It is also a guiding principle in the resulting pedagogical praxis that this work has established for my course in Australian culture and literature at Hasanuddin University. I was not prepared to compromise my own ethical and cultural identity and position yet will admit, at times, I felt pressured to do so if I was going to be seen to be performing legitimate scholarly work. Novera argues that:Little research has focused specifically on the adjustment of Indonesian students in Australia. Hasanah (1997) and Philips (1994) note that Indonesian students encounter difficulties in fulfilling certain Western academic requirements, particularly in relation to critical thinking. These studies do not explore the broad range of academic and social problems. Yet this is a fruitful area for research, not just because of the importance of Indonesian students to Australia, and the importance of the Australia-Indonesia relationship to both neighbouring nations, but also because adjustment problems are magnified by cultural differences. There are clear differences between Indonesian and Australian cultures, so that a study of Indonesian students in Australia might also be of broader academic interest […]Studies of international student adjustment discuss a range of problems, including the pressures created by new role and behavioural expectations, language difficulties, financial problems, social difficulties, homesickness, difficulties in dealing with university and other authorities, academic difficulties, and lack of assertiveness inside and outside the classroom. (467)While both my supervisor and I would agree that I faced all of these obstacles during my PhD candidature, this article is focusing solely on the battle to present my methodology, a dialogic encounter between Buginese feminism and mainstream Australian culture using Helen Garner’s short stories, to a Western process and have it be “legitimised”. Endang writes that short stories are becoming more popular in the industrial era in Indonesia and they have become vehicles for writers to articulate the realities of social life such as poverty, marginalization, and unfairness (141-144). In addition, Noor states that the short story has become a new literary form particularly effective for assisting writers in their goal to help the marginalized because its shortness can function as a weapon to directly “scoop up” the targeted issues and “knock them out at a blow” (Endang 144-145). Indeed, Helen Garner uses short stories in a way similar to that described by Endang: as a defiant act towards the government and current circ*mstances (145). My study of Helen Garner’s short stories explored the way her stories engage with and resist gender relations and inequality between men and women in Australian society through four themes prevalent in the narratives: the kitchen, landscape, language, and sexuality. I wrote my thesis in standard Australian English and I complied with expected forms, formatting, referencing, structuring etc. My thesis also included the Buginese translations of some of Garner’s work. However, the theoretical approaches that informed my analysis cannot be separated from the personal. In the title, I use the term ‘dancing’ to indicate a dialogue with white Australian women by moving back and forth between Australian culture and Buginese culture. I use the term ‘dancing’ as an extension of Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading but employ it as a signifier of my movement between insider and outsider (of Australian feminism), that is, I extend it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. According to Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, the “essence of Said’s argument is to know something is to have power over it, and conversely, to have power is to know the world in your own terms” (83). Ashcroft and Ahluwalia add how through music, particularly the work of pianist Glenn Gould, Said formulated a way of reading imperial and postcolonial texts contrapuntally. Such a reading acknowledges the hybridity of cultures, histories and literatures, allowing the reader to move back and forth between an internal and an external standpoint of cultural references and attitudes in “an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (Said 66). While theorising about the potential dance between Australian and Buginese feminisms in my work, I was living the dance in my day-to-day Australian university experience. Trying to accommodate the expected requirements of a PhD thesis, while at the same time ensuring that I maintained my own personal, cultural and professional dignity, that is ade’, and siri’, required some fancy footwork. Siri’ is central to my Buginese worldview and had to be positioned as such in my PhD thesis. Also, the realities that women are still marginalized and that gender inequality and disparities persist in Indonesian society become a motivation to carry out my PhD study. The opportunity to study Australian culture and literature in that country, allowed me to increase my global and local complexity as an individual, what Pieterse refers to as “ a process of hybridization” and to become as Beck terms an “actor” and “manager’’ of my life (as cited in Edmunds 1). Gaining greater autonomy and reconceptualising both masculinity and femininity, while dominant themes in Garner’s work, are also issues I address in my personal and professional goals. In other words, this study resulted in hybridized knowledge of Australian concepts of feminism and Buginese societies that offers a reference for students to understand and engage with different feminist thought. By learning how feminism is understood differently by Australians and Buginese, my Indonesian students can decide what aspects of feminist ideas from a Western perspective can be applied to Buginese culture without transgressing Buginese customs and habits.There are few Australian literary works that have been translated into Indonesian. Those that have include Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2007) and My Life is a Fake (2009), James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout (1957), Emma Darcy’s The Billionaire Bridegroom (2010) , Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), and Colleen McCullogh’s The Thorn Birds (1978). My translation of five short stories from Postcards from Surfers complemented these works and enriched the diversity of Indonesian translations of world literary works, the bulk of which tends to come from the United Kingdom, America, the Middle East, and Japan. However, actually getting through the process of PhD research followed by examination required my supervisor and I to negotiate cross-cultural terrain, academic agendas and Western expectations of what legitimate thesis writing should look like. Employing Said’s contrapuntal pedagogy and Warrior’s notion of subaltern dancing became my illegitimate methodological frame.Said points out that contrapuntal analysis means that students and teachers can cross-culturally “elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (318). He adds that “we must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others” (32). Contrapuntal is a metaphor Said derived from musical theory, meaning to counterpoint or add a rhythm or melody, in this case, Buginese and Anglo-Australian feminisms. Warrior argues for an indigenous critique of how power and knowledge is read and in doing so he writes that “the subaltern can dance, and so sometimes can the intellectual” (85). In his rereading of Spivak, he argues that subaltern and intellectual positions can meet “and in meeting, create the possibility of communication” (86). He refers to this as dancing partly because it implicitly acknowledges without silencing the voices of the subaltern (once the subaltern speaks it is no longer the subaltern, so the notion of dancing allows for communication, “a movement from subalternity to something else” (90) which can mark “a new sort of non-complicitous relationship to a family, community or class of origin” (91). By “non-complicit” Warrior means that when a member of the subaltern becomes a scholar and therefore a member of those who historically silence the subaltern, there are other methods for communicating, of moving, between political and cultural spaces that allow for a multiplicity of voices and responses. Warrior uses a traditional Osage in-losh-ka dance as an example of how he physically and intellectually interacts with multiple voices and positions:While the music plays, our usual differences, including subalternity and intellectuality, and even gender in its own way, are levelled. For those of us moving to the music, the rules change, and those who know the steps and the songs and those who can keep up with the whirl of bodies, music and colours hold nearly every advantage over station or money. The music ends, of course, but I know I take my knowledge of the dance away and into my life as a critic, and I would argue that those levelled moments remain with us after we leave the drum, change our clothes, and go back to the rest of our lives. (93)For Warrior, the dance becomes theory into practice. For me, it became not only a way to soundly and “appropriately” present my methodology and purpose, but it also became my day to day interactions, as a female Buginese scholar, with western, Australian academic and cultural worldviews and expectations.One of the biggest movements I had to justify was my use of the first person “I”, in my thesis, to signify my identity as a Buginese woman and position myself as an insider of my community with a hybrid western feminism with Australia in mind. Perrault argues that “Writing “I” has been an emancipatory project for women” (2). In the context of my PhD thesis, uttering ‘I’ confirmed my position and aims. However, this act of explicitly situating my own identity and cultural position in my research and thesis was considered one of the more illegitimate acts. In one of the examiner reports, it was stated that situating myself centrally was fraught but that I managed to avoid the pitfalls. Judy Long argues that writing in the female first person challenges patriarchal control and order (127). For me, writing in the first person was essential if I had any chance of maintaining my Buginese identity and voice, in both my thesis and in my Australian tertiary experience. As Trinh-Minh writes, “S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given permission to do so or not” (8).Van Dijk, cited in Hamilton, notes that the west and north are bound by an academic ethnocentrism and this is a particular area my own research had to negotiate. Methodologically I provided a comparative rather than a universalising perspective, engaging with middle-class, heterosexual, western, white women feminism but not privileging them. It is important for Buginese to use language discourses as a weapon to gain power, particularly because as McGlynn claims, “generally Indonesians are not particularly outspoken” (38). My research was shaped by a combination of ongoing dedication to promote women’s empowerment in the Buginese context and my role as an academic teaching English literature at the university level. I applied interpretive principles that will enable my students to see how the ideas of feminism conveyed through western literature can positively improve the quality of women’s lives and be implemented in Buginese culture without compromising our identity as Indonesians and Buginese people. At the same time, my literary translation provides a cultural comparison with Australia that allows a space for further conversations to occur. However, while attempting to negotiate western and Indonesian discourses in my thesis, I was also physically and emotionally trying to negotiate how to do this as a Muslim Buginese female PhD candidate in an Anglo-Australian academic institution. The notion of ‘dancing’ was employed as a signifier of movement between insider and outsider knowledge. Throughout the research process and my thesis I ‘danced’ with Australian feminism, traditional patriarchal Buginese society, Western academic expectations and my own emerging Indonesian feminist perspective. To ensure siri’ remained the pedagogical and ethical basis of my approach I applied Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s employment of a traditional Osage dance as a self-reflexive, embodied praxis, that is, I extended it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. The notion of ‘dance’ allows for movement, change, contact, tension, touch and distance: it means that for those who have historically been marginalised or confined, they are no longer silenced. The metaphoric act of dancing allowed me to legitimise my PhD work – it was successfully awarded – and to negotiate a western tertiary institute in Australia with my own Buginese knowledge, culture and purpose.ReferencesAshcroft., B., and P. Ahluwalia. Edward Said. London: Routledge, 1999.Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel. Random House LLC, 2007.Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake: A NNovel. Random House LLC, 2009.Darcy, Emma. Billionaire Bridegroom 2319. Harlequin, 2010.Endang, Fransisca. "Disseminating Indonesian Postcoloniality into English Literature (a Case Study of 'Clara')." Jurnal Sastra Inggris 8.2: 2008.Edmunds, Kim. "The Impact of an Australian Higher Education on Gender Relations in Indonesia." ISANA International Conference "Student Success in International Education", 2007Garner, Helen. Postcards from Surfers. Melbourne: McPhee/Gribble, 1985.Hamilton, Deborah, Deborah Schriffrin, and Heidi E. Tannen, ed. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Victoria: Balckwll, 2001.Long, Judy. 1999. Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York: New York UP, 1999.McGlynn, John H. "Silent Voices, Muted Expressions: Indonesian Literature Today." Manoa 12.1 (2000): 38-44.Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle Press, 1987.Pelras, Christian. The Bugis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995.Pieterse, J.N. Globalisation as Hybridisation. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, eds., Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, 1995.Marshall, James V. Walkabout. London: Puffin, 1957.McCullough, C. The Thorn Birds Sydney: Harper Collins, 1978.Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989.Novera, Isvet Amri. "Indonesian Postgraduate Students Studying in Australia: An Examination of Their Academic, Social and Cultural Experiences." International Education Journal 5.4 (2004): 475-487.