tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/authors-11603/articles
Authors – The Conversation
2023-10-26T12:31:10Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/215889
2023-10-26T12:31:10Z
2023-10-26T12:31:10Z
To better understand addiction, students in this course take a close look at liquor in literature
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555246/original/file-20231023-15-kxsfnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C31%2C5152%2C3383&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Characters in books can teach lessons about addiction.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/open-book-and-glass-of-white-wine-in-sunlight-royalty-free-image/1219727594?phrase=wine+literature&adppopup=true">Nataliia Shcherbyna via iStock/Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>Alcohol in American Literature</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>I got the idea for the course when I was writing a chapter on the temperance movement in American literature for my doctoral dissertation. I ended up reading a lot of fiction and poetry about alcohol and the anti-alcohol movement. I thought it would be fun to teach a class that <a href="https://www.academia.edu/12903259/_Temperance_Novels_and_Moral_Reform_in_Oxford_History_of_the_Novel_in_English_Oxford_UP_2014_">surveyed American literature through a booze-themed lens</a>. </p>
<p>Since alcohol affects and disables people regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or class, it is easy to find literature about the impact of alcohol from many points of view. </p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>I pair my course with a medical doctor who teaches a course on the <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/addiction-4157312">biology of addiction</a>. In the biology course, students learn about the <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/addiction-overview-4581803">biological and physiological effects</a> of diseases of addiction, <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/substance-use-vs-substance-use-disorder-whats-the-difference-6385961">substance use and abuse</a>, dependency and recovery.</p>
<p>The core curriculum at John Carroll University requires students to take paired courses from different departments that are linked together. A colleague who teaches biology courses approached me about linking my alcohol class to her addiction class. Students must take both of our courses during the same semester. The combined courses give students both a scientific and literary view of addiction. </p>
<p>Students read fiction, poetry and drama about many aspects of alcohol and other addictive substances: celebrating them, struggling with them, even prohibiting and regulating them. Students compare the literary representations of substance and alcohol abuse with medical descriptions and impacts. For example, when my class reads Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person">Cat Person,</a>” we talk about the role of alcohol in reducing inhibition when casually dating.</p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>My goal is for students to come to a better understanding of how alcohol influences literature. They learn how some writers portray the way alcoholism further marginalizes minorities. For example, characters in <a href="https://fallsapart.com/">Sherman Alexie</a>’s “<a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-lone-ranger-and-tonto-fistfight-in-heaven-20th-anniversary-edition-sherman-alexie/12459512?ean=9780802121998">The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven</a>” are enrolled members of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. They live on the reservation and have great difficulty finding or keeping a job. Many characters suffer from intergenerational trauma, poverty and a pervasive addiction to alcohol. </p>
<p>For their final project, students must pitch a movie that offers a compelling plot with relatable characters. The storyline must be backed up by a deep understanding of the science of disease and addiction. </p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>• “<a href="https://tinhouse.com/book/night-of-the-living-rez/">Night of the Living Rez</a>,” by Morgan Talty, explores addiction and poverty among the Penobscot Nation.</p>
<p>• “<a href="https://www.hemingwayhome.com/store/p/the-sun-also-rises-softcover">The Sun Also Rises</a>,” by Ernest Hemingway, is a classic novel set in 1920s Paris about a set of heavy-drinking American ex-pats dealing with the trauma of World War I.</p>
<p>• We visit <a href="https://karamuhouse.org/">Karamu House</a>, the U.S.’s oldest continuing African American theater, to watch a performance of “<a href="https://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=6301">Clyde’s</a>,” a popular play by Lynn Nottage that is set in a truck stop sandwich shop that employs the recently incarcerated.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>Students can be better advocates for their own personal health, and the health of others, if they understand how addictive substances affect their minds and bodies. Pre-health students in particular get a general introduction to medical issues related to addiction and how American authors have long portrayed booze. </p>
<p>For example, Frances Watkins Harper’s “<a href="https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/full-texts-of-classic-works/the-two-offers-by-frances-watkins-harper/">The Two Offers</a>,” written in the 1850s, is believed to be the first short story ever published by an African American woman. It is a temperance story that encourages young women not to marry a drunkard, highlighting the antebellum Black community’s concerns about sobriety and domestic well-being, in addition to freedom.</p>
<p>The course hones students’ critical reading and writing skills while challenging them to think about the role of alcohol, substance abuse, sobriety and recovery in their lives and in American culture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215889/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Debra J. Rosenthal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This course beckons students to examine how alcoholic beverages are portrayed in books by American authors.
Debra J. Rosenthal, Professor of English, John Carroll University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213602
2023-09-19T12:15:09Z
2023-09-19T12:15:09Z
This course uses ‘climate fiction’ to teach about the perils that a warming planet faces
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548581/original/file-20230915-35026-le1o7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Storytelling can be an effective way to impart lessons in science.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/global-warming-royalty-free-image/157419001">imagedepotpro/E+ Collection/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>“Climate Change Literature”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>After reading many fiction books that featured themes of climate change, I felt compelled to create a course that would allow students to do the same. The idea was to have students learn about our planetary crisis by exploring how it’s portrayed in literature.</p>
<p>At John Carroll University, students are required to take paired courses that are tethered together from two different departments. I approached a colleague who teaches a biology course about climate science to see if he wanted to link his course to mine. Students must co-enroll in both of our courses during the same semester. The combined courses give students both a scientific and literary view of climate change. In my colleague’s class, students learn about <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022">carbon dioxide emissions</a> and the like. Then, in my class, they study how fiction writers and poets incorporate concerns about the effects of rising temperatures into their work.</p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>The major work of fiction we read is Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/flight-behavior-barbara-kingsolver?variant=32206054916130">Flight Behavior</a>,” about a low-income family in Appalachia. Millions of monarch butterflies become confused by warming temperatures and accidentally overwinter on the family farm, setting off much conflict. We also read lots of poetry and short fiction with themes of the impacts of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/13/global-heating-more-accurate-to-describe-risks-to-planet-says-key-scientist">planetary heating</a>. We read some fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Tommy Orange, Olivia Clare, Jess Walter and more. Poets include Matthew Olzmann, Nickole Brown, Ross Gay, Dante Di Stefano and Craig Santos Perez. </p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>By reading climate fiction and poetry, students learn how overreliance on fossil fuels overlaps with issues of <a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5632/">economic injustice</a>, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9363288/">racial disparities in climate impacts</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html">climate migration</a>. We explore narrative voice, structure, imagery, plot, dialogue, style and other textual concerns in creative works influenced by living in the <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene/">Anthropocene</a> – or the period, according to some scientists, when human activity began to significantly affect the planet’s climate and ecosystems. <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/when-did-the-anthropocene-actually-begin/">That period</a> is thought by some climate change experts to have <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/the-human-epoch-when-did-the-anthropocene-begin">begun in the 1950s</a>. Through classroom discussion, we share the collective experience of engaging with characters who navigate a threatened world.</p>
<p>To integrate the biology and English classes, the students’ final projects are pitches for a Hollywood movie that portrays a changed world due to planetary heating while also getting the science right. The assignment is harder than it sounds: Students must understand the harmful results of carbon emissions and craft a compelling story.</p>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>Climate change is an existential crisis <a href="https://www.wri.org/insights/2023-ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report-climate-change-findings">affecting us all right now</a>. Many students do not study Earth science in high school; their first, and possibly only, exposure to evidence-based climate change happens in college. Authors address consequences such as warming temperatures, ocean acidification, desertification and sea-level rise. Thus, literature has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate disruption.</p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>Literature helps us feel the immediacy of what’s at stake in a climate-changed world. The storytelling in fiction and poetry teaches us much that scientific and policy reports, charts, graphs and forecasts cannot. While data can predict rising sea levels, for example, a short story such as <a href="https://lithub.com/new-jesus/">Tommy Orange’s “New Jesus” </a> shows us how it feels to live in a submerged town where residents’ feet are always wet. Climate researchers predict the increasing desertification of the American Southwest. Through <a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/325/tamarisk-hunter-Bacigalupi">Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story “The Tamarisk Hunter,”</a> readers experience what it looks like to see towns abandoned due to the lack of water, and golf courses where sand traps no longer exist because the entire course has turned to sand.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>Analyzing fiction and poetry sharpens students’ critical interpretive skills and prepares them to think originally and creatively as they enter a workforce altered and threatened by climate change. For example, pre-health majors will see the impacts of climate change on the human body. Business majors will need to know how to operate when extreme weather and disrupted supply chains affect the bottom line.</p>
<p>Our two paired courses combine science and literature to equip students with expansive ways of asking questions about their role in the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213602/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Debra J. Rosenthal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Poetry and prose are prominent features in this course about how climate change is affecting the world.
