Journal articles: 'History of journalistic criticism in Portugal' – Grafiati (2025)

Abstract:

In the immediate post-25 April scenario, the Portuguese media adopted revolutionary language as the foundation of a journalism oriented towards political-ideological combat and social criticism. This hegemonic discourse derived from a reality characterized by daily changes and conflicts, became itself an instrument of political and social change. The primary goal of this work is to carry out a discourse and content analysis having as objects of study an informative newspaper and another of a propagandistic nature in the biennium 1974–75, based on a sample of words gathered from headlines within these publications. The studied media are the informative Diário de Notícias and the doctrinal weekly Esquerda Socialista. In the context of the transition to democracy in Portugal, we conclude that informative and doctrinal journalism merged within a single body guided by the commitment of journalists to the revolutionary cause.

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The History of Stupidity in Poland. The historiographic pamphlets [Dzieje głupoty w Polsce. Pamflety dziejopisarskie] was the most important publication by Aleksander Bocheński. The book was also one of the most representative reflections on the post-war trend of political realism in Poland. The journalistic reaction to the first edition of the book in the forties of the 20th century proved that the theses included in it were highly unpopular. The author’s criticism of insurrection trends in Polish politics met with opposition from Marxists as well as non-party intellectuals, both at home and abroad. Although motives of Bocheński’s concepts were usually understood, they were rejected as they served communists, were contrary to Marxist doctrine or had no moral foundations. Those opinions constitute an important contribution to the views of Polish intelligentsia on political realism at the beginnings of the Polish People’s Republic.

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As the Croatian lands were exposed to often aggressive Austrian, Hungarian, and Italian politics until WWI and in some regions even later, so Croatian music criticism was written in the Croatian, German and Italian languages. To the best of our knowledge, the history of Croatian music criticism began in 1826 in the literary and entertainment journal Luna, and was written by an anonymous author in the German language.A forum for Croatian language music criticism was opened in Novine Horvatzke, i.e. in its literary supplement Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska in 1835, which officially started to promote the Croatian National Revival, setting in motion the process of constituting the Croatian nation in the modern sense of the word. However, those articles cannot be considered musical criticism, at least not in the modern sense of the word, as they never went beyond the level of mere journalistic reports. The first music criticism in the Croatian language in the true sense of the word is generally considered a very comprehensive text by a poet Stanko Vraz (1810-51) about a performance of the first Croatian national opera Ljubav i zloba (Love and malice) by Vatroslav Lisinski (1819-54) from 1846. In terms of its criteria for judgement, that criticism proved to become a model for the majority of 19th-century and later Croatian music criticism. Two judgement criteria are clearly expressed within it: national and artistic.Regardless of whether we are dealing with 1) ideological-utilitarian criticism, which was directed towards promoting the national ideology (Franjo Ksaver Kuhač, 1834-1911; Antun Dobronić, 1878-1955), 2) impressionist criticism based on the critic’s subjective approach to particular work (Antun Gustav Matoš, 1873-1914; Milutin Cihlar Nehajev, 1880-1931; Nikola Polić, 1890-1960), or 3) Marxist criticism (Pavao Markovac, 1903-41), we may observe the above mentioned two basic criteria. Only at the end of the period under consideration the composer Milo Cipra (1906-85) focused his interest on immanent artistic values, shunning any ideological utilitarianism, and insisting on the highest artistic criteria.

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Resumen: La progresiva radicalización ideológica del régimen republicano, instaurado en Portugal en octubre de 1910, provocó una oposición conservadora y monárquica que se organizó en el exilio, sobre todo en el sur de Galicia. Entre octubre de 1911 y junio de 1912, estacionados en varios pueblos y villas gallegas en la raya con Portugal, los monárquicos hicieron dos incursiones en territorio portugués —el primero en Vinhais y el segundo en Chaves— con el fin de fomentar la rebelión contra régimen instaurado. Sin embargo, las tropas republicanas, más numerosas y mejor equipadas, vencieron todos los combates. En la época, este episodio de guerra civil mereció amplia cobertura periodística, particularmente por la prensa afecta al régimen republicano. Los mapas y las fotografías de la frontera fueron ampliamente utilizados para localizar e ilustrar los acontecimientos. En este texto, pretendemos reconstituir estos movimientos, proponiendo una lectura geográfico-histórica de la raya luso-gallega, en el contexto de este episodio.Palabras clave: República portuguesa, incursiones monárquicas, raya galaico-portuguesa, cartografía propaganda.Abstract: The ideological radicalisation of the republican regime, established in Portugal in October 1910, gave rise to the forming of a conservative and monarchical opposition in exile, in the south of the Spanish historic region of Galicia. Between October 1911 and June 1912, from several Galician villages not far from the Portuguese border, the monarchists made two incursions into the north of the country - the first to Vinhais and the second to Chaves - with the aim of fuelling popular uprisings and a military rebellion against the new regime. However, the Republican troops, more numerous and better equipped, won all the battles. At the time, this episode of civil war received extensive journalistic coverage particularly from the newspapers close to the republican regime. Maps and photographs of the border were widely used to locate and illustrate the events. From the historic-geographical perspective of the Portuguese-Galician border, this paper reconstitutes these movements in the broader historical context.Key words: Portuguese Republic, monarchical incursions, Portuguese-Galician border, propaganda maps.

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The Portuguese colonial legislation summarized in the segregating measures of the Colonial Act of 1930, the year that inaugurated Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal after the 1926 military coup, had unavoidable consequences. Our goal is to demonstrate the importance of this political measure through the journalistic production of the Goan intellectuality, that is, the political culture that arose from the clash between the defenders of the regime and those who advocated solutions of freedom and democracy in autonomy or independence. After a comprehensive Goan press survey, the choice of a special issue of O Anglo-Lusitano to present as historical foundation in this study was due to the fact that owing to its broad spectrum of cultural and political participation, it served as medium for ascertaining the existence of a crossroad of visions of the imperial whole, in the construction of intellectual networks of opposition and resistance, both from Goa and exile, enunciating the end of the Portuguese empire.

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Studies and research on biological invasions have acquired increasing attention in environmental history. However, the acknowledgement of certain specific cultural markers –such as the press– has been hitherto limited in such works. In light of this, this paper seeks to evaluate the importance of regional Portuguese newspapers in studying plant pests and agricultural diseases through a substantial corpus of publications produced between the 1850s and 1910s. This article looks at three newspapers Jornal de Penafiel (1890-1914), the Damião de Goes (1886-1914) and the O Elvense (1880-1904) in order to establish the informative potential gleaned from these types of sources in different regions in the north, centre and south Portugal respectively. The results highlight the importance of vine diseases (phylloxera, mildium, oidium) in the examined journalistic narratives. Nevertheless, other pests (potato blight, chestnut blight, brown rot) or bioinvaders (locust) were also important parts of these discourses. The results of this research reveals just how closely directed periodical press and diffusion of technical knowledge were in the strategies and attitudes against agricultural pests, showing that science was incorporated into the relationship between State and the rural communities.

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AbstractThe expansion of the colonial public sphere in India during the 1930s and 1940s saw the nation's English-language press increasingly serve as a key site in the struggle for freedom despite British censorship. This article examines the journalistic career of T. G. Narayanan, the first Indian war correspondent and investigative reporter, to understand the role of English-language newspapers in India's quest for independence. Narayanan reported on two major events leading to independence: the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Second World War. Drawing on Michael Walzer's concept of the ‘connected critic’, this research demonstrates that Narayanan's journalism fuelled the Indian nationalist movement by manoeuvring around British censors to publicize and expand Mahatma Gandhi's criticism of British rule, especially in light of the famine and war. His one departure from the pacifist leader, however, was his support of Indian soldiers serving in the Indian National Army and British Army.

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AbstractThis article is a study about the measures that European organizations take in response to violations of media freedom in Russia. Despite vigorous efforts, the media situation has not improved considerably. What are the reasons for the apparent inefficiency of the European enforcement mechanism? To overcome the tangle of sometimes contradictory historical, sociological, philosophical, and mere pragmatic explanations, one has to distinguish obstacles at the conceptual level from obstacles at the level of implementation. I will argue that insistence on a specific Russian mentality and another idea of freedom of expression in the Russian context is a mere rhetorical trick of the ruling political forces to hide the lack of democratic commitment in Russia and to avoid criticism from the West. Whereas these 'ideological' reasons—or, at least, their historical necessity—can be rejected, 'practical' reasons for the small impact of European measures cannot be denied. When exclusively addressing those responsible in the Russian government, European organizations underestimate not only reluctance by the Russian authorities but also the complexity of the whole situation. Without a change of journalistic behavior and some institutions closely connected with the work of journalists—and, most notably, a comprehensive alteration of public opinion—it is improbable that the situation of the media will change in the future.

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True to our original mission, this new issue of Transfers brings together a plurality of disciplines, from history to anthropology and literary criticism. It showcases reactions to the current pandemic as well as far-reaching reflections on the meanings of mobility. Bracketing our issue, two articles engage with the history of mobility. Drawing our attention to the extent of the automobility system, in “The Freeway Journey: Landscape and Mobility in the Southern Auto Industry,” John E. Mohr questions the economic and social costs of developing the I-85 highway corridor through the American South. Hugo Silveira Pereira interrogates “The Past, Present, and Future of Peripheral Mobilities in Portugal” through a history of the Portuguese narrow-gauge railway system that spans over a century.

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The article discusses the features of the genesis and functioning of a special type of historical narrative in Soviet scholarship, which gained particular strength in the 1930s and gradually exhausted by the late 1940s. For convenience of characterization, the author focuses on Soviet works about ancient history and analyzes the main attitudes of their authors (“old” Marxists, scholars who coverted to Marxism, and the Soviet generation of historians), and the reasons and features of their appeal to the genre of historical and journalistic narratives about the past eras. This type of narrative is therefore associated with the formation and flowering of the Stalinist regime. The changes of the 1930s are all the more remarkable as we can compare the style of historians who wrote before and after this time. Using the examples of A. Tyumenev or B. Bogaevsky, the reader can see how respectful and loyal attitude to foreign scholarship was replaced by loud criticism of the limitations of “bourgeois” historians, in whose works Soviet historians certainly found features of “reactionary”. On the example of the books by N.I. Nedelsky and A.V. Mishulin, the author shows how historians who did not engage in scholarship before the revolution took the same path. In conclusion, the author gives the general characteristics of the genre, as well as an explanation of why it was doomed to gradual self-exhaustion, not only because it depended on external (political) but also because it was influenced by internal reasons.

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Theodor Geiger, who emigrated from Germany to Scandinavia in 1933 and never returned after 1945, was one of the last universal scholars in the field of social science. Among many contributions, Geiger provided decisive contributions to the sociology of law, to social stratification, and to the sociology of education and ideology criticism. Yet, his extensive research in the field of journalism, the public sphere and the media has only received scarce attention so far. His expertise as a classic also in the field of communication studies can, above all, be seen from the still existing topicality of his theoretical-normative, and at the same time empiric-analytical investigations. In his analysis of the intelligentsia which in his view includes journalists, he postulates that ideology critique based on facts and sober rationality should be the main task of this public-related occupation, which should confront all parties involved in the political power struggle in a fundamentally independent distance. In his ‘Criticism of Advertising’ he reconstructs the history of the development of this phenomenon, characteristic to affluent capitalistic societies, and designs a systematic typology of the methods of persuasive public communication. He also unmasks in precise economic argumentation as ideological errors the common assumptions that cross-financing by adverting would enhance the journalistic quality and would mean real money-saving to audiences. Moreover, of his empirical research on radio reception can teach us that there are realistic chances of popular distribution of cultural products, as well as methodical potentials are resulting from his experiment. From the example of Theodor Geiger, a classic forgotten in communication science and journalism, productive possibilities of an interdisciplinary subject history can be derived which does not understand itself as hagiography.

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Resumo: O presente artigo estuda, inicialmente, o Santo Ofício português – iniciado em 1536 e oficialmente extinto apenas no século XIX, em 1821 –, procurando abordar alguns aspectos históricos, sociais, políticos e culturais decorrentes do funcionamento do tribunal inquisitorial em solo luso. Para tanto, dialoga-se com historiadores e intelecuais como António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, dentre outros. Em um segundo momento do estudo, analisa-se a obra História da origem e estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal (1854), de Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), buscando-se evidenciar a forma pela qual a narrativa historiográfica herculaniana constituiu um discurso crítico em relação à institucionalização da Inquisição no reino português – durante a monarquia de D. João III – e aos laços estreitos entre os poderes real e religioso.Palavras-chave: Inquisição; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.Abstract: This article initially studies the Portuguese Holy Office - which began in 1536 and was officially extinguished only in the 19th century, in 1821 - and seeks to address some historical, social, political and cultural aspects arising from the operation of the Inquisitorial Court on Portuguese soil. To do so, it dialogues with historians and intellectuals such as António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, among others. In a second moment of study, the work History of the origin and establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal (1854), by Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), is analyzed, seeking to highlight the way in which the herculanian historiographic narrative constituted a discursive criticism in relation to the institutionalization of the Inquisition in the Portuguese kingdom – during the monarchy of D. João III – and to the close ties between the real and religious powers.Keywords:Inquisition; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.Resumo: O presente artigo[1] estuda, inicialmente, o Santo Ofício português – iniciado em 1536 e oficialmente extinto apenas no século XIX, em 1821 –, procurando abordar alguns aspectos históricos, sociais, políticos e culturais decorrentes do funcionamento do tribunal inquisitorial em solo luso. Para tanto, dialoga-se com historiadores e intelecuais como António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, dentre outros. Em um segundo momento do estudo, analisa-se a obra História da origem e estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal (1854), de Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), buscando-se evidenciar a forma pela qual a narrativa historiográfica herculaniana constituiu um discurso crítico em relação à institucionalização da Inquisição no reino português – durante a monarquia de D. João III – e aos laços estreitos entre os poderes real e religioso.Palavras-chave: Inquisição; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.Abstract: This article initially studies the Portuguese Holy Office - which began in 1536 and was officially extinguished only in the 19th century, in 1821 - and seeks to address some historical, social, political and cultural aspects arising from the operation of the Inquisitorial Court on Portuguese soil. To do so, it dialogues with historians and intellectuals such as António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, among others. In a second moment of study, the work History of the origin and establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal (1854), by Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), is analyzed, seeking to highlight the way in which the herculanian historiographic narrative constituted a discursive criticism in relation to the institutionalization of the Inquisition in the Portuguese kingdom – during the monarchy of D. João III – and to the close ties between the real and religious powers.Keywords: Inquisition; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.[1] Este estudo é parte da tese As representações da Inquisição nos discursos historiográfico de Alexandre Herculano e literário de José Saramago, defendida em 2014, na UFJF.