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Book, 1993. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of lllinois, 1988. 271-313.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.Warrior, Robert. ""The Subaltern Can Dance, and So Sometimes Can the Intellectual." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.1 (2011): 85-94.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In recent times there has been a notable increase in the number of first novels by young Australian authors which have attained international release. Some mentionable titles would be Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded, Andrew McGahan's Praise and Fiona Capp's Night Surfing. These novels, which come brimming with language particular to Australia and to the sub-cultural groupings represented in the texts, seem to have found an eager overseas readership despite what would ordinarily be seen as their untranslatable content. The high levels of culturally-specific brand names, slang, vulgarities and references to popular culture used in these novels should be a hindrance to the effective comprehension of the narratives themselves as well as the culture they portray. Making the specificities of a culture comprehensible to the outside world will always be a difficult task, but the advent of on-line publishing has introduced some interesting possible tactics and some entirely new hurdles for future translators to consider. It is problematic to attempt to define a 'culture', and hom*ogeneous languages and cultures do not truly exist, but with every international transfer comes the act of translation which must suppose a certain empirically assessible definition of the psychological space between the source culture of the text and that of its target audience. Texts to be sold internationally are carefully selected and often meticulously renovated to be made comprehensible to a chosen target readership. The notion of a such a reading market presupposes levels of shared knowledge between the two cultures: it requires an assessment of sameness and difference in order to define which portions of the text need to be translated. Translation theorist Anthony Pym has asserted the notion that all texts belong to certain peoples or situations and thereby resist translation due to the necessity for the texts to undergo a change of values (beyond the linguistic) when moved away from their apparently rightful place (Pym 102). This suggests that any text has a natural home where the ideal reader probably resides. Thus, even the movement of a text between groups who share a language (for example, from Australia to England or the USA) will require a certain amount of translation to be maximally accessible for the foreign reader. On-line publishing destabilises the levels of control available to publishers and translators. The apparent concerns of royalty payments and copyright are currently under observation, but there is also the radical alteration of the notion of a target book-buying market. A text published electronically is basically available to the world. There are no physical frontiers or issues of stock availability to prevent the text from being read by anyone, anywhere, who has a basic grasp of the language being used in the particular document (and more and more search engines even provide a translation facility that overcomes some of that initial language barrier). Thus, an Australian text can be read by any reader of English irrespective of cultural background or supposed suitability as a receiver. Under the controlled conditions made possible by working towards assumed receiving markets, translators have developed a series of coping mechanisms to overcome the dilemmas of translation difficulties. In some cases, a translator may domesticate a text by exchanging a word for an option which is vaguely similar but is more comprehensible to the target culture (an example might be the replacement of 'vegemite' with 'peanut butter' as was the case in the recent French translation of Sally Morgan's My Place). A second option is to retain the word in its original form, forcing readers to investigate the meaning elsewhere. This works positively for the diligent reader, but there is also a level of reading at which the reader may be happy to 'skip over' the laborious sections while still 'getting the gist' of the storyline. This does little for the development of greater awareness about the source culture or for an understanding of a particular term's appropriateness within the context of the narrative. A third method is to make use of footnotes within the text to explain any untranslatable passages. Opportunities exist here for adding historical data and brief asides which may broaden the reader's understanding of the narrative. Even pictures or maps may be added to help create an ideal reader and collapse the space of potential misunderstanding between the two cultures. This is a positive approach in pedagogical terms but few publishers wish to produce a text which is three times longer than the original. There is also the risk here, as Pym has stated, of rendering the text more sociological than narrative (Pym 87). In addition, the eye's constant retreat to the bottom of the page makes the text disjointed and may sacrifice poetic allusions. One exciting advantage of electronic publishing, in terms of translatability of culturally-specific language, is the potential for the use of hypertext links as a sort of intratextual footnote. While preserving the basic form of the original text and not visually disrupting the narrative, Internet links can be used to provide immediate access to all manner of educational information. To illustrate these points, one need only look at one of the Australian novels in question, Nick Earls's Zigzag Street, which has recently been translated into German and has been warmly embraced by readers of English around the world. Barely a page can be turned in this text without the reader discovering another culturally-specific reference. The following haphazardly abridged portion of Chapter 37 is exemplary of the frequency of such problematic language: The car doesn't start...I call the RACQ...I sit out on the bonnet with a big pile of toast with Vegemite on it...me and my old Laser...I drive and I sing along to Triple J... At around 2 o'clock I walk up to Wee Willie Winkie's on Waterworks Road...and I buy a packet of Tim Tams...I buy a banana Paddle Pop and eat it on the way home. Zigzag Street has been released in English outside of Australia without alteration despite Earls's usage of terms which may not even resonate with Australian readers outside the text's Brisbane home, let alone with other English-speaking communities. This humorous tale of a young man's personal development in the face of adversity has engaged readers world-wide, yet press coverage and fan mail still query the real meanings of strange and exotic words like 'Tim Tam'. What hypertext offers is a space-saving, non-disruptive opportunity to imbue a text with additional information about seemingly untranslatable terms. If Zigzag Street were published electronically and came with Internet links, the reader might have the opportunity to more extensively understand the implications of the Australian vernacular in use. Tim Tams, for example, have a social role beyond their being a biscuit (as virtual currency in offices and the providers of solace to the downtrodden and dumped). This is an intracultural meaning attributed to that particular signifier which could not be understood without explanation. The reader can no doubt judge that Triple J is some form of music, but a jump to the Triple J Website allows him or her to say 'this is a radio station, primarily aimed at young people, it supports certain political agendas, it plays a certain type of music...', thus understanding the motivations of the character, the events of the story and, importantly, a little bit more about the source culture. The use of hypertext links cannot fully translate culturally-specific references, only first-hand experience of the culture can do that. But in the few examples made apparent in the short paragraph from Zigzag Street, hypertext provides a level of comprehension of the text beyond that which is possible through traditional footnotes. The reader is able to partially experience the source culture of the text (by at least knowing what a Tim Tam looks like or by listening to Triple J -- whose site now comes with a RealAudio feature) rather than standing at a distance making vague and frequently misguided assumptions about the culture or conducting an unproductive reading which simply ignores the culturally-specific terminology. In terms of form and the retention of a smooth narrative flow, the text is not technically disjointed. At the same time however, the reading of text will be a non-linear experience at the discretion of the reader. It has been said that this is reflective of the way we usually approach a text; that is, jumping between thoughts which we then associate with each other to build a network of concepts. Hypertext parallels human cognition in this way and allows for deeper exploration and interpretation of the text's culture of origin (Balasubramanian 5). Though entertaining, the translations of food and brand names may seem like flippant examples. Yet, it is easy to see the importance of the principles if they were appropriated to cases of historical data or ideologies which may be wrongly interpreted by the international reading market. (This is not to say that Tim Tams are not very, VERY important social documents.) Of course no reading of the text will arrive at the reader without mediation in terms of the links chosen for the site. As with all translations, there are political and ethical decisions to be made in conjunction with the semantic ones. It should also be stated that the advantages lie mainly in the domain of intralingual translation projects and that few novels are currently published in their entirety on the Internet. There are, however, many abstracts, short stories, journals and other documents laden with similar levels of cultural information which can benefit from this innovation. The introduction of the Internet has reduced the physical distance between cultural groupings by making information about any given culture immediately available to the entire world. It is translation, however, that initiates the reduction in the psychological space between cultures. Innovative use of the Internet's potential for translation could make intercultural communication a much smoother and more interesting project resulting in a feeling for the reader of inclusion, rather than intrusion on the source culture of a text. References Balasubramanian, V. "Hypertext -- An Introduction." State of the Art Review of Hypermedia Issues and Applications. 1998. 20 Oct. 1998 <http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/hypertext_review/chapter1.php>. Earls, Nick. Zigzag Street. Sydney: Transworld, 1996. Pym, Anthony. Translation and Text Transfer. Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Land, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lara Cain. "'What the Hell is a Tim Tam?' Reducing the Space between Cultures through Electronic Publishing." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/timtam.php>. Chicago style: Lara Cain, "'What the Hell is a Tim Tam?' Reducing the Space between Cultures through Electronic Publishing," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 4 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/timtam.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lara Cain. (1998) 'What the hell is a Tim Tam?' Reducing the space between cultures through electronic publishing. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/timtam.php> ([your date of access]).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

What began as a simple request for a book by one of my former students, at times, has not been so simple. The student, whom I refer to as Carla (name changed), hoped to read about characters similar to herself and her friends. As a teacher, I have often tried to hook my students on reading by presenting books with characters to which they can relate. These books can help increase their overall knowledge of the world, open their minds to multiple realities and variations of the human experience and provide scenarios in which they can live vicariously. Carla’s request was a bit more complicated than I had imagined. As a “Deaf” student who attended a state school for the Deaf and who viewed herself as a member of a linguistic cultural minority, she expected to read a book with characters who used American Sign Language and who participated as members within the Deaf Community. She did not want to read didactic books about deafness but wanted books with unpredictable plots and believable characters. Having graduated from a teacher-preparation program in Deaf Education, I had read numerous books about deafness. While memoirs and biographical selections had been relatively easy to acquire and were on my bookshelf, I had not once read any fictional books for adolescents that included a deaf character. (I refer to ‘Deaf’ as representing individuals who identify in a linguistic, cultural minority group. The term ‘deaf’ is used as a more generic term given to individuals with some degree of hearing loss. In other articles, ‘deaf’ has been used pejoratively or in connection to a view by those who believe one without the sense of hearing is inferior or lacking. I do not believe or wish to imply that. ) As a High School teacher with so many additional work responsibilities outside of classroom teaching, finding fictional books with deaf characters was somewhat of a challenge. Nevertheless, after some research I was able to recommend a book that I thought would be a good summer read. Nancy Butts’ Cheshire Moon (1992) is charming book about thirteen-year-old Miranda who is saddened by her cousin’s death and furious at her parents' insistence that she speak rather than sign. The plot turns slightly mystical when the teens begin having similar dreams under the “Cheshire moon”. Yet, the story is about Miranda, a deaf girl, who struggles with communication. Without her cousin, the only member of her family who was fluent in sign language, communication is difficult and embarrassing. Miranda feels