bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What is the World Coming to? Senility, Illness and Irony in the Costello fictions and Diary of a Bad Year
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, the focus is on the relationship between irony and senescence in Coetzee’s fiction from the first decade of this century. The opening section provides a theoretical introduction to the cultural constructions of senility and their links to the notion of irony. In section two, the novels and shorter fiction featuring Elizabeth Costello as a character (mainly Elizabeth Costello, “As a Woman Grows Older,” and “The Old Woman and the Cats”) are closely analysed to explore the intersection of what is referred to as the “ironic dialogism” of Coetzee’s Australian fiction and the ethical aspects of senility. Diary of a Bad Year is then analysed to examine how two forms of irony, formal and overt, assist Coetzee in critiquing neoliberal biopolitics and prejudicial discourses surrounding senescence. The term “ironic autogerontography” is introduced to highlight the links between Coetzee’s fictional representations of old age and his own experience of ageing.
Epilogue: Positive Incapabilities
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This epilogue examines the intersection of embodiment, disability, and creative process in J.M. Coetzee’s novels as well as recapitulates the central arguments of the book. Through an exploration of Coetzee’s fictions and personal reflections, it reveals how his characters navigate their worlds constrained by norms they cannot conform to, reflecting broader themes of incapacitation and resistance. Coetzee’s narrative techniques often mirror his own struggles with writing, demonstrating how his personal challenges – both physical and psychological – shape his literary output. His notebooks reveal a profound engagement with the debilitating aspects of writing, revealing how these experiences inform his depiction of disability and non-normative bodies. By confronting the limitations of his creative process, Coetzee not only challenges conventional portrayals of disability but also integrates these struggles into his texts’ formal and thematic innovations. His works, thus, reflect an intricate dialogue between his embodied experiences and his narrative strategies, underscoring how creative disruptions contribute to the distinctive “disabled textuality” of his oeuvre.
Introduction To Human Spoken Interaction As A Complex Adaptive System
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the main arguments, concepts and themes of the study, as well as clarifying its original contribution. The study context is introduced as a superdiverse one and information is provided on the participants and the nature of the data. We provide a rationale for this specific corpus. Finally there is a statement of the purpose and aims of the book and its structure is then outlined. For the benefit of readers, there are short introductions to Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) and Conversation Analysis (CA).
L2 Interaction: Word Searches, Development and CDST
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

In this chapter we establish what is already known about the phenomenon of human spoken interaction and issues which we will be studying in later chapters; we also identify what is not known, that is, the research gaps. We review the literature on word search sequences as well as on CDST and its principles. We also examine relevant CA and CDST studies on L2 development, particularly longitudinal studies. The chapter identifies a major research gap, in that there have so far been no studies of how the interaction engine functions as a complex adaptive system.
Patterns of Word Search Sequences at the Group Level
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

In Chapters 4 we present the narrow, particular view of human interaction through word search sequences, which are a specialised application of the mechanism of repair for the location and production of target lexical items. We display how the speakers in the corpus as a group have adapted the mechanism of the word search in ways that enable social actions in this particular ELF context. This chapter establishes the basic functioning in this setting of the mechanism of word search sequences as complex systems. The analyses described the common features found among the four participants in terms of word search initiation patterns, the candidate solutions, as well as the partners’ responses to prosody-marked candidate solutions done by the Japanese participants.
Longitudinal Changes in Word Search Sequences
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

Chapter 5 investigates if the word search sequences initiated by four Japanese participants changed over time. It examines the patterns in the use of word search sequences over time between the four lead participants and their interlocutors. The chapter is divided into two parts. First, it analyses the overall patterns of change found among the four Japanese participants, namely. This includes the participants’ overall English language proficiency and the quantified frequency of word search sequences. We then give a detailed analysis of the word search sequence patterns of the four main participants and their fixed partners. By analysing the data by time and by participants, the chapter examines the individual differences as well as commonalities as this small cohort of four L2 speakers adapts to their ELF interactional environment and interlocutors. We reveal the relative levels of homogeneity and heterogeneity in relation to the word search sequences employed by these four participants over time. The chapter demonstrates that it is possible to study these dyadic interactions themselves as complex systems which adapt over time to changes in the participants, their partners and the environment.
Seeing Human Spoken Interaction As A Complex Adaptive System
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we attempt to show how the interaction engine functions as a complex adaptive system, using two different presentations. We will first demonstrate how the data from this study can be understood from a macro CDST perspective by matching its principles to the results from the CA analyses. We then apply the principles to one short excerpt from the corpus in Section 6.3, explaining how CDST principles are evident at the micro level in its functioning. The data analysis demonstrates that the L2 speakers make expert, inventive use of the universal interaction engine to convey meaning, even when they are only intermediate level users of the specific overlaid language they are using. This also provides a worked-through example of how the CA-CDST approach works, allowing simultaneous analysis of macro and micro levels.
Conclusions and Implications
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we summarise the main findings of the study, both on the broad-scale in terms of human spoken interaction as a complex adaptive system, as well as the narrow empirical focus on L2 interaction in this specific informal ELF setting.
Legitimisation strategies for a de-legitimised political world
Authors: Butler Robert
Published: January 2025