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Ivan Porfirevich Filevich (August 20 (September 1), 1856 – January 7 (20), 1913) – a Russian historian, publicist, and public figure, born in Chełm Land to the family of a Uniate priest, a native of Galicia, Orthodox. He graduated from St. Petersburg University, later taught Russian language, literature, and history at the First Realschule and at the Gymnasium of the Imperial Philanthropic Society in St. Petersburg. Since 1890, he worked at the Department of Russian History at the Imperial Warsaw University, first as an extra-ordinary professor, and since 1897 as an ordinary professor. His origin predetermined his interest in the history of Carpathian Rus, in particular Galicia and Chełm Land, and its population. In 1890, he received a Master’s degree for his work “The Struggle of Poland and Lithuania-Rus for the Galician-Vladimir Legacy”. In 1897, he defended his doctoral degree at Kazan University on “History of Ancient Rus. Territory and Population”. He frequently travelled across Carpathian Rus. Having retired in 1908, he devoted himself to journalistic and social activities. Ivan Filevich authored monographs: “The Struggle of Poland and Lithuania-Rus for the Galicia-Vladimir Legacy. Historical Sketches” (1890) and “History of Ancient Rus. Territory and Population” (1896), as well as numerous studies, among which were: “A Forgotten Corner” (1881), “Ugric Rus and Related Issues and Tasks of Russian Historical Science” (1894), “Sketch of the Carpathian Territory and Population” (1895), “On the development of geographical nomenclature” (1899), “Concerning the theory of two Russian nationalities” (1902), “The question of two Russian nationalities and ‘Kievan Antiquity’” (1902), “Carpathian Rus on the eve of the 20th century” (1905), “From the History of Carpathian Rus. Essays on Galician-Russian Life Since 1772 (1848–1866)” (1907) etc. Many of his minor materials (criticism and bibliographies) were published in Izvestia of the St. Petersburg Slavic Charitable Society, Slavic Review, Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, Warsaw University News, etc. In his last years, Filevich was actively involved in social and journalistic activities, popularizing scientific knowledge and informing readers about Western Russian, especially Chełm and Polish issues. His articles were published mainly in Novoye Vremya. He drew up notes and historical references for the development of legislative proposals on the Chełm and presented historical, statistical, and economic materials in the Duma commission on the separation of Chełm. Filevich managed to see the results of his work. The law “On the formation of Chełm province from the eastern parts of the Lublin and Sedletsk provinces, with its removal from the administration of the Warsaw Governor-General” was approved on June 23 (July 6) 1912. However, in fact, the province was officially opened on September 8, 1913, after I.P. Filevich’s death.

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Background. Topicality of the theme. With the advent of the Internet, Internet journalism has appeared. In relating to theater, in essence, it is theatrical criticism, which has only undergone major changes. In recent years, there have been lively discussions in professional circles about the state and prospects of theater criticism as a profession, about the nature of theater criticism, its self-identification in the modern information space. Round tables with the participation of leading theater critics are devoted to the issues of the current state of theater criticism, a number of relevant materials have been published in specialized publications, often with indicative headings: “Who needs theater critics?” [1], “Theater criticism: final or transformation?” [9]; interviews of theater critics, in which they uphold the positions of the profession and, at the same time, speak about urgent problems and the need to update it taking into account rapidly changing realities: with S. Vasilyev [2], N. Pivovarova [5], Ya. Partola [6]; discussion articles on the status and prospects of the profession by M. Harbuziuk [3], M. Dmitrevskaya [4], N. Pesochinsky [7], I. Chuzhynova [10], S. Schagina, E. Strogaleva, E. Gorokhovskaya [11]. Thus, there are several points of view on this topic: that theatrical journalism has replaced theatrical criticism; that theatrical critics of the old school did not have time to adapt to the changing world and use new tools in this profession, and young critics just occupy their niches in the youth media and on the Internet; that the profession of a critic does not go beyond the framework of participation in expert councils, jury membership, attendance at theater festivals, and writing reviews on request. The question, however, is still open. The main goal of this article is to determine the degree and main character of the interaction of journalism and theatrical criticism in modern media. Results of the study. Those who are seriously engaged in theater studies and academic theater criticism feel the need for specialized publications, the number of which in Ukraine is reduced to a minimum. Therefore, those who had the opportunity to publish reviews in the socio-political periodicals, have to combine three professional areas in one, becoming a theater journalist. Academically trained theater critics can write and often write good books, but, as a rule, do not know how to write for newspapers and magazines. But graduates of journalistic departments who write about the theater are not familiar with professional terminology, which is able to give a correct assessment of the premiere performance. The question arises: how to combine those and these, that the theater journalism was both fascinating and acute, and moderately scandalous, but at the same time accurate and high-quality? To grow such specialists is a matter of work, there can be no conveyor system here. Modern theater criticism, gradually becoming obsolete, rather survives from the common theatrical space. The theater critic cannot be a free artist, and live on the money from the results of his work, because in non-capital cities the number of journals in which the theater specialist would have had time to publish his works has decreased by several times. In cities such as Poltava, Sumy, Chernigov, the issues relating to theatrical premieres are not covered by critics (they are simply not there), but by journalists who write on various topics and rarely specialize in one. The substitution of theatrical critique by journalism is quite natural, for example, for cities where there is no professional training of theater critics, however in Kiev, Kharkiv and Lviv theater studies continue, and a certain number of graduates hope for the viability of this profession. Theatrical criticism and theatrical journalism are in their own way demanded in certain circles. Criticism is closer to theaters, journalism – to the audience. It is difficult to debate with this statement that new epoch came with the Internet. Now, the spoken word has a completely different value. For example, а word thrown on Facebook can have the same effect on public opinion as a big, built, hard fought text. This does not mean that you do not need to write large texts and publish them on paper. You just need to understand and accept the new reality, its advantages and disadvantages, its danger and its benefits. It is a very important problem of our consciousness and the problem of our theater. The Internet has given a new push to the development of new type of media-translations, actively working in social networks. Sites appear on the network where online remote screenings of performances are held. They provide Internet audiences with the opportunity to be acquainted with the history of national and world theater art; they are introduced to modern avant-garde performances. Of course, this also brings the theater closer to a wide, as a rule, young audience and opens up new opportunities for a different kind of theater journalism. Сonclusions. Thus, the Internet becomes an active means of influencing the minds in the modern media space. The Internet influences everyone and everything, changing attitudes towards theatrical art, as well as contemporary theater criticism and theater journalism. However in this case, it is essential to remember that not the Internet, but only professional theater criticism that has been and remains the breeding ground for the scientific work of theater critics and art historians, while creating the history of dramatic, opera and ballet theater.

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The main article is devoted to the historical and philosophical reconstruction of controversy between Vladimir Solovyov and the authors of the “Faith and Reason” - a magazine of the Kharkov Theological Seminary. This controversy took its place in the “theological and journalistic” or the “theocratic” period of Solovyov’s works (1880s). Particular attention is paid to the disputes of Solovyov and T. Stoyanov (Konstantin Istomin), A.P. Shost'in and the French Orthodox priest Fr. Vladimir Gette on the theory of dogmatic development in the church. In the context of this controversy, the arguments for the “defense” of Solovyov's position, cited in the magazine “Orthodox Review” by a theologian and Konstantin Leontyev's follower Ivan Kristi are also analyzed. The reception of Solovyov's theocratic ideas and reaction to his ecclesiastical views in both the Catholic and Orthodox circles of Russian and Western society is shown. Especially it concerns the criticism of Solovyov’s ideas in the pages of the French magazines “L’Univers”, “L'Union Chrétienne”, “Revue d’Eglise greque-unie”, etc. The evolution of Solovyov's views on the problem of the union of Eastern and Western churches, the renewal of church communication between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the main result of which was his fundamental but unfinished work “The History and Future of the Theocracy” (Zagreb, 1887) was demonstrated. A conclusion about the “superficiality” of the judgments of the majority of Vladimir Solovyov's ideological opponents, as well as later interpreters of his legacy, following the French Jesuit Michel d'Erbigny, who tried to present him as a “Russian Newman” who converted from Orthodoxy into the Catholic faith is drawn. It is shown that Solovyov’s projects of the “religion of the Holy Spirit” and the “Universal Church”, created on its basis, should be considered primarily in the context of his own philosophical quest, and not in connection with the confessional and ideological divergences of his time.

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National megalomania in Polish reflection in the early 20th centuryIn the early 20th century, a number of Polish thinkers betrayed a mentality in which was deeply rooted the notion of the Polish nation’s unique character. These thinkers also expressed a conviction that Poles had a special mission both in Europe in general and towards other European nations. The signs of the intellectual elite’s national megalomania were reflected in Polish journalistic writings in the final period of World War I and the initial period of regained independence shortly after it.The article analyzes the views of selected thinkers: the philosopher W. Lutosławski, the journalist and literary critic A. Górski, the publicist A. Chołoniewski, and the historian J.K. Kochanowski. All of them believed in an optimistic picture of Polish history and emphasized the significance of the Polish mission in an ethical dimension understood as a desire to establish European order based both on respect towards the individual and at the same time on national diversity. This attitude was clearly based on Romantic thought – a historiosophy tinted with mesianism. All these authors dealt with the same themes from Polish history, treating them as a justification of their attitudes (such as: the Republic of Nobility as an embodiment of the ideal of freedom, Poland as an intermediary between the East and the West, as well as the propagator of Christian civilization in the East; the prominent role of Poles among the Slavic peoples, the importance of Catholicism). All in all, they created a mythologized vision of the Polish Republic in order to integrate the Polish society and mobilize it to act. This stream of glorification of the Polish statehood met with severe criticism after Poland regained its independence. S. Zakrzewski, F. Bujak, J.S. Bystroń, Bocheński brothers and others protested against falsifying the history of Poland.

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This publication emerges from a process of co-creation in which historian Maartje Janse and research journalist Anne-Lot Hoek challenge the dominant national narrative about the colonial experience in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). In combining journalistic and academic writing with musical performance by musician Ernst Jansz they amplify the critical voices that have spoken out against colonial injustice and that have long been ignored in public and academic debate. Even though it is often suggested that the mindset of people in the past prevented them from seeing what was wrong with things we now find highly problematic, they argue that there was indeed a tradition of colonial criticism in the Netherlands, one that included the voices of many ‘forgotten critics’ whose lives and criticism are the subject of this publication. The voices however were for a long time overlooked by Dutch historians. The publication is organized around the biographies of several critics (whose lives Janse and Hoek have published on before), the historical debate afterwards and includes reflective videos and texts on the process of co-creation.Maartje Janse started the process by tracing the life history of an outspoken nineteenth-century critic of the colonial system in the Dutch East Indies, Willem Bosch. The authors argue that it was not self-evident how criticism of colonial injustices should be voiced and that Bosch experimented with different methods, including organizing one of the first Dutch pressure groups.The story of Willem Bosch inspired Ernst Jansz, a Dutch musician with Indo roots, to compose a song (‘De ballade van Sarina en Kromo’). It is an interpretation of an old Malaysian ‘krontjong’ song, that Jansz transformed into a protest song that reminds its listeners of protest songs of the 1960s and 1970s. Jansz, in his lyrics, adds an indigenous perspective to this project. He performed the song during the Voice4Thought festival in 2016, a gathering that aimed to reflect upon migration and mobility in current times. Filmmaker Sjoerd Sijsma made a video ‘pamplet’ in which the performance of Ernst Jansz, an interview with Maartje Janse, and historical images from the colonial period have been combined.Anne-Lot Hoek connected Willem Bosch to a series of twentieth-century anti-colonial critics such as Dutch Indies civil servant Siebe Lijftogt, Indonesian nationalists Sutan Sjahrir, Rachmad Koesoemobroto, Dutch writer Rudy Kousbroek and Indonesian activist Jeffry Pondaag. She argues that dissenting voices have been underrepresented in the post-war debates on colonialism and its legacy for decades, and that one of the main reasons is that the notion of the objective historian was not effectively problematized for a long time.http://dissentingvoices.bridginghumanities.com/

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In the article is analyzed the Mykola Hnatyshak`s publicistic works, which are concentrated in the publications of the author’s column «From the Literary Life» in the newspaper «Meta» (Lviv, 1931—1939). This Catholic critic led this column during 1935—1939 and published there his own articles, notes, reviews and polemical materials. M. Hnatyshak founded a column to persuade those representatives of the intellectuals who believed that literature and art were social phenomena that did not bring a material benefit that these intellectuals were not wright. He also defined the conception of «Catholic literature» and «Catholic criticism». Catholic literature was in the process of formation not only in the Ukrainian literary environment of Galicia, but also in the more developed countries of the Western Europe. Hnatyshak drew attention to the fact that the Catholic literature is not limited to poetic and prose works of religious subjects, and it is possible to include in it those literary works that do not contradict the ideals of a truth, kindness and beauty. He also thought it was necessary to develop literature on a national basis, but opposed journalistic rhetoric and didacticism. A number of publications in the column «From the Literary Life» were debatable. M. Hnatyshak argued with the representative of liberal critic Mykhailo Rudnytskyi: in a public debate on topic «Should a writer have a worldview?» (14th April 1935). At the same time, M. Hnatyshak opposed M. Rudnytskyi at the same time, M. Hnatyshak opposed M. Rudnytskyi in question of evaluation criteria during awarding writers in the 1935 literary awards. M. Hnatyshak emphasized the need to know the origins in the context of the history of Ukrainian literature — works of folk poetry, chronicles, Cossack epic. «The Tale of Igor’s Campaign» is a unique monument of the XI century, which presents the mythological, Christian and knight’s spirit of knyazes times. The critic drew special attention to the inheritance of Markian Shashkevych, Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko. M. Hnatyshak’s other publications were reviews of new poetic and prose works, researches and periodicals. Key words: Mykola Hnatyshak, Catholic criticism, publicism, newspaper «Meta», column «From the Literary Life».