isolated, alienated, and unsure of herself. Because of the main character’s age, the book was not the best recommendation for a high school student; however, when Carla finished Cheshire Moon, she asked for another book with Deaf characters. Problem & Purpose Historically, authors have used deafness as a literary device to relay various messages about the struggles of humankind and elicit sympathy from readers (Batson & Bergman; Bergman; Burns; Krentz; Panara; Taylor, "Deaf Characters" I, II, III; Schwartz; Wilding-Diaz). In recent decades, however, the general public’s awareness of and perhaps interest in deaf people has risen along with that of our increasingly multicultural world. Educational legislation has increased awareness of the deaf as has news coverage of Gallaudet University protests. In addition, Deaf people have benefited from advances in communicative technology, such as Video Relay (VRS) and instant messaging pagers, more coordinated interpreting services and an increase in awareness of American Sign Language. Authors are incorporating more deaf characters than they did in the past. However, this increase does not necessarily translate to an increase in understanding of the deaf, nor does it translate to the most accurate, respectably, well-rounded characterization of the deaf (Pajka-West, "Perceptions"). Acquiring fictional books that include deaf characters can be time-consuming and challenging for teachers and librarians. The research examining deaf characters in fiction is extremely limited (Burns; Guella; Krentz; Wilding-Diaz). The most recent articles predominately focus on children’s literature — specifically picture books (Bailes; Brittain). Despite decades of research affirming culturally authentic children’s literature and the merits of multicultural literature, a coexisting body of research reveals the lack of culturally authentic texts (Applebee; Campbell & Wirtenberg; Ernest; Larrick; Sherriff; Taxel). Moreover, children’s books with deaf characters are used as informational depictions of deaf individuals (Bockmiller, 1980). Readers of such resource books, typically parents, teachers and their students, gain information about deafness and individuals with “disabilities” (Bockmiller, 1980; Civiletto & Schirmer, 2000). If an important purpose for deaf characters in fiction is educational and informational, then there is a need for the characters to be presented as realistic models of deaf people. If not, the readers of such fiction gain inaccurate information about deafness including reinforced negative stereotypes, as can occur in any other literature portraying cultural minorities (Pajka-West, "Perceptions"). Similar to authors’ informational depictions, writers also reveal societal understanding of groups of people through their fiction (Banfield & Wilson; Panara; Rudman). Literature has often stigmatized minority culture individuals based upon race, ethnicity, disability, gender and/or sexual orientation. While readers might recognize the negative depictions and dismiss them as harmless stereotypes, these portrayals could become a part of the unconscious of members of our society. If books continually reinforce stereotypical depictions of deaf people, individuals belonging to the group might be typecast and discouraged into a limited way of being. As an educator, I want all of my students to have unlimited opportunities for the future, not disadvantaged by stereotypes. The Study For my doctoral dissertation, I examined six contemporary adolescent literature books with deaf characters. The research methodology for this study required book selection, reader sample selection, instrument creation, book analysis, questionnaire creation, and data analysis. My research questions included: 1) Are deaf characters being presented as culturally Deaf characters or as pathologically deaf and disabled; 2) Do these readers favor deaf authors over hearing ones? If so, why; and, 3) How do deaf and hearing adult readers perceive deaf characters in adolescent literature? The Sample The book sample included 102 possible books for the study ranging from adolescent to adult selections. I selected books that were recognized as suitable for middle school or high school readers based upon the reading and interest levels established by publishers. The books also had to include main characters who are deaf and deaf characters who are human. The books selected were all realistic fiction, available to the public, and published or reissued for publication within the last fifteen years. The six books that were selected included: Nick’s Secret by C. Blatchford; A Maiden’s Grave by J. Deaver; Of Sound Mind by J. Ferris; Deaf Child Crossing by M. Matlin; Apple Is My Sign by M. Riskind; and Finding Abby by V. Scott. For the first part of my study, I analyzed these texts using the Adolescent Literature Content Analysis Check-off Form (ALCAC) which includes both pathological and cultural perspective statements derived from Deaf Studies, Disability Studies and Queer Theory. The participant sample included adult readers who fit within three categories: those who identified as deaf, those who were familiar with or had been acquaintances with deaf individuals, and those who were unfamiliar having never associated with deaf individuals. Each participant completed a Reader-Response Survey which included ten main questions derived from Deaf Studies and Schwartz’ ‘Criteria for Analyzing Books about Deafness’. The survey included both dichotomous and open-ended questions. Research Questions & Methodology Are deaf characters being presented as culturally Deaf or as pathologically deaf and disabled? In previous articles, scholars have stated that most books with deaf characters include a pathological perspective; yet, few studies actually exist to conclude this assertion. In my study, I analyzed six books to determine whether they supported the cultural or the pathological perspective of deafness. The goal was not to exclusively label a text either/or but to highlight the distinct perspectives to illuminate a discussion regarding a deaf character. As before mentioned, the ALCAC instrument incorporates relevant theories and prior research findings in reference to the portrayals of deaf characters and was developed to specifically analyze adolescent literature with deaf characters. Despite the historical research regarding deaf characters and due to the increased awareness of deaf people and American Sign Language, my initial assumption was that the authors of the six adolescent books would present their deaf characters as more culturally ‘Deaf’. This was confirmed for the majority of the books. I believed that an outsider, such as a hearing writer, could carry out an adequate portrayal of a culture other than his own. In the past, scholars did not believe this was the case; however, the results from my study demonstrated that the majority of the hearing authors presented the cultural perspective model. Initially shocking, the majority of deaf authors incorporated the pathological perspective model. I offer three possible reasons why these deaf authors included more pathological perspective statements while the hearing authors include more cultural perspective statements: First, the deaf authors have grown up deaf and perhaps experienced more scenarios similar to those presented from the pathological perspective model. Even if the deaf authors live more culturally Deaf lifestyles today, authors include their experiences growing up in their writing. Second, there are less deaf characters in the books written by deaf authors and more characters and more character variety in the books written by the hearing authors. When there are fewer deaf characters interacting with other deaf characters, these characters tend to interact with more hearing characters who are less likely to be aware of the cultural perspective. And third, with decreased populations of culturally Deaf born to culturally Deaf individuals, it seems consistent that it may be more difficult to obtain a book from a Deaf of Deaf author. Similarly, if we consider the Deaf person’s first language is American Sign Language, Deaf authors may be spending more time composing stories and poetry in American Sign Language and less time focusing upon English. This possible lack of interest may make the number of ‘Deaf of Deaf’ authors, or culturally Deaf individuals raised by culturally Deaf parents, who pursue and are successful publishing a book in adolescent literature low. At least in adolescent literature, deaf characters, as many other minority group characters, are being included in texts to show young people our increasingly multicultural world. Adolescent literature readers can now become aware of a range of deaf characters, including characters who use American Sign Language, who attend residential schools for the Deaf, and even who have Deaf families. Do the readers favor deaf authors over hearing ones? A significant part of my research was based upon the perceptions of adult readers of adolescent literature with deaf characters. I selected participants from a criterion sampling and divided them into three groups: 1. Adults who had attended either a special program for the deaf or a residential school for the deaf, used American Sign Language, and identified themselves as deaf were considered for the deaf category of the study; 2. Adults who were friends, family members, co-workers or professionals in fields connected with individuals who identify themselves as deaf were considered for the familiar category of the study; and, 3. hearing adults who were not aware of the everyday experiences of deaf people and who had not taken a sign language class, worked with or lived with a deaf person were considered for the unfamiliar category of the study. Nine participants were selected for each group totaling 27 participants (one participant from each of the groups withdrew before completion, leaving eight participants from each of the groups to complete the study). To elicit the perspectives of the participants, I developed a Reader Response survey which was modeled after Schwartz’s ‘Criteria for Analyzing Books about Deafness’. I assumed that the participants from Deaf and Familiar groups would prefer the books written by the deaf authors while the unfamiliar participants would act more as a control group. This was not confirmed through the data. In fact, the Deaf participants along with the participants as a whole preferred the books written by the hearing authors as better describing their perceptions of realistic deaf people, for presenting deaf characters adequately and realistically, and for the hearing authors’ portrayals of deaf characters matching with their perceptions of deaf people. In general, the Deaf participants were more critical of the deaf authors while the familiar participants, although as a group preferred the books by the hearing authors, were more critical of the hearing authors. Participants throughout all three groups mentioned their preference for a spectrum of deaf characters. The books used in this study that were written by hearing authors included a variety of characters. For example, Riskind’s Apple Is My Sign includes numerous deaf students at a school for the deaf and the main character living within a deaf family; Deaver’s A Maiden’s Grave includes deaf characters from a variety of backgrounds attending a residential school for the deaf and only a few hearing characters; and Ferris’ Of Sound Mind includes two deaf families with two CODA or hearing teens. The books written by the deaf authors in this study include only a few deaf characters. For example, Matlin’s Deaf Child Crossing includes two deaf girls surrounded by hearing characters; Scott’s Finding Abby includes more minor deaf characters but readers learn about these characters from the hearing character’s perspective. For instance, the character Jared uses sign language and attends a residential school for the deaf but readers learn this information from his hearing mother talking about him, not from the deaf character’s words. Readers know that he communicates through sign language because we are told that he does; however, the only communication readers are shown is a wave from the child; and, Blatchford’s Nick’s Secret includes only one deaf character. With the fewer deaf characters it is nearly impossible for the various ways of being deaf to be included in the book. Thus, the preference for the books by the hearing authors is more likely connected to the preference for a variety of deaf people represented. How do readers perceive deaf characters? Participants commented on fourteen main and secondary characters. Their perceptions of these characters fall into six categories: the “normal” curious kid such as the characters Harry (Apple Is My Sign), Jeremy (Of Sound Mind) and Jared (Finding Abby); the egocentric spoiled brat such as Palma (Of Sound Mind) and Megan (Deaf Child Crossing); the advocate such as Harry’s mother (Apple Is My Sign) and Susan (A Maiden’s Grave); those dependent upon the majority culture such as Palma (Of Sound Mind) and Lizzie (Deaf Child Crossing); those isolated such as Melissa (Finding Abby), Ben (Of Sound Mind), Nick (Nick’s Secret) and Thomas (Of Sound Mind); and, those searching for their identities such as Melanie (A Maiden’s Grave) and Abby (Finding Abby). Overall, participants commented more frequently about the deaf characters in the books by the hearing authors (A Maiden’s Grave; Of Sound Mind; Apple Is My Sign) and made more positive comments about the culturally Deaf male characters, particularly Ben Roper, Jeremy and Thomas of Of Sound Mind, and Harry of Apple Is My Sign. Themes such as the characters being dependent and isolated from others did arise. For example, Palma in Of Sound Mind insists that her hearing son act as her personal interpreter so that she can avoid other hearing people. Examples to demonstrate the isolation some of the deaf characters experience include Nick of Nick’s Secret being the only deaf character in his story and Ben Roper of Of Sound Mind being the only deaf employee in his workplace. While these can certainly be read as negative situations the characters experience, isolation is a reality that resonates in some deaf people’s experiences. With communicative technology and more individuals fluent in American Sign Language, some deaf individuals may decide to associate more with individuals in the larger culture. One must interpret purposeful