The Introduction argues that in the face of a growing crisis of legitimacy, politicians and regimes are forced to adapt their discursive strategies in order to retain their authority in the eyes of their subjects. This crisis includes competition from populist waves, new forms of media constituting a powerful alternative device for political communication, and global socio-economic, health and environmental challenges. Accordingly, political actors must seek to legitimise their actions and policies if they are to hold on to power or normalise certain ideologies, and this may imply or lead to de-legitimisation. This introductory chapter highlights the bridge between the concept of legitimacy in political science and the discursive process of legitimisation within Critical Discourse Studies. The notions of crisis and conflict are then introduced in relation to existing studies. The approach adopted in this volume is then outlined in relation to previous research into legitimisation, and the book’s structure and chapters are explained in detail.
Smoothing processes in United Nations discourse on violence against women: A diachronic perspective
Authors: Atzeni Célia
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, it is argued that the United Nations (UN) may resort to specific processes of discursive smoothing from 2010 onwards for diplomatic reasons, as the end of the 2000s and the 2010s were marked by an international crisis on the notion of human rights. Discursive smoothing can be defined as the process of removing traces of heterogeneity, debate, difficulty, conflict or extreme positions from discourse, and it enables official institutions such as the UN to produce a consensual discourse which is less likely to be challenged. Specifically, this chapter discusses the smoothing processes used by the UN in their discourse on violence against women. Textometric methods are applied to a computerised corpus: the VIOLENCE corpus, a 5.5-million-word corpus, was compiled in order to conduct this corpus-based study and is made up of UN English and French press releases and reports dealing with the issue of violence against women and published between 1996 and 2019. The results shed light on the diachronic nature of the smoothing processes used by the UN.
A critical analysis of figurative language in the political discourse of conflict in Africa
Authors: Kanté Issa
Published: January 2025

This corpus-based study of fifteen political speeches examines the role of figurative language in discourses of conflict in six West and Central African countries facing a collision between various forms of conflict. The chapter addresses how metaphor and metonymy interact with syntax, lexicalisation and the ideology of glorification in the discourses to address new forms of conflict. Cognitive approaches and Critical Discourse Studies give us tools to uncover the underlying meanings and purposes of figurative constructions and their potential effects on recipients. It is argued that these discursive devices seek to shape the opinions and (re)actions of recipients, and the overall socio-cognitive critical goal is to draw attention to the manipulative and mind-controlling nature of such discourses. The analysis reveals underlying subjective representations and the personal fragility of political leaders, and also shows how the ideology of glorification through figurative language is used not only to downplay the actual causes and atrocities of armed conflicts, but also to obscure leaders’ failures. Similarly, it demonstrates how the discourses are characterised by a deliberate omission of the real causes and solutions of the crises – leaders seeking to conceal their responsibilities and accountability.
“In Defense of Newspaper Poets”
Authors: Bonifacio Ayendy
Published: January 2025

By the early twentieth century, newspaper poetry was fading, with high-status New England magazines shaping literary standards. George Santayana and others criticized the "genteel tradition," which they saw as stifling American cultural production, favoring a modernist approach that rejected sentimental and conventional forms. Via an analysis of James E. Kinsella’s (known as “Chicago’s Post Office Poet”) short column in the Chicago Tribune titled “In Defense of Newspaper Poets” and Glen Allen’s satirical column in The New York Times Magazine, “Pity the Poor Newspaper Poet!” the final chapter argues for a broader understanding of newspaper poems through their paratextual contexts, emphasizing the need to reconsider literary value beyond modernist conventions. By examining both Anglophone and Hispanophone newspaper poetry, this book aims to enrich our comprehension of nineteenth-century literature and advocate for more inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches in literary studies.
Introduction: The Relational Turn in British and German Culture
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: January 2025