Debra J. Rosenthal, Professor of English, John Carroll University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213690
2023-09-18T12:19:43Z
2023-09-18T12:19:43Z
‘Big Bang of Numbers’ – The Conversation’s book club explores how math alone could create the universe with author Manil Suri
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548584/original/file-20230915-21-llxf3v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=30%2C36%2C4059%2C2955&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fractals emerge on Day 4 of Suri's playful Genesis-inspired narrative about math's role in creation.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/abstract-glowing-swirl-backgrounds-royalty-free-image/1129644961">oxygen/Moment via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Conversation U.S. launched its new book club with a bang – talking to mathematician <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lFWFsSkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">Manil Suri</a> about his nonfiction work “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324007036">The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math</a>.” Suri, <a href="https://theconversation.com/pi-gets-all-the-fanfare-but-other-numbers-also-deserve-their-own-math-holidays-200046">a previous</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/want-to-fix-gerrymandering-then-the-supreme-court-needs-to-listen-to-mathematicians-114345">author in</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/declines-in-math-readiness-underscore-the-urgency-of-math-awareness-202691">The Conversation</a>, has also written an award-winning <a href="https://www.manilsuri.com/books">fiction trilogy</a>, in addition to being a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.</em></p>
<p><em>Below is an edited excerpt from the book club discussion. You’re welcome to keep the conversation flowing by adding your own questions for Suri to the comments.</em></p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Watch the full book club meeting and leave your own question in the comments at the bottom of this article.</span></figcaption>
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<p><strong>What is the Big Bang of numbers and where do you go from there in the book?</strong></p>
<p>I think the story for me started way back when I was an undergraduate in Bombay. My algebra professor told us this very famous saying by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-Kronecker">Leopold Kronecker</a>, the famous mathematician, that God gave us the integers and all the rest is the work of human beings. What he meant was that once you have the whole numbers – 1, 2, 3, 4 – which are somehow coming from heaven, then you can build up the rest of mathematics from it.</p>
<p>And then he went on and said, Hey, I can actually do better. I don’t need God. I can actually, as a mathematician, create the numbers out of nothing. And he showed us this marvelous, almost magic trick, where you start with something called the empty set and then you start building the numbers.</p>
<p>It was the closest I’ve been to a religious experience, almost like the walls just dissolved and suddenly there were numbers everywhere. </p>
<p>Once I started writing my novels, I was meeting a lot of people who were artists and writers. And they would always say, you know, we used to love math when we were in school, but afterward we never had a chance to really pursue it. And can you tell us something about your mathematics?</p>
<p>So, I started building a kind of talk, which started with this big bang, as I call it, building the numbers out of nothing. I finally decided I should write a math book, and it would be aimed at a wide audience.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo of a sea shell with light triangles of various sizes" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548579/original/file-20230915-29605-ileohl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Patterns in nature, like the triangles on this shell, can be explained by simple mathematical rules.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324007036">Larry Cole</a></span>
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<p>And I said, well, can you go further? You can create the numbers, but can you actually start building everything, including the whole universe from that? So that was a way to try to lay out mathematics almost as a story where one thing follows from the other and everything is embedded in one narrative.</p>
<p><strong>Who were you imagining to be your readers as you were writing the book?</strong></p>
<p>There’s just so much joy to be had out of mathematics, so many things that you don’t really see in normal courses where the emphasis is always on doing the calculations, finding the right answer. So this book is written for people who want to really engage with mathematics on the level of ideas rather than get into computations and calculations.</p>
<p><strong>After you set off your Big Bang of numbers, you dig in to some of life’s big questions. What do you see as math’s role in grappling with those big thoughts, like where the universe came from, why we even exist and so on?</strong></p>
<p>Once you start talking about the Big Bang, what comes into your mind is creation. There is a doctrine called <em>creatio ex nihilo</em>, which is basically creating everything out of nothing. </p>
<p>That’s a cornerstone of many religions where God creates the universe out of nothing. It’s also in some sense being explored by physicists, where you have some sort of singularity and from that, everything emerges in the Big Bang.</p>
<p>So my thought was, both these areas, religion and physics, are in the public’s imagination much more than mathematics is. Is there a way to posit math as the creative force of everything?</p>
<p>Physicist <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1963/wigner/biographical/">Eugene Wigner</a>, who was a Nobel laureate, talked about the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics at describing everything in our physical universe. It’s so good at modeling physics and what have you. Could it be that math is really the true driving force of the universe? Rather than us just inventing it and using it to describe the universe, could the universe really be describing mathematics? Then the universe is just a physical manifestation, an approximation, if you will, of those mathematical ideas. It’s a completely different view of math.</p>
<p><strong>There’s an ongoing debate over whether math is something that people invented or whether it’s something that exists independently of us. In the book, you say that perhaps the deepest insight that math can offer us is that it’s both of those things.</strong></p>
<p>So the glib answer to your question whether math’s invented or discovered is that you have to create a new word. Instead of discovered or invented it’s “disvented.”</p>
<p>What I mean by that is simply that there are some questions we really can’t get to any kind of logical or supportable answer. One is the question of our own existence – people might believe one thing or the other, but it always comes down to: Is there some real purpose to our lives, or is our creation just something that happened randomly – you know, molecules getting together?</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="silhouette of a head with lots of math notations exploding out" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548576/original/file-20230915-19-czqnre.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Is math something that is born from the human mind?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324007036">'The Big Bang of Numbers'</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Now if we invent mathematics, then we’re inventing it for a purpose. If it just generates by itself, starting with emptiness, building around numbers in some strange realm that we don’t know about, then it’s just wafting around, purposeless.</p>
<p>Math has that duality that can’t be resolved. So it’s a metaphor, telling us, hey, you can’t decide for math, and you’ll never be able to decide for yourself about your own existence. </p>
<p><strong>Can you tell us a bit about your previous books, the Indian novels?</strong></p>
<p>The first one was called “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393342826">The Death of Vishnu</a>.” I went back to visit my parents in Mumbai in around 1995, and this man Vishnu, who used to live in our building and do errands, was dying on our steps. I started writing this as a short story.</p>
<p>It started going into a more philosophical realm when a writing teacher said, you know, Vishnu is also the name of the caretaker of the universe in Hindu mythology. So if you name somebody Vishnu, you need to somehow explore that. So that’s what opened up this whole new world for me.</p>
<p>The second book was “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393333633">The Age of Shiva</a>.” That one’s the journey of a woman right after India’s independence in 1947. She’s making her way in a very male-dominated world, and she’s not perfect.</p>
<p>Then the third one, I decided, OK, I need to put in some science and math characters. So “<a href="https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393346817-the-city-of-devi-77f37252-adcc-41f0-9b53-383405f76cab">The City of Devi</a>” actually has both a physicist and a statistician. Again it’s in Mumbai, set in the future with the threat of a nuclear war with Pakistan and a love triangle unfolding in front of that. </p>
<p>It’s kind of interesting. I thought that I was done with this mythical “where do we come from?” kind of philosophy that I had in the three books, but apparently not, because now “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324007036">The Big Bang of Numbers</a>” looks at it from a mathematical perspective.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213690/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
A book-length thought experiment uses math to investigate some of life’s big questions.
Maggie Villiger, Senior Science + Technology Editor
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211429
2023-09-17T20:00:21Z
2023-09-17T20:00:21Z
Substack newsletters are a literary trend. What’s the appeal – and what should you read?
<p>Every week since August 2021, Australian author Bri Lee has released a regular weekly Substack newsletter, <a href="https://newsandreviews.substack.com">News & Reviews</a>, to thousands of paid and unpaid subscribers. </p>
<p>The “news” offers commentary on current events and Lee’s particular interests and knowledge areas. “Reviews” can be of just about anything, ranging from books and articles to film and television, or fashion, architecture, events and miscellaneous “fancy things”.</p>
<p>The writing is erudite and well informed, but also very personal. The newsletter has been successful enough to support the launch of a monthly “magazine” edition of News & Reviews, featuring work from a range of other writers, like <a href="https://theconversation.com/stella-prize-shortlist-2023-your-guide-to-6-gripping-courageous-books-202958">Stella Prize shortlisted</a> graphic novelist Eloise Grills and playwright and <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/news/a-u-new-imprint-joan-curated-by-nakkiah-lui">Allen & Unwin publisher</a> Nakkiah Lui.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547709/original/file-20230912-18248-qa221i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eloise Grills is one of the writers who contribute to Bri Lee’s Substack publication.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.eloisegrills.com/">Oscar Miller</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Newsletter publications like News & Reviews are becoming increasingly popular outlets for writers at all stages of their careers. <a href="https://www.asauthors.org.au/news/monetising-your-newsletter-bri-lee-shares-her-experience-using-substack-to-supplement-her-income/">Lee notes</a> it provides a useful way of generating regular income between her longer form, traditionally published writing. It also allows her a level of direct connection with her audience, without the algorithmic “flattening” of social media. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/big-beautiful-females-and-familiar-dystopias-new-graphic-nonfiction-interrogates-21st-century-life-182224">Big beautiful females and familiar dystopias: new graphic nonfiction interrogates 21st-century life</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>How Substack works</h2>
<p>Lee was also drawn to the convenience of Substack itself. Newsletters can be managed from a simple dashboard on the platform and start-up costs are virtually nonexistent. </p>
<p>Rather than charge writers a fee, Substack takes a cut of revenue generated by reader subscriptions. Free and paywalled content tiers can be easily included in each newsletter. </p>
<p>Substack and similar platforms allow readers to directly support writers they care about. And writers are free to pursue niche topics and areas of interest, targeting smaller, more invested audiences.</p>
<p>Early adopters of Substack, like <a href="https://sinocism.com">Bill Bishop</a> and <a href="https://tsa.substack.com">Kelly Dwyer</a>, were largely journalists and media commentators who had already established a dedicated readership via news sites. In recent years, however, they have been increasingly joined by literary authors like <a href="https://marygaitskill.substack.com">Mary Gaitskill</a>, <a href="https://cheeseburgergothic.substack.com">John Birmingham</a>, and <a href="https://salmanrushdie.substack.com">Salman Rushdie</a>, among others. </p>