isolation such as Ben Roper’s (Of Sound Mind) case, working in a location that provides him with the best employment opportunities, differently than Melissa Black’s (Finding Abby) isolating feelings of being left out of family dinner discussions. Similarly, variations in characterization including the egocentric, spoiled brat and those searching for their identities are common themes in adolescent literature with or without deaf characters being included. Positive examples of deaf characters including the roles of the advocate such as Susan (A Maiden’s Grave) and Harry’s mother (Apple Is My Sign), along with descriptions of regular everyday deaf kids increases the varieties of deaf characters. As previously stated, my study included an analysis based on literary theory and prior research. At that time, unless the author explicitly told readers in a foreword or a letter to readers, I had no way of truly knowing why the deaf character was included and why the author made such decisions. This uncertainty of the author’s decisions changed for me in 2007 with the establishment of my educational blog. Beginning to Blog When I started my educational blog Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature in February 2007, I did not plan to become a blogger nor did I have any plans for my blog. I simply opened a Blogger account and added a list of 106 books with deaf characters that was connected to my research. Once I started blogging on a regular basis, I discovered an active audience who not only read what I wrote but who truly cared about my research. Blogging had become a way for me to keep my research current; since my blog was about deaf characters in adolescent literature, it became an advocacy tool that called attention to authors and books that were not widely publicized; and, it enabled me to become part of a cyber community made up of other bloggers and readers. After a few months of blogging on a weekly basis, I began to feel a sense of obligation to research and post my findings. While continuing to post to my blog, I have acquired more information about my research topic and even received advance reader copies prior to the books’ publication dates. This enables me to discuss the most current books. It also enables my readers to learn about such books. My blog acts as free advertisem*nt for the publishing companies and authors. I currently have 195 contemporary books with deaf characters and over 36 author and professional interviews. While the most rewarding aspect of blogging is connecting with readers, there have been some major highlights in the process. As I stated, I had no way of knowing why the deaf character was included in the books until I began interviewing the authors. I had hoped that the hearing authors of books with deaf characters would portray their characters realistically but I had not realized the authors’ personal connections to actual deaf people. For instance, Delia Ray, Singing Hands, wrote about a Deaf preacher and his family. Her book was based on her grandfather who was a Deaf preacher and leading pioneer in the Deaf Community. Ray is not the only hearing author who has a personal connection to deaf people. Other examples include: Jean Ferris, Of Sound Mind, who earned a degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology. Ferris’ book includes only two hearing characters, the majority are Deaf. All of her characters are also fluent in American Sign Language; Jodi Cutler Del Dottore, Rally Caps, who includes a deaf character named Luca who uses a cochlear implant. Luca is based on Cutler Del Dottore’s son, Jordan, who also has a cochlear implant; finally, Jacqueline Woodson, Feathers, grew up in a community that included deaf people who did not use sign language. As an adult, she met members of the Deaf Community and began learning American Sign Language herself. Woodson introduces readers to Sean who is attractive, funny, and intelligent. In my study, I noted that all of the deaf characters where not diverse based upon race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status (Pajka-West, "Perceptions"). Sean is the first Deaf American-African character in adolescent literature who uses sign language to communicate. Another main highlight is finding Deaf authors who do not receive the mainstream press that other authors might receive. For example, Ann Clare LeZotte, T4, introduces readers to main character Paula Becker, a thirteen year old deaf girl who uses sign language and lipreading to communicate. Through verse, we learn of Paula’s life in Germany during Hitler’s time as she goes into hiding since individuals with physical and mental disabilities were being executed under the orders of Hitler’s Tiergartenstrasse 4 (T4). One additional highlight is that I learn about insider tips and am then able to share this information with my blog readers. In one instance I began corresponding with Marvel Comic’s David Mack, the creator of Echo, a multilingual, biracial, Deaf comic book character who debuted in Daredevil and later The New Avengers. In comics, it is Marvel who owns the character; while Echo was created for Daredevil by Mack, she later appears in The New Avengers. In March 2008, discussion boards were buzzing since issue #39 would include original creator, Mack, among other artists. To make it less complicated for those who do not follow comics, the issue was about whether or not Echo had become a skrull, an alien who takes over the body of the character. This was frightening news since potentially Echo could become a hearing skrull. I just did not believe that Mack would let that happen. My students and I held numerous discussions about the implications of Marvel’s decisions and finally I sent Mack an email. While he could not reveal the details of the issue, he did assure me that my students and I would be pleased. I’m sure there was a collective sigh from readers once his email was published on the blog. Final Thoughts While there have been pejorative depictions of the deaf in literature, the portrayals of deaf characters in adolescent literature have become much more realistic in the last decade. Authors have personal connections with actual deaf individuals which lend to the descriptions of their deaf characters; they are conducting more detailed research to develop their deaf characters; and, they appear to be much more aware of the Deaf Community than they were in the past. A unique benefit of the genre is that authors of adolescent literature often give the impression of being more available to the readers of their books. Authors often participate in open dialogues with their fans through social networking sites or discussion boards on their own websites. After posting interviews with the authors on my blog, I refer readers to the author’s on site whether it through personal blogs, websites, Facebook or Twitter pages. While hearing authors’ portrayals now include a spectrum of deaf characters, we must encourage Deaf and Hard of Hearing writers to include more deaf characters in their works. Consider again my student Carla and her longing to find books with deaf characters. Deaf characters in fiction act as role models for young adults. A positive portrayal of deaf characters benefits deaf adolescents whether or not they see themselves as biologically deaf or culturally deaf. Only through on-going publishing, more realistic and positive representations of the deaf will occur. References Bailes, C.N. "Mandy: A Critical Look at the Portrayal of a Deaf Character in Children’s Literature." Multicultural Perspectives 4.4 (2002): 3-9. Batson, T. "The Deaf Person in Fiction: From Sainthood to Rorschach Blot." Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 11.1-2 (1980): 16-18. Batson, T., and E. Bergman. Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press (1985). Bergman, E. "Literature, Fictional characters in." In J.V. Van Cleve (ed.), Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People & Deafness. Vol. 2. Washington, D.C.: McGraw Hill, 1987. 172-176. Brittain, I. "An Examination into the Portrayal of Deaf Characters and Deaf Issues in Picture Books for Children." Disability Studies Quarterly 24.1 (Winter 2004). 24 Apr. 2005 < http://www.dsq-sds.org >. Burns, D.J. An Annotated Checklist of Fictional Works Which Contain Deaf Characters. Unpublished master’s thesis. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University,1950. Campbell, P., and J. Wirtenberg. How Books Influence Children: What the Research Shows. Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 11.6 (1980): 3-6. Civiletto, C.L., and B.R. Schirmer. "Literature with Characters Who Are Deaf." The Dragon Lode 19.1 (Fall 2000): 46-49. Guella, B. "Short Stories with Deaf Fictional Characters." American Annals of the Deaf 128.1 (1983): 25-33. Krentz, C. "Exploring the 'Hearing Line': Deafness, Laughter, and Mark Twain." In S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson, eds., Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 234-247. Larrick, N. "The All-White World of Children's Books. Saturday Review 11 (1965): 63-85. Pajka-West, S. “The Perceptions of Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature”. The ALAN Review 34.3 (Summer 2007): 39-45. ———. "The Portrayals and Perceptions of Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Virginia, 2007. ———. "Interview with Deaf Author Ann Clare LeZotte about T4, Her Forthcoming Book Told in Verse." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 5 Aug. 2008. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2008/08/interview-with-deaf-author-ann-clare.html >.———. "Interview with Delia Ray, Author of Singing Hands." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 23 Aug. 2007. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2007/08/interview-with-delia-ray-author-of.html >.———. "Interview with Jacqueline Woodson, author of Feathers." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 29 Sep. 2007. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2007/09/interview-with-jacqueline-woodson.html >. ———. "Interview with Jodi Cutler Del Dottore, author of Rally Caps." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 13 Aug. 2007. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2007/08/interview-with-jodi-cutler-del-dottore.html >. Panara, R. "Deaf Characters in Fiction and Drama." The Deaf American 24.5 (1972): 3-8. Schwartz, A.V. "Books Mirror Society: A Study of Children’s Materials." Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 11.1-2 (1980): 19-24. Sherriff, A. The Portrayal of Mexican American Females in Realistic Picture Books (1998-2004). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: 2005. Taxel, J. "The Black Experience in Children's Fiction: Controversies Surrounding Award Winning Books." Curriculum Inquiry 16 (1986): 245-281. Taylor, G.M. "Deaf Characters in Short Stories: A Selective Bibliography. The Deaf American 26.9 (1974): 6-8. ———. "Deaf Characters in Short Stories: A Selective Bibliography II." The Deaf American 28.11 (1976): 13-16.———. "Deaf Characters in Short Stories: A Selective Bibliography III." The Deaf American 29.2 (1976): 27-28. Wilding-Diaz, M.M. Deaf Characters in Children’s Books: How Are They Portrayed? Unpublished master’s thesis. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1993.———. "Deaf Characters in Children’s Books: How Are They Perceived?" In Gallaudet University College for Continuing Education and B.D. Snider (eds.), Journal: Post Milan ASL & English Literacy: Issues, Trends & Research Conference Proceedings, 20-22 Oct. 1993.Adolescent Fiction Books Blatchford, C. Nick’s Secret. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2000. Deaver, J. A Maiden’s Grave. New York: Signet, 1996. Ferris, J. Of Sound Mind. New York: Sunburst, 2004. Matlin, M. Deaf Child Crossing. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 2004. Riskind, M. Apple Is My Sign. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Scott, V. Finding Abby. Hillsboro, OR: Butte, 2000.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This issue of M/C Journal is devoted to all things cute – Internet animals and stuffed toys, cartoon characters and branded bears. In what follows our nine contributors scrutinise a diverse range of media objects, discussing everything from the economics of Grumpy Cat and the aesthetics of Furbys to Reddit’s intellectual property dramas and the ethics of kitten memes. The articles range across diverse sites, from China to Canada, and equally diverse disciplines, including cultural studies, evolutionary economics, media anthropology, film studies and socio-legal studies. But they share a common aim of tracing out the connections between degraded media forms and wider questions of culture, identity, economy and power. Our contributors tell riveting stories about these connections, inviting us to see the most familiar visual culture in a new way. We are not the first to take cute media seriously as a site of cultural politics, and as an industry in its own right. Cultural theory has a long, antagonistic relationship with the kitsch and the disposable. From the Frankfurt School’s withering critique of cultural commodification to revisionist feminist accounts that emphasise the importance of the everyday, critics have been conducting sporadic incursions into this space for the better part of a century. The rise of cultural studies, a discipline committed to analysing “the scrap of ordinary or banal existence” (Morris and Frow xviii), has naturally provided a convincing intellectual rationale for such research, and has inspired an impressive array of studies on such things as Victorian-era postcards (Milne), Disney films (Forgacs), Hallmark cards (West, Jaffe) and stock photography (Frosh). A parallel strand of literary theory considers the diverse registers of aesthetic experience that characterize cute content (Brown, Harris). Sianne Ngai has written elegantly on this topic, noting that “while the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine” (814). Other scholars trace the historical evolution of cute aesthetics and commodities. Cultural historians have documented the emergence of consumer markets for children and how these have shaped what we think of as cute (Cross). Others have considered the history of domestic animal imagery and its symptomatic relationship with social anxieties around Darwinism, animal rights, and pet keeping (Morse and Danahay, Ritvo). And of course, Japanese popular culture – with its distinctive mobilization of cute aesthetics – has attracted its own rich literature in anthropology and area studies (Allison, Kinsella). The current issue of M/C Journal extends these lines of research while also pushing the conversation in some new directions. Specifically, we are interested in the collision between cute aesthetics, understood as a persistent strand of mass culture, and contemporary digital media. What might the existing tradition of “cute theory” mean in an Internet economy where user-generated content sites and social media have massively expanded the semiotic space of “cute” – and the commercial possibilities this entails? As the heir to a specific mode of degraded populism, the Internet cat video may be to the present what the sitcom, the paperback novel, or the Madonna video was to an earlier moment of cultural analysis. Millions of people worldwide start their days with kittens on Roombas. Global animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, are appearing, along with new talent agencies for celebrity pets. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business (and then a dotcom bubble). YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and branded material, now circulates. All this reminds us of the oft-quoted truism that the Internet is “made of kittens”, and that it’s “kittens all the way down”. Digitization of cute culture leads to some unusual tweaks in the taste hierarchies explored in the aforementioned scholarship. Cute content now functions variously as an affective transaction, a form of fandom, and as a subcultural discourse. In some corners of the Internet it is also being re-imagined as something contemporary, self-reflexive and flecked with irony. The example of 4Chan and LOLcats, a jocular, masculinist remix of the feminized genre of pet photography, is particularly striking here. How might the topic of cute look if we moving away from the old dialectics of mass culture critique vs. defense and instead foreground some of these more counter-intuitive aspects, taking seriously the enormous scale and vibrancy of the various “cute” content production systems – from children’s television to greeting cards to CuteOverload.com – and their structural integration into current media, marketing and lifestyle industries? Several articles in this issue adopt this approach, investigating the undergirding economic and regulatory structures of cute culture. Jason Potts provides a novel economic explanation for why there are so many animals on the Internet, using a little-known economic theory (the Alchian-Allen theorem) to explain the abundance of cat videos on YouTube. James Meese explores the complex copyright politics of pet images on Reddit, showing how this online community – which is the original source of much of the Internet’s animal gifs, jpegs and videos – has developed its own procedures for regulating animal image “piracy”. These articles imaginatively connect the soft stuff of cute content with the hard stuff of intellectual property and supply-and-demand dynamics. Another line of questioning investigates the political and bio-political work involved in everyday investments in cute culture. Seen from this perspective, cute is an affect that connects ground-level consumer subjectivity with various economic and political projects. Carolyn Stevens’ essay offers an absorbing analysis of the Japanese cute character Rilakkuma (“Relaxed Bear”), a wildly popular cartoon bear that is typically depicted lying on the couch and eating sweets. She explores what this representation means in the context of a stagnant Japanese economy, when the idea of idleness is taking on a new shade of meaning due to rising under-employment and precarity. Sharalyn Sanders considers a fascinating recent case of cute-powered activism in Canada, when animal rights activists used a multimedia stunt – a cat, Tuxedo Stan, running for mayor of Halifax, Canada – to highlight the unfortunate situation of stray and feral felines in the municipality. Sanders offers a rich analysis of this unusual political campaign and the moral questions it provokes. Elaine Laforteza considers another fascinating collision of the cute and the political: the case of Lil’ Bub, an American cat with a rare genetic condition that results in a perpetually kitten-like facial expression. During 2011 Lil’ Bub became an online phenomenon of the first order. Laforteza uses this event, and the controversies that brewed around it, as an entry point for a fascinating discussion of the “cute-ification” of disability. These case studies remind us once more of the political stakes of representation and viral communication, topics taken up by other contributors in their articles. Radha O’Meara’s “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? How Cat Videos Disguise Surveillance as Unselfconscious Play” provides a wide-ranging textual analysis of pet videos, focusing on the subtle narrative structures and viewer positioning that are so central to the pleasures of this genre. O’Meara explains how the “cute” experience is linked to the frisson of surveillance, and escape from surveillance. She also explains the aesthetic differences that distinguish online dog videos from cat videos, showing how particular ideas about animals are hardwired into the apparently spontaneous form of amateur content production. Gabriele de Seta investigates the linguistics of cute in his nuanced examination of how a new word – meng – entered popular discourse amongst Mandarin Chinese Internet users. de Seta draws our attention to the specificities of cute as a concept, and how the very notion of cuteness undergoes a series of translations and reconfigurations as it travels across cultures and contexts. As the term meng supplants existing Mandarin terms for cute such as ke’ai, debates around how the new word should be used are common. De Seta shows us how deploying these specific linguistic terms for cuteness involve a range of linguistic and aesthetic judgments. In short, what exactly is cute and in what context? Other contributors offer much-needed cultural analyses of the relationship between cute aesthetics, celebrity and user-generated culture. Catherine Caudwell looks at the once-popular Furby toy brand its treatment in online fan fiction. She notes that these forms of online creative practice offer a range of “imaginative and speculative” critiques of cuteness. Caudwell – like de Seta – reminds us that “cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour”, an affect that can encompass friendliness, helplessness, monstrosity and strangeness. Jonathon Hutchinson’s article explores “petworking”, the phenomenon of social media-enabled celebrity pets (and pet owners). Using the famous example of Boo, a “highly networked” celebrity Pomeranian, Hutchinson offers a careful account of how cute is constructed, with intermediaries (owners and, in some cases, agents) negotiating a series of careful interactions between pet fans and the pet itself. Hutchinson argues if we wish to understand the popularity of cute content, the “strategic efforts” of these intermediaries must be taken into account. Each of our contributors has a unique story to tell about the aesthetics of commodity culture. The objects they analyse may be cute and furry, but the critical arguments offered here have very sharp teeth. We hope you enjoy the issue.Acknowledgments Thanks to Axel Bruns at M/C Journal for his support, to our hard-working peer reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments, and to the Swinburne Institute for Social Research for the small grant that made this issue possible. ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Cuteness as Japan’s Millenial Product.” Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Ed. Joseph Tobin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 34-48. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forgacs, David. "Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood." Screen 33.4 (1992): 361-374. Frosh, Paul. "Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production." Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 625-646. Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Jaffe, Alexandra. "Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards." Journal of Material Culture 4.2 (1999): 115-141. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 220 - 54. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Morse, Deborah and Martin Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811-847. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. West, Emily. "When You Care Enough to Defend the Very Best: How the Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism." Media, Culture & Society 29.2 (2007): 241-261.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Literature—at least serious literature—is something that we work at. This is especially true within the academy. Literature departments are places where workers labour over texts carefully extracting and sharing meanings, for which they receive monetary reward. Specialised languages are developed to describe professional concerns. Over the last thirty years, the productions of mass culture, once regarded as too slight to warrant laborious explication, have been admitted to the academic workroom. Gothic studies—the specialist area that treats fearful and horrifying texts —has embraced the growing acceptability of devoting academic effort to texts that would once have fallen outside of the remit of “serious” study. In the seventies, when Gothic studies was just beginning to establish itself, there was a perception that the Gothic was “merely a literature of surfaces and sensations”, and that any Gothic of substantial literary worth had transcended the genre (Thompson 1). Early specialists in the field noted this prejudice; David Punter wrote of the genre’s “difficulty in establishing respectable credentials” (403), while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hoped her work would “make it easier for the reader of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century novels to write ‘Gothic’ in the margin” (4). Gothic studies has gathered a modicum of this longed-for respectability for the texts it treats by deploying the methodologies used within literature departments. This has yielded readings that are largely congruous with readings of other sorts of literature; the Gothic text tells us things about ourselves and the world we inhabit, about power, culture and history. Yet the Gothic remains a production of popular culture as much as it is of the valorised literary field. I do not wish to argue for a reintroduction of the great divide described by Andreas Huyssen, but instead to suggest that we have missed something important about the ways in which popular Gothics—and perhaps other sorts of popular text—function. What if the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? How might this change the way we read these texts? Johan Huizinga noted that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’” (8). If the Gothic sometimes offers playful texts, then those texts might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a limited time. This might help to account for the wicked spectacle offered by Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and in particular, its presentation of the black mass. The black mass is the parody of the Christian mass thought to be performed by witches and diabolists. Although it has doubtless been performed on rare occasions since the Middle Ages, the first black mass for which we have substantial documentary evidence was celebrated in Hampstead on Boxing Day 1918, by Montague Summers; it is a satisfying coincidence that Summers was one of the Gothic’s earliest scholars. We have record of Summer’s mass because it was watched by a non-participant, Anatole James, who was “bored to tears” as Summers recited tracts of Latin and practiced hom*osexual acts with a youth named Sullivan while James looked on (Medway 382-3). Summers claimed to be a Catholic priest, although there is some doubt as to the legitimacy of his ordination. The black mass ought to be officiated by a Catholic clergyman so the host may be transubstantiated before it is blasphemed. In doing so, the mass de-emphasises interpretive meaning and is an assault on the body of Christ rather than a mutilation of the symbol of Christ’s love and sacrifice. Thus, it is not conceived of primarily as a representational act but as actual violence. Nevertheless, Summers’ black mass seems like an elaborate form of sexual play more than spiritual warfare; by asking an acquaintance to observe the mass, Summers formulated the ritual as an erotic performance. The black mass was a favourite trope of the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out features an extended presentation of the mass; it was first published in 1934, but had achieved a kind of genre-specific canonicity by the nineteen-sixties, so that many Gothics produced and consumed in the sixties and seventies featured depictions of the black mass that drew from Wheatley’s original. Like Summers, Wheatley’s mass emphasised licentious sexual practice and, significantly, featured a voyeur or voyeurs watching the performance. Where James only wished Summers’ mass would end, Wheatley and his followers presented the mass as requiring interruption before it reaches a climax. This version of the mass recurs in most of Wheatley’s black magic novels, but it also appears in paperback romances, such as Susan Howatch’s 1973 The Devil on Lammas Night; it is reimagined in the literate and genuinely eerie short stories of Robert Aickman, which are just now thankfully coming back into print; it appears twice in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. Nor was the black mass confined to the written Gothic, appearing in films of the period too; The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Witches (1966), Satan’s Skin, aka Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) all feature celebrations of the Sabbat, as, of course do the filmed adaptations of Wheatley’s novels, The Devil Rides Out (1967) and To the Devil a Daughter (1975). More than just a key trope, the black mass was a procedure characteristic of the English Gothic of the sixties; narratives were structured so as to lead towards its performance. All of the texts mentioned above repeat narrative and trope, but more importantly, they loosely repeat experience, both for readers and the