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Resumo: Este trabalho busca reconstituir um diálogo literário entre os três maiores poetas que habitavam a capitania de Minas Gerais na década de 1780, e que estiveram implicados na chamada Conjuração Mineira. Diálogo este que se fez tendo como enredo poético comum a crítica à construção do prédio da Cadeia, em Vila Rica, um projeto empreendido pelo governador Luís da Cunha Menezes, cujo governo se caracterizou pelo desmoronamento das redes de poder local a que os mesmos poetas pertenciam, como naturais da colônia e magistrados do Império português. Os trechos aqui apresentados, para revelação deste inusitado diálogo, foram extraídos das “Cartas chilenas” (autoria de Tomás Antônio Gonzaga); de um poema de Alvarenga Peixoto encontrado em miscelânea da Biblioteca de Évora; e de uma ode ainda inédita de Cláudio Manuel da Costa, que integra um códice da Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, em Lisboa.Palavras-chave: poesia; história; política; Minas Gerais; Arcádia Ultramarina.Abstract:This paper seeks to reconstruct a literary dialogue between the three greatest poets who inhabited the captaincy of Minas Gerais in the 1780s, and who took part in the so-called Conjuration Mineira. Such dialogue was established having as a common poetic plot the criticism of the prison building, in Vila Rica, a project undertaken by the governor Luís da Cunha Menezes, whose government was characterized by the collapse of the networks of local power to which the same poets belonged, as natives of the colony and as magistrates of the Portuguese Empire. The excerpts presented here, revealing this unusual dialogue, were extracted from “Cartas Chilenas” (written by Tomás Antônio Gonzaga); from a poem of Alvarenga Peixoto which has been found in a miscellany of the Évora Library; and from an ode of Cláudio Manuel da Costa, still unpublished and included in a codex of the National Library of Portugal, in Lisbon.Keywords: poetry; history; politics; Minas Gerais; Arcadia Ultramarina.

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Focusing on the history of Russian imagology, the article aims at identifying the origins of the imagological interests in research and public thought in Russia in the first and second thirds of the 20th century as well as research approaches of that time that may be required by modern imagology. This analytical insight arises from the endeavor of contemporary scholars to update and develop the imagology paradigm. The Patriotic War of 1812 and the entry of Russian troops into Paris in 1814 gave a powerful impulse to the imagological interests in Russian society. These events highlighted the irrational nature of European stereotypes and provided an opportunity for the Russian intellectual elite to observe how the European image of Russia evolves depending on the historical situation, which, in its turn, induced the Russians to collect and conceptualise the information about the image of Russia in European texts of different epochs. The Rossica Department in the Imperial Public Library was opened for the scholars to do bibliographic research of foreign publications about Russia. Commenting foreign essays about Russia was an important part of Russian academic and journalistic activity. Such publications regularly appeared in Syn Otechestva, Otechestvennye zapiski, Severnyy Arkhiv, Sovremennik, Biblioteka dlya chteniya, Russkiy vestnik, and Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniya. The first imagological research proper was V.A. Klyuchevsky’s Skazaniya inostrantsev o Moskovskom gosudarstve [Legends of Foreigners about the Moscow State, 1866]. Without a critical analysis of foreign sources, the historian uses excerpts from different foreign texts to reconstruct an integral image of the Moscow state in the European consciousness. Although the first Russian imagological researches appeared in history, they laid the basis for the development of literary criticism. The book collection “Rossica” allowed Russian and foreign scholars (M.P. Alekseev, B.L. Modzalevsky, E.V. Tarle, M. Kadot) to study the Western literary opinion about Russia. Yu.M. Lotman relied on the imagological observations made by V.A. Klyuchevsky and his followers. Methodology of Soviet imagological research in literary criticism (M.P. Alekseev, B.G. Reizov, A.K. Vinogradov) was guided by the principles of history. These facts give grounds to speak about the formation of the Russian tradition of imagological researches, which has two characteristics: 1) following the principle of historicity and 2) focus on the functioning of the image of Russia in European literature of different epochs. In this context, it seems relevant for the Russian imagological works to focus on the phenomenon of “reverse reception” in Russian literature of the 19th century, that is on the Russian writers’ endeavor to comprehend the European image of Russia (to create a “meta-image”) and to oppose this image with their own holistic idea of Russia and its national features.

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This article aims to correct some of the basic errors in Melvillian Islamiccriticism. One of the classics of Western literature is Herman Melville’s MobyDick. the allegorical story of one man’s pursuit of a great white whale.4 Likeall great novelists, Melville was struggling with the great moral issues thattranscend individuals and even civilizations. This contrasts with most ofmodem literature, which exhibits journalistic habits of mind and tends to dealin superficial analysis rather than with the reflective process that gives contentto meditation and thought.Modem literary criticism exhibits the same shallowness. George Orwellexplained the problem perhaps when he observed that applying the same standardsto such novelists as Dickens and Dostoyevsky and to most contemporarywriters is like weighing a flea on a spring-balance intended forelephants.” Critics, he added, don’t do this, because it would mean having tothrow out most of the books they get for review.The value of Melville’s work is that it is possessed of the moral imperativeand is designed to lead the forces of wisdom and balance against the spiritualbankruptcy and anarchy of the encroaching materialism in modem Westerncivilization.The tragedy of Melville’s work is the superficiality of its reliance onIslamic sources, which Melville had read but only in Orientalist distortion.This tragedy has been compounded by later generations of Orientalists whohave used the distortions of Melville to generate their own. Perhaps the mostinsidious of these latter-day Orientalists is Dorothy Finklestein, author ofMelville’s Oriendu, who we shall refer to simply as “the critic."Her study of Melville’s Islamic references devotes a complete section to“Muhammad and the Arabs” in the chapter on “Prophets and Conquerers.”Following this, she presents an exhaustive analysis of “Islamic Characters andSymbols.” She harshly rejects Melville’s immature resort to secondary Islamicsources; namely Carlyle’s Hero, Heroworship, and Heroic History, Goethe’s ...

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Abstract:VISUAL METHODOLOGIES: FROM THE POEM OF VIOLENCE TO THE GRAPHIC NARRATIVE OF OPPRESSION BY YOUNG PORTUGUESEIn this case study, addresses the real/imagined oppression, visually depicted, in a class of 12 girls and 5 boys, of the 2nd cycle of basic education, coming from urban and rural milieu of Braga – Portugal, through of interdisciplinary work in Portuguese Language and Visual Education. In the first phase, in Portuguese, the discussion was of differences between a non-explicit journalistic and a poetic event, evidenced in the (visual) metaphor and implicit in the poem. The support for drawings of students was the poem by Bertolt Brecht From the river all drag / If it says is violent / But nobody says violent / The margins that compress it. On articulated, by visual methodologies (Rose, 2005), the visual images and written discourse, the authors tended to play central figures, according to gender, for portraits of coercion situations displaying his knowledge and experience. In conclusion, there were crossed points of view and were enunciated rebelliousness, disagreements between (co)protagonists (adults and classmates), with dominant negative emotions, namely, contempt, fear, guilt, retaliation/revenge, cowardice, laziness, physical discomfort grips, and impotence of younger, with complaints about the rules and prohibitions of adults, who flee and threatening to kill himself, evildoers and tell lies. In particular, the interior scenarios (family, school, the street, the urban, and rural point of view) grasped positions of authority challenged, pressures and cultural rituals (and marriage procession), with natural, figurative and symbolic elements (doors closed, sticks in the air, explosions ...). Rarely actions / interactions of protest, threat and escape, which clarify the negative stimulus of departure, are reversed in positive emotions. The reasons attributed to the painful circumstances can be read in speech bubbles and thoughts concerning insoluble, socio-emotional, family, discipline and bullying issues. The girls draw dramatic scenes and criticism of mother figure, showing physical abuse, but use violence against boys of the school.Keywords: Oppression; Positive Psychology; Portuguese culture, drawing, preadolescents; arts education; Visual Methodologies; assimilation-contrast rule.Resumo:No Estudo de Caso, é retratada a opressão real/imaginada, numa turma de 12 raparigas e 5 rapazes, do 2º ciclo, do ensino básico, oriundos de meio urbano e rural, em Braga - Portugal, por um trabalho interdisciplinar, em Língua Portuguesa e Educação Visual. Na primeira fase, em Língua Portuguesa, debateram-se diferenças entre um acontecimento jornalístico e um relato poético, evidenciado na metáfora (visual) e no poema implícito. Teve-se como suporte escrito o poema de Bertolt Brecht Do rio que tudo arrasta / Se diz que é violento / Mas ninguém diz violentas / As margens que o comprimem. Nos discursos articulados por metodologias visuais (Rose, 2005) das imagens visuais e escritas, os autores tenderam a reproduzir figuras centrais, segundo género, para retratos de coação e libertação do seu conhecimento e experiência. Nas conclusões, registaram-se pontos de vista cruzados e enunciaram-se as rebeldias, desavenças de (co)protagonistas (mães, adultos e colegas), com emoções negativas dominantes, incluindo menosprezo, medo, culpa, represália/vingança, cobardia, preguiça, desconforto por apertos físicos, impotência dos menores, com queixas das regras e proibições dos adultos, de quem fogem e ameaçam matar-se, fazem maldades e dizem mentiras. Os cenários interiores (familiares, escolares, na rua, urbanos e campestres) agarraram as funções de autoridade contestada, pressões e rituais culturais (procissão e casamento), com elementos naturais, figurativos e simbólicos (portas fechadas, paus no ar, rebentamentos…). Raras vezes as ações/interações de protesto, ameaça e fuga, que esclarecem o estímulo negativo de partida, são revertidas em emoções positivas. As razões atribuídas para as circunstâncias penosas podem ler-se em balões de fala e de pensamentos, relativos às questões insolúveis, socio-afetivas, familiares, disciplinares e de bullying. As raparigas desenham cenas dramáticas e críticas/contestatárias de figura de mãe, evidenciando maus tratos físicos, mas são violentas contra os rapazes da escola.Palavras-chave: opressão; Psicologia Positiva; cultura portuguesa; desenho; pré-adolescentes; educação artística; Metodologias Visuais; regra de assimilação contraste.

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Объектом внимания в статье становится научно-публицистическое наследие выдающегося осетинского ученого, доктора филологических наук, профессора, лауреата нескольких престижных премий Тамерлана Александровича Гуриева. В статье исследуются проблемы осетинской нартологии, литературоведения, теории и практики художественного перевода. Объектом анализа в статье стали такие работы Гуриева, как «К проблеме генезиса осетинских нартовских имен», «Антропонимия осетинского нартовского эпоса», «Проблемы Нартиады», «Наследие скифов и алан», «Кто есть кто в аланской Нартиаде». В них освящаются особенности мотивов, сюжетов нартовского эпоса, их вариативность, связь с мировыми эпосами, образы героев, их характеры, мотивации поступков, эволюционные процессы их развития. Второй аспект содержания предлагаемой работы – проблема творчества К.Х. Хетагурова в научно-публицистическом наследии Т.А. Гуриева. В статье также анализируется та сторона Гуриева-литературоведа, которая связана с его талантом полемиста, способного отстаивать собственный взгляд на некоторые произведения Коста Хетагурова. Автор на основе глубокого понимания специфики басенного жанра, истории его формирования и развития убедительно опровергает мнение тех, кто считал басни Коста лишь переводами произведений его предшественников-баснописцев. Т.А. Гуриев, сопоставляя тексты басен К.Л. Хетагурова и И.А. Крылова, доказательно приходит к выводу, что великий осетинский поэт не прибегал к переводам уже известных басен, что его басни, если даже они основаны на мировых сюжетах, оригинальны, самобытны и глубоко национальны. Третий аспект научного наследия Т.А. Гуриева, нашедший отражение в настоящей работе, связан с анализом работ ученого, посвященных теории и практике художественного перевода. The object of attention in the article is that part of the scientific and journalistic heritage of the outstanding Ossetian scientist, doctor of philological sciences, professor, laureate of several prestigious prizes Tamerlan Alexandrovich Guriev. The article examines the problems of Ossetian nartology, literary criticism, theory and practice of literary translation. The object of analysis in the article was such works by Guriev as “On the problem of the genesis of Ossetian Nart names”, “Anthroponymy of the Ossetian Nart epic”, “Problems of Nartiada”, “The heritage of the Scythians and Alans”, “Who is who in the Alan Nartiada”. They sanctify the features of motives, plots of the Nart epic, their variability, connection with world epics, images of heroes, their characters, motivations of actions, evolutionary processes of their development. The second aspect of the content of the proposed work is the problem of K.Kh. Khetagurov in the scientific and journalistic heritage T.A. Guriev. The article also analyzes the side of Guriev as a literary critic, which is associated with his talent as a polemicist, able to defend his own view of some of the works of Kosta Khetagurov. The author, on the basis of a deep understanding of the specifics of the fable genre, the history of its formation and development, convincingly refutes the opinion of those who considered Costa's fables only translations of the works of his predecessors, fabulists. T.A. Guriev, comparing the texts of the fables of K.L. Khetagurov and I.A. Krylova, conclusively comes to the conclusion that the great Ossetian poet did not resort to translations of already known fables, that his fables, even if they are based on world plots, are original, distinctive and deeply national. The third aspect of the scientific heritage of T.A. Guriev, reflected in this work, is associated with an analysis of the scientist's works devoted to the theory and practice of literary translation.