<p>This comes at a time when it’s arguably <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjQn7H5iaKBAxXOk1YBHe4zAKkQFnoECBcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.canberratimes.com.au%2Fstory%2F8009112%2Fthe-free-market-is-tough-on-australian-writing-does-the-country-need-a-national-publisher%2F&usg=AOvVaw03ogJJkekvCPI9WEK6OIXO&opi=89978449">much harder</a> to publish literary fiction – and author incomes from conventional publication are <a href="https://theconversation.com/two-thirds-of-australian-authors-are-women-new-research-finds-they-earn-just-18-200-a-year-from-their-writing-195426">often unsatisfactory</a>.</p>
<p>Might Substack newsletters emerge as a viable alternative to print and digital books, and the conventional model of literary publishing?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-salman-rushdies-decision-to-publish-on-substack-the-death-of-the-novel-167530">Is Salman Rushdie's decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>New writing by leading authors</h2>
<p>This seemed like a possible direction in 2021, when several prominent authors began to publish their new fiction through the platform. <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-salman-rushdies-decision-to-publish-on-substack-the-death-of-the-novel-167530">Salman Rushdie</a> and <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/87409-chuck-palahniuk-to-serialize-a-novel-on-substack.html">Chuck Palahniuk</a> were among the early adopters. </p>
<p>Both Rushdie and Palahniuk were deliberately courted via the <a href="https://on.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers">Substack Pro program</a>, which incentivises successful writers to publish content on Substack by offering them advance funding. This initiative has been a source of some <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/substack-backlash/">controversy</a> because Substack does not generally disclose which writers are on the Pro program, nor the size of the advances they are paid. </p>
<p>However, literary authors are not really using Substack as a replacement for conventional books. Rather, Substack publication can provide their subscribers with a kind of “early access period” for forthcoming works. </p>
<p>Palahniuk completed the serialisation of his novel Greener Pastures in 2022, and the novel is now <a href="https://chuckpalahniuk.substack.com/p/closed-for-renovations">due for publication</a> with Simon and Schuster next year. </p>
<p>Similarly, UK author Hanif Kureishi is reworking his Substack reflections on his experience of being paralysed into a memoir, Shattered, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/18/hanif-kureishi-to-publish-memoir-about-accident-that-left-him-paralysed-shattered">also due to be published</a> in 2024. It may be fair to say Substack operates more as a supplement to traditional literary publishing than as its alternative. </p>
<p>Often authors are using Substack for forms of writing that wouldn’t always be viable in other mediums. Since the last instalment of Greener Pastures, Palahniuk’s newsletter, <a href="https://chuckpalahniuk.substack.com">Plot Spoiler</a>, has largely focused on personal reminiscences and updates, as well as curating new short fiction from himself and his writing students. </p>
<p>Mary Gaitskill was invited to the platform in mid-2022 as Substack’s “writer in residence”. Since then, she has delivered a brilliant series of <a href="https://marygaitskill.substack.com">fortnightly essays</a> on wide-ranging topics. She has shared her thoughts on the <a href="https://marygaitskill.substack.com/p/two-minutes-of-hate">Depp-Heard trial</a>, the <a href="https://marygaitskill.substack.com/p/incels">“incel” movement</a>, and the handling of public <a href="https://marygaitskill.substack.com/p/writing-about-rape">sex abuse scandals</a>. This is interspersed with insightful reviews and interviews with other writers.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547714/original/file-20230912-21-g6jjky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mary Gaitskill was invited to Substack as ‘writer in residence’ in mid-2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/4984681833/sizes/o/in/set-72157624812563361/">Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By contrast, George Saunders’ Substack, <a href="https://georgesaunders.substack.com">Story Club</a>, has more of an explicitly educational focus. It offers guided, page-by-page readings of classic short stories, often combined with associated prompts and exercises for aspiring writers. </p>
<p>Saunders uses the newsletter format to make rigorous, textually focused literary criticism more accessible. According to Saunders, discussion of the mechanics of writing and narrative construction should not just be confined to creative writing classrooms. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/gut-punches-and-belly-laughs-in-george-saunders-dark-flights-of-fantasy-theres-the-gleam-of-something-precious-191347">Gut-punches and belly laughs: in George Saunders' dark flights of fantasy there's the gleam of something precious</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Immediacy and intimacy</h2>
<p>The appeal of author newsletters has probably come to reside more in the immediacy and intimacy of these kinds of writings, rather than the prospect of an advance look at forthcoming or developing fiction. </p>
<p>The novels will arrive eventually, but until then it can be enjoyable to find out what is on an author’s mind in any given week, through pieces like Salman Rushdie’s <a href="https://salmanrushdie.substack.com/p/movie-nights-1">brief, withering assessment</a> of Denis Villeneuve’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/">Dune</a>.</p>
<p>Australian authors who have taken to Substack have followed some similar trajectories. </p>
<p>For the award-winning memoirist Maggie Mackellar, her <a href="https://maggiemackellar.substack.com">newsletter</a> is a weekly impetus for work that may go into a future book, as well as the chance “to write exactly what I want and not have to fit into a magazine’s agenda”. Mackellar’s Sydney Review of Books <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/mackellar-newsletter-curious-experiment/">essay</a> on the merits of the newsletter as a literary form is worth investigating. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=288&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=288&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=288&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547717/original/file-20230912-3061-pg6s6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Maggie Mackellar’s Substack is a weekly prompt for work that may go into a future book.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Other writers, like YA authors <a href="https://emilygale.substack.com">Emily Gale</a> and <a href="https://liliwilkinson.substack.com">Lili Wilkinson</a>, use Substack newsletters to engage their readers by offering tips and advice for writing, insights into what they’ve recently been reading and pop-culture commentary. </p>
<h2>The Paris End</h2>
<p>More recently, a new publication from Melbourne writers Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz follows the magazine-like Substack model explored by Bri Lee. <a href="https://theparisend.substack.com">The Paris End</a> typically delivers two to three long-form essays each month (illustrated by cartoonist Aaron Billings) and a bi-weekly review section covering trends, books, dining and more. </p>
<p>The Paris End is hyperlocal in its focus and very conversational in style. Its writers are dedicated to reviving “the art of reportage”: they get out into the streets of Melbourne to interview locals and explore issues and events firsthand. </p>
<p>It aims to move away from the trend towards removed and highly reflective online writing on current events and controversies. By contrast, the Paris End writers get involved – they put themselves into the stories. </p>
<p>So far, they have covered <a href="https://theparisend.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-the-green-haired-girls">gender studies controversies</a> at the University of Melbourne, the <a href="https://theparisend.substack.com/p/design-files-mindset">Nightingale apartment project</a>, the revival of <a href="https://theparisend.substack.com/p/mass-appeal">traditional Catholicism</a>, the (second!) <a href="https://theparisend.substack.com/p/the-tote-autonomous-zone">campaign to save </a> historical Melbourne music venue The Tote, Jordan Peterson’s <a href="https://theparisend.substack.com/p/reply-guy-resurrected">recent Melbourne visit</a>, and more. </p>
<p>The pieces are characterised by a sense of genial curiosity and open-mindedness. While the authors are forthright about their own positions, they are generally willing to give space to contrary voices in their pieces and entertain alternative points of view. </p>
<p>As a model, the Paris End writers <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/art-and-design/melbourne-meets-the-new-yorker-the-bold-new-magazine-reviewing-the-city-20230725-p5dr21.html">are drawn</a> to the wry, gossipy voice of the early New Yorker, which flourished in the early 20th century when there was still a sense New York was just “a big country town”. </p>
<p>It’s a term that no longer fits New York, but possibly applies to Melbourne today – and the awkward meeting point between booming big city populations and lingering small-town mentalities The Paris End’s editors aim to capture. </p>
<p>The Paris End is like the New Yorker if the entire magazine consisted of feature-length “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/talk-of-the-town">Talk of the Town</a>” pieces. It feels distinct and unique, and it is difficult to imagine it being delivered through any other medium. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/substack-isnt-a-new-model-for-journalism-its-a-very-old-one-151245">Substack isn't a new model for journalism – it’s a very old one</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Is it sustainable?</h2>
<p>The growing volume of author newsletters on Substack and other platforms is already starting to feel overwhelming for some, however. After making a few well-intentioned subscriptions, my inbox is now starting to fill with unopened newsletters. They are in good company with the unwatched shows on my Netflix list, and the unread books on my shelves. </p>
<p>While there are benefits to the regular writing habits demanded by the newsletter model, it may not always be sustainable. Mary Gaitskill, for instance, has <a href="https://marygaitskill.substack.com/p/just-stepping-out-for-a-bit">just announced</a> a lengthy break, so she can concentrate on fiction writing: “I’ve been trying to work on fiction and do SStack and for right now it’s not working.” </p>
<p>For some authors, the income stream it generates may help to support longer writing projects. For others, the grind of generating enough weekly or fortnightly content to retain paid subscriber bases may not be worthwhile or workable. </p>
<p>One issue is that Substack users will typically need to have a preexisting readership and established networks. In most cases, writers will need to also be publishing material through other outlets to establish and maintain an audience for their newsletters. </p>
<p>Substack has recently attempted to make it easier for writers to promote their work directly on the platform. They have launched the Twitter-like <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/5/23670452/substack-notes-tweets-posts-twitter">Notes</a> for shorter content, and added the ability for readers to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/5/23670452/substack-notes-tweets-posts-twitter">follow</a> writers’ profiles and updates before they subscribe to their newsletters. </p>
<p>These developments are moving Substack more in the direction of conventional social media, and it is not yet known whether they will help writers to establish or build audiences. </p>
<p>Despite these efforts, X (formerly Twitter) remains an important promotional tool for Substack writers. Strong engagement on the platform is often indicative of success on Substack (and has been one of the criteria used to recruit writers to Substack Pro). </p>
<p>This dependence is not always beneficial, however. In April of this year, links to Substack content were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/11/row-between-twitter-and-substack-ends-with-uneasy-truce">temporarily prohibited</a> on Twitter. At the time, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk had publicly objected to the similarities between Substack Notes and Twitter. </p>
<p>The matter now appears to be resolved, but it demonstrates how the current volatility surrounding X can impact Substack writers.</p>
<p>These concerns aside, Substack is still arguably the most prominent and accessible email newsletter platform available. Its rapid adoption by both local and international authors has resulted in the creation of fascinating and innovative new content.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211429/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Novitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
So many authors are creating Substack newsletters – from Bri Lee’s magazine-like News & Reviews, to George Saunders’ writing tips and Hanif Kureishi’s reflections on being paralysed. But can it last?
Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/203642
2023-04-26T12:27:13Z
2023-04-26T12:27:13Z
The invasion of Iraq defined US’ foreign relations – but in popular Iraqi literature, the war is just a piece of the country’s complex history
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522380/original/file-20230421-4069-2z6dne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Iraqis shop in Baghdad's famous book market in July 2022. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1241645580/photo/iraq-daily-life.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=OQhTZ4qR5aPJyNaS_M-YkuDY40ockiWCrrwJ6g7wMyA=">Sabah Arar/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s been just over 20 years since the <a href="https://www.cfr.org/timeline/iraq-war">United States invaded Iraq</a>. Some Americans have largely forgotten about the invasion, despite the fact the Sept. 11 attacks that precipitated it still loom large in U.S. national memory. Even during the heart of the war in 2006, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/14/upshot/if-americans-can-find-north-korea-on-a-map-theyre-more-likely-to-prefer-diplomacy.html">most young Americans</a> could not find Iraq on a map. </p>
<p>Many Iraqis, though, have a more nuanced, deeper understanding of the country’s recent history: An understanding which can be seen in their literature – and particularly in the contemporary, post-invasion literature that <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/middleeast/people/faculty/reneeran.html">scholars like me study</a>. </p>
<p>For the past two decades, <a href="https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/iraq-corporeality-and-memory/">Iraqi literature</a> in particular has undertaken a <a href="https://arablit.org/2022/01/05/focus-iraq-canonical-works-new-voices/">deep excavation</a> of its recent past, going far beyond the confines of the U.S. invasion. </p>
<p>Iraqi literature sometimes reflects on the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/world/middleeast/30saddam.html">dictatorship of Saddam Hussein</a>, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Iraq-War">Iran-Iraq war</a> in the 1980s, and the <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/net-migration">experience of immigration</a> to Western countries – in addition to 9/11 and the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq following false claims of Saddam’s possessing weapons of mass destruction. </p>
<p>In other words, while many in the U.S. have focused on Iraq through the lens of the 2003 invasion, these events are not the heart of contemporary Iraqi literature.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man wearing a hat has smiling eyes and looks toward a person who is obscured, except for their hand." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522378/original/file-20230421-4894-le0097.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim appears at a book event in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://flickr.com/photos/bokmassan/21708918793/in/photolist-z5kTek-yP7h3S-2gEaEjT">Niklas Maupoix/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Literary timelines of Iraqi history</h2>
<p>The short stories of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313242/the-corpse-exhibition-by-hassan-blasim/">Hassan Blasim</a> and <a href="https://store.deepvellum.org/products/no-windmills-in-basra">Diaa Jubaili</a>, two modern Iraqi storytellers who have both found critical acclaim in Western media, offer a way to understand some of the literary narratives of recent Iraqi history. </p>
<p><a href="https://hassanblasim.net">Blasim, a filmmaker</a> and writer born in Baghdad in 1973, currently lives in Finland. Jubaili, born in 1977 in Basra near the borders with Kuwait and Iran, has remained in Basra.</p>
<p>Their stories present the U.S. invasion and its consequences as part of a longer history of foreign occupations and internal political violence in Iraq. </p>
<p>This history of violence, their fiction suggests, has roots in the mid-20th century. During that time, newly independent Iraq’s successive governments, and their foreign backers, attempted to chart a path forward for the country. </p>
<p>Blasim and Jubaili show that it is the intervening decades, as opposed to just the U.S. invasion in 2003, that have come to define modern Iraq. </p>
<p>In fact, several of their short stories are written about Iraq’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Persian-Gulf-War">previous wars</a> and the dictatorship of Saddam, with no reference to the U.S. invasion. When their stories do reference the invasion, it is often as one of a litany of violent events.</p>
<p>Somewhat improbably, many of their stories creatively retell a broad swath of Iraqi history in just a few short pages – an undertaking that might make a historian or political scientist break out in hives. </p>
<p>How could one possibly reduce such complexity to a few pages? </p>
<p>To <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/books/2022/09/06/iraqi-author-diaa-jubailis-no-windmills-in-basra-is-a-surrealist-ode-to-his-home-town/">quote Jubaili</a>: “There is no need to write a story with a lot of words when the idea behind it can only sustain a few lines.” </p>
<h2>Simple ideas</h2>
<p>Jubaili’s themes – entailing the disorientation caused by cyclical wars – – seem to be summed up in a single line in one of his stories, “The Frog.” </p>
<p>In this story, an enterprising man realizes he will turn a large profit selling frogs that he catches in Basra’s Shatt al-Arab river to East Asian oil refinery workers. One day, he catches a “giant frogman” who has been living in the river since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Disoriented, the frogman panics, asking the frog catcher: “Is the war over?”</p>
<p>Which war, indeed? By virtue of its geographic position, Basra was at the epicenter of the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.</p>
<p>But Iraq also experienced <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/remembering-iraqi-uprising-twenty-five-years-ago">political revolutions in 1991</a>, during which armed Kurdish and Shiite minorities attempted to depose Saddam. <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/iraq-invades-kuwait">Iraq also invaded Kuwait</a> in 1990 because of territorial ambitions. This led the United Nations to issue <a href="https://archive.globalpolicy.org/previous-issues-and-debate-on-iraq/41759.html">crippling economic sanctions</a> for the next 13 years.</p>
<p>Like the frogman, the lives of Jubaili’s characters are marked by many of these events.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A brown-skinned middle-aged man looks directly at the camera. He wears a dark blue shirt and sits in front of a dark background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522379/original/file-20230421-14-3g9o5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Iraqi author Diaa Jubaili is an example of a writer from the country who mentions, but does not focus excessively on, the U.S. invasion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/ضياء_جبيلي_1.jpg">Diaa1977/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A closer read</h2>
<p>Where Jubaili’s stories are often absurd and vaguely humorous, Blasim’s prize-winning short stories are hard to read. His prose unflinchingly describes all manners of violence and human suffering. </p>
<p>In the <a href="https://apersonalanthology.com/2019/10/18/the-hole-by-hassan-blasim/">2014 short story</a> “The Hole,” a man fleeing masked gunmen in Baghdad trips and falls into a deep pit. Quickly, he realizes that he is not the only person trapped there. There is another man: someone who claims to be a jinn – or genie – who fell in while fleeing persecutors during the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Caliphate/The-Abbasid-caliphate">Abbasid Caliphate</a>, which ruled the area that is now Iraq from 750 to 1500 C.E. Also sharing the hole is the corpse of a Russian soldier from the <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/finlands-winter-war-with-the-soviet-union/30280490.html">Soviet-Finnish war</a>, waged from 1939 to 1940. </p>
<p>After a few pages, a woman covered in electronics fleeing a dystopic, futuristic robot falls into the hole, as well. The hole becomes a metaphor for a chain that links “bloody fights, repetitive and disgusting” across time and space, according to the story. </p>
<p>History, it seems, acts as “a photocopier churning out copies” upon which are imprinted “the same face, a face shaped by pain and torment,” as Blasim writes. </p>
<p>In another of Blasim’s short stories, “The Madman of Freedom Square,” a man considered insane by the people of his town narrates three generations of his family history against the backdrop of the ebbs and flows of competing 20th-century political and religious ideologies. </p>
<p>In the story’s final lines, set in the present day, a stranger talks the unwitting narrator, “the madman of Freedom Square,” into wearing an explosives-strapped vest. </p>
<p>Ultimately, these stories encourage readers to elevate the importance of human lives over the events that are said to define them.</p>
<p>This literature resists narratives of the U.S. invasion as a supposedly exceptional event. It also resists the tokenized testimonies of the survivors of the occupation: those faces that are the usual focus of media coverage, academic scholarship and political punditry in the U.S. </p>
<p>And even in the stories’ insistence on the ever-presence of death, whether in Blasim’s macabre and violent tones or in Jubaili’s sometimes-humorous, sometimes-absurd ones, this literature becomes a metaphor for the immense fortitude that it takes to survive and give meaning to one’s world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203642/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Renee Ragin Randall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The short stories of modern Iraqi writers Hassan Blasim and Diaa Jubaili show that the 2003 invasion and subsequent war in Iraq are not at the heart of contemporary Iraqi literature.
Renee Ragin Randall, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies, University of Michigan
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/203036
2023-04-24T19:22:58Z
2023-04-24T19:22:58Z
Cancel culture: YouTube videos on ‘getting cancelled’ are now their own genre and have links to the past
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522406/original/file-20230421-18-3j3jq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C178%2C4322%2C3034&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The aptly-titled video 'Canceling,' by cultural commentator and YouTuber ContraPoints, crystallized the cancellation video genre. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">(Wikipedia)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/cancel-culture--youtube-videos-on--getting-cancelled--are-now-their-own-genre-and-have-links-to-the-past" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>The <a href="https://umaine.edu/undiscoveredmaine/small-business/resources/marketing-for-small-business/social-media-tools/social-media-statistics-details/">explosion of</a> user-created content on platforms like YouTube, Twitch and TikTok has unsettled traditional notions of authorship.</p>
<p>We can consider relationships between authors and audiences, and their roles in the creative process, by examining how some YouTubers have addressed critiques of their public commentary after they have been “cancelled.”</p>
<p>Cancelling is a colloquial term applied to anything from discussion about an author with a critical tone to internet pile-ons or <a href="https://theconversation.com/social-media-misogyny-the-new-way-andrew-tate-brought-us-the-same-old-hate-191928">campaigns to deplatform individuals</a> after that person does something their audience perceives as wrong. </p>
<p>There is <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/30/20879720/what-is-cancel-culture-explained-history-debate">much debate</a> as to whether cancelling is a real phenomenon. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, videos where YouTubers address their own cancellation, answer their audiences’ questions about their public mistake and correct misunderstandings suggest <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.002">forms of authorship that predate the modern emphasis</a> on an individual creator.</p>
<p>Jessie Krahn, one of the authors of this story, has studied these “cancellation videos” as a unique sub-genre of YouTube apology videos.</p>
<h2>Direct response to audience desire</h2>
<p>In a 2019 article in <em>Vice</em>, Bettina Makalintal wrote that YouTubers’
“<a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywykzb/how-youtubers-james-charles-jaclyn-hill-pewdiepie-turned-the-apology-video-into-a-genre">apologies — like lipsticks — have become just another product” and their own genre</a>. YouTube apology videos feature a YouTuber unequivocally taking responsibility for one accusation. </p>
<p>In YouTube cancellation videos, by contrast, creators take responsibility for some of the accusations, question the validity of others and address the dynamics of social media cancellation more broadly in relation to their own situation. These videos are created in direct response to audience desire. </p>
<p>YouTubers frame these videos as opportunities to be <a href="https://www.sociomix.com/diaries/entertainment/the-problems-with-cancel-culture-and-popular-youtubers/1627615253">frank and open</a> with their viewers, acknowledging their audiences’ criticisms as worthy of engagement. However, they also critique the audiences’ critiques. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uFvtCUzfyL4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">YouTube video ‘No More Lies’ from James Charles has had more than 50 million views.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Accepting, rejecting some criticisms</h2>
<p>One of the most famous examples of a cancellation video is <a href="https://medium.com/bolstered/youtube-beauty-gurus-an-explainer-232177009b7c">YouTube beauty guru</a> James Charles’s “<a href="https://youtu.be/uFvtCUzfyL4">No More Lies</a>,” when Charles surveys <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a27484210/james-charles-tati-westbrook-youtube-drama-timeline/">criticisms levied against him</a>. The video, which has had more than 50 million views since it was posted in 2019, was in response to a messy public fallout that began with allegations that he was inconsiderate to a friend and mentor. </p>
<p>In Charles’s cancellation video, he stands by everything he said in an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3Ukl4l_LM8">earlier apology video</a>, but the cancellation video also refutes public criticisms of his character. Commentators note some criticism directed at Charles <a href="https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/44555/1/james-charles-tati-westbrook-drama-homophobia">was homophobic</a>.</p>
<p>The aptly titled 2020 video “<a href="https://youtu.be/OjMPJVmXxV8">Canceling</a>,” by cultural commentator and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/contrapoints-political-philosophy-natalie-wynn-youtube/579532/">YouTuber ContraPoints</a>, crystallized the cancellation video genre. </p>
<p>In the video, Natalie Wynn, the personality behind ContraPoints, addresses the <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/youtuber-contrapoints-attacked-after-including-controversial-buck-angel-video-1466757">controversy that erupted</a> after she included content that some viewers believed endorsed the view that transgender identity is only authentic if a person transitions through medical intervention. </p>
<p>Wynn examines a number of her controversial tweets. She dismisses many of the criticisms as taking her tweets out of context and suggests that some of the criticisms were transphobic. However, she also accepts when something she wrote was open to being misconstrued, admitting: “We’ll call this a bad tweet.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OjMPJVmXxV8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Video from Contrapoints on ‘Canceling.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Moral discussions</h2>
<p>Cancellation videos reveal how social media authors create their content in <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40550803">direct response</a> to audience commentary and expectation. For audience members, cancelling is a way to negotiate their love for authors with their own values. </p>
<p>When an author is “cancelled,” audiences try to understand how they can continue engaging with the author despite their <a href="https://mashable.com/article/james-charles-tati-westbrook-bye-sisters-youtube-drama">newfound knowledge</a> of the author’s perceived flaws.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/joe-rogan-is-at-it-again-cancel-culture-can-be-harsh-but-it-can-also-help-reduce-harm-176776">Joe Rogan is at it again: Cancel culture can be harsh, but it can also help reduce harm</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>When, in response, YouTubers reach out to their viewers through the format their audiences came to know them in, it is a way to be publicly forthcoming and engage viewers in moral discussions. Such videos also reinscribe the boundaries that restrict audiences to only knowing authors through their video content.</p>
<p>Cancellation videos are examples of the ways internet video is not merely driven by the identities of popular personalities on social media, but also by the audience’s responses to those personalities. </p>
<p>Dialogues between authors and audiences shape future content created by the YouTubers. </p>
<h2>Pre-modern authorship</h2>
<p>The mode of authorship seen in YouTube cancellation videos combines the intense interest in the <a href="https://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/romtextv2/files/2013/02/cc08_n01.pdf">author as a singular creator</a> that has long dominated popular conceptions of authorship with an older model of authorship that was popular in 17th-century England.</p>
<p>Before the <a href="https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/conjectures-original-composition-1759">belief in the original genius of the author</a> took root in Britain during the late 18th century, many anonymous pamphlets and books circulated that were crafted directly around readers’ desires and reading habits.</p>
<p>These included <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/secret-history-in-literature-16601820/1B0294ACC0E70BB5D3A56D15F2FD94CC">popular genres like the secret history, which purported to expose state secrets and political sexual intrigues, and “printed hoaxes” (both generating hoaxes and debunking them)</a>. </p>
<p>Such texts directly responded to their <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Reading-Fictions-1660-1740-Deception-in-English-Literary-and-Political/Loveman/p/book/9781138376229">readers’ desire for literature that invited public discussion and was socially oriented</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Patrons seen in a coffee house with long bench tables." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522172/original/file-20230420-22-tec37q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522172/original/file-20230420-22-tec37q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522172/original/file-20230420-22-tec37q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522172/original/file-20230420-22-tec37q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522172/original/file-20230420-22-tec37q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522172/original/file-20230420-22-tec37q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522172/original/file-20230420-22-tec37q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Drawing of a London coffee house, circa 1690-1700.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Trustees of the British Museum)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New access to information</h2>
<p>Authors wrote to engage with the political struggles of the time, and took advantage of <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171228/the-social-life-of-coffee/">the new coffeehouses</a> to circulate their ideas and boost their texts’ popularity. </p>
<p>The number of coffeehouses <a href="https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/newspapers-gossip-and-coffee-house-culture">increased exponentially</a> in late 17th-century London. They were cheap places in which to conduct business and gain access to the latest newspapers and political gossip. </p>
<p>Coffeehouses’ bench-style seating made them egalitarian spaces for discussion, thus making them an integral part of the rise of democratic ideals in British society.</p>
<p>The rise in texts dependent upon social conversation to render them popular was directly linked to new public spaces. These spaces expanded access to news and knowledge for men <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09574049108578077">(and some women)</a> at all levels of British society. </p>
<h2>New public spaces, new texts</h2>
<p>Seventeenth-century readers had a new, more accessible forum for media consumption, and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/jearlmodcultstud.15.2.58?mag=the-woman-famous-for-not-sleeping-with-a-king">this influenced the texts being produced by authors at the time</a>. The same can be said for social media influencers today. </p>
<p>Examining social media creation within the complicated history of authorship spotlights how new ways of consuming media shift the relationship between author and audience. </p>
<p>It also suggests how authorial agency is never only about one person’s creative drive.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203036/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erin Keating has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jessie Krahn has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities. </span></em></p>
What do YouTuber influencer videos about being ‘cancelled’ share with 17th-century texts? Both were crafted directly in response to audiences in new social spaces.