The introductory chapter provides the historical and political background for the British and German literature, TV drama, and film discussed in this book by examining the United Kingdom’s and Germany’s engagement with the Holocaust and its memory since 1945, each country’s role in the establishment of Israel, and their position in relation to Palestine and Palestinian statehood, including solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The introduction also establishes the theoretical framework for this book by providing an overview of recent discussions in memory studies, Palestine/Israel studies, and World studies that inform the development of critical relationality as a methodology throughout the book.
Relational Memories: The Holocaust and the Nakba in the British Imaginary
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: January 2025

The second chapter extends the idea of ‘displaced relationality’ by moving to the British context to examine how the Holocaust and the Palestinian nakba are represented in a comparative context. Using Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries The Promise (2011) and Marina Lewycka’s book We Are All Made of Glue (2009) as case studies, this chapter shows how ‘relational memories’ – which are memories that create links between events that might seem unconnected and/or are often depicted as such – provide a comparative framework for examining Jewish and Palestinian suffering. Hesse argues that, together with Kosminsky’s and Lewycka’s juxtaposition of the British Mandate with the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, this comparative approach challenges accepted narratives of the Holocaust, the creation of the state of Israel and the nakba as separate events, as well as foregrounding the United Kingdom’s responsibility as a colonial power alongside its continued involvement in the region.
Disrupted Familial Relationality: Ethnicity, Alternative Alliances and Hybridity in Contemporary British Culture
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: January 2025

Using the concept of ‘disrupted familial relationality’, the works examined – Claire Hajaj’s novel Ishmael’s Oranges (2014) and Hugo Blick’s miniseries The Honourable Woman (2014) – depict Jewish-Palestinian marriage and friendship as well as Jewish-Palestinian children to challenge perceptions of Jewish and Palestinian suffering as separate and to imagine alternative alliances. Hesse argues that Hajaj and Blick consider how families and the ideologies that they transmit contribute to the exclusion of those that are seen as outside the collective national or ethnic community. Instead, they foreground Palestinians and their narratives of suffering, and their displacement and dispossession at the hands of Israel, as well as Palestinian aspirations to statehood. In this way, both artists encourage their audiences to reflect on the power differentials that govern these contexts, including those between Israel, Palestine and international powers. These imbalances are often occluded in discussions that emphasise a kinship approach on a national and international level, including those that use being part of the ‘family of nations’ as a justification for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and to obscure Israel’s role as a settler-colonial and occupying power, alongside the UK’s involvement as a mandatory power in Palestine at the start of the twentieth century.
Relational Coexistence: Donations Across Divides and Imagined Kinship in Palestine/Israel
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers how German authors and directors establish a ‘relational coexistence’ – a coexistence between (Israeli) Jewish and Palestinian characters that models relations between Israel and Palestine that take into account each community’s history of suffering and displacement and emphasises the relations between these histories. Werner Sonne’s novel Wenn ich dich vergesse, Jerusalem (If I Forget You, Jerusalem, 2008; translated into English as Where the Desert Meets the Sea, 2019) and Leon Geller and Marcus Vetter’s documentary Das Herz von Jenin (The Heart of Jenin, 2008) do this using blood and organ donations across divides. These function as a critical means to challenge ideas of kinship and universal humanity and the possibilities of coexistence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in a shared state, possibilities that take into account the power imbalances between Palestinians and (Israeli) Jews before 1948 and after the Second Intifada. In this chapter Hesse develops the concept of ‘relational coexistence’ to challenge the ideas of Israeli Jews and Palestinians as antagonists in the European imaginary. At the same time, the concept draws attention to the German desire to imagine a solution to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and Palestinian aspirations for statehood. In this context, the emphasis on relationality and coexistence is linked to a desire to be absolved of Holocaust guilt.
Conclusion: Future Relationalities
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: January 2025

The conclusion offers a critical outlook on the future of relationality by focusing on (Israeli) Jewish and Palestinian artists working in the diaspora, especially those that consider relations across the Israel-Palestine divide, such as Israeli Jewish artist Oreet Ashery and Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour. Focusing on their co-authored mixed genre work The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (2009), Hesse examines the more speculative genres that are becoming increasingly popular in Palestinian and Israeli culture. She asks how these genres might facilitate ways of transcending the political impasse between Israeli Jewish and Palestinian relations in the present by focusing on speculative relationalities that are situated in the future rather than in the present or the past.
ReFocus: The Films of Lawrence Kasdan
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