characters depicted. While Summers’ black mass apparently made for tiresome viewing, textual representations of the black mass typically embrace the pageant and sensuality of the Catholic mass it perverts, involving music, incense and spectacle. Often animalistic sex, bestial*ty, infanticide or human sacrifice are staged, and are intended to fascinate rather than bore. Although far from canonical in a literary sense, by 1969 Wheatley was an institution. He had sold 27 million books worldwide and around 70 percent of those had been within the British market. All of his 55 books were in print. A new Wheatley in hardcover would typically sell 30,000 copies, and paperback sales of his back catalogue stood at more than a million books a year. While Wheatley wrote thrillers in a range of different subgenres, at the end of the sixties it was his ‘black magic’ stories that were far and away the most popular. While moderately successful when first published, they developed their most substantial audience in the sixties. When The Satanist was published in paperback in 1966, it sold more than 100,000 copies in the first ten days. By 1973, five of these eight black magic titles had sold more than a million copies. The first of these was The Devil Rides Out which, although originally published in 1934, by 1973, helped by the Hammer film of 1967, had sold more than one and a half million copies, making it the most successful of the group (“Pooter”; Hedman and Alexandersson 20, 73). Wheatley’s black magic stories provide a good example of the way that texts persist and accumulate influence in a genre field, gaining genre-specific canonicity. Wheatley’s apparent influence on Gothic texts and films that followed, coupled with the sheer number of his books sold, indicate that he occupied a central position in the field, and that his approach to the genre became, for a time, a defining one. Wheatley’s black magic stories apparently developed a new readership in the sixties. The black mass perhaps became legible as a salacious, nightmarish version of some imaginary hippy gathering. While Wheatley’s Satanists are villainous, there is a vaguely progressive air about them; they listen to unconventional music, dance in the nude, participate in unconventional sexual practice, and glut themselves on various intoxicants. This, after all, was the age of Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and Oz magazine, “an era of personal liberation, in the view of some critics, one of moral anarchy” (Morgan 149). Without suggesting that the Satanists represent hippies there is a contextual relevancy available to later readers that would have been missing in the thirties. The sexual zeitgeist would have allowed later readers to p*rnographically and pleasurably imagine the liberated sexuality of the era without having to approve of it. Wheatley’s work has since become deeply, embarrassingly unfashionable. The books are racist, sexist, hom*ophobic and committed to a basically fascistic vision of an imperial England, all of which will repel most casual readers. Nor do his works provide an especially good venue for academic criticism; all surface, they do not reward the labour of careful, deep reading. The Devil Rides Out narrates the story of a group of friends locked in a battle with the wicked Satanist Mocata, “a pot-bellied, bald headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp” (11), based, apparently, on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (Ellis 145-6). Mocata hopes to start a conflict on the scale of the Great War by performing the appropriate devilish rituals. Led by the aged yet spry Duke de Richleau and garrulous American Rex van Ryn, the friends combat Mocata in three substantial set pieces, including their attempt to disrupt the black mass as it is performed in a secluded field in Wiltshire. The Devil Rides Out is a ripping story. Wheatley’s narrative is urgent, and his simple prose suggests that the book is meant to be read quickly. Likewise, Wheatley’s protagonists do not experience in any real way the crises and collapses that so frequently trouble characters who struggle against the forces of darkness in Gothic narratives. Even when de Richlieu’s courage fails as he observes the Wiltshire Sabbat, this failure is temporary; Rex simply treats him as if he has been physically wounded, and the Duke soon rallies. The Devil Rides Out is remarkably free of trauma and its sequelæ. The morbid psychological states which often interest the twentieth century Gothic are excluded here in favour of the kind of emotional fortitude found in adventure stories. The effect is remarkable. Wheatley retains a cheerful tone even as he depicts the appalling, and potentially repellent representations become entertainments. Wheatley describes in remarkable detail the actions that his protagonists witness from their hidden vantage point. If the Gothic reader looks forward to gleeful blasphemy, then this is amply provided, in the sort of sardonic style that Lewis’ The Monk manages so well. A cross is half stomped into matchwood and inverted in the ground, the Christian host is profaned in a way too dreadful to be narrated, and the Duke informs us that the satanic priests are eating “a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered”. Rex is chilled by the sound of a human skull rattling around in their cauldron (117-20). The mass offers a special quality of experience, distinct from the everyday texture of life represented in the text. Ostensibly waiting for their chance to liberate their friend Simon from the action, the Duke and Rex are voyeurs, and readers participate in this voyeurism too. The narrative focus shifts from Rex and de Richlieu’s observation of the mass, to the wayward medium Tanith’s independent, bespelled arrival at the ritual site, before returning to the two men. This arrangement allows Wheatley to extend his description of the gathering, reiterating the same events from different characters’ perspectives. This would be unusual if the text were simply a thriller, and relied on the ongoing release of new information to maintain narrative interest. Instead, readers have the opportunity to “view” the salacious activity of the Satanists a second time. This repetition delays the climactic action of the scene, where the Duke and Rex rescue Simon by driving a car into the midst of the ritual. Moreover, the repetition suggests that the “thrill” on offer is not necessarily related to plot —it offers us nothing new —but instead to simply seeing the rite performed. Tanith, although conveyed to the mass by some dark power, is delayed and she too becomes a part of the mass’ audience. She saw the Satanists… tumbling upon each other in the disgusting nudity of their ritual dance. Old Madame D’Urfé, huge-buttocked and swollen, prancing by some satanic power with all the vigour of a young girl who had only just reached maturity; the Babu, dark-skinned, fleshy, hideous; the American woman, scraggy, lean-flanked and hag-like with empty, hanging breasts; the Eurasian, waving the severed stump of his arm in the air as he gavotted beside the unwieldy figure of the Irish bard, whose paunch stood out like the grotesque belly of a Chinese god. (132) The reader will remember that Madame D’Urfé is French, and that the cultists are dancing before the Goat of Mendes, who masquerades as Malagasy, earlier described by de Richlieu as “a ‘bad black’ if ever I saw one” (11). The human body is obsessively and grotesquely racialized; Wheatley is simultaneously at his most politically vile and aesthetically Goya-like. The physically grotesque meshes with the crudely sexual and racist. The Irishman is typed as a “bard” and somehow acquires a second racial classification, the Indian is horrible seemingly because of his race, and Madame D’Urfé is repulsive because her sexuality is framed as inappropriate to her age. The dancing crone is defined in terms of a younger, presumably sexually appealing, woman; even as she is denigrated, the reader is presented with a contrary image. As the sexuality of the Satanists is excoriated, titillation is offered. Readers may take whatever pleasure they like from the representations while simultaneously condemning them, or even affecting revulsion. A binary opposition is set up between de Richlieu’s company, who are cultured and moneyed, and the Satanists, who might masquerade as civilised, but reveal their savagery at the Sabbat. Their race becomes a further symptom of their lack of civilised qualities. The Duke complains to Rex that “there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo… We might almost be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!” (115). The Satanists become “a trampling mass of bestial animal figures” dancing to music where, “Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge” (121). Music and melody are cultural constructions as much as they are mathematical ones. The breakdown of music suggests a breakdown of culture, more specifically, of Western cultural norms. The Satanists feast, with no “knives, forks, spoons or glasses”, but instead drink straight from bottles and eat using their hands (118). This is hardly transgression on the scale of devouring an infant, but emphasises that Satanism is understood to represent the antithesis of civilization, specifically, of a conservative Englishness. Bad table manners are always a sign of wickedness. This sort of reading is useful in that it describes the prejudices and politics of the text. It allows us to see the black mass as meaningful and places it within a wider discursive tradition making sense of a grotesque dance that combines a variety of almost arbitrary transgressive actions, staged in a Wiltshire field. This style of reading seems to confirm the approach to genre text that Fredric Jameson has espoused (117-9), which understands the text as reinforcing a hegemonic worldview within its readership. This is the kind of reading the academy often works to produce; it recognises the mass as standing for something more than the simple fact of its performance, and develops a coherent account of what the mass represents. The labour of reading discerns the work the text does out in the world. Yet despite the good sense and political necessity of this approach, my suggestion is that these observations are secondary to the primary function of the text because they cannot account for the reading experience offered by the Sabbat and the rest of the text. Regardless of text’s prejudices, The Devil Rides Out is not a book about race. It is a book about Satanists. As Jo Walton has observed, competent genre readers effortlessly grasp this kind of distinction, prioritising certain readings and elements of the text over others (33-5). Failing to account for the reading strategy presumed by author and audience risks overemphasising what is less significant in a text while missing more important elements. Crucially, a reading that emphasises the political implications of the Sabbat attributes meaning to the ritual; yet the ritual’s ability to hold meaning is not what is most important about it. By attributing meaning to the Sabbat, we miss the fact of the Sabbat itself; it has become a metaphor rather than a thing unto itself, a demonstration of racist politics rather than one of the central necessities of a black magic story. Seligman, Weller, Puett and Simon claim that ritual is usually read as having a social purpose or a cultural meaning, but that these readings presume that ritual is interested in presenting the world truthfully, as it is. Seligman and his co-authors take exception to this, arguing that ritual does not represent society or culture as they are and that ritual is “a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case” (20). Rather than simply reflecting history, society and culture, ritual responds to the disappointment of the real; the farmer performs a rite to “ensure” the bounty of the harvest not because the rite symbolises the true order of things, but as a consolation because sometimes the harvest fails. Interestingly, the Duke’s analysis of the Satanists’ motivations closely accords with Seligman et al.’s understanding of the need for ritual to console our anxieties and disappointments. For the cultists, the mass is “a release of all their pent-up emotions, and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success or good fortune” (121). The Satanists perform the mass as a response to the disappointment of the participant’s lives; they are ugly, uncivil outsiders and according to the Duke, “probably epileptics… nearly all… abnormal” (121). The mass allows them to feel, at least for a limited time, as if they are genuinely powerful, people who ought to be feared rather than despised, able to command the interest and favour of their infernal lord, to receive sexual attention despite their uncomeliness. Seligman et al. go on to argue ritual “must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation.” Ritual “cannot be analysed as a coherent system of beliefs” (26). If this is so, we cannot expect the black mass to necessarily say anything coherent about Satanism, let alone racism. In fact, The Devil Rides Out tends not to focus on the meaning of the black mass, but on its performance. The perceivable facts of the mass are given, often in instructional detail, but any sense of what they might stand for remains unexplicated in the text. Indeed, taken individually, it is hard to make sense or meaning out of each of the Sabbat’s components. Why must a skull rattle around a cauldron? Why must a child be killed and eaten? If communion forms the most significant part of the Christian mass, we could presume that the desecration of the host might be the most meaningful part of the rite, but given the extensive description accorded the mass as a whole, the parody of communion is dealt with surprisingly quickly, receiving only three sentences. The Duke describes the act as “the most appalling sacrilege”, but it is left at that as the celebrants stomp the host into the ground (120). The action itself is emphasised over anything it might mean. Most of Wheatley’s readers will, I think, be untroubled by this. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition… tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended” (53-4). Rather than stretching towards an interpretation of the Sabbat, readers simply accept it a necessary condition of a “black magic story”. While the genre and its tropes are constructed, they tend to appear as “natural” to readers. The Satanists perform the black mass because that is what Satanists do. The representation does not even have to be compelling in literary terms; it simply has to be a “proper” black mass. Richard Schechner argues that, when we are concerned with ritual, “Propriety”, that is, seeing the ritual properly executed, “is more important than artistry in the Euro-American sense” (178). Rather than describing the meaning of the ritual, Wheatley prefers to linger over the Satanist’s actions, their gluttonous feasting and dancing, their nudity. Again, these are actions that hold sensual qualities for their performers that exceed the simply discursive. Through their ritual behaviour they enter into atavistic and ecstatic states beyond everyday human consciousness. They are “hardly human… Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and the warlocks of the middle ages…” and are “governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestial*ty…” (117-8). They finally reach a state of “maniacal exaltation” and participate in an “intoxicated nightmare” (135). While the mass is being celebrated, the Satanists become an undifferentiated mass, their everyday identities and individuality subsumed into the subjunctive world created by the ritual. Simon, a willing participant, becomes lost amongst them, his individual identity given over to the collective, subjunctive state created by the group. Rex and the Duke are outside of this subjunctive world, expressing revulsion, but voyeuristically looking on; they retain their individual identities. Tanith is caught between the role played by Simon, and the one played by the Duke and Rex, as she risks shifting from observer to participant, her journey to the Sabbat being driven on by “evil powers” (135). These three relationships to the Sabbat suggest some of the strategies available to its readers. Like Rex and the Duke, we seem to observe the black mass as voyeurs, and still have the option of disapproving of it, but like Simon, the act of continuing to read means that we are participating in the representation of this perversity. Having committed to reading a “black magic story”, the reader’s procession towards the black mass is inevitable, as with Tanith’s procession towards it. Yet, just as Tanith is compelled towards it, readers are allowed to experience the Sabbat without necessarily having to see themselves as wanting to experience it. This facilitates a ludic, undiscursive reading experience; readers are not encouraged to seriously reflect on what the Sabbat means or why it might be a source of vicarious pleasure. They do not have to take responsibility for it. As much as the Satanists create a subjunctive world for their own ends, readers are creating a similar world for themselves to participate in. The mass—an incoherent jumble of sex and violence—becomes an imaginative refuge from the everyday world which is too regulated, chaste and well-behaved. Despite having substantial precedent in folklore and Gothic literature (see Medway), the black mass as it is represented in The Devil Rides Out is largely an invention. The rituals performed by occultists like Crowley were never understood by their participants as being black masses, and it was not until the foundation of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the later nineteen-sixties that it seems the black mass was performed with the regularity or uniformity characteristic of ritual. Instead, its celebration was limited to eccentrics and dabblers like Summers. Thus, as an imaginary ritual, the black mass can be whatever its writers and readers need it to be, providing the opportunity to stage those actions and experiences required by the kind of text in which it appears. Because it is the product of the requirements of the text, it becomes a venue in which those things crucial to the text are staged; forbidden sexual congress, macabre ceremony, violence, the appearance of intoxicating and noisome scents, weird violet lights, blue candle flames and the goat itself. As we observe the Sabbat, the subjunctive of the ritual aligns with the subjunctive of the text itself; the same ‘as if’ is experienced by both the represented worshippers and the readers. The black mass offers an analogue for the black magic story, providing, almost in digest form, the images and experiences associated with the genre at the time. Seligman et al. distinguish between modes that they term the sincere and the ritualistic. Sincerity describes an approach to reading the world that emphasises the individual subject, authenticity, and the need to get at “real” thought and feeling. Ritual, on the other hand, prefers community, convention and performance. The “sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the ‘mere convention’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction” (103). Where the sincere is meaningful, the ritualistic is practically oriented. In The Devil Rides Out, the black mass, a largely unreal practice, must be regarded as insincere. More important than any “meaning” we might extract from the rite is the simple fact of participation. The individuality and agency of the participants is apparently diminished in the mass, and their regular sense of themselves is recovered only as the Duke and Rex desperately drive the Duke’s Hispano into the ritual so as to halt it. The car’s lights dispel the subjunctive darkness and reduce the unified group to a gathering of confused individuals, breaking the spell of naughtily enabling darkness. Just as the meaningful aspect of the mass is de-emphasised for ritual participants, for readers, self and discursive ability are de-emphasised in favour of an immersive, involving reading experience; we keep reading the mass without pausing to really consider the mass itself. It would reduce our pleasure in and engagement with the text to do so; the mass would be revealed as obnoxious, unpleasant and nonsensical. When we read the black mass we tend to put our day-to-day values, both moral and aesthetic, to one side, bracketing our sincere individuality in favour of participation in the text. If there is little point in trying to interpret Wheatley’s black mass due to its weakly discursive nature, then this raises questions of how to approach the text. Simply, the “work” of interpretation seems unnecessary; Wheatley’s black mass asks to be regarded as a form of play. Simply, The Devil Rides Out is a venue for a particular kind of readerly play, apart from the more substantial, sincere concerns that occupy most literary criticism. As Huizinga argued that, “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration… [A significant] characteristic of play [is] its secludedness, its limitedness” (9). Likewise, by seeing the mass as a kind of play, we can understand why, despite the provocative and transgressive acts it represents, it is not especially harrowing as a reading experience. Play “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil…. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply...” (Huizinga 6). The mass might well offer barbarism and infanticide, but it does not offer these to its readers “seriously”. The subjunctive created by the black mass for its participants on the page is approximately equivalent to the subjunctive Wheatley’s text proposes to his readers. The Sabbat offers a tawdry, intoxicated vision, full of strange performances, weird lights, queer music and druggy incenses, a darkened carnival apart from the real that is, despite its apparent transgressive qualities and wretchedness, “only playing”. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2000. Hedman, Iwan, and Jan Alexandersson. Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley. DAST Dossier 1. Köping 1973. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1989. Huizinga, J. hom*o Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Medway, Gareth J. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York: New York UP, 2001. “Pooter.” The Times 19 August 1969: 19. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986. Seligman, Adam B, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Thompson, G.R. Introduction. “Romanticism and the Gothic Imagination.” The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Ed. G.R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1974. 1-10. Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil Rides Out. 1934. London: Mandarin, 1996.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction I think the Privacy Act is a huge edifice to protect the minority of things that could go wrong. I’ve got a good example for you, I’m just trying to think … yeah the worst one I’ve ever seen was the Balga Youth Program where we took these students on a reward excursion all the way to Fremantle and suddenly this very alienated kid started to jump under a bus, a moving bus so the kid had to be restrained. The cops from Fremantle arrived because all the very good people in Fremantle were alarmed at these grown-ups manhandling a kid and what had happened is that DCD [Department of Community Development] had dropped him into the program but hadn’t told us that this kid had suicide tendencies. No, it’s just chronically bad. And there were caseworkers involved and … there is some information that we have to have that doesn’t get handed down. Rather than a blanket rule that everything’s confidential coming from them to us, and that was a real live situation, and you imagine how we’re trying to handle it, we had taxis going from Balga to Fremantle to get staff involved and we only had to know what to watch out for and we probably could have … well what you would have done is not gone on the excursion I suppose (School Principal, quoted in Balnaves and Luca 49). These comments are from a school principal in Perth, Western Australia in a school that is concerned with “at-risk” students, and in a context where the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 has imposed limitations on their work. Under this Act it is illegal to pass health, personal or sensitive information concerning an individual on to other people. In the story cited above the Department of Community Development personnel were apparently protecting the student’s “negative right”, that is, “freedom from” interference by others. On the other hand, the principal’s assertion that such information should be shared is potentially a “positive right” because it could cause something to be done in that person’s or society’s interests. Balnaves and Luca noted that positive and negative rights have complex philosophical underpinnings, and they inform much of how we operate in everyday life and of the dilemmas that arise (49). For example, a ban on euthanasia or the “assisted suicide” of a terminally ill person can be a “positive right” because it is considered to be in the best interests of society in general. However, physicians who tacitly approve a patient’s right to end their lives with a lethal dose by legally prescribed dose of medication could be perceived as protecting the patient’s “negative right” as a “freedom from” interference by others. While acknowledging the merits of collaboration between people who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk”, this paper examines some of the barriers to collaboration. Based on both primary and secondary sources, and particularly on oral testimonies, the paper highlights the tension between privacy as a negative right and collaborative helping as a positive right. It also points to other difficulties and dilemmas within and between the institutions engaged in this joint undertaking. The authors acknowledge Michel Foucault’s contention that discourse is power. The discourse on privacy and the sharing of information in modern societies suggests that privacy is a negative right that gives freedom from bureaucratic interference and protects the individual. However, arguably, collaboration between agencies that are working to support individuals “at-risk” requires a measured relaxation of the requirements of this negative right. Children and young people “at-risk” are a case in point. Towards Collaboration From a series of interviews conducted in 2004, the school authorities at Balga Senior High School and Midvale Primary School, people working for the Western Australian departments of Community Development, Justice, and Education and Training in Western Australia, and academics at the Edith Cowan and Curtin universities, who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk” as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project called Smart Communities, have identified students “at-risk” as individuals who have behavioural problems and little motivation, who are alienated and possibly violent or angry, who under-perform in the classroom and have begun to truant. They noted also that students “at-risk” often suffer from poor health, lack of food and medication, are victims of unwanted pregnancies, and are engaged in antisocial and illegal behaviour such as stealing cars and substance abuse. These students are also often subject to domestic violence (parents on drugs or alcohol), family separation, and homelessness. Some are depressed or suicidal. Sometimes cultural factors contribute to students being regarded as “at-risk”. For example, a social worker in the Smart Communities project stated: Cultural factors sometimes come into that as well … like with some Muslim families … they can flog their daughter or their son, usually the daughter … so cultural factors can create a risk. Research elsewhere has revealed that those children between the ages of 11-17 who have been subjected to bullying at school or physical or sexual abuse at home and who have threatened and/or harmed another person or suicidal are “high-risk” youths (Farmer 4). In an attempt to bring about a positive change in these alienated or “at-risk” adolescents, Balga Senior High School has developed several programs such as the Youth Parents Program, Swan Nyunger Sports Education program, Intensive English Centre, and lower secondary mainstream program. The Midvale Primary School has provided services such as counsellors, Aboriginal child protection workers, and Aboriginal police liaison officers for these “at-risk” students. On the other hand, the Department of Community Development (DCD) has provided services to parents and caregivers for children up to 18 years. Academics from Edith Cowan and Curtin universities are engaged in gathering the life