Erin Keating, Associate Professor, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba
Jessie Krahn, Master's student, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/198628
2023-02-23T20:17:01Z
2023-02-23T20:17:01Z
How linguistic diversity in English-language fiction reveals resistance and tension
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510196/original/file-20230214-24-s66z91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C704%2C4164%2C2466&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel 'Purple Hibiscus' intersperses Igbo words and expressions. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> (Rolf Vennenbernd/Pool Photo via AP)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Linguistic diversity, like other types of diversity, can enrich life. It’s a truism that languages and cultures are closely allied. Some believe that language imposes <a href="http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/whorf.html">its own unique perceptual grid on its users</a>. </p>
<p>If this were true, translation would be virtually impossible. On the other hand, it’s generally accepted that <a href="https://www.routledge.com/On-Translation/Ricoeur/p/book/9780415357784">a translation seldom reproduces the exact sense of the original text</a>; nuances don’t travel well. </p>
<p>The French phrase <em>joie de vivre</em> can be translated as “joy of living,” but that doesn’t capture the Gallic flavour of the original “joie,” which is why anglophones feel impelled to borrow the French phrase. </p>
<p>My forthcoming book <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/words-in-collision-products-9780228016977.php?page_id=46&"><em>Words in Collision: Multilingualism in English-Language Fiction</em></a> shows how language diversity has been employed by authors. </p>
<h2>Resistance, power conflicts</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A line drawing of a woman." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510197/original/file-20230214-24-h3mz41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510197/original/file-20230214-24-h3mz41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510197/original/file-20230214-24-h3mz41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510197/original/file-20230214-24-h3mz41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510197/original/file-20230214-24-h3mz41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510197/original/file-20230214-24-h3mz41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510197/original/file-20230214-24-h3mz41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In Charlotte Brontë’s novel ‘Shirley,’ English protagonists Shirley and Caroline use French to resist their patriarchal milieu.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In English-language fiction, a non-English tongue can provide a liberating alternative to conventional norms of behaviour. In <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/18827/shirley-by-charlotte-bronte/9780679640097">Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel <em>Shirley</em></a>, French serves the dual English protagonists, Shirley and Caroline, as a means of resisting the claustrophobic grip of their patriarchal milieu. </p>
<p>In other works of literature, linguistic clashes feed into broader power conflicts. <a href="https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/henry-v/entire-play/">Shakespeare’s play <em>Henry V</em></a>, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/treasures/Shakespeare/prtshakehenry5.html">likely written in 1599,</a> includes a remarkable amount of French dialogue. In the play, a literal war on the battlefield is paralleled by a figurative war between languages. Shakespeare’s Dauphin brags about the merits of his horse in a mixture of both languages that is likely to strike spectators as absurdly pretentious: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Ça, ha! He bounds from the earth as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu!” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A less violent but still earnest war of words is fought in Henry James’s 1890 novel <em><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-tragic-muse-9780141922126">The Tragic Muse</a></em>. Here, French language becomes identified with the art of the Paris theatre, while English represents the antagonistic forces of Anglo-Saxon sobriety. </p>
<h2>Political struggles, decolonizing</h2>
<p>Linguistic collisions <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Empire-Writes-Back-Theory-and-Practice-in-Post-Colonial-Literatures/Ashcroft-Griffiths-Tiffin/p/book/9780415280204">are rife in works of post-colonial literature</a>, where they coincide with political struggles between regimes of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583863_5">European hegemony and decolonizing movements</a>.</p>
<p>A recent example is Arundhati Roy’s 1998 novel <em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/158400/the-god-of-small-things-by-arundhati-roy/9780735273283">The God of Small Things</a></em>. In it, English, a holdover from <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/British-raj">the British Raj</a>, vies for supremacy <a href="https://omniglot.com/writing/malayalam.htm">with Malayalam</a>, the regional language <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Kerala">of Kerala</a> where <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/arundhati-roy">Roy was born</a>.</p>
<p>In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel <em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/880/purple-hibiscus-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/9780345807526">Purple Hibiscus</a></em>, Eugene, the father of the protagonist, Kambili, imposes English speech on his Igbo-speaking Nigerian family, while they resist by speaking Igbo in private. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D9Ihs241zeg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, ‘The Danger of a Single Story.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Monolingualism as ideology</h2>
<p>Comparative literature scholar Sarah Dowling <a href="https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/translingual-poetics">studies “translingual poetries”</a> — poetry written in multiple languages “informed by feminist, anti-racist, immigrant rights and Indigenous sovereignty movements.” Dowling prefers the term “translingual” because unlike “the term <em>multilingual</em>, which is often associated with dominant multiculturalisms, the term <em>translingual</em> typically describes critical, oppositional and survival practices.”</p>
<p>“Monolingualism is an ideology, a structuring principle that touches every aspect of social life,” writes Dowling. “It shapes how we understand ourselves and our units of belonging by <a href="https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/translingual-poetics">constructing homologous relationships between mother tongue, ethnicity and nation</a>.”</p>
<p>Dowling’s insight rings true. As a student, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/905457673/how-stephen-miller-became-the-architect-of-trumps-immigration-policies">Stephen Miller, the architect</a> of ex-U.S. president Donald Trump’s exclusionary immigration policy, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/07/how-stephen-miller-went-teen-troll-trump-whisperer/">protested against the presence of Spanish in his Southern California high school</a>. </p>
<h2>Signs of promise</h2>
<p>Polyglot texts (texts using multiple languages) have become increasingly common; they are salvos fired against arrogant monolingualism. Monolingual English speakers would do best to join the multilingual world and welcome these texts. </p>
<p>The continuing emergence of polyglot texts like Julia Alvarez’s 1996 poetry collection <em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/327929/the-other-sideel-otro-lado-by-julia-alvarez/9780452273412">The Other Side/El Otro Lado</a></em> or Quiara Alegría Hudes’s memoir <em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/548314/my-broken-language-by-quiara-alegria-hudes">My Broken Language</a></em> (2021) demonstrate cosmopolitanism rather than insularity.</p>
<p>Such a development is likely to enhance our <em>joie de vivre</em>, however we choose to translate it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198628/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Ross does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Polyglot texts — texts that use many languages — have become increasingly common as writers document struggles between regimes of European hegemony and decolonizing movements.