Lawrence Kasdan is the screenwriter of such beloved blockbusters as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Bodyguard (1992), and The Force Awakens (2015); simultaneously, he has gained critical acclaim as the director of pictures that dissect contemporary American society: Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1988), and Grand Canyon (1991). This book is the very first in-depth investigation into his work as a filmmaker who has created some of the most influential films of the past half century, yet has received remarkably little attention within academia. As the first forensic analysis of Kasdan’s canon, the book takes a multi-disciplinary approach to showcase original research and begin an overdue scholarly discourse regarding Kasdan’s influence on American cinema and the wider culture. Through the application of different methodologies, the book demonstrates that Kasdan has made a unique and important contribution to American film, both as writer and director, and the study provides a starting point for scholars to examine his filmography in greater detail. Additionally, ReFocus: The Films of Lawrence Kasdan contributes to debates regarding authorship, genre, and representations of the “1960s generation”; and it acts as an invaluable learning resource in the fields of creative writing, cultural studies, and, especially, film studies.
Visual Language in the Raiders of the Lost Ark Screenplay
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the development of Lawrence Kasdan’s script for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), from its first to fifth draft. It explores how he was able to transfer the ideas discussed in the story conference into a comprehensible narrative. Accepting Claudia Sternberg’sdefinition of the screenplay as a text in its own right, the chapter reveals the techniques Kasdan employed in order to build character, suspense, and surprise through a dense but fluid writing style. Kasdan’s unique approach would bring a distinctive physicality and sense of humor that would be evident in Steven Spielberg’s direction. By comparing the final script to the finished film, then, the study establishes the extent of Kasdan’s authorship in a movie that is usually associated with his more celebrated co-creators (Spielberg and George Lucas). Additionally, the case study provides evidence of the collaborative nature of film development. The investigation reveals, too, why Kasdan’s screenwriting suited the needs of the era so closely, allowing his entry into the professional sphere of the most commercially successful filmmakers of the period and leading to the creation of a film that has become a popular classic.
Classical Structure in the “Perfect Ensemble” of The Big Chill
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983) has been called a “perfect” ensemble film. A computer analysis of 600 screenplays showed that the film has the tightest presence range for any multi-protagonist cast, suggesting that it eschews the Campbellian “Hero’s Journey” in favor of a more egalitarian piece. The Big Chill, then, does not appear to conform to the norms of classical narrative structure. Yet, by applying Kristin Thompson’s four-act-structure paradigm – based upon characters’ goals rather than story action – then this chapter demonstrates how the film still follows the traditions of classical Hollywood storytelling, though it is visual choices that guide the viewer to understand character motivations rather than explicit script elements. The chapter posits that the restrained visual style actually accentuates such spotlighting maneuvers. Finally, the chapter interrogates a major story development in the closing scene that is so hidden by style that it seems to have escaped the notice of any viewer or critic, and invites Kasdan to explain his rationale firsthand.
Altruism and Otherness in The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist , and Grand Canyon
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

As a white male graduate of a prestigious university and having worked as an advertising copywriter before beginning his Hollywood career, Lawrence Kasdan’s is a privileged situation, and his films have been criticized for their “Reaganite” perspective. This chapter employs socio-historical analysis to reflect upon the ways that the main characters in three of his most celebrated “state of the nation” pictures – all white middle-class professionals – interact with those from different backgrounds. Whether it is the ensemble in The Big Chill bemoaning the more altruistic paths that they did not take, or the protagonists in The Accidental Tourist (1988) and Grand Canyon (1991) trying to help others, Kasdan’s socially liberal values are communicated frequently through his films. However, he has been criticized for espousing a white-savior form of altruism, with Grand Canyon accused of propagating a “patriarchal, benign racism.” This chapter discusses these concerns, balancing them against Kasdan’s inclusion of more female and black protagonists in Grand Canyon than was usual in the era, and with the fact that he attempted to criticize his cohort’s complacency in The Big Chill and The Accidental Tourist, even if he favors the perspectives of the affluent white leads.
From Noir to Kurosawa: Allusion and Homage in Lawrence Kasdan’s Films
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the major influences on Lawrence Kasdan’s creative output. Using both primary interviews and intertextual analysis, it suggests that Kasdan has a proclivity for homage, as he frequently references the work of George Cukor, John Ford, and David Lean. The chapter then demonstrates how one filmmaker has remained a constant inspiration throughout Kasdan’s career: Akira Kurosawa. It then examines four screenwriting elements – dialogue, plot, character and themes – in order to demonstrate how Kasdan’s work has been repeatedly informed by Kurosawa’s storytelling style. Moreover, the chapter explores the ways in which Kasdan’s noted versatility may have been inspired by Kurosawa’s career choices, with both filmmakers adapting and subverting genres to explore personal concerns within paradigms recognizable to contemporary audiences. Furthermore, it compares the progressive world views at the heart of both filmmakers’ work, even as both worked predominantly within very conservative periods in their countries’ respective histories.
From Star Wars to Saga: Lawrence Kasdan and The Empire Strikes Back
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