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O projeto iluminista subentende que a educação humana, escapando ao controle das autoridades eclesiásticas e políticas, tornaria o acesso ao pensamento racional irrestrito. Um dos instrumentos de divulgação da pedagogia iluminista foram os jornais, considerados uma epístola regular entre homens de letras que gradualmente vão sendo destinadas a parcelas mais amplas da população. Dentre os mais importantes representantes das Luzes em Portugal está o jornalista José Liberato, autor de dois jornais publicados em Londres entre 1813 e 1821. O autor compreendeu o seu papel de introduzir os portugueses na Era da Razão e, para tanto, imbuiu-se de uma pedagogia que respeitava tanto a religião quanto a monarquia. A proposta deste artigo é investigar os ideais letrados de Liberato, sua proposta pedagógica e, mais importante, como o seu exercício jornalístico construiu uma utopia voltada para pensar o futuro português. Palavras-chave: História do jornalismo; Iluminismo; Utopia política; José Liberato; O Investigador. ABSTRACTThe Enlightenment implies that human education, escaping the control of ecclesiastical and political authorities, would make possible unrestricted access to rational thought. One of the communication tools of the Enlightenment pedagogy were the newspapers, considered a regular letter among men of letters gradually being designed to broader segments of the population. Among the most important representatives of the Enlightenment in Portugal is the journalist José Liberato, author of two newspapers published in London between 1813 and 1821. The author understood their role to introduce the Portuguese in the Age of Reason and is imbued-in a pedagogy that respected both religion and the monarchy. The purpose of this article is to investigate the literate ideals of Liberato, his pedagogical proposal and, most importantly, how his journalistic exercise built a dedicated utopia to think the Portuguese future.Keywords: History of journalism; Enlightenment; Political utopia; José Liberato; O Investigador. RESUMENEl proyecto de la Ilustración implica que la educación humana, escapando al control de las autoridades eclesiásticas y políticas, haría que el acceso al pensamiento racional sin restricciones. Una de las herramientas de comunicación de la pedagogía de la Ilustración fueron los periódicos, considerado una carta habitual entre los hombres de letras gradualmente siendo destinadas a segmentos más amplios de la población. Entre los representantes más importantes de la Ilustración en Portugal es el periodista José Liberato, autor de dos periódicos publicados en Londres entre 1813 y 1821. El autor entiende su papel en introducir los portugueses en la Edad de la Razón y, por tanto, está imbuido en una pedagogía que respete la religión y la monarquía. El propósito de este artículo es investigar los ideales literatos de Liberato, su propuesta pedagógica y, lo más importante, cómo su ejercicio periodístico construyó una utopía dedicado a pensar el futuro portugués.Palabras-clave: Historia del periodismo; Ilustración; Utopía política; José Liberato; O Investigador. ReferênciasCorreio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário. Hipólito José da Costa. Londres: W. Lewis.1808-1822.DARNTON, Robert. Os dentes falsos de George Washington: um guia não convencional para o século XVIII. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005.LUSTOSA, Isabel. Insultos impressos. A guerra dos jornalistas na Independência (1821-1823). São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2000.MACHADO, Adelaide Maria Muralha Vieira. A Importância de se chamar português: José Liberato Freire de Carvalho na direção do Investigador Português em Inglaterra, 1814-1819.Tese de Doutorado apresentada ao Centro de História da Cultura em Portugal. Abril de 2011.MERCIER, Louis-Sebastien. L'an deux Mille quatre cent quarante, revê s'il en fût jamais. Paris, 1773. Disponível em: https://play.google.com/books/ Acesso em Maio/2015.NEVES, Lúcia Maria Bastos. Corcundas e Constitucionais. A cultura política na independência (1820 - 1822). Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2003.O Campeão, José Liberato Freire de Carvalho, Londres, 1819-1821.O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra ou Jornal Literário, Politico, etc. Bernardo José de Abrantes e Castro, Vicente Pedro Nolasco da Cunha, Miguel Caetano de Castro e José Liberato Freire de Carvalho. Londres, 1811-1819.REIS, José Eduardo. "A literatura e a ideia do mundo ideal: relatório de um programa para a disciplina de Literatura Comparada", E-topia: Revista Electrónica de Estudos sobre a Utopia, n.º 1, 2004. Disponível em http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/artigo10461.PDF Acesso em Maio/2015. Disponível em:Url: http://opendepot.org/2719/ Abrir em (para melhor visualização em dispositivos móveis - Formato Flipbooks):Issuu / Calameo

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Agostinho da Silva, de engajado filólogo a humanista militante e crítico: itinerário seareiro em tempos de formação do Salazarismo (1928-1933) Resumo: Este estudo reconstitui o itinerário teórico-político de Agostinho da Silva entre os anos de 1928 e 1933, sobretudo através da análise de uma série de artigos que publicou na Seara Nova, relevante revista portuguesa de “doutrina e crítica”. À luz desse recorte temático-cronológico, o viés aqui privilegiado perspectiva: 1) uma parte pouco conhecida, porém representativa, da obra de juventude de Agostinho da Silva, por meio da qual podemos conhecer a atuação de um jovem e polêmico filólogo, engajado numa ofensiva de renovação dos Estudos Clássicos em Portugal, ao arrepio do establishment intelectual; 2) a gestação do humanismo militante e crítico que, doravante, se estabelecerá como fundamento decisivo do seu pensamento e ação; e 3) a institucionalização coetânea, no plano macro-político, do Estado Novo de Antônio de Oliveira Salazar. Ao chegar às considerações finais, poderá o leitor compreender a forma como os três aspectos analisados ao longo do estudo encontram-se estreitamente articulados, na medida em que quedará demonstrado como a trajetória teórica e política do jovem pensador recapitula as grandes questões daquela conjuntura portuguesa e europeia do Entre-Guerras. Nesse sentido, a história do indivíduo, aqui, é também retrato condensado de uma época. Palavras-chave: Agostinho da Silva. Seara Nova. Crítica dos intelectuais e do salazarismo. Helenismo e humanismo. Modernização europeísta. Agostinho da Silva, from engaged philologist to militant and critical humanist: a Seara Nova collaborator’s path in times of formation of Salazarism (1928-1933) Abstract: This study reconstructs the theoretical-political path of Agostinho da Silva between the years of 1928 and 1933, mainly through the analysis of a series of articles published in Seara Nova, a relevant Portuguese journal of “doctrine and criticism”. In the light of this thematic and chronological approach, the point of view distinguished here focuses on: 1) a little-known, but representative, part of Agostinho da Silva's youth work, through which we can know the performance of a young and polemical philologist, engaged in an offensive to renew the Classical Studies in Portugal, against the intellectual establishment; 2) the gestation of the militant and critical Humanism that will henceforth be established as the decisive foundation of his thought and action; and 3) the contemporary institutionalization, at the macro-political level, of the New State led by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Upon reaching the final considerations, the reader will be able to understand how the three aspects analyzed throughout the study are closely articulated, inasmuch as it will be demonstrated how the theoretical and political trajectory of the young thinker recapitulates the major issues of that Portuguese and European context of the interwar period. In this sense, the history of the individual, here, is also the condensed portrait of an era. Keywords: Agostinho da Silva. Seara Nova. Criticism of the intellectuals and of Salazarism. Hellenism and Humanism. Europeanist modernization. Agostinho da Silva, de filólogo comprometido a humanista militante y crítico: itinerario seareiro en tiempos de formación del Salazarismo (1928-1933) Resumen: Este estudio reconstituye el itinerario teórico-político de Agostinho da Silva entre los años 1928 y 1933, sobre todo a través del análisis de una serie de artículos que publicó en Seara Nova, una relevante revista portuguesa de “doctrina y crítica”. A la luz de este abordaje temático-cronológico, el punto de vista aquí privilegiado enfoca: 1) una parte poco conocida pero representativa de la obra de juventud de Agostinho da Silva, a través de la cual podemos conocer la actuación de un joven y polémico filólogo, comprometido en una ofensiva para renovar los Estudios Clásicos en Portugal, contra el establishment intelectual; 2) la gestación del humanismo militante y crítico que en adelante se establecerá como la base decisiva de su pensamiento y acción; y 3) la institucionalización coetánea, a nivel macropolítico, del Estado Nuevo de Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Al llegar a las consideraciones finales, el lector podrá comprender cómo se articulan estrechamente los tres aspectos analizados a lo largo del estudio, en la medida en que quedará demostrado cómo la trayectoria teórica y política del joven pensador recapitula las grandes cuestiones de aquella coyuntura portuguesa y europea de entreguerras. En este sentido, la historia del individuo, aquí, es también el retrato condensado de una época. Palabras clave: Agostinho da Silva. Seara Nova. Crítica de los intelectuales y del salazarismo. Helenismo y humanismo. Modernización europeísta. Data de registro: 20/03/2020Data de aceite: 23/09/2020

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The article analyzes the behavioral patterns (gestures, roles, scripts) and texts of Vlas Doroshevich (in particular, articles and essays by Doroshevich written him about V. P. Burenin, A. I. Herzen, D. L. Mordovtsev). One of the most famous books during the life of the writer “The Way of the Cross” (1915) is almost forgotten today. However, historians and literary historians still study his book “Sakhalin. Hard Labour” (1903). Being a contemporary of A. P. Chekhov, Vlas Doroshevich, who lived after him for almost 20 years, repeatedly turned to the life history of his contemporary, recognized as a genius during his lifetime. In such an appeal, one can see not only the performance of newspaper and journal work due to the commercialization of literary work, but also life-creating practices. One of the most obvious practices is a trip to Sakhalin and a description of travel experiences in a book. On the material of essays, feuilletons, memories that were written by Doroshevich for the Sutin’s ‘Russian word’ this patterns are investigated. Firstly, it’s self-representation as Famous Other (often Genius). So Doroshevich wrote about Chekhov, however, most of the information is not related to the life and work of Chekhov, but closely connected to the life and work of Doroshevich. Secondly journalistic fiction filled the voids. The automatism of this type of writing is already exposed at the level of headings, among which the majority are built according to the unified model of ‘Chekhov and X’: Chekhov and Maupassant, Chekhov and criticism, Chekhov and Sakhalin, Chekhov and Suvorin, Chekhov and the title of writer, Chekhov and Marx, Chekhov and the stage, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Gorky. The last text, replicating the narrative model, chosen in the feuilleton Chekhov and Suvorin: X was very fond of Y, as Y was very fond of X. Thirdly, Doroshevich has not only parodied contemporaries, but also parodied himself. Thus “Memories of Chekhov” deceive the expectations of readers. The narrator Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov writes his text as Doroshevich himself wrote about Chekvov several years before. Lastly, pragmatics of Doroshevich'es texts is conceptualized in the pattern Simeon, who did not live to see the Christ. Doroshevich used this idiom when he's speaking about forgotten Russian writer Daniil Mordovtsev. Mordovtsev was so-called ‘little man’ of Russian literature. Doroshevich did not want to be the same, so Chekhov’s symbolic capital needed him as a way to change his own life, endow it with new, albeit secondary, meanings.

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Resumo: Com a publicação do romance intitulado A noite das mulheres cantoras, em 2011, Lídia Jorge lança-se a perscrutar o efêmero cenário da música pop numa trama envolvente, a qual não somente aponta para importantes aspectos da vida cultural portuguesa, mas também demonstra certa ousadia autoral em transformar em matéria literária os meandros do espetáculo midiático e suas contradições. Pelas palavras da escritora, “na história de um bando conta-se sempre a história de um povo”, logo, o quinteto vocal entregar-se-á de modo fáustico não a uma grande causa, mas à busca desmesurada pelo estrelato, diante do qual parece não importar valores éticos, estéticos e ideológicos a expor, pois, seus corpos a uma inevitável violência não apenas simbólica. Se as aptidões artísticas unem as personagens nesse peculiar microcosmo que certamente privilegia o universo feminino, o fato de pertencerem a famílias de retornados amplia a mensagem que subjaz à narrativa: a derrocada do império português em África e a retomada da democracia. Portanto, antigos fados ou os célebres versos de “Uma casa portuguesa” ficarão para trás ante o ritmo frenético dos novos tempos. Ora, é Portugal mais perto do chamado mundo globalizado e a distanciar-se da longa noite salazarista. Enfim, este pequeno estudo terá como aporte teórico, entre outros, as reflexões de Eduardo Lourenço, Roland Barthes e Guy Debord e servirão para o cotejo do referido romance, cuja crítica parece apresentar lacunas, não obstante a vigorosa letra de uma das mais consagradas escritoras da literatura portuguesa.Palavras-chave: Lídia Jorge; literatura portuguesa; romance português contemporâneo; literatura de autoria feminina; sociedade do espetáculo.Abstract: With the publication of the novel entitled The night of the singing women, in 2011, Lídia Jorge looks closely at the ephemeral scene of the pop music in an engaging plot, which not only points to important aspects of Portuguese cultural life, but it also demonstrates a certain authorial boldness in turning into literary matters the intricacies of the media spectacle and its contradictions. In the words of the writer, “in the history of a band one always tells the story of a people”, so to achieve fame, the vocal quintet will not care about ethical, aesthetic and ideological values that will expose their bodies to unavoidable violence that is not just symbolic. If artistic skills unite the characters in this peculiar microcosm, which certainly favors the female universe, the condition of belonging to returnee families expands the message that underlies the narrative: the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa and the resumption of democracy. So old fados or the famous verses of “A Portuguese Home” will be left behind in the frenetic pace of the new times. Now Portugal is closer to the so-called globalized world and moving away from the long Salazar night. Finally, this small study will have as theoretical support, among others, the reflections of Eduardo Lourenço, Roland Barthes and Guy Debord will serve for the analysis of this novel, whose criticism seems to have gaps, despite the vigorous writing of one of the most famous writers of Portuguese literature.Keywords: Lídia Jorge; Portuguese literature; contemporary Portuguese novel; female authored literature; society of the spectacle.