stories of these “at-risk” students. One aspect of this research entails the students writing their life stories in a secured web portal that the universities have developed. The researchers believe that by engaging the students in these self-exploration activities, they (the students) would develop a more hopeful outlook on life. Though all agencies and educational institutions involved in this collaborative project are working for the well-being of the children “at-risk”, the Privacy Act forbids the authorities from sharing information about them. A school psychologist expressed concern over the Privacy Act: When the Juvenile Justice Department want to reintroduce a student into a school, we can’t find out anything about this student so we can’t do any preplanning. They want to give the student a fresh start, so there’s always that tension … eventually everyone overcomes [this] because you realise that the student has to come to the school and has to be engaged. Of course, the manner and consequences of a student’s engagement in school cannot be predicted. In the scenario described above students may have been given a fair chance to reform themselves, which is their positive right but if they turn out to be at “high risk” it would appear that the Juvenile Department protected the negative right of the students by supporting “freedom from” interference by others. Likewise, a school health nurse in the project considered confidentiality or the Privacy Act an important factor in the security of the student “at-risk”: I was trying to think about this kid who’s one of the children who has been sexually abused, who’s a client of DCD, and I guess if police got involved there and wanted to know details and DCD didn’t want to give that information out then I’d guess I’d say to the police “Well no, you’ll have to talk to the parents about getting further information.” I guess that way, recognising these students are minor and that they are very vulnerable, their information … where it’s going, where is it leading? Who wants to know? Where will it be stored? What will be the outcomes in the future for this kid? As a 14 year old, if they’re reckless and get into things, you know, do they get a black record against them by the time they’re 19? What will that information be used for if it’s disclosed? So I guess I become an advocate for the student in that way? Thus the nurse considers a sexually abused child should not be identified. It is a positive right in the interest of the person. Once again, though, if the student turns out to be at “high risk” or suicidal, then it would appear that the nurse was protecting the youth’s negative right—“freedom from” interference by others. Since collaboration is a positive right and aims at the students’ welfare, the workable solution to prevent the students from suicide would be to develop inter-agency trust and to share vital information about “high-risk” students. Dilemmas of Collaboration Some recent cases of the deaths of young non-Caucasian girls in Western countries, either because of the implications of the Privacy Act or due to a lack of efficient and effective communication and coordination amongst agencies, have raised debates on effective child protection. For example, the British Laming report (2003) found that Victoria Climbié, a young African girl, was sent by her parents to her aunt in Britain in order to obtain a good education and was murdered by her aunt and aunt’s boyfriend. However, the risk that she could be harmed was widely known. The girl’s problems were known to 6 local authorities, 3 housing authorities, 4 social services, 2 child protection teams, and the police, the local church, and the hospital, but not to the education authorities. According to the Laming Report, her death could have been prevented if there had been inter-agency sharing of information and appropriate evaluation (Balnaves and Luca 49). The agencies had supported the negative rights of the young girl’s “freedom from” interference by others, but at the cost of her life. Perhaps Victoria’s racial background may have contributed to the concealment of information and added to her disadvantaged position. Similarly, in Western Australia, the Gordon Inquiry into the death of Susan Taylor, a 15 year old girl Aboriginal girl at the Swan Nyungah Community, found that in her short life this girl had encountered sexual violation, violence, and the ravages of alcohol and substance abuse. The Gordon Inquiry reported: Although up to thirteen different agencies were involved in providing services to Susan Taylor and her family, the D[epartment] of C[ommunity] D[evelopment] stated they were unaware of “all the services being provided by each agency” and there was a lack of clarity as to a “lead coordinating agency” (Gordon et al. quoted in Scott 45). In this case too, multiple factors—domestic, racial, and the Privacy Act—may have led to Susan Taylor’s tragic end. In the United Kingdom, Harry Ferguson noted that when a child is reported to be “at-risk” from domestic incidents, they can suffer further harm because of their family’s concealment (204). Ferguson’s study showed that in 11 per cent of the 319 case sample, children were known to be re-harmed within a year of initial referral. Sometimes, the parents apply a veil of secrecy around themselves and their children by resisting or avoiding services. In such cases the collaborative efforts of the agencies and education may be thwarted. Lack of cultural education among teachers, youth workers, and agencies could also put the “at-risk” cultural minorities into a high risk category. For example, an “at-risk” Muslim student may not be willing to share personal experiences with the school or agencies because of religious sensitivities. This happened in the UK when Khadji Rouf was abused by her father, a Bangladeshi. Rouf’s mother, a white woman, and her female cousin from Bangladesh, both supported Rouf when she finally disclosed that she had been sexually abused for over eight years. After group therapy, Rouf stated that she was able to accept her identity and to call herself proudly “mixed race”, whereas she rejected the Asian part of herself because it represented her father. Other Asian girls and young women in this study reported that they could not disclose their abuse to white teachers or social workers because of the feeling that they would be “letting down their race or their Muslim culture” (Rouf 113). The marginalisation of many Muslim Australians both in the job market and in society is long standing. For example, in 1996 and again in 2001 the Muslim unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total (Australian Bureau of Statistics). But since the 9/11 tragedy and Bali bombings visible Muslims, such as women wearing hijabs (headscarves), have sometimes been verbally and physically abused and called ‘terrorists’ by some members of the wider community (Dreher 13). The Howard government’s new anti-terrorism legislation and the surveillance hotline ‘Be alert not alarmed’ has further marginalised some Muslims. Some politicians have also linked Muslim asylum seekers with terrorists (Kabir 303), which inevitably has led Muslim “at-risk” refugee students to withdraw from school support such as counselling. Under these circ*mstances, Muslim “at-risk” students and their parents may prefer to maintain a low profile rather than engage with agencies. In this case, arguably, federal government politics have exacerbated the barriers to collaboration. It appears that unfamiliarity with Muslim culture is not confined to mainstream Australians. For example, an Aboriginal liaison police officer engaged in the Smart Communities project in Western Australia had this to say about Muslim youths “at-risk”: Different laws and stuff from different countries and they’re coming in and sort of thinking that they can bring their own laws and religions and stuff … and when I say religions there’s laws within their religions as well that they don’t seem to understand that with Australia and our laws. Such generalised misperceptions of Muslim youths “at-risk” would further alienate them, thus causing a major hindrance to collaboration. The “at-risk” factors associated with Aboriginal youths have historical connections. Research findings have revealed that indigenous youths aged between 10-16 years constitute a vast majority in all Australian States’ juvenile detention centres. This over-representation is widely recognised as associated with the nature of European colonisation, and is inter-related with poverty, marginalisation and racial discrimination (Watson et al. 404). Like the Muslims, their unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total in 2001 (ABS). However, in 1998 it was estimated that suicide rates among Indigenous peoples were at least 40 per cent higher than national average (National Advisory Council for Youth Suicide Prevention, quoted in Elliot-Farrelly 2). Although the wider community’s unemployment rate is much lower than the Aboriginals and the Muslims, the “at-risk” factors of mainstream Australian youths are often associated with dysfunctional families, high conflict, low-cohesive families, high levels of harsh parental discipline, high levels of victimisation by peers, and high behavioural inhibition (Watson et al. 404). The Macquarie Fields riots in 2005 revealed the existence of “White” underclass and “at-risk” people in Sydney. Macquarie Fields’ unemployment rate was more than twice the national average. Children growing up in this suburb are at greater risk of being involved in crime (The Age). Thus small pockets of mainstream underclass youngsters also require collaborative attention. In Western Australia people working on the Smart Communities project identified that lack of resources can be a hindrance to collaboration for all sectors. As one social worker commented: “government agencies are hierarchical systems and lack resources”. They went on to say that in their department they can not give “at-risk” youngsters financial assistance in times of crisis: We had a petty cash box which has got about 40 bucks in it and sometimes in an emergency we might give a customer a couple of dollars but that’s all we can do, we can’t give them any larger amount. We have bus/metro rail passes, that’s the only thing that we’ve actually got. A youth worker in Smart Communities commented that a lot of uncertainty is involved with young people “at-risk”. They said that there are only a few paid workers in their field who are supported and assisted by “a pool of volunteers”. Because the latter give their time voluntarily they are under no obligation to be constant in their attendance, so the number of available helpers can easily fluctuate. Another youth worker identified a particularly important barrier to collaboration: because of workers’ relatively low remuneration and high levels of work stress, the turnover rates are high. The consequence of this is as follows: The other barrier from my point is that you’re talking to somebody about a student “at-risk”, and within 14 months or 18 months a new person comes in [to that position] then you’ve got to start again. This way you miss a lot of information [which could be beneficial for the youth]. Conclusion The Privacy Act creates a dilemma in that it can be either beneficial or counter-productive for a student’s security. To be blunt, a youth who has suicided might have had their privacy protected, but not their life. Lack of funding can also be a constraint on collaboration by undermining stability and autonomy in the workforce, and blocking inter-agency initiatives. Lack of awareness about cultural differences can also affect unity of action. The deepening inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the Australian society, and the Howard government’s harshness on national security issues, can also pose barriers to collaboration on youth issues. Despite these exigencies and dilemmas, it would seem that collaboration is “the only game” when it comes to helping students “at-risk”. To enhance this collaboration, there needs to be a sensible modification of legal restrictions to information sharing, an increase in government funding and support for inter-agency cooperation and informal information sharing, and an increased awareness about the cultural needs of minority groups and knowledge of the mainstream underclass. Acknowledgments The research is part of a major Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, Smart Communities. The authors very gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the interviewees, and thank *Donald E. Scott for conducting the interviews. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. 1996 and 2001. Balnaves, Mark, and Joe Luca. “The Impact of Digital Persona on the Future of Learning: A Case Study on Digital Repositories and the Sharing of Information about Children At-Risk in Western Australia”, paper presented at Ascilite, Brisbane (2005): 49-56. 10 April 2006. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/ 06_Balnaves.pdf>. Dreher, Tanya. ‘Targeted’: Experiences of Racism in NSW after September 11, 2001. Sydney: University of Technology, 2005. Elliot-Farrelly, Terri. “Australian Aboriginal Suicide: The Need for an Aboriginal Suicidology”? Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health, 3.3 (2004): 1-8. 15 April 2006 http://www.auseinet.com/journal/vol3iss3/elliottfarrelly.pdf>. Farmer, James. A. High-Risk Teenagers: Real Cases and Interception Strategies with Resistant Adolescents. Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas, 1990. Ferguson, Harry. Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. Rouf, Khadji. “Myself in Echoes. My Voice in Song.” Ed. A. Bannister, et al. Listening to Children. London: Longman, 1990. Scott E. Donald. “Exploring Communication Patterns within and across a School and Associated Agencies to Increase the Effectiveness of Service to At-Risk Individuals.” MS Thesis, Curtin University of Technology, August 2005. The Age. “Investing in People Means Investing in the Future.” The Age 5 March, 2005. 15 April 2006 http://www.theage.com.au>. Watson, Malcolm, et al. “Pathways to Aggression in Children and Adolescents.” Harvard Educational Review, 74.4 (Winter 2004): 404-428. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid, and Mark Balnaves. "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>. APA Style Kabir, N., and M. Balnaves. (May 2006) "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>.