Lawrence Kasdan was a late replacement to write the screenplay for the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back (1980). George Lucas only hired him following the death of its original writer, Leigh Brackett, and Kasdan says that it was “the smallest influence that I’ve ever had on a film.” Yet there are many thematic elements that echo those in his own later works: the questioning of social norms, the fear of exposure, the tension between altruism and individualism, a desire to include marginalized groups, and the evolution of family (or surrogate family) roles. This chapter analyzes the scene and dialogue text of the scripts themselves. By comparing Leigh Brackett’s first draft, plus story conference notes by Lucas, with Kasdan’s screenplay drafts and notes, then a picture emerges of just how much authorial presence Kasdan had in what is widely considered the best Star Wars film. Moreover, the textual analysis demonstrates how integral Kasdan was in establishing the “saga” elements that would elevate Star Wars from one surprise hit into the series that has shaped storytelling and business models in Hollywood for nearly half a century.
An Interview with Lawrence Kasdan
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

This section reproduces excerpts from a two-hour interview with American writer-director Lawrence Kasdan. In the wide-ranging discussion, Kasdan talks about his early frustration as he struggled to sell his first screenplay, the issues with seeing his scripts directed by others, and the difficulties in directing others’ screenplays. Furthermore, Kasdan explains how he favors theme and character over plot, considers the duality in many of his characters (and his own life), and expresses his admiration for actors. Through firsthand testimony, then, the interview acts as a primary source in understanding important aspects of cinema history. It reveals Lawrence Kasdan’s thoughts on influential films to which he contributed, as well as demonstrating some of his motivations and rationales in a 45-year career as a Hollywood filmmaker and screenwriter.
The UN Ladies’ War
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The second chapter examines the ways Ahn Junghyo in Silver Stallion rewrites the Korean War as a gender war. Initially, the author’s portrayal of the Korean War as a civil conflict questions the supposedly humanitarian cause of American intervention in the Korean War. Contradicting the US’s self-image as a kind of global police force, the novel invites the reader to wonder whose interests the ‘police action’ was really aimed at protecting. The author’s anti–Cold War project coincides with a sexual politics that rewrites the Korean War as a contest between South Korean patriarchs and American GIs over the bodies of Korean women. In turn, this contest sets off a new war waged against the traditional system of Korean patriarchy by military prostitutes who wish to reclaim the rights to their bodies. While foregrounding the female protagonist’s achievement of full subjecthood in this war, this chapter also restores anti-communist persecution to the novel by placing the protagonist and her family’s ordeal within the context of an ideological branding of certain individuals by the authoritarian South Korean government. Read in this way, the protagonist and her family’s ostracism, this chapter argues, alludes to the notorious anti-communist punishment of guilt-by-association persecution.
The Politics of Neutrality
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The fourth chapter measures the achievements and shortcomings of Ha Jin’s War Trash against its professed anti–Cold War project. By illuminating the Chinese Civil War that unfolded in the US-run POW camps during the Korean War, Jin aims at debunking both the US Cold War view of the Korean War as an anti-communist crusade and the Chinese Communist Party’s view that the Korean War illustrates a war of liberation from imperialist oppression. Nonetheless, the author’s anti–Cold War project is paradoxically compromised by the political orientation that emerges in his attempt at documenting the events in the POW camps in a ‘neutral’ manner. Jin’s attempt to carve out a neutral space within the fierce ideological battlefield of a POW camp ends up promoting to the reader the quite specific ideological form of Western liberalism. This chapter charts the protagonist’s liberal individualism veering towards a form of solipsism in his attempted intellectual journey to political autonomy. The conclusion of this chapter is that the microhistory recuperated in War Trash is as deeply enmeshed in politics as the grand histories generated by the two ideological rival camps. In this way, the author’s anti–Cold War project comes to grief.
Conclusion: Living the Cold War Legacy
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The conclusion begins by pointing to a certain imbalance and self-contradiction structuring the Korean War fiction. It also analyses a group of Korean partisan fictions and memoirs. The conclusion then raises the question of whether or not the Korean War and the concomitant Cold War are yet over. In today’s South Korea, the old ideological conflicts that once divided the Korean peninsula militarily have taken on new, often highly volatile, forms that separate the forces of the right and the liberal-left. If, in the old days, the ideological clashes that took place between the military regime and democratic activists, including left-wing intellectuals and progressive college students, the frontline of this ideological war has more recently been redrawn in such a way as to polarise the masses themselves into two very large, hostile groups. As a result, conservative citizens who call themselves T’aegŭkki protesters have positioned themselves at the one end of the ideological spectrum, with liberal and liberal-left citizens positioned at the other. The book concludes with some reflections on the implications of the appearance of this new form of mass politics in terms of the local Cold War.
Hamlet as Resisting Subject: Intersecting Artistic Tactics in the Mousetrap s of Doran and Godwin
Authors: Denslow Kristin N. , Pittman L. Monique
Published: January 2025