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Attention has not hitherto been turned intently to the popularity of particular branches of sports in the research of the history of Estonian sports. It has more intuitively been believed that the most popular branch of sports in the pre-war Republic of Estonia (1918–1940) was football. The conspicuously extensive coverage of football in the periodical press has provided grounds for this belief. Compared to other sports games and the more major individual branches, football had the most international matches at the level of national teams, which attracted thousands of spectators. Estonian clubs annually hosted squads from neighbouring countries. Professional clubs mainly from Central Europe brought thousands of spectators to the stadiums in the latter half of the 1920s and in the early 1930s. Rivalries between squads at home were also of great interest to the public and the media. The other primary ball games, basketball and volleyball, started being played in Estonia some ten years after football, and their position was weaker internationally as well: contacts between countries were infrequent. The international basketball association was established in 1932 and its analogue in volleyball was founded in 1947. Track and field, the largest branch of individual athletics, also could not compete with football in terms of matches and international contacts. This article is the first more serious attempt to compare the popularity of branches of sports in Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s. I compared the more major branches of sports in four categories: the number of participants in the particular branch of sports, the sizes of audiences, their ability to cope economically (balance sheets and revenue reports), and their position in the print media. The fact that there are gaps in the data in both the archives and in periodicals, and that the information for different years does not always match, made comparison of the numbers of participants difficult. The methodology used for ascertaining the number of participants was also not necessarily the same. An adequate comparison to the more important individualsports branches is complicated to arrive at because until 1933, the Eesti Kerge-, Raske- ja Veespordiliit (Estonian Association of Track and Field, Heavy Athletics and Aquatic Sports) was the umbrella organisation for major branches of sports such as track and field, wrestling, weightlifting, boxing, swimming, diving, gymnastics and cycling, whereas the last two sports branches are not even mentioned in the association’s name. Conclusions can nevertheless be drawn concerning the number and proportions of persons active in different branches of sports based on indirect data. I compared the size of the membership of the separate sports associations and the number of participants in the Estonian championships of the three largest sports games (football, basketball, volleyball). Periodicals proved to be the most reliable in ascertaining the numbers of spectators since they unfailingly noted the larger attendance numbers based on spectator ticket information or visual observation. The sketchy information on attendance at competitions in individual sports is a problem, but from the standpoint of this article’s research problem, the fact that before World War II there was not a single large sports arena in Estonia is important. The gymnasiums that were in use accommodated slightly over 500 spectators in total. This means that a thousand and more spectators could gather only at stadiums, where primarily football matches and track and field competitions were held. The print media reported the numbers of spectators at those competitions. I compared the attendance numbers for football and track and field competitions, and calculated the average number of spectators. There are gaps in the balance sheets and revenue reports of the separate sports associations for the period under consideration, yet the Eesti Spordi Keskliit (Central Association of Estonian Sports) published them in its yearbooks for 1935–1939, which makes it possible to draw correct conclusions concerning the economic viability of the separate sports associations. While I used the method of source criticism for the preceding three categories, I studied the representation of branches of sports in print media together with Kristjan Remmelkoor using content analysis. We focused exclusively on print media because that was the primary means of mass communication at that time, and it covered the entire period under consideration, unlike radio, which began broadcasting for the first time in 1926. On the basis of circulation numbers, we selected two dailies with nationwide circulation that were published in Tallinn (Vaba Maa was published only until 1938, thus it was replaced for final comparison with another Tallinn daily paper Uus Eesti) and one daily from southern Estonia for content analysis. We studied the newspaper issues from the years 1921, 1925, 1930, 1935 and 1939. Based on the pilot project, we identified the branches of sports that were reported the most and worked out a methodology on the basis of which to search for and categorise branches of sports. After six months, I carried out a repeat analysis for one month of each year that was under consideration. The repeat analysis covered all four dailies. The results differed by 3.97%. Thereat in comparing the two branches of sports that were reported on most, the difference in football was 0.69% and 0.43% in track and field. It became evident as a result of the study that compared to basketball and volleyball, there were almost four times more football enthusiasts. Compared to the other more popular individual sports, we can indirectly conclude that football was the branch of sports with the largest number of enthusiasts. Football had the most spectators in Estonia in the interwar period because branches of sports practiced in indoor conditions could not fit more than 500 spectators into gymnasiums, since there was no large sports arena. Football had the largest audiences when considering the track and field competitions and football matches held at stadiums. In 1935–1939, the Eesti Jalgpalli Liit (Estonian Football Association) was Estonia’s most prosperous separate sports association. It became evident on the basis of content analysis that the two most widely reported branches of sports in print media were football, and track and field. Thereat the number of reports on track and field grew in the latter half of the 1930s and surpassed the figures for football. At the same time, the number of texts on Estonian football was the largest over the entire period that has been studied. The greatest number of texts on football were in journalistic genres that required absorbed reading, which stood out better in newspapers. Due to these circumstances, football became the most popular branch of sports in Estonia in the interwar period. The Estonian national squad’s international match against Latvia held on 18 June 1940 characterises football’s symbolic capital. This match that took place at Kadriorg stadium at a turning point in history evolved into a nationalist demonstration against the Soviet Union’s occupying regime. The crowd went from the stadium to Kadriorg Palace, where President Konstantin Päts was under the guard of the foreign regime. This match and the events that followed it are etched in the people’s collective memory. They have made their way into many published memoirs and also into belles-lettres, and have been echoed in both poetry and prose.

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Abstract A prominent strand of literary criticism today assumes that literature as literature is not significant enough to merit critical scrutiny. Instead of attending to the features that distinguish literature from everyday expression, this criticism values literature for its closeness to and reflection of life. Different as they might appear in their subject matter and approach, Character, The Disposition of Nature, and None Like Us share this “literature-as-life” orientation. In Character, Toril Moi, Rita Felski, and Amanda Anderson remind us of the pleasures of identification, embracing the layperson’s native inclination to consider “characters as objects of identification, sources of emotional response, or agents of moral vision and behavior” (4). Blending life writing with cultural criticism, Stephen Best uses his own narrative to attempt to rewrite the “‘traumatic model of black history’ in which the present is merely an endless, Oedipal repetition of slavery and Jim Crow” (6). Instead of the presence of an identity founded on this never-ending circuit of remembrance and despair, Best wants to dwell in impossibility, contradiction, paradox, and in-betweenness. Jennifer Wenzel’s study, The Disposition of Nature, blends paraphrases of literary representations of real-world environmental problems with references to political and cultural theories and to historical and journalistic accounts. In Wenzel’s case studies on such things as the story of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, the lifelikeness of literature engenders a meditative kind of outrage and skepticism. Given the fact that literary critics are no more expert in life than are their readers, the literature-as-life orientation shared by these authors leads to a kind of critical self-destruction.

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Media frauds often lead to lively public discussions about journalism’s professional identity and its social mandate. The paper uses the so-called Relotius case as a starting point for a systematic analysis of the responsibility of narrative journalists in an age of “fake news” and post-truth politics – and the question of how they can be held to account in the online realm. Claas Relotius counted as one of the most talented journalistic storytellers in the German-speaking world. In December 2018, however, the news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that he had fabricated many of his texts, either completely or partly. This revelation developed into one of the biggest German media scandals of the recent years and triggered a massive outcry, also in international media. A multi-method research design allows for a differentiated assessment of the Relotius case in particular and web-based media accountability processes in general: A literature review and problem-centered interviews with senior reporters demonstrate that stylistic devices of fiction have a long history in German narrative journalism – also in Spiegel magazine. A discourse analysis focusing on the public debate following the revelation of the scandal points out that many journalistic commenters, including Spiegel’s editorial board, displayed a clear lack of self-criticism in their discussion of the case, while non-professional watchbloggers broadened the scope of the analysis. The paper reflects the empirical results from a normative perspective, in order to illustrate the potentials and shortcomings of professional journalistic self-observation as opposed to external public control in online discourses.

Abstract:

This variable describes what kind of concept of culture underlies the cultural coverage at a certain point of time or across time. The variable dissects the concept of culture into cultural forms that are being journalistically covered. It presupposes that each article predominantly focuses on one cultural genre or discipline, such as literature, music, or film, which is the case in most articles in the cultural beat that are written according to cultural journalists’ areas of specialization. By identifying the cultural forms covered, the variable delivers an answer to the question of what kind of culture has been covered, or what kind of culture has been represented. Forms of culture are sometimes also called artistic or cultural disciplines (Jaakkola, 2015) or cultural genres (Purhonen et al., 2019), and cultural classification (Janssen et al., 2011) or cultural hierarchy (Schmutz, 2009). The level of detail varies from study to study, according to the need of knowledge, with some scholars tracing forms of subculture (Schmutz et al., 2010), while others just identify the overall development of major cultural forms (Purhonen et al., 2019; Jaakkola, 2015a). The concepts of culture can roughly be defined as being dominated by high cultural, popular cultural, or everyday cultural forms (Kristensen, 2019). While most culture sections in newspapers are dominated by high culture, and the question is rather about which disciplines, in the operationalization it is not always easy to draw lines between high and popular forms in the postmodern cultural landscape where boundaries are being blurred. Nevertheless, the major forms of culture in the journalistic operationalization of culture are literature, classical music, theatre, and fine arts. As certain forms of culture – such as classical music and opera – are focused on classical high culture, and other forms – such as popular music and comics – represent popular forms, distribution of coverage according to cultural forms may indicate changes in the cultural concept. Field of application/theoretical foundation The question of the concept of culture is a standard question in content analyses on arts and cultural journalism in daily newspapers and cultural magazines, posed by a number of studies conducted in different geographical areas and often with a comparative intent (e.g., Szántó et al., 2004; Janssen, 1999; Reus & Harden, 2005; Janssen et al., 2008; Larsen, 2008; Kõnno et al., 2012; Jaakkola, 2015a, 2015b; Verboord & Janssen, 2015; Purhonen et al., 2019; Widholm et al., 2019). The essence of culture has been theorized in cultural studies, predominantly by Raymond Williams (e.g., 2011), and sociologists of art (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). In studying journalistic coverage of arts and culture, the concept of culture reveals the anatomy of coverage and whether the content is targeting a broader audience (inclusive concept of culture) or a narrow audience (exclusive or elitist concept of culture). A prevalent motivation to study the ontological dimension of cultural coverage is also to trace cultural change, which means that the concept of culture is longitudinally studied (Purhonen et al., 2019). References/combination with other methods of data collection Concept of culture often occurs as a variable to trace cultural change. The variable is typically coupled with other variables, mainly with representational means, i.e., the journalistic genre (Jaakkola, 2015), event type (Stegert, 1998), or author gender (Schmutz, 2009; Jaakkola, 2015b). Quantitative content analyses may also be complemented with qualitative analyses (Purhonen et al., 2019). Sample operationalization Cultural forms are separated according to the production structure (journalists and reviewers specializing in one cultural form typically indicate an increase of coverage for that cultural form). At a general level, the concept of culture can be divided into the following cultural forms: literature, music – which is, according to the newsroom specialization typically roughly categorized into classical and popular music – visual arts, theatre, dance, film, design, architecture and built environment, media, comics, cultural politics, cultural history, arts education, and other. Subcategories can be separated according to the interest and level of knowledge. The variable needs to be sensitive towards local features in journalism and culture. Example study Jaakkola (2015b) Information about Jaakkola, 2015 Author: Maarit Jaakkola Research question/research interest: Examination of the cultural concept across time in culture sections of daily newspapers Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat) Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008) Info about variable Variable name/definition: Concept of culture Unit of analysis: Article/text item Values: Cultural form Description 1. Fiction literature Fiction books: fictional genres such as poetry, literary novels, thrillers, detective novels, children’s literature, etc. 2. Non-fiction literature Non-fiction books: non-fictional genres such as textbooks, memoirs, encyclopedias, etc. 3. Classical music Music of more high-cultural character, such as symphonic music, chamber music, opera, etc. 4. Popular music Music of more popular character, such as pop, rock, hip-hop, folk music, etc. 5. Visual arts Fine arts: painting, drawing, graphical art, sculpture, media art, photography, etc. 6. Theatre Scene art, including musicals (if not treated as music, i.e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 7. Dance Scene art, including ballet (if not treated as music, .e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 8. Film Cinema: fiction, documentary, experimental film, etc. 9. Design Design of artefacts, jewelry, fashion, interiors, graphics, etc. 10. Architecture Design, aesthetics, and planning of built environment 11. Media Television, journalism, Internet, games, etc. 12. Comics Illustrated periodicals 13. Cultural politics Policies, politics, and administration concerning arts and culture in general 14. Cultural history Historical issues and phenomena 15. Education Educational issues concerning different cultural disciplines 16. Other Miscellaneous minor categories, e.g., lifestyle issues (celebrity, gossip, everyday cultural issues), and larger categories developed from within the material can be separated into values of their own Scale: nominal Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders) References Jaakkola, M. (2015a). The contested autonomy of arts and journalism: Change and continuity in the dual professionalism of cultural journalism. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Jaakkola, M. (2015b). Outsourcing views, developing news: Changes of art criticism in Finnish dailies, 1978–2008. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 383–402. Janssen, S. (1999). Art journalism and cultural change: The coverage of the arts in Dutch newspapers 1965–1990. Poetics 26(5–6), 329–348. Janssen, S., Kuipers, G., & Verboord, M. (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73(5), 719–740. Janssen, S., Verboord, M., & Kuipers, G. (2011). Comparing cultural classification: High and popular arts in European and U.S. elite newspapers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 63(51), 139–168. Kõnno, A., Aljas, A., Lõhmus, M., & Kõuts, R. (2012). The centrality of culture in the 20th century Estonian press: A longitudinal study in comparison with Finland and Russia. Nordicom Review, 33(2), 103–117. Kristensen, N. N. (2019). Arts, culture and entertainment coverage. In T. P. Vos & F. Hanusch (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of journalism studies. Wiley-Blackwell. Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Meridian Books. Larsen, L. O. (2008). Forskyvninger. Kulturdekningen i norske dagsaviser 1964–2005 [Displacements: Cultural coverage in Norwegian dailies 1964–2005]. In K. Knapskog & L.O. Larsen (Eds.), Kulturjournalistikk: pressen og den kulturelle offentligheten (pp. 283–329). Scandinavian Academic Press. Purhonen, S., Heikkilä, R., Karademir Hazir, I., Lauronen, T., Rodríguez, C. F., & Gronow, J. (2019). Enter culture, exit arts? The transformation of cultural hierarchies in European newspaper culture sections, 1960–2010. Routledge. Reus, G., & Harden, L. (2005). Politische ”Kultur”: Eine Längsschnittanalyse des Zeitungsfeuilletons von 1983 bis 2003 [Political ‘culture’: A longitudinal analysis of culture pages, 1983–2003]. Publizistik, 50(2), 153–172. Schmutz, V. (2009). Social and symbolic boundaries in newspaper coverage of music, 1955–2005: Gender and genre in the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Poetics, 37(4), 298–314. Schmutz, V., van Venrooij, A., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (2010). Change and continuity in newspaper coverage of popular music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Popular Music and Society, 33(4), 505–515. Stegert, G. (1998). Feuilleton für alle: Strategien im Kulturjournalismus der Presse [Feuilleton for all: Strategies in cultural journalism of the daily press]. Max Niemeyer Verlag. Szántó, A., Levy, D. S., & Tyndall, A. (Eds.). (2004). Reporting the arts II: News coverage of arts and culture in America. National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP). Verboord, M., & Janssen, J. (2015). Arts journalism and its packaging in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, 1955–2005. Journalism Practice, 9(6), 829–852. Widholm, A., Riegert, K., & Roosvall, A. (2019). Abundance or crisis? Transformations in the media ecology of Swedish cultural journalism over four decades. Journalism. Advance online publication August, 6. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919866077 Williams, R. (2011). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Routledge. (Original work published 1976).