Michael Ross, Professor Emeritus of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/200569
2023-02-23T14:30:16Z
2023-02-23T14:30:16Z
I was an adoring Dahl fan as a child but let’s not reissue them for a new generation
<p>If children are built, in part, by the books they’re raised on, then I was all Roald Dahl. From my small bedroom in suburban Essex, his stories allowed me to try on new and distinctly more exciting lives for size. </p>
<p>There was James aboard his giant peach, George with his marvellous granny vanquishing medicine and of course, Charlie, who wins a trip to a chocolate factory and a lifetime’s supply of sweets — for the grandchild of a dentist, an impossible dream.</p>
<p>And Dahl was my dream maker, a fairy godfather, a living wizard. So much so that when I, the adoring fan, eventually met him at a Puffin Club convention I was rendered mute under his spell. </p>
<p>His books represented escape from the humdrum of the everyday that I recognised even aged seven. And more than that, they were an education. I learned new words as well as important lessons. Enemies can be bested, no matter how much bigger they are, grown-ups aren’t always right and reading books is, in itself, a kind of magic.</p>
<p>However, looking back through a more forensic lens, there were other, less edifying ideas I picked up as well. </p>
<p>From The Twits, I learned that the “African language” that the Muggle-Wump monkeys spoke was “weird”. From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I learned that being “enormously fat” was a character flaw, on a par with selfishness. From The Witches, I learned that being bald, as a woman, meant you were probably evil and definitely ugly. Daft, obviously, but still it lingered in my 30s when to my abject horror, I developed alopecia.</p>
<h2>Making amends</h2>
<p>So, I was invested in the argument when, in February 2023, it was revealed that Dahl’s publishers, Puffin, have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/18/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-to-remove-language-deemed-offensive">made some tweaks</a> for the latest print runs. There has been an outcry, with everyone from author <a href="https://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie/status/1627075835525210113?s=20">Salman Rushdie</a> to UK <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64702224">prime minister Rishi Sunak</a> weighing in to condemn this “censorship”, as if Puffin were burning or banning books. </p>
<p>The fact that this was done in discussion with Dahl’s estate cannot assuage them, nor that these small changes are the kind made every day to books either pre-publication or before a new print run.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-the-far-from-diverse-publishing-industry-sensitivity-readers-are-vital-199913">In the far from diverse publishing industry, sensitivity readers are vital</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>And the changes are small. That language is no longer “weird”, just “African”. Augustus Gloop is no longer “enormously fat”, just “enormous”. Mrs Twit is no longer “beastly and ugly”, just “beastly”. A witch posing as a woman is no longer likely to be a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” but may be a “top scientist or running a business”.</p>
<p>The stories and Dahl’s voice with his energetic, inventive turns of phrase, remain intact. A win, surely? Or is it? Because, while the language might be superficially “fixed”, the books still contain problematic themes and character traits. </p>
<p>Baldness in women is still linked to badness. Being “enormous” is still a character flaw. And this is before we begin to <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-pygmies-to-puppets-what-to-do-with-roald-dahls-enslaved-oompa-loompas-in-modern-adaptations-166967">unpack the Oompa-Loompas</a>, albeit in their new gender neutral guise.</p>
<p>When we read, we learn what it might be like to be someone other than our self. We find common ground as well as differences. In other words, we learn <a href="https://www.empathylab.uk/plugging-into-books-to-super-charge-our-empathy-muscles">empathy</a>. But through Dahl, the spectrum of those with whom we’re invited to empathise or even to recognise as “like me” is fairly narrow, while too many others are sidelined as bad in their difference, potentially leading readers to reject them off the page as well.</p>
<p>So what is the answer to this and other “difficult” texts? (Dahl, of course, isn’t the only author to have equated ugliness or disability with villainy, nor to display chronic fatphobia.)</p>
<p>As an expert in creative writing, my preference would be to let them quietly fall out of print. No “censorship”, but no reruns either. Don’t give them a brand new foil wrapper that suggests the contents are fresh and 21st century. That implies a currency, a relevance, a truth.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A young asian girl wearing glasses with her hair in pigtails smiles as she reads in a library." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511950/original/file-20230223-22-nxy5ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511950/original/file-20230223-22-nxy5ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511950/original/file-20230223-22-nxy5ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511950/original/file-20230223-22-nxy5ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511950/original/file-20230223-22-nxy5ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511950/original/file-20230223-22-nxy5ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511950/original/file-20230223-22-nxy5ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bookshops don’t have enough shelves for the myriad new children’s releases.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/school-education-literacy-concept-asian-girl-358649762">Chinnapong/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Instead let them sit on the shelves of parents and grandparents (who are the real Dahl fans now, children have far wider taste) and be seen, with their cracked covers and dog-eared pages, for what they are – things of the past, to be appreciated as such.</p>
<p>It’s not as if, without Dahl, there will be a void with no funny books, no magic books, no books about giants to fill it. Bookshops don’t have enough shelves for the myriad new releases. The <a href="https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/lollies">Lollies Prize</a> celebrates brilliantly funny new books for children every year. <a href="https://www.empathylab.uk/">Empathy Lab</a> curates an annual collection of around 50 new books that don’t skimp on stakes or adventure or menace, but also work to nurture inclusivity.</p>
<p>I was a child of Dahl and am indebted to him for nurturing my love of words. But I’m glad my own daughter showed scant interest, for there are more stories out there, and better ones, to shape her generation and the next.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200569/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jo Nadin is a member of the Society of Authors (SOA) and the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). Her book, No Man's Land, is part of the Empathy Lab collection. Her book, The Worst Class in the World Gets Worse, is shortlisted for the Lollies Prize. </span></em></p>
Let Dahl’s books be seen for what they are: things of the past, to be appreciated as such.
Joanna Nadin, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Bristol
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197771
2023-01-23T18:54:12Z
2023-01-23T18:54:12Z
More means less: Extended copyright benefits the corporate few, not the public
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504764/original/file-20230116-14-bardrl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=54%2C20%2C2737%2C1983&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Canada's extension of copyright to 70 years after an author's death puts corporate profits ahead of the public interest.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdombres/5814893360/in/photostream/">(CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES/flickr)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Who benefits from Canada’s recent extension of copyright? Dead authors? Students? Marginalized writers? If you answered no to all of these, you’d be correct. </p>
<p>At the beginning of January, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/canada-public-domain-pause-1.6706498">Canada extended its copyright period</a> by an additional 20 years after an author’s death. Previously, copyright lasted up to 50 years after an author’s death. The extension means that works will not enter the public domain in Canada for 70 years after a creator’s death. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://canlii.ca/t/jqgw0">Supreme Court of Canada</a> has made it clear that “Copyright law does not exist solely for the benefit of authors,” but is meant to balance the rights of users and authors. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2021/2021scc32/2021scc32.html?resultIndex=1">Supreme Court</a> has also stated that while copyright should ensure a just reward as incentive for authors, “increasing public access to and dissemination of artistic and intellectual works, which enrich society and often provide users with the tools and inspiration to generate works of their own, is a primary goal of copyright.”</p>
<p>The latest copyright extension is a result of the trade negotiations that created the <a href="https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-commerce/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/agr-acc/cusma-aceum/index.aspx?lang=eng">Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA)</a> — the successor to the <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services/policy-notice/contracting-policy-notice-2020-2-replacement-north-american-free-trade-agreement-nafta.html">North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three men wearing suits sit at a table. Two of them hold up booklets with signatures. Behind them are flags of mexico, canada and the U.S." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504305/original/file-20230112-69951-mdyx52.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a signing ceremony for the CUSMA agreement with the then-presidents of the U.S. and Mexico in Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like any monetary negotiation, these <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back-to-Basics/Trade">trade agreements</a> include give and take. Canada gets greater access to U.S. markets, for example, while the U.S. gets Canada to adopt the same copyright duration that they have.</p>
<p>Copyright material is increasingly valuable to Canada. In 2019, copyright-based industries contributed about $95.6 billion to Canada’s economy and made up around <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/corporate/transparency/open-government/economic-impact-copyright-based-industries.html">4.9 per cent of GDP</a>. That means the country needs a more fine-tuned approach to trade deals. And a better understanding of how to best foster our creative industries.</p>
<h2>Who benefits from longer copyrights?</h2>
<p>Most authors need to license their work for it to reach a wide audience. The <a href="https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-42/"><em>Copyright Act</em></a> grants first ownership to the author who can license it. The act also states that the economic rights belong to the owner of the copyright. That is most often a media company, <a href="https://cb-cda.gc.ca/en/copyright-information/collective-societies">collective society</a>, publisher or other corporate entity. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman with grey hair carries a book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=985&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=985&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504307/original/file-20230112-60779-sqm2jw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=985&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The extension of copyrights means Canadians will have to wait much longer for works like Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale to enter the public domain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If copyright is a way to incentivize and reward creativity, that incentive should manifest while the author is still alive. The idea of authors benefiting during their lifetime was brought to Parliament’s Copyright Review Committee in 2018 by musician <a href="https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2018/12/bryan-adamscopyrightwarning/">Bryan Adams</a>. </p>
<p>In Canada, copyrights are usually turned over to an author’s heirs <a href="https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-42/section-14.html">25 years after their death</a>. This right is one of the ways the <em>Copyright Act</em> seeks to maintain a balance between having an economic incentive to be creative and making works available to others for education and inspiration. </p>
<p>Adams suggested that this would do a lot more good for authors if it were to occur 25 years after the copyright was initially granted. That would mean an author could gain greater benefits during their lifetime. </p>
<p>If further proof was needed regarding who really benefits from this extension, an article from <a href="https://ip.fasken.com/who-really-benefits-from-canadas-impending-copyright-term-extension/">Jean-Philippe Mikus of Fasken law firm</a> makes it clear. </p>
<p>Mikus states that the term extension is a “positive development” for copyright owners. But he also highlights that an author’s heirs can simply have the works handed to them. He goes on to suggest that Canadian law needs to copy the <a href="https://edwardslaw.ca/blog/work-made-for-hire-explained/">American work-for-hire model</a>, essentially ensuring that authors have no claim or ownership in their own creations.</p>
<h2>The public domain</h2>
<p>Another important aspect of copyright is its public interest goal, and works entering the public domain are essential to fulfill that goal. <a href="https://www.ifla.org/publications/the-public-domain-why-wipo-should-care-2007/#:%7E:text=The%20public%20domain%20is%20part,commercial%20and%20non%2Dcommercial%20purposes">The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions</a> clearly outlines the importance of works entering the public domain:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The public domain is part of the common cultural and intellectual heritage of humanity and is the major source of inspiration, imagination and discovery for creators. Works in the public domain are not subject to any restrictions and may be freely used without permission for commercial and non-commercial purposes. It is important for access to knowledge and must be accessible for the benefit of creators, inventors, universities and research centres.”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SiEXgpp37No?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Large corporations like Disney have lobbied the U.S. Congress to extend copyright protections.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Law professor <a href="https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/04/the-harm-from-budget-2022s-hidden-copyright-term-extension-part-one-entry-to-public-domain-of-canadian-authors-lost-for-a-generation/">Michael Geist</a> points out that an entire generation will lose out on works not entering the public domain for an additional 20 years. </p>
<p>The extension of copyright has been described as essentially <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/29/canada-steals-cultural-works-from-the-public-by-extending-copyright-terms/">stealing cultural works from the public</a>. Canadian authors whose works fall under the extended copyright period include Marian Engel, Adele Wiseman, Hugh MacLennan, Margaret Laurence, bpNichol and Gabrielle Roy, to name just a few.</p>
<p>The public domain allows publishers to publish works that may have been languishing elsewhere because they weren’t seen as being economically viable. In addition, with fewer royalties to pay for the work, publishers are able to add pedagogical material to the text. </p>
<p>It is unlikely that any government will pass legislation to roll back the duration of copyright, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing that can be done. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/04/the-canadian-government-makes-its-choice-implementation-of-copyright-term-extension-without-mitigating-against-the-harms/">Geist argues</a> for a registration system for the new extension. The author (owner) of the copyright would have to proactively register the copyright to retain it for the additional 20 years. This would allow works to still enter the public domain, particularly works that might not be being published because they aren’t seen as lucrative enough. </p>
<p>Under the <em>Copyright Act</em>, “<a href="https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-42/page-6.html#h-103270">Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright</a>.” But expansion of the fair dealing exception to include “such as” before the listed purposes could also help encourage new creations and bolster educational goals. </p>
<p>Adding “such as,” similar to <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html">fair use in the U.S.</a>, makes the list illustrative and allows for wider interpretation of what is an allowable use. This would be in line with <a href="https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/INDU/Reports/RP10537003/indurp16/indurp16-e.pdf">recommendation 18 of the government’s Statutory Review of the Copyright Act</a>. </p>
<p>Corporate copyright owners are ultimately most concerned about their bottom line. Better protections for users’ rights are needed to ensure the public retains access to Canadian culture and heritage so Canadian creativity and innovation can continue to thrive.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197771/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Macklem is a PhD Candidate in Law at the University of Western Ontario. She currently teaches at Western, King's University College and Brescia University College. She is cited in York University v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), 2021 SCC 32 and The Statutory Review of the Copyright Act, both of which are cited in this article.</span></em></p>
Canada’s extension of copyright might be good for corporations that hold copyrights, but it’s bad news for creators and the public.