Over the course of Hamlet’s performance history, the play-within-a-play has functioned as a meta-theatrical moment manifesting changing assumptions about the truth-telling potential of staged Shakespeare. In their Royal Shakespeare Company filmed stagings of Hamlet’s play, Gregory Doran (2010) and Simon Godwin (2016) explore ocular surveillance as epistemic method, highlighting the intermedial mechanics of reproduction in order to consider how the digitally imbricated human subject talks back to systems of power. As digital networks come to define and, often invisibly, confine the human in the twenty-first century, Doran and Godwin capitalise on The Mousetrap as a vital mode of resistance to the all-seeing and all-knowing digital network. Grappling with the human subject’s shrinking agency within the surveillance state, these Mousetraps invoke Michel de Certeau’s understanding of power and resistance.Though the Mousetrap stagings of Doran and Godwin spotlight Hamlet’s cunning and evasive tactics, they also question and appropriate two sites of epistemological authority--the surveillance camera and the institutional theatre--in acts of creative rebellion. In these performances, the intermedial techniques of theatre, film, social media, and artisanal craft centre the crisis of human subjectivity within networks of knowledge that threaten human flourishing.
Rita Dove, Blues Aesthetics and Shakespearean Improvisation
Authors: Garrison John S. , Sharif Saiham
Published: January 2025

Rita Dove’s “Shakespeare Say,” a poem published in Museum (1983) and read at her inauguration ceremony as U.S. poet laureate (1993), offers an intriguing case study for the role of improvisation in Shakespearean adaptation. The poem alternates between the neutral voice of the poetic speaker and the voice of American blues singer Champion Jack Dupree. Upon close analysis, Dove’s lyric emerges as a meditation on both the limits of adaptation and the limits of language to articulate desire. At the center of this essay, we see how Dove’s “Shakespeare Say” seeks to resurrect not only a lost voice in the history of black performance but also how the poet and the singer use context-based and spontaneous improvisation to situate themselves as artists in the shadow of Shakespeare’s language. The operations of improvised appropriation find expression in the only other poem by Dove that explicitly engages Shakespeare: “Blues in Half-Tones, 3/4 Time.” Taken together, the poems reveal Dove contemplating how the logics of musical performance, especially those genres which have improvisation built into them, speak to the ways in which Shakespeare’s work has been inherited and continually repurposed--changing as it is appropriated by new forms of performance and emerging audience-communities.
(Un)Veiling Isabella in Measure for Measure
Authors: Williams Nora J.
Published: January 2025

Isabella’s veil in Measure for Measure is extra-textual in that she is, strictly speaking, a novitiate: not quite a nun. Situated within the play’s historical context, one ‘yet unsworn’, as Isabella is, would not have worn a veil (1.4.9). Still, in a majority of prominent productions of Measure for Measure in England and North American since the mid-eighties, directors have veiled Isabella on stage—and, more crucially for my purposes, unveiled her as well. In this chapter, I propose that the veiled figure of Isabella activates patriarchal anxieties about visibility, legibility, and control that are already present in Measure for Measure and are often played out in production through her costume and its use. I argue that the play’s misogynist dramaturgy combines with the veil’s instability and over-determination as a semiotic signifier to make Isabella’s veil particularly vulnerable to appropriation by audiences during performance. I suggest that Isabella’s Christian veil on Western stages is scripted, to some extent, by the existing scripts for ‘veil’ operative within the wider culture, which frame the veiled woman as both dangerously fanatical and oppressed and in need of saving.
‘I have perused her well’: The Hypersexualisation of Anne Boleyn in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII and Showtime’s The Tudors
Authors: Hachimi Yasmine
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on Anne Boleyn’s early courtship with Henry VIII and explores the ways in which William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII, or All Is True and Showtime’s The Tudors fictionalise and appropriate Anne Boleyn as a sexual object to contain female sexual ambiguity and perform it in accordance with the misogynist male gaze of popular culture. The essay argues that male appropriations of Anne represent her pornographically, a tendency that culminates in The Tudors but can be seen in the earliest historical fiction about Anne as well. Although these historically distant appropriations use socially relevant tropes active at the time of production to highlight the erotics of passivity and agency, they accomplish the same end. The Tudors series exploits its visual medium – television – to make explicit and confirm what is latent in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play. Recognising how these directorial and appropriative choices operate both within the text and with the text to direct Anne perpetuates conversations about her body and sexuality and limits Anne’s agency by denying her the right to perform her own identity.
Trammelling up the Consequence: Making Shakespeare Fiction
Authors: Hartley Andrew James
Published: January 2025