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Media critics tend to think about reviews in two ways: either as autonomous acts of creative intervention or as necessary fodder for publicity campaigns. Rather than elevate either of these options, I offer an account of my own reviewing experience as anecdotal evidence of the interrelation between creative intervention and commodification at work in every printed newspaper review. As Frederick Jameson argued long ago in his essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”, capitalist culture always contains elements of utopian or counter-hegemonic fantasy, but these elements are quickly absorbed and squelched within the market. Indeed, the appearance of literary criticism itself is bound up with the transformation of cultural activity into commodity form. In order to appreciate how reviews function within the economy of literary journalism, one should underestimate neither the ease with which even the most insightful review has always already been absorbed into the process of commodification nor how this process can work against the market’s own best interests. (For a study of the economic impact of reviewing, see Cameron. For the complications involved in writing a history of reviews and reviewers, see Fosdick.) For the last few years, I have written book reviews primarily for my local newspaper, the Iowa City Press-Citizen. As a 15,000-run newspaper, the Press-Citizen is listed in the small newspaper category for journalism awards and is one of the smallest newspapers owned by the giant media conglomerate, Gannett. Because Iowa City is home to the Big Ten, 30,000-student University of Iowa, the Press-Citizen has a more highly educated audience than that of other newspapers with similar press runs. Yet the educated readership also means that the local population expects a journalistic product with the sophistication of the New Yorker while the marketplace is only slightly larger than that of the little old ladies in Dubuque. Because of budget limitations, the Press-Citizen’s cultural reporting occupies a small percentage of its local news pages. As a result, the editorial staff deems newsworthy only those reviews demonstrating a clear local angle. From one perspective, this decision represents a commitment to the community. In practical terms, however, the policy means that the newspaper solicits reviews only for the authors who participate in “Live from Prairie Lights”, a reading series jointly sponsored by the university’s not-for-profit, public radio station, WSUI, and one of the city’s independently owned bookstores, Prairie Lights. The reading series owes its reputation, in part, to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, consistently hailed by U.S. News and World Report as the number one MFA creative writing program in the nation. Because the Workshop attracts established alumni (such as Michael Cunningham and John Irving) as well as ambitious younger writers, Prairie Lights has become a popular stop for authors touring in the geographical pentagram between Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, Kansas City, and St. Louis. Before I even type a word, therefore, any review I send to the Press-Citizen already has been commodified by the editorial staff’s decision to base its definition of newsworthiness on the publicity needs of a network of local businesses. Furthermore, if I decide not to write a review – or if the editorial staff decides it cannot afford to pay any correspondent for the review – the newspaper simply saves money and hassle by reprinting wire reviews published in any of the other 100 Gannett newspapers in the U.S. In order to add to the variety – to increase heterogeneity in the public sphere – I must first submit to a very restricted notion of what that sphere is. While Gannett’s business model involves absorbing and centralising local media outlets, Prairie Lights’s business model tends to undermine such a corporate mindset through its role as the area’s largest independent bookstore. Sponsoring “Live from Prairie Lights” is one way that the store, with help from the radio station, fights for its survival against superstore chains and discounted on-line giants. My review’s extra publicity for Prairie Lights, then, helps a brick-and-mortar independent bookstore maintain its independence. To the bookstore staff, the fact that my review appears in the local paper matters more than whether I denounce or celebrate a visiting writer. So, again, before I type a single word, my reviews simultaneously participate within a compromised commercial system and undermine the corporate policies of my newspaper’s parent company by helping support the independent mindset of a key local business. Just as my printed review is always already framed by the local editorial policies of a media conglomerate and the promotional needs of a large independent bookstore, it is also automatically placed in conversation with the paratextual press releases, plot synopses, and blurbs provided by the publishing houses. Even if I approach the work from a completely different angle than the publicists suggest, readers will readily align my perspective against the myriad of uncritical, press-release-based reviews to be found on Google News, Lexis-Nexis, or Metacritic.com. And even if local readers manage to avoid those reviews, they will still be exposed to the official publicity information if they listen to WSUI’s “Live from Prairie Lights”. Despite the commitment of Iowa Public Radio to an independent assessment of news and culture, the introductions provided by the program’s host nearly always regurgitate the publicity information as the homogenizing conceptual frame into which all aberrant discussions of the work become mere exceptions that prove the rule. The interrelation between creativity and commodification becomes apparent even in best-case scenarios. In September 2002, for example, the University of Iowa Press published a book of recently rediscovered Farm Service Agency photographs from the 1930s that proved complementary to the more familiar photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. An Iowa writer worked with the photographer’s surviving family members and wrote a well-documented, insightful, historical narrative to contextualise the photos. Anticipating local interest in the collection, Prairie Lights ordered hundreds of copies and moved the radio broadcast from the bookstore to a larger auditorium. Because of the Iowa connections at every phase of the project, it was easy to convince the Press-Citizen to run a lengthy review accompanied by several photos. After sifting through the photographs, digesting the narrative, and skeptically perusing the university press’s promotional material, I challenged myself to do something more than regurgitate the information provided me. Giving a cultural studies twist to Anatole France’s romantic dictum of the good critic relating the adventures of his soul among masterpieces, I decided to provide my own analysis of the photographs as cultural objects and only then turn to the narrative as a contrasting explanation of the uncanny vibrancy of these images of the last century. While I was sometimes critical of her evaluation, the author was impressed enough with my efforts that she called my editor to inform him personally that my review was the best she had read and that I was the only reviewer who had actually looked beyond the press release. Having never before been so complimented by an author, I decided to attend the reading and meet her face-to-face. Not surprisingly, the experience proved disillusioning. The writer proved as insightful in the program’s question and answer session as she had been in her prose, and the photos were as intriguing on the video screen as they were in the book. Yet the mobile radio production equipment and the portable cashier station – even more so, its constant beeping – made clear just how my investment of time and intellect served crossed purposes. While I was helping my readership make sense of these rediscovered photos from the past, I was also helping the University of Iowa Press and Prairie Lights sell books even as I was helping the Press-Citizen sell ads for the press and bookstore. The photo collections brought enough pleasure that many of the audience members were buying several copies to give as gifts, but that pleasure was both preconditioned for and a by-product of the cycle of production and publicity. At the moment when my review proved insightful enough to warrant a commendatory phone call from the author, it was most at risk of becoming a mere cog in the process of commodification. Rather than declare with any finality that reviews are either inspired or ingratiating, media critics need to continue to account for such interconnections between the creative and commercial factors of publication. References Cameron, Samuel. “On the Role of Critics in the Culture Industry.” Journal of Cultural Economics 19.4 (December 1995): 321-31. Fosdick, Scott. “From Discussion Leader to Consumer Guide.” Journalism History 30.2 (Summer 2004): 91-7. Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (1979): 130-48. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Charis-Carlson, Jeffrey. "Creativity, Commodification, and the Making of a Middlebrow Book Review." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/04-charis-carlson.php>. APA Style Charis-Carlson, J. (Oct. 2005) "Creativity, Commodification, and the Making of a Middlebrow Book Review," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/04-charis-carlson.php>.

Abstract:

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

Abstract:

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

Abstract:

I. First Brexit, then Trump: Has the past year or so ushered in a “wave” (Weisberg), a “barrage” (Desmond-Harris) or a “deluge” (Sidahmed) of that notoriously noxious affect, hate? It certainly feels that way to those of us identified with progressive social and political causes—those of us troubled, not just by Trump’s recent electoral victory, but by the far-right forces to which that victory has given voice. And yet the questions still hanging over efforts to quantify emotional or affective states leaves the claim that there has been a clear spike in hate moot (Ngai 26; Massumi 136-7; Ahmed, Promise 3-8). So let’s try asking a different question. Has this same period seen a rise, across liberal media platforms, in the rhetorical work of “hate-attribution”? Here, at least, an answer seems in readier reach. For no one given to scrolling distractedly through liberal Anglophone media outlets, from The New York Times, to The Guardian, to Slate, will be unfamiliar with a species of journalism that, in reporting the appalling activities associated with what has become known as the “alt-right” (Main; Wallace-Wells; Gourarie), articulates those activities in the rubric of a calculable uptick in hate itself.Before the U.S. Presidential election, this fledgling journalistic genre was already testing its wings, its first shudderings felt everywhere from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s widely publicized documentary, Hate Rising (2016), which explores the rise of white supremacist movements across the South-West U.S, to an edition of Slate’s Trumpcast entitled “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate,” which broached the torment-by-Twitter of left-wing journalist David French. In the wake of the election, and the appalling acts of harassment and intimidation it seemed to authorize, the genre gained further momentum—leading to the New Yorker’s “Hate Is on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” to The Guardian’s “Trump’s Election led to Barrage of Hate,” and to Vox’s “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” And it still has traction today, judging not just by James King’s recent year-in-review column, “The Year in Hate: From Donald Trump to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” but by Salon’s “A Short History of Hate” which tracks the alt-right’s meteoric 2016 rise to prominence, and the New York Times’ recently launched hate-speech aggregator, “This Week in Hate.”As should already be clear from these brisk, thumbnail accounts of the texts in question, the phenomena alluded to by the titular term “hate” are not instances of hate per se, but rather instances of “hate-speech.” The word “hate,” in other words, is being deployed here not literally, to refer to an emotional state, but metonymically, as a shorthand for “hate-speech”—a by-now widely conventionalized and legally codified parlance originating with the U.N. Declaration to describe “violent or violence-inciting speech or acts that “aim or intend to inflict injury, or incite prejudice or hatred, against persons of groups” because of their ethnic, religious, sexual or social affiliation. And there is no doubt that, beyond the headlines, these articles do incredibly important work, drawing connections between, and drawing attention to, a host of harmful activities associated with the so-called “alt-right”—from a pair of mangled, pretzel-shaped swastikas graffiti-ed in a children’s playground, to acts of harassment, intimidation and violence against women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people, to Trump’s own racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tweets. Yet the fact that an emotion-term like hate is being mobilized across these texts as a metonym for the “alt-right” is no oratorical curio. Rather, it perpetuates a pervasive way of thinking about the relationship between the alt-right (a political phenomenon) and hate (an emotional phenomenon) that should give pause to those of us committed to mining that vein of cultural symptomatology now consigned, across the social sciences and critical humanities, to affect theory. Specifically, these headlines inscribe, in miniature, a kind of micro-assessment, a micro-geography and micro-theory of hate. First, they suggest that, even prior to its incarnation in specific, and dangerous, forms of speech or action, hate is in and of itself anathema, a phenomenon so unquestioningly dangerous that a putative “rise” or “spike” in its net presence provides ample pretext for a news headline. Second, they propose that hate may be localized to a particular social or political group—a group subsisting, unsurprisingly, on that peculiarly contested frontier between the ideological alt-right and the American Midwest. And third, they imply that hate is so indubitably the single most significant source of the xenophobic, racist and sexist activities they go on to describe that it may be casually used as these activities’ lexical proxy. What is crystallizing here, I suggest, is what scholars of rhetoric dub a rhetorical “constellation” (Campbell and Jamieson 332)—a constellation from which hate emerges as, a) inherently problematic, b) localizable to the “alt-right,” and, c) the primary engine of the various activities and expressions we associate with them. This constellation of conventions for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movement has coalesced into a “genre” we might dub the genre of “hate-attribution.” Yet while it’s far from clear that the genre is an effective one in a political landscape that’s fast becoming a political battleground, it hasn’t appeared by chance. Treating “hate,” then, less as a descriptive “grid of analysis” (Sedgwick 152), than as a rhetorical projectile, this essay opens by interrogating the “hate-attribution” genre’s logic and querying its efficacy. Having done so, it approaches the concept of “alternatives” by asking: how might calling time on the genre help us think differently about both hate itself and about the forces catalyzing, and catalyzed by, Trump’s presidential campaign? II.The rhetorical power of the genre of hate-attribution, of course, isn’t too difficult to pin down. An emotion so thoroughly discredited that its assignment is now in and of itself a term of abuse (see, for example, the O.E.D’s freshly-expanded definition of the noun “hater”), hate is an emotion the Judeo-Christian tradition deems not just responsible for but practically akin to murder (John 3:1). In part as a result of this tradition, hate has proven thoroughly resistant to efforts to elevate it from the status of an expression of a subject’s pestiferous inner life to the status of a polemical response to an object in the world. Indeed, while a great deal of the critical energy amassing under the rubric of “affect theory” has recently been put into recuperating the strategic or diagnostic value of emotions long scorned as irrelevant to oppositional struggle—from irritation and envy, to depression, anger and shame (Ngai; Cvetkovich; Gould; Love)—hate has notably not been among them. In fact, those rare scholarly accounts of affect that do address “hate,” notably Ahmed’s excellent work on right-wing extremist groups in the United Kingdom, display an understandable reluctance to rehabilitate it for progressive thought (Cultural Politics). It should come as no surprise, then, that the genre of “hate-attribution” has a rare rhetorical power. In identifying “hate” as the source of a particular position, gesture or speech-act, we effectively drain said position, gesture or speech-act of political agency or representational power—reducing it from an at-least-potentially polemical action in or response to the world, to the histrionic expression of a reprehensible personhood. Yet because hate’s near-taboo status holds across the ideological and political spectrum, what is less clear is why the genre of hate-attribution has achieved such cachet in the liberal media in particular. The answer, I would argue, lies in the fact that the work of hate-attribution dovetails all too neatly with liberal political theory’s longstanding tendency to laminate its social and civic ideals to affective ideals like “love,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” and, when in a less demonstrative humor, “tolerance”. As Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions has recently shown, this tradition has an impressive philosophical pedigree, running from Aristotle’s philia (16), John Locke’s “toleration” and David Hume’s “sympathy” (69-75), to the twentieth century’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its promotion of “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” And while the labour of what Lauren Berlant calls “liberal sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza”, 636) has never quite died away, it does seem to have found new strength with the emergence of the “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, Queen)—from its recent popular apotheosis in the Clinton campaign’s notorious “Love Trumps Hate” (a slogan in which “love,” unfortunately, came to look a lot like resigned technocratic quietism in the face of ongoing economic and environmental crisis [Zizek]), to its revival as a philosophical project among progressive scholars, many of them under the sway of the so-called “affective turn” (Nussbaum; Hardt; Sandoval; hooks). No surprise, then, that liberalism’s struggle to yoke itself to “love” should have as its eerie double a struggle to locate among its ideological and political enemies an increasingly reified “hate”. And while the examples of this project we’ve touched on so far have hailed from popular media, this set of protocols for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movements is not unique to media circles. It’s there in political discourse, as in ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement, on MSNBC, that “Americans will unite against [Trump’s] hatred.” And it’s there, too, in academic media studies, from FLOW journal’s November 2016 call for papers inviting respondents to comment, among other things, on “the violence and hatred epitomized by Trump and his supporters,” to the SCMS conference’s invitation to members to participate in a pop-up panel entitled “Responding to Hate, Disenfranchisement and the Loss of the Commons.” Yet while the labor of hate-attribution to which many progressive forces have become attached carries an indisputable rhetorical force, it also has some profound rhetorical flaws. The very same stigma, after all, that makes “hate” such a powerful explanatory grenade to throw also makes it an incredibly tough one to land. As Ahmed’s analysis of the online rhetoric of white supremacist organizations should remind us (Cultural Politics), most groups structured around inciting and promoting violence against women and minorities identify, perversely, not as hate groups, but as movements propelled by the love of race and nation. And while left-wing pundits pronounce “hate” the signature emotion of a racist, misogynist Trump-voting right, supporters of Trump ascribe it, just as routinely, to the so-called “liberal elite,” a group whose mythical avatars—from the so-called “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW,” to the supercilious Washington politico—are said to brand “ordinary [white, male] Americans” indiscriminately as racist, misogynistic, homophobic buffoons. Thus, for example, The Washington Post’s uncanny, far-right journalistic alter-ego, The Washington Times, dubs the SPLC a “liberal hate group”; the Wikipedia mirror-site, Conservapedia, recasts liberal objections to gun violence as “liberal hate speech” driven by an “irrational aversion to weapons”; while one blood-curdling sub-genre of reportage on Steve Bannon’s crypto-fascist soapbox, Breitbart News, is devoted to denouncing what it calls “ ‘anti-White Racism.’” It’s easy enough, of course, to defend the hate-attribution genre’s liberal incarnations while dismissing its right-wing variants as cynical, opportunistic shams, as Ahmed does (Cultural Politics)—thereby re-establishing the wellspring of hate where we are most comfortable locating it: among our political others. Yet to do so seems, in some sense, to perpetuate a familiar volley of hate-attribution. And to the extent that, as many media scholars have shown (Philips; Reed; Tett; Turow), our digital, networked political landscape is in danger of being reduced to a silo-ed discursive battleground, the ritual exchange of terminological grenades that everyone seems eager to propel across ideological lines, but that no one, understandably, seems willing to pick up, seems counter-productive to say the least.Even beyond the genre’s ultimate ineffectiveness, what should strike anyone used to reflecting on affect is how little justice it does to the ubiquity and intricacy of “hate” as an affective phenomenon. Hate is not and cannot be the exclusive property or preserve of one side of the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s critical faculties too far to see the extent to which the genre of hate-attribution participates in the emotional ballistics it condemns or seeks to redress. While trafficking in a relatively simple hate-paradigm (as a subjective emotional state that may be isolated to a particular person or group), the genre itself incarnates a more complex, socially dynamic model of hate in which the emotion operates through logics of projection perhaps best outlined by Freud. In the “hate-attribution” genre, that is, hate—like those equally abjected categories “sentimentality,” “worldliness” or “knowingness” broached by Sedgwick in her bravura analyses of “scapegoating attribution” (150-158)—finds its clearest expression in and through the labor of its own adscription. And it should come as no surprise that an emotion so widely devalued, where it is not openly prohibited, might also find expression in less overt form.Yet to say as much is by no means to discredit the genre. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, there’s no particular reason why “the passions and emotions that lie behind a particular speech act” (34)—even up to and including hate—should devalue the speech acts they rouse. On the contrary, to pin the despicable and damaging activities of the so-called “alt right” on “hate” is, if anything, to do an injustice to a rich and complex emotion that can be as generative as it can be destructive. As Freud suggests in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” for example, hate may be the very seed of love, since the forms of “social feeling” (121) celebrated under the liberal rubric of “tolerance,” “love,” and “compassion,” are grounded in “the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (121; italics mine). Indeed, Freud projects this same argument across a larger, historical canvas in Civilization and its Discontents, which contends that it is in our very struggle to combat our “aggressive instincts” that human communities have developed “methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (31). For Freud, that is, the practice of love is a function of ongoing efforts to see hate harnessed, commuted and transformed. III.What might it mean, then, to call time on this round of hate-attribution? What sort of “alternatives” might emerge when we abandon the assumption that political engagement entails a “struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 131), and thus, by that same token, a struggle over the exact location and source of hate? One boon, I suggest, is the license it gives those of us on the progressive left to simply own our own hate. There’s little doubt that reframing the dangerous and destructive forms of speech fomented by Trump’s campaign, not as eruptions of hate, or even as “hate-speech,” but as speech we hate would be more consistent with what once seemed affect theory’s first commandment: to take our own affective temperature before launching headlong into critical analysis. After all, when Lauren Berlant (“Trump”) takes a stab at economist Paul Krugman’s cautions against “the Danger of Political Emotions” with the timely reminder that “all the messages are emotional,” the “messages” she’s pointing to aren’t just those of our political others, they’re ours; and the “emotions” she’s pointing to aren’t just the evacuated, insouciant versions of love championed by the Clinton campaign, they’re of the messier, or as Ngai might put it, “uglier” (2) variety—from shame, depression and anger, to, yes, I want to insist, hate.By way of jump-starting this program of hate-avowal, then, let me just say it: this essay was animated, in part, by a certain kind of hate. The social critic in me hates the breathtaking simplification of the complex social, economic and emotional forces animating Trump voters that seem to actuate some liberal commentary; the psychologist in me hates the self-mystification palpable in the left’s insistence on projecting and thus disowning its own (often very well justified) aggressions; and the human being in me, hating the kind of toxic speech to which Trump’s campaign has given rise, wishes to be able to openly declare that hatred. Among its other effects, hate is characterized by hypervigilance for lapses or failings in an object it deems problematic, a hypervigilance that—sometimes—animates analysis (Zeki and Romoya). In this sense, “hate” seems entitled to a comfortable place in the ranks of what Nick Salvato has recently dubbed criticism’s creative “obstructions”—phenomena that, while “routinely identified as detriments” to critical inquiry, may also “form the basis for … critical thinking” (1).Yet while one boon associated with this disclosure might be a welcome intellectual honesty, a more significant boon, I’d argue, is what getting this disclosure out of the way might leave room for. Opting out of the game of hurling “hate” back and forth across a super-charged political arena, that is, we might devote our column inches and Facebook posts to the less sensational but more productive task of systematically challenging the specious claims, and documenting the damaging effects, of a species of utterance (Butler; Matsuda; Waldron) we’ve grown used to simply descrying as pure, distilled “hate”. And we also might do something else. Relieved of the confident conviction that we can track “Trumpism” to a spontaneous outbreak of a single, localizable emotion, we might be able to offer a fuller account of the economic, social, political and affective forces that energize it. Certainly, hate plays a part here—although the process by which, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, affect “make[s] present, vivid and mattering … a worldly world” (371) demands that we scrutinize that hate as a syndrome, rather than simply moralize it as a sin, addressing its mainsprings in a moment marked by the nerve-fraying and life-fraying effects of what has become known across the social sciences and critical humanities as conditions of social and economic “precarity” (Muehlebach; Neil and Rossiter; Stewart).But perhaps hate’s not the only emotion tucked away under the hood. Here’s something affect theory knows today: affect moves not, as more traditional theorists of political emotion have it, “unambiguously and predictably from one’s cognitive processing,” but in ways that are messy, muddled and indirect (Gould 24). That form of speech is speech we hate. But it may not be “hate speech.” That crime is a crime we hate. But it may not be a “hate-crime.” One of the critical tactics we might crib from Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is that of decoding and decrypting, in even the most hateful acts, an instance of what Berlant, herself optimistically, calls “optimism.” For Berlant, after all, optimism is very often cruel, attaching itself, as it seems to have done in 2016, to scenes, objects and people that, while ultimately destined to “imped[e] the aim that brought [it to them] initially,” nevertheless came to seem, to a good portion of the electorate, the only available exponent of that classic good-life genre, “the change that’s gonna come” (“Trump” 1-2) at a moment when the Democratic party’s primary campaign promise was more of the free-market same. 