Lisa Macklem, PhD Candidate, Law, Western University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197784
2023-01-19T13:35:55Z
2023-01-19T13:35:55Z
How Edgar Allan Poe became the darling of the maligned and misunderstood
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505203/original/file-20230118-7884-ogudaj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C2%2C795%2C544&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Could the pugnacious writer ever have imagined that he would one day become a cult hero?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nick Lehr/The Conversation via DALL-E 2</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Edgar Allan Poe, who would have turned 215 years old on Jan. 19, 2024, remains one of the world’s most recognizable and popular literary figures.</p>
<p>His face – with its sunken eyes, enormous forehead and disheveled black hair – adorns <a href="https://outofprint.com/products/edgar-allan-poe-ka-dots-gray-tote">tote bags</a>, <a href="https://www.blackcraftcult.com/products/poe-molded-ceramic-mug">coffee mugs</a>, <a href="https://www.etsy.com/market/edgar_allan_poe_shirt">T-shirts</a> and <a href="https://www.bluelips.com/pd-edgar-allan-poe-lunchbox.cfm">lunch boxes</a>. He appears as a meme, either sporting a popped collar and aviator shades as <a href="https://technical.ly/startups/who-is-edgar-allan-bro-twitter/">Edgar Allan Bro</a>, or riffing on “Bohemian Rhapsody” by muttering, “I’m just Poe boy, nobody loves me” as a raven on his shoulder adds, “He’s just a Poe boy from a Poe family.” </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1587087488253919234"}"></div></p>
<p>Netflix has sought to capitalize on the writer’s popularity, releasing the mystery-thriller “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14138650/">The Pale Blue Eye</a>,” which features Poe as a West Point cadet, <a href="https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-Vignettes/General-History/139-Poe-and-West-Point/">where he spent less than a year</a> before being court-martialed, and a Poe-inspired miniseries, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15567174/">The Fall of the House of Usher</a>.” </p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mfHlxkMAAAAJ&hl=en">But as a Poe scholar</a>, I sometimes wonder whether Poe’s appeal is less about the power and complexity of his prose and more about an attraction to the idea of Poe. </p>
<p>After all, Poe’s most famous literary creations tend to be unsympathetic villains. There are psychopaths who perpetuate seemingly motiveless murders in “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2148/2148-h/2148-h.htm#chap2.7">The Black Cat</a>” and “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2148/2148-h/2148-h.htm#chap2.20">The Tell-Tale Heart</a>”; protagonists who abuse women in “<a href="https://poestories.com/read/ligeia">Ligeia</a>” and “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2148/2148-h/2148-h.htm#chap2.8">The Fall of the House of Usher</a>”; and characters who exact cruel, fatal revenge on unwitting victims in “<a href="https://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHyper/POE/cask.html">The Cask of Amontillado</a>” and “<a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHyper/POE/hop_frog.html">Hop-Frog</a>.”</p>
<p>The degenerate characters whose perspectives Poe invites readers to inhabit don’t exactly align with a cultural moment characterized by the #MeToo movement, safe spaces and trigger warnings. </p>
<p>At the same time, the conception of Poe the writer seems to tap into a cultural affection for outsiders, nonconformists and underdogs who ultimately prove their worth.</p>
<h2>A character assassination that misfires</h2>
<p>The idea of Poe the underdog began with his death in 1849, which was greeted by <a href="https://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/nyt49100.htm">a cruel notice in the New York Tribune</a>: “This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.”</p>
<p>The obituary writer, who turned out to be Poe’s sometime friend and constant rival <a href="https://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/nyt49100.htm">Rufus W. Griswold</a>, claimed that the deceased had “few or no friends” and proceeded with a general character assassination built on exaggerations and half-truths. </p>
<p>Strange as it seems, Griswold <a href="https://poemuseum.org/rufus-wilmot-griswold-poes-literary-executor">was also Poe’s literary executor</a>, and he expanded the obituary into a biographical essay that accompanied Poe’s collected works. If this was a marketing ploy, it worked. The friends that Griswold claimed Poe lacked rose to his defense, and journalists spent decades debating who the man really was.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Black and white drawing of man with beard and thinning hair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505204/original/file-20230118-19-5zsave.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505204/original/file-20230118-19-5zsave.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505204/original/file-20230118-19-5zsave.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505204/original/file-20230118-19-5zsave.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505204/original/file-20230118-19-5zsave.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505204/original/file-20230118-19-5zsave.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505204/original/file-20230118-19-5zsave.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rufus W. Griswold penned the first draft of Poe’s life and legacy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/rufus-w-griswold-royalty-free-illustration/186797733?phrase=rufus%20w.%20griswold&adppopup=true">raveler1116/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During Poe’s lifetime, most readers encountered his work through magazines, and he was rarely well paid. But Griswold’s edition <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NyEumvZL1QMC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false">went through 19 printings in the 15 years after Poe’s death</a>, and his stories and poems have been endlessly reprinted and translated ever since.</p>
<p>Griswold’s defamatory portrait, along with the grim subject matter of Poe’s stories and poems, still influences the way readers perceive him. But it has also produced a sustained reaction or counterimage of Poe as a tragic hero, a tortured, misunderstood artist who was too good – or, at any rate, too cool – for his world. </p>
<p>While translating Poe’s works into French in the 1850s and 1860s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NyEumvZL1QMC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false">promoted his hero as a kind of countercultural visionary</a>, out of step with a moralistic, materialistic America. Baudelaire’s Poe valued beauty over truth in his poetry and, in his fiction, saw through the self-improvement pieties that were popular at the time to reveal “the natural wickedness of man.” Poe struck a chord with European writers, and as his international stature rose in the late 19th century, literary critics in the U.S. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NyEumvZL1QMC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false">wrung their hands</a> over his lack of appreciation “at home.” </p>
<h2>Poe’s underdog story takes off</h2>
<p>By the turn of the 20th century, the stage was set for Poe to be embraced as the perennial underdog. And Poe often did appear on stage around this time, as the subject of several biographical melodramas that depicted him as a tragic figure whose lack of success had more to do with a hostile cultural and publishing environment than his own failings. </p>
<p>That image appeared on the silver screen as early as 1909 in D.W. Griffith’s short film “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allen_Poe_(film)">Edgar Allen Poe</a>.” With Poe’s wife, Virginia, languishing on a sick bed, the poet ventures out to sell “The Raven.” After meeting rejection and scorn, he manages to sell his manuscript and returns home with provisions for his ailing wife, only to find that she has died.</p>
<p>Later films also depict Poe as being misunderstood or underappreciated in his lifetime. A wildly inaccurate biopic, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034997/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe</a>,” released in 1942, ends with a voice-over commenting, “…little did [the public] know that the manuscript of ‘The Raven,’ which he tried in vain to sell for $25, would years later bring the price of $17,000 from a collector.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Movie poster featuring headshots of various actors." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505205/original/file-20230118-23-o9c2of.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505205/original/file-20230118-23-o9c2of.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505205/original/file-20230118-23-o9c2of.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505205/original/file-20230118-23-o9c2of.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505205/original/file-20230118-23-o9c2of.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505205/original/file-20230118-23-o9c2of.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505205/original/file-20230118-23-o9c2of.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In ‘The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe,’ Poe’s talents are overlooked, as ‘men scoffed at his greatness.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-loves-of-edgar-allan-poe-poster-from-left-mary-howard-news-photo/1137205217?phrase=the%20loves%20of%20edgar%20allan%20poe%20movie%20poster&adppopup=true">LMPC/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In real life, while an early draft of “The Raven” was declined by one editor, Poe had no trouble selling the poem, <a href="https://muse-jhu-edu.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/pub/1/article/643024">and it was an immediate sensation</a>.</p>
<p>But here “The Raven” becomes a stand-in for Poe himself, something dark and mysterious that, according to legend, people in Poe’s time failed to appreciate. </p>
<p>Poe is an obscure writer and amateur detective in the 1951 film “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043782/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">The Man with a Cloak</a>,” which ends with a saloonkeeper allowing the rain to wash away the ink on an IOU that Poe gave him. On the reverse side of the note is a manuscript of the poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44885/annabel-lee">Annabel Lee</a>,” as its bearer declares, “That name’ll never be worth anything. Not in a hundred years.” </p>
<p>Of course, the audience watching this film almost exactly 100 years after Poe’s death knew better. </p>
<h2>The most interesting plants grow in the shade</h2>
<p>Which brings us to “The Pale Blue Eye,” in which Henry Melling portrays Cadet Poe, an outcast with a keen crime solver’s intellect. In a refreshing change, this younger Poe is not a tortured artist or a haunted, brooding figure. He is, however, picked on by his peers and underestimated by his superiors – yet again, an underdog viewers want to root for. </p>
<p>In that sense, the Poe in “The Pale Blue Eye” fits well with his contemporary image, which also permeates the early episodes of “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13443470/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Wednesday</a>,” Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff set at Nevermore Academy that’s chock full of Poe references. </p>
<p>The headmistress of Nevermore Academy – a Hogwarts-like school for outcasts – refers to Poe as “our most famous alumni,” which explains why the school’s annual boat race is the Poe Cup and why there’s a statue of Poe guarding a secret passage.</p>
<p>The delightfully antisocial protagonist, Wednesday, played by Jenna Ortega, is an outcast among outcasts – the Poe figure at a school whose name evokes Poe. In one scene, a sympathetic teacher urges her not to lose “the ability to not let others define you. It’s a gift.” She adds, “The most interesting plants grow in the shade.”</p>
<p>When John Lennon sang “Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe” in “<a href="https://genius.com/The-beatles-i-am-the-walrus-lyrics">I Am the Walrus</a>,” he didn’t have to say who was kicking him or why. The point was, Poe deserved better; the most interesting plants do grow in the shade, unlovely and unloved. </p>
<p>And that’s exactly why so many people – aspiring writers and artists, but also everyone when they’re lonely and misunderstood – see a little bit of themselves in the weary-but-wise image of Poe.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197784/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Peeples does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Is the writer’s appeal less about the power and complexity of his prose, and more about the view of him as a perennial underdog?