This essay tells the story of adaptations of Macbeth and Hamlet as novels which the author wrote with David Hewson for Audible, how they came to be, and how people responded to them. It reflects upon questions of authorship, collaboration and cultural ownership, and the confusion which arises out of the persistence of a heroic modernist valorization of single authorship which reduces collaboration to either/or binaries pitting the modern ‘adapter’ against the ‘original author’ in battles over authority and authenticity. These battles are uniquely shaped by Shakespeare’s cultural standing and legacy which are unavoidably perceived to be at stake by the audience who might be drawn to such retellings, though many of that audience’s assumptions are problematically loaded with misrememberings, with socio-political projections, and other questionable cultural associations. The essay attempts to consider how the resultant tension to produce something which is at once new and clearly rooted in the adapted material, inevitably runs foul of such assumptions, and how that tension strains and complicates any sense of artistic control and achievement on the part of the contemporary authors.
Tzara’s Chronometer: Literary History and the Antipodal Avant-Gardes
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

Tristan Tzara’s interest in Indigenous and African poetries has consequences for the way we think of national literary history and the internationalism of the avant-gardes. On the one hand it is an avant-garde primitivism, yet on the other it reveals the non-Western origins of the European avant-gardes. Much later this would be confirmed through the actions of international avant-gardes themselves; they would find the inspiration they needed, from the cosmopolitan European avnat-gardes of the early twentieth century, to challenge their own literary establishments. Tzara’s encounters provide the backdrop for the theory of Antipodean avant-gardes as a challenge to the standard literary historical account of the emergence of avant-gardes in Europe. Moreover, this introduces the core theoretical problematic of this book: the contradictions of literary time and literary history; that the study of avant-gardes far away from the European metropoles often reveal more about the core nature and essence of avant-gardes than the study of those exclusively within the metropoles.
Expansive Geometries: Ania Walwicz’s Polish
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

Where with Ern Malley we took seriously the challenge of to the avant-gardes and modernism in the postwar period, here the geopolitical resonances of the post-Soviet world come into view. Walwicz migrates from socialist Poland, only to find herself in multicultural Australia, in which she is “doubly marginalised,” both as migrant and self-proclaimed avant-gardist. Establishing an advanced culture in a stagnating settler society brings forth manifold contradictions. This becomes most pronounced in Walwicz’s “expansive geometries,” or long-form writing, which explore both the lingering memories of socialist society and displacement within settler society. Walwicz’s ideosyncratic annd signature style, her absolute authority in performance and prosody, makes its mark, and defines her era. Walwicz troubles the idea that avant-garde poets could not also be canonical, given her work is studied in Australian universities and high schools. But the contradiction of Polish identity, multiculturalism, geopolitical culture and the place of avant-gardisms within the larger body of national Australian literature remains. Walwicz brings back all the problems outlined in the introductory moments of this book; of West and non-West, of avant-gardes as a challenge to the Europeanising and universalising project.
Lionel Fogarty’s Historical Style
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

Like Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who was not an avant-garde poet, Fogarty, who is often called an avant-gardist, is both an ardent First Nations nationalist and internationalist. Fogarty travelled around the world to rally support for the Indigenous cause, even to Southern Africa, to support national liberation movements there. As one of the most prominent Black socialist and nationalist activists in the history of the continent, Fogarty brings the social dialectics of deep civilisational and national cultures to bear on the internationalism of avant-gardism in the most extreme ways. At once Fogarty’s internationalism seems to issue forth a World Council of poetry – First Nations engagement with the Asia-Pacific, African-Indigenous solidarity, the international movement against Western imperialism, and so on – and yet as poet it comes down to the most elementary level of all poetry; prosody and rhythm. How this political engagement becomes part of Fogarty’s difficult and intricate prosodics needs further study. If Fogarty is an avant-garde poet, he is also a poet of national culture, a poet of his Continent and a poet for all revolutionaries worldwide. And as Mudrooroo put it; guerrilla poetics requires guerrilla reading. How we read Fogarty matters for us and for the future of our planet.
Traitorous Text: Amanda Stewart Off and On the Page
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