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Abstract:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. —John Milton (1608-1674) Introduction The publication of 12 cartoons depicting images of Prophet Mohammed [Peace Be Upon Him] first in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, and later reprinted in European media and two New Zealand newspapers, sparked protests around the Muslim world. The Australian newspapers – with the exception of The Courier-Mail, which published one cartoon – refrained from reprinting the cartoons, acknowledging that depictions of the Prophet are regarded as “blasphemous by Muslims”. How is this apparent act of restraint to be assessed? Edward Said, in his book Covering Islam has acknowledged that there have been many Muslim provocations and troubling incidents by Islamic countries such as Iran, Libya, Sudan, and others in the 1980s. However, he contends that the use of the label “Islam” by non-Muslim commentators, either to explain or indiscriminately condemn “Islam”, ends up becoming a form of attack, which in turn provokes more hostility (xv-xvi). This article examines how two Australian newspapers – The Australian and The West Australian – handled the debate on the Prophet Muhammad cartoons and considers whether in the name of “free speech” it ended in “a form of attack” on Australian Muslims. It also considers the media’s treatment of Muslim Australians’ “free speech” on previous occasions. This article is drawn from the oral testimonies of Muslims of diverse ethnic background. Since 1998, as part of PhD and post-doctoral research on Muslims in Australia, the author conducted 130 face-to-face, in-depth, taped interviews of Muslims, aged 18-90, both male and female. While speaking about their settlement experience, several interviewees made unsolicited remarks about Western/Australian media, all of them making the point that Muslims were being demonised. Australian Muslims Many of Australia’s 281,578 Muslims — 1.5 per cent of the total population (Australian Bureau of Statistics) — believe that as a result of media bias, they are vilified in society as “terrorists”, and discriminated in the workplace (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission; Dreher 13; Kabir 266-277). The ABS figures support their claim of discrimination in the workplace; in 1996 the unemployment rate for Muslim Australians was 25 per cent, compared to 9 per cent for the national total. In 2001, it was reduced to 18.5 per cent, compared to 6.8 per cent for the national total, but the ratio of underprivileged positions in the labour market remained almost three times higher than for the wider community. Instead of reflecting on Muslims’ labour market issues or highlighting the social issues confronting Muslims since 9/11, some Australian media, in the name of “free speech”, reinforce negative perceptions of Muslims through images, cartoons and headlines. In 2004, one Muslim informant offered their perceptions of Australian media: I think the Australian media are quite prejudiced, and they only do show one side of the story, which is quite pro-Bush, pro-Howard, pro-war. Probably the least prejudiced media would be ABC or SBS, but the most pro-Jewish, pro-America, would be Channel Seven, Channel Nine, Channel Ten. They only ever show things from one side of the story. This article considers the validity of the Muslim interviewee’s perception that Australian media representation is one-sided. On 26 October 2005, under the headline: “Draw a Cartoon about Mohammed and You Must Die”, The Australian warned its readers: ISLAM is no laughing matter. Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, is being protected by security guards and several cartoonists have gone into hiding after the newspaper published a series of 12 cartoons about the prophet Mohammed. According to Islam, it is blasphemous to make images of the prophet. Muslim fundamentalists have threatened to bomb the paper’s offices and kill the cartoonists (17). Militant Muslims The most provocative cartoons appearing in the Danish media are probably those showing a Muhammad-like figure wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse coming out of it, or a queue of smoking suicide bombers on a cloud with an Islamic cleric saying, “Stop stop we have run out of virgins”. Another showed a blindfolded Muslim man with two veiled Muslim women standing behind him. These messages appeared to be concerned with Islam’s repression of women (Jyllands-Posten), and possibly with the American channel CBS airing an interview in August 2001 of a Palestinian Hamas activist, Muhammad Abu Wardeh, who recruited terrorists for suicide bombings in Israel. Abu Wardeh was quoted as saying: “I described to him [the suicide bomber] how God would compensate the martyr for sacrificing his life for his land. If you become a martyr, God will give you 70 virgins, 70 wives and everlasting happiness” (The Guardian). Perhaps to serve their goals, the militants have re-interpreted the verses of the Holy Quran (Sura 44:51-54; 55:56) where it is said that Muslims who perform good deeds will be blessed by the huris or “pure being” (Ali 1290-1291; 1404). However, since 9/11, it is also clear that the Muslim militant groups such as the Al-Qaeda have become the “new enemy” of the West. They have used religion to justify the terrorist acts and suicide bombings that have impacted on Western interests in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid amongst other places. But it should be noted that there are Muslim critics, such as Pakistani-born writer, Irshad Manji, Bangladeshi-born writer Taslima Nasreen and Somalian-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who have been constant critics of Muslim men’s oppression of women and have urged reformation. However, their extremist fellow believers threatened them with a death sentence for their “free speech” (Chadwick). The non-Muslim Dutch film director, Theo van Gogh, also a critic of Islam and a supporter of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, advocated a reduction in immigration into Holland, especially by Muslims. Both van Gogh and Hirsi Ali – who co-scripted and co-produced the film Submission – received death threats from Muslim extremists because the film exhibited the verses of the Quran across the chest, stomach and thighs of an almost naked girl, and featured four women in see-through robes showing their breasts, with texts from the Quran daubed on their bodies, talking about the abuse they had suffered under Islam (Anon 25). Whereas there may be some justification for the claim made in the film, that some Muslim men interpret the Quran to oppress women (Doogue and Kirkwood 220), the writing of the Quranic verses on almost-naked women is surely offensive to all Muslims because the Quran teaches Muslim women to dress modestly (Sura 24: 30-31; Ali 873). On 4 November 2004, The West Australian reported that the Dutch director Theo van Gogh was murdered by a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan Muslim on 2 November 2004 (27). Hirsi Ali, the co-producer of the film was forced to go into hiding after van Gogh’s murder. In the face of a growing clamour from both the Dutch Muslims and the secular communities to silence her, Ayaan Hirsi Ali resigned from the Dutch Parliament in May 2006 and decided to re-settle in Washington (Jardine 2006). It should be noted that militant Muslims form a tiny but forceful minority of the 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide. The Muslim majority are moderate and peaceful (Doogue and Kirkwood 79-80). Some Muslim scholars argue that there is specific instruction in the Quran for people to apply their knowledge and arrive at whatever interpretation is of greatest benefit to the community. It may be that stricter practitioners would not agree with the moderate interpretation of the Quran and vice versa (Doogue and Kirkwood 232). Therefore, when the Western media makes a mockery of the Muslim religion or their Prophet in the name of “free speech”, or generalises all Muslims for the acts of a few through headlines or cartoons, it impacts on the Muslims residing in the West. Prophet Muhammad’s Cartoons With the above-mentioned publication of Prophet Muhammad’s cartoons in Denmark, Islamic critics charged that the cartoons were a deliberate provocation and insult to their religion, designed to incite hatred and polarise people of different faiths. In February 2006, regrettably, violent reactions took place in the Middle East, Europe and in Asia. Danish embassies were attacked and, in some instances, were set on fire. The demonstrators chanted, “With our blood and souls we defend you, O Prophet of God!”. Some replaced the Danish flag with a green one printed with the first pillar of Islam (Kalima): “There is no god but God and Mohammed is the messenger of God”. Some considered the cartoons “an unforgivable insult” that merited punishment by death (The Age). A debate on “free speech” soon emerged in newspapers throughout the world. On 7 February 2006 the editorial in The West Australian, “World Has Had Enough of Muslim Fanatics”, stated that the newspaper would not publish cartoons of Mohammad that have drawn protests from Muslims around the world. The newspaper acknowledged that depictions of the prophet are regarded as “blasphemous by Muslims” (18). However, the editorial was juxtaposed with another article “Can Liberty Survive a Clash of Cultures?”, with an image of bearded men wearing Muslim head coverings, holding Arabic placards and chanting slogans, implying the violent nature of Islam. And in the letters page of this newspaper, published on the same day, appeared the following headlines (20): Another Excuse for Muslims to Threaten Us Islam Attacked Cartoon Rage: Greatest Threat to World Peace We’re Living in Dangerous Times Why Treat Embassies with Contempt? Muslim Religion Is Not So Soft Civilised World Is Threatened The West Australian is a state-based newspaper that tends to side with the conservative Liberal party, and is designed to appeal to the “man in the street”. The West Australian did not republish the Prophet Muhammad cartoon, but for 8 days from 7 to 15 February 2006 the letters to the editor and opinion columns consistently criticised Islam and upheld “superior” Western secular values. During this period, the newspaper did publish a few letters that condemned the Danish cartoonist, including the author’s letter, which also condemned the Muslims’ attack on the embassies. But the overall message was that Western secular values were superior to Islamic values. In other words, the newspaper adopted a jingoistic posture and asserted the cultural superiority of mainstream Australians. The Danish cartoons also sparked a debate on “free speech” in Australia’s leading newspaper, The Australian, which is a national newspaper that also tends to reflect the values of the ruling national government – also the conservative Liberal party. And it followed a similar pattern of debate as The West Australian. On 14 February 2006, The Australian (13) published a reader’s criticism of The Australian for not republishing the cartoons. The author questioned whether the Muslims deserved any tolerance because their Holy Book teaches intolerance. The Koran [Quran] (22:19) says: Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. Perhaps this reader did not find the three cartoons published in The Australian a few days earlier to be ‘offensive’ to the Australian Muslims. In the first, on 6 February 2006, the cartoonist Bill Leak showed that his head was chopped off by some masked people (8), implying that Muslim militants, such as the Hamas, would commit such a brutal act. The Palestinian Hamas group often appear in masks before the media. In this context, it is important to note that Israel is an ally of Australia and the United States, whereas the Hamas is Israel’s enemy whose political ideology goes against Israel’s national interest. On 25 January 2006, the Hamas won a landslide victory in the Palestine elections but Israel refused to recognise this government because Hamas has not abandoned its militant ideology (Page 13). The cartoon, therefore, probably means that the cartoonist or perhaps The Australian has taken sides on behalf of Australia’s ally Israel. In the second cartoon, on 7 February 2006, Bill Leak sketched an Arab raising his sword over a school boy who was drawing in a classroom. The caption read, “One more line and I’ll chop your hand off!” (12). And in the third, on 10 February 2006, Bill Leak sketched Mr Mohammed’s shadow holding a sword with the caption: “The unacceptable face of fanaticism”. A reporter asked: “And so, Mr Mohammed, what do you have to say about the current crisis?” to which Mr Mohammed replied, “I refuse to be drawn on the subject” (16). The cartoonist also thought that the Danish cartoons should have been republished in the Australian newspapers (Insight). Cartoons are supposed to reflect the theme of the day. Therefore, Bill Leak’s cartoons were certainly topical. But his cartoons reveal that his or The Australian’s “freedom of expression” has been one-sided, all depicting Islam as representing violence. For example, after the Bali bombing on 21 November 2002, Leak sketched two fully veiled women, one carrying explosives under her veil and asking the other, “Does my bomb look big in this”? The cartoonist’s immediate response to criticism of the cartoon in a television programme was, “inevitably, when you look at a cartoon such as that one, the first thing you’ve got to do is remember that as a daily editorial cartoonist, you’re commenting first and foremost on the events of the day. They’re very ephemeral things”. He added, “It was…drawn about three years ago after a spate of suicide bombing attacks in Israel” (Insight). Earlier events also suggested that that The Australian resolutely supports Australia’s ally, Israel. On 13-14 November 2004 Bill Leak caricatured the recently deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in The Weekend Australian (18). In the cartoon, God appeared to be displeased with him and would not allow him to enter paradise. Arafat was shown with explosives strapped to his body and threatening God by saying, “A cloud to myself or the whole place goes up….”. On the other hand, on 6 January 2006 the same cartoonist sympathetically portrayed ailing Israeli leader Ariel Sharon as a decent man wearing a black suit, with God willing to accept him (10); and the next day Sharon was portrayed as “a Man of Peace” (12). Politics and Religion Thus, the anecdotal evidence so far reveals that in the name of “freedom of expression”, or “free speech” The West Australian and The Australian newspapers have taken sides – either glorifying their “superior” Western culture or taking sides on behalf of its allies. On the other hand, these print media would not tolerate the “free speech” of a Muslim leader who spoke against their ally or another religious group. From the 1980s until recently, some print media, particularly The Australian, have been critical of the Egyptian-born Muslim spiritual leader Imam Taj el din al-Hilali for his “free speech”. In 1988 the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils bestowed the title of Mufti to Imam al- Hilali, and al-Hilali was elevated to a position of national religious leadership. Al-Hilali became a controversial figure after 1988 when he gave a speech to the Muslim students at Sydney University and accused Jews of trying to control the world through “sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, treason and economic hoarding” (Hewett 7). The Imam started being identified as a “Muslim chief” in the news headlines once he directly criticised American foreign policy during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. The Imam interpreted US intervention in Kuwait as a “political dictatorship” that was exploiting the Gulf crisis because it was seen as a threat to its oil supply (Hewett 7). After the Bali bombings in 2002, the Howard government distributed information on terrorism through the “Alert and Alarmed” kit as part of its campaign of public awareness. The first casualty of the “Be alert, but not alarmed” campaign was the Imam al-Hilali. On 6 January 2003, police saw a tube of plastic protruding from a passenger door window and suspected that al-Hilali might have been carrying a gun when they pulled him over for traffic infringements. Sheikh al-Hilali was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting police (Morris 1, 4). On 8 January 2003 The Australian reminded its readers “Arrest Adds to Mufti’s Mystery” (9). The same issue of The Australian portrayed the Sheikh being stripped of his clothes by two policemen. The letter page also contained some unsympathetic opinions under the headline: “Mufti Deserved No Special Treatment” (10). In January 2004, al-Hilali was again brought under the spotlight. The Australian media alleged that al-Hilali praised the suicide bombers at a Mosque in Lebanon and said that the destruction of the World Trade Center was “God’s work against oppressors” (Guillatt 24). Without further investigation, The Australian again reported his alleged inflammatory comments. Under the headline, “Muslim Leader’s Jihad Call”, it condemned al-Hilali and accused him of strongly endorsing “terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, during his visit to Lebanon”. Federal Labor Member of Parliament Michael Danby said, “Hilali’s presence in Australia is a mistake. He and his associates must give authorities an assurance he will not assist future homicide attacks” (Chulov 1, 5). Later investigations by Sydney’s Good Weekend Magazine and SBS Television found that al-Hilali’s speech had been mistranslated (Guillatt 24). However, the selected print media that had been very critical of the Sheikh did not highlight the mistranslation. On the other hand, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell has been critical of Islam and is also opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war in 2003, but the print media appeared to ignore his “free speech” (Dateline). In November 2004, Dr Pell said that secular liberal democracy was empty and selfish, and Islam was emerging as an alternative world view that attracted the alienated (Zwartz 3). In May 2006, Dr Pell said that he tried to reconcile claims that Islam was a faith of peace with those that suggested the Quran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims but: In my own reading of the Koran [Quran], I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages (Morris). Muslim leaders regarded Dr Pell’s anti-Islam statement as “inflammatory” (Morris). However, both the newspapers, The Australian and The West Australian remained uncritical of Dr Pell’s “free speech” against Islam. Conclusion Edward Said believed that media images are informed by official definitions of Islam that serve the interests of government and business. The success of the images is not in their accuracy but in the power of the people who produce them, the triumph of which is hardly challenged. “Labels have survived many experiences and have been capable of adapting to new events, information and realities” (9). In this paper the author accepts that, in the Australian context, militant Muslims are the “enemy of the West”. However, they are also the enemy of most moderate Australian Muslims. When some selected media take sides on behalf of the hegemony, or Australia’s “allies”, and offend moderate Australian Muslims, the media’s claim of “free speech” or “freedom of expression” remains highly questionable. Muslim interviewees in this study have noted a systemic bias in some Australian media, but they are not alone in detecting this bias (see the “Abu Who?” segment of Media Watch on ABC TV, 31 July 2006). To address this concern, Australian Muslim leaders need to play an active role in monitoring the media. This might take the form of a watchdog body within the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. If the media bias is found to be persistent, the AFIC might then recommend legislative intervention or application of existing anti-discrimination policies; alternatively, AFIC could seek sanctions from within the Australian journalistic community. One way or another this practice should be stopped. References Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. The Holy Quran: Text, Translation and Commentary. New Revised Ed. Maryland, USA: Amana Corporation, 1989. Anonymous. “Dutch Courage in Aftermath of Film-Maker’s Slaying.” The Weekend Australian 6-7 Nov. 2004. Chadwick, Alex. “The Caged Virgin: A Call for Change in Islam.” 4 June 2006 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5382547>. Chulov, Martin. “Muslim Leader’s Jihad Call.” The Australian 19 Feb. 2004. Dateline. “Cardinal George Pell Interview.” SBS TV 6 April 2005. 7 June 2006 http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/>. Dreher, Tanya. “Targeted”, Experiences of Racism in NSW after September 11, 2001. Sydney: University of Technology, 2005. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Understanding Age-Old Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Insight. “Culture Clash.” SBS TV 7 March 2006. 11 June 2006 http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/archive.php>. Guillatt, Richard. “Moderate or Menace.” Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend 21 Aug. 2004. Hewett, Tony. “Australia Exploiting Crisis: Muslim Chief.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Nov. 1990. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Ismaa – Listen: National Consultations on Eliminating Prejudice against Arab and Muslim Australians. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2004. Jyllands-Posten. 24 Jan. 2006. http://www.di2.nu/files/Muhammad_Cartoons_Jyllands_Posten.html>. Jardine, Lisa. “Liberalism under Pressure.” BBC News 5 June 2006. 12 June 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5042418.stm>. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. Media Watch. “Abu Who?” ABC Television 31 July 2006. http://abc.net.au/mediawatch/>. Morris, Linda. “Imam Facing Charges after Row with Police.” Sydney Morning Herald 7 Jan. 2003. Morris, Linda. “Pell Challenges Islam – O Ye, of Little Tolerant Faith.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 May 2006. Page, Jeremy. “Russia May Sell Arms to Hamas.” The Australian 18 Feb. 2006. Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Vintage, 1981, 1997. Submission. “Film Clip from Short Submission.” Submission. 11 June 2006. http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2655656?htv=12> The Age. “Embassies Torched over Cartoons.” 5 Feb. 2006. http://www.theage.com.au>. The Guardian. “Virgins? What Virgins?” 12 Jan. 2002. 4 June 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/>. Zwartz, Barney. “Islam Could Be New Communism, Pell Tells US Audience.” Sydney Morning Herald 12 Nov. 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid. "Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media: Free Speech or Taking Sides." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/1-kabir.php>. APA Style Kabir, N. (Sep. 2006) "Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media: Free Speech or Taking Sides," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/1-kabir.php>.

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>.