Scott Peeples, Professor of English, College of Charleston
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/191145
2022-12-12T13:36:37Z
2022-12-12T13:36:37Z
How are books made?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499657/original/file-20221207-22-cnct7g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C0%2C2106%2C1407&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Making a book takes lots of brainstorming and writing, but there are many steps to printing it, too.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/printing-press-and-worker-royalty-free-image/172466344?phrase=book%20press%20factory&adppopup=true">sykono/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/curious-kids-us-74795">Curious Kids</a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">curiouskidsus@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
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<p><strong>How are books made? Julia, age 10, Petoskey, Michigan</strong></p>
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<p>Books are <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/parts-of-a-book-terms-and-meanings">material things</a> – usually made of paper, ink, thread and glue – but a lot of work goes into making them before they get assembled into something you might find at a library or bookstore. Most of this work has to do with a book’s content, the writing and art on its pages. </p>
<h2>Cooking up ideas</h2>
<p>Book authors usually begin the writing process by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOCp1OlYnGs">brainstorming ideas</a>. They write down a number of thoughts and make notes about things they’ve observed or read. </p>
<p>Authors writing a made-up story, called fiction, might imagine the possible characters’ personalities and habits. They might also outline a plot, or the sequence of events that will happen in the story. </p>
<p>An author who is writing nonfiction – like history or science – will research the topic and decide how to interpret what they find. The research may involve looking at archival documents, interviewing people or visiting locations where important events happened.</p>
<p>Once authors have ideas about what they want to write, they need to think about whom they’d like to read their book. If, for example, an author is writing about <a href="https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-could-we-change-other-planets-in-the-solar-system-so-we-could-live-on-them-176738">outer space</a> for a general audience, it’s important to explain the science in way that everyone can understand. An author who is writing for other astronomers who already know a lot about the subject shouldn’t spend much time explaining the most basic things.</p>
<h2>Revise, revise, revise</h2>
<p>After authors have brainstormed, researched, plotted and outlined their projects, they draft <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzoK4FoVyuY">and revise</a>. Few authors write something down once and never change what they’ve written. Most write a first or rough draft and later change many things, from the order of topics to the particular words they use. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A close-up shot of someone holding a red pen and revising a text." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495488/original/file-20221115-23-n7jrgl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495488/original/file-20221115-23-n7jrgl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495488/original/file-20221115-23-n7jrgl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495488/original/file-20221115-23-n7jrgl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495488/original/file-20221115-23-n7jrgl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495488/original/file-20221115-23-n7jrgl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495488/original/file-20221115-23-n7jrgl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Most writers go through many drafts before their story is ready to sell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/proofread-royalty-free-image/680338102?phrase=editor&adppopup=true">Lamaip/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span>
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<p>When authors need to make these tough decisions about what to change, they may have the help of an editor. An editor’s job is to review drafts of a proposed book and help the writer make it as good as it can be, and to coordinate all the steps to publish the book.</p>
<p>Editors work for publishers, the companies that help create the final form of the book and then distribute, advertise and sell it. When writers want to work with an editor, and hope to turn their story into a real book, they send their revised draft to publishers in hopes that the company will purchase it. This way, authors get paid for their writing, but the publisher also profits from book sales.</p>
<p>Many other people <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/industry-guides/Publishing">work at a publishing company</a>, too. Copy editors and proofreaders check for mistakes in an author’s writing. Designers and typesetters are responsible for the look of the book, <a href="https://theconversation.com/this-course-teaches-how-to-judge-a-book-by-its-cover-and-its-pages-print-and-other-elements-of-its-design-190817">including its cover</a>. Publishers may also find illustrators for a book, although many authors want to illustrate their own.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man in a suit jacket stands grinning in front of a few easels with copies of a book called 'My Story, My Dance.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495484/original/file-20221115-17-gsamm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495484/original/file-20221115-17-gsamm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495484/original/file-20221115-17-gsamm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495484/original/file-20221115-17-gsamm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495484/original/file-20221115-17-gsamm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495484/original/file-20221115-17-gsamm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495484/original/file-20221115-17-gsamm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Illustrator James E. Ransome appears at the launch of the children’s book ‘My Story, My Dance,’ about the dancer Robert Battle, in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/illustrator-james-e-ransome-appears-to-celebrate-the-ailey-news-photo/494861826?phrase=children%27s%20book%20illustrator&adppopup=true">Donna Ward/Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>The final steps</h2>
<p>When the content of a book is all ready, it will be sent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S_h6y9QNYk">to a printer</a> to be inked onto paper, glued or sewn together as a collection of pages, and bound into hardback or paperback copies. Hardbacks are books with stiff cardboard bindings and paper dust jackets to protect the covers. Paperbacks have a cover of only thick paper and are cheaper to make. </p>
<p>The first printing of some kinds of books, like novels or histories, is often a hardback. If lots of people want to buy the book and the publisher prints another batch of books – called a print run – they will typically be paperbacks.</p>
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<img alt="An old manuscript page shows a large figure in a pink robe dictating to a small scribe wearing a blue one." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499638/original/file-20221207-11743-w8izk8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499638/original/file-20221207-11743-w8izk8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499638/original/file-20221207-11743-w8izk8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499638/original/file-20221207-11743-w8izk8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499638/original/file-20221207-11743-w8izk8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499638/original/file-20221207-11743-w8izk8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499638/original/file-20221207-11743-w8izk8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Scribes, who were trained in writing, used to write down stories or ideas that the author told them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Manesse_Bligger_von_Steinach.jpg">UB Heidelberg/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>So far, I have described the way that most books are made now. But book creation predates modern publication, printing and even paper. For many centuries, books were written by hand on vellum, which is made of animal skin. </p>
<p>Before the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyBbj5hj8DQ">invention of the printing press</a> around 1440, most writing <a href="https://www.medievalists.net/2014/06/copycat-life-medieval-scribe/">was done by scribes</a>, artisans who were trained to write in special scripts called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdyLCh9YvE8&list=PL-vTxWFyVBpEVwPJuikoyLAEMb48zpHh6">calligraphy</a>. Authors could recite their work aloud to scribes, and the scribes would write it down. Scribes also copied a lot of material from other books to make new books for patrons, readers who told scribes what they wanted in a book and paid for it. </p>
<p>In my work as <a href="https://english.wvu.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty-directory/lara-farina">an English professor</a>, I study many of these medieval handwritten books, called manuscripts. Often, manuscripts can give modern readers an idea of what particular people in the past wanted to read. For example, a book written for a queen might contain the stories she liked, calendars of important dates, a history of her family or her country and prayers and poems she might recite. There’s a good chance that the queen’s book was unique, because it was written specifically for her.</p>
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<img alt="A page from an old manuscript with an elaborately decorated letter 'S.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499822/original/file-20221208-14036-cv8u59.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499822/original/file-20221208-14036-cv8u59.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=791&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499822/original/file-20221208-14036-cv8u59.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=791&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499822/original/file-20221208-14036-cv8u59.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=791&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499822/original/file-20221208-14036-cv8u59.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499822/original/file-20221208-14036-cv8u59.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499822/original/file-20221208-14036-cv8u59.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A page from the St. Albans prayerbook, with an elaborately decorated ‘S’ at the start of a psalm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psalm_136_Initial_S.jpg">Hildesheim Cathedral Library/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>You can look here at <a href="https://www.albani-psalter.de/stalbanspsalter/english/translation/trans003.shtml">pages from a manuscript</a> made for use by one particular woman: <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396584/obo-9780195396584-0253.xml">Christina of Markyate</a>, a holy woman in 12th-century England. She ran away from home as a teenager to become a recluse and later became a spiritual adviser to the monks of St. Albans monastery. The monks made this very beautiful book of prayers for her.</p>
<p>You can <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21qi9ZcQVto">make your own mini-book</a> just by folding a single piece of paper. Think of some content, write a draft and then be your own scribe by writing and illustrating your book! </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/21qi9ZcQVto?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Here’s a quick way to make your own eight-page book.</span></figcaption>
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<p><em>Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191145/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lara Farina does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It takes a lot of steps – and help from other people – to make a physical book you can hold in your hands.
Lara Farina, Professor of English, West Virginia University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/195426
2022-11-28T19:04:29Z
2022-11-28T19:04:29Z
Two thirds of Australian authors are women – new research finds they earn just $18,200 a year from their writing
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497571/original/file-20221128-22-ctbtk8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C22%2C7360%2C4880&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Most Australian book authors do not earn enough income from their creative practice to make ends meet. They rely on other jobs and other support, such as a partner’s income.</p>
<p>In the 2020-21 financial year, the average personal income in Australia was approximately $A70,000. Only one-third of authors earned this amount from all their sources of income combined. The average total income for authors, including all sources of income, was $64,900.</p>
<p>And the amount they earned from their books alone was far, far less.</p>
<p>In 2022, <a href="https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/projects/2022-national-survey-of-australian-book-authors">we surveyed over 1,000 Australian book authors</a>.</p>
<p>We found the average annual income authors derive from practising as an author is $18,200. That’s an increase from $15,100 seven years ago (adjusted for inflation). But it’s a modest increase from a low base: it represents growth of less than 3% per annum over seven years.</p>
<p>Book writing is a profession dominated by women, who make up two thirds of all Australian authors. More than 80% of authors have attended university and almost half have completed a postgraduate degree – a high level of education that is not matched by high income.</p>
<p>In our survey (which followed up on <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-read-the-australian-book-industry-in-a-time-of-change-49044">an earlier 2015 study</a>), we asked Australian book authors about their income and how they allocate their time, the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on their career, their relationships with their readers and publishers, and more. We wanted to find out what has changed in the last seven years – and whether conditions are improving for Australian authors.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-read-the-australian-book-industry-in-a-time-of-change-49044">How to read the Australian book industry in a time of change</a>
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<h2>Authors’ earnings and ‘portfolio careers’</h2>
<p>If you are planning a career as an author, what could you expect to earn? </p>
<p>Education authors earned the highest average income from their practice as an author ($27,300), followed by children’s ($26,800) and genre fiction ($23,300) authors. Even though these figures are above the overall average for authors, they are not enough to live on, to support a family, or to pay rent or a mortgage.</p>
<p>At the other end of the spectrum are poets, who earned an average of $5,700 from their creative practice. Literary authors earned $14,500, which is a decrease in real terms since 2015. </p>
<p>To break this down, an author’s income from their creative practice includes advances from publishers, royalties on book sales, fees for live appearances, Public Lending Rights (PLR) and Education Lending Rights (ELR) paid by the government for the use of their work in libraries and educational institutions, prizes and fellowships, and rights sales for film, TV etc. </p>
<p>Artists’ careers are often known as “portfolio careers” – which sounds more glamorous than the bracing reality of juggling multiple commitments