Jas Duke was a key inspiration for the performer and Concrete/Sound poet Amanda Stewart. So were the leading figures of the Euro-US avant-gardes, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low and Henri Chopin, who Stewart met and performed with. Stewart’s works embody everything about the development of an Antipodean avant-garde poetics between the centuries – internationally connected, concerned with local and national politics, enthusiastic about avant-gardes style and technique (and as technically accomplished as any European counterpart) yet still ironic or sarcastic about the tradition, as per Malley and Brennan. Like Walwicz, Stewart explicitly identified as avant-garde, as a participant in the avant-garde tradition, and continues to work in various groups like Machine for Making Sense, across experimental music and experimental poetry scenes. Stewart is as avant-garde poets always were and perhaps always will be; a poet on and off the page. As the closing case study, Stewart’s living body of work leaves us suspended in the digital age. What was, what is the Antipodal avant-garde? Does it have a future? What powers lie still dormant now in this long and complex history?
Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf
Authors: Grøtta Marit
Published: January 2025

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. These writers depict scenes where the characters collect, behold, and cherish portrait photographs. At the same time, they pay attention to the difficulty of reading faces, the problem of the unreturned gaze, and the challenge of living with ghost-like doubles. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, the book discusses these writers’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, the book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.
Introduction: Reading Faces in the Age of Portrait Photography
Authors: Grøtta Marit
Published: January 2025

The Introduction outlines the historical and theoretical perspectives that are used in the book as well as its main argument. It first considers how the age of photography offered new premises for the practice of reading of faces, stressing the intimate connection between faces, gazes and technology. Second, it discusses how literature looks at portrait photographs. It argues that the writings of Proust, Kafka and Woolf uncover the emotional and relational implications of portrait photographs and show how the modernist generation tried to come to terms with technical images and mediated faces. The last part considers various theoretical approaches to faces and photographs and discusses how we should understand the complex affective register marking the modernist media paradigm.
Power in Photographs: Franz Kafka
Authors: Grøtta Marit
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the fascination with portrait photographs in Kafka’s writings and argues that his chief interest lies in the power of photographs. It first examines Kafka’s exchange of letters and photographs with his fiancée Felice Bauer, highlighting his attempt at interpreting the photographs and his concern with “unreturned gazes” and gestures. Next, it examines the role of photographs in The Man Who Disappeared, suggesting that the contemplation of photographs in Kafka’s fiction reveals the characters’ emotional attachments, while at the same time exposing ambivalences and dissonances that promote a liberation process. A third section discusses Kafka’s treatment of politically charged photographs, such as lynching photos and photos from the First World War, suggesting that Kafka questions what kind of identification such images create and explores the sinister and violent aspects of photographs circulating early in the twentieth century. The concluding section considers how the photographed subject in Kafka’s day was inscribed in a set of power relations that pulled toward identity or anonymity.
Sympathy in Photographs: Virginia Woolf
Authors: Grøtta Marit
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues that Woolf uses portrait photographs to investigate the problems of sympathy, communication and understanding. It first discusses the technique of “showing seeing” in her early novels (The Voyage Out and Night and Day), suggesting that this is a way of exploring the characters’ confrontation with otherness. Second, it discusses the role of photographs in Orlando. It proposes that the insertion of photographs in the book creates zones of silence and invite the reader to contemplate an album of faces. A third section examines “Three Guineas” in relation to the cosmopolitan gaze and the globalization of emotions. To conclude, the chapter considers Woolf’s engagement with photographs in light of contemporaneous processes of globalization and the reconfiguration of the relation between the familiar and the foreign.
The Fate of Reading in the Work of Joyce: Illusion, Demystification, Sexuality
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

This chapter discloses Joyce’s fascination with and repeated examination of the act and theme of reading and misreading. In Dubliners, an enhanced Bovary-type model prevails, as characters regularly misapply the conclusions of fiction to situations in the real world. A paradigmatic example is found in “An Encounter,” where the passionate reading of Westerns engenders a day of truancy that turns into a very different kind of adventure from the one the boys had imagined---an encounter with a self-identified “bookworm” pederast. The trajectory that appears in A Portrait is rather different, and offers two opposed kinds of reading. In Ulysses, we find a sustained drama of misreading, hidden reading, and of demystified reading. Printed words are repeatedly set forth as potentially or typically deceptive signs that critical readers are urged to see through. In addition, we see entire cycles of furtive readings, particularly as sexually charged materials are hidden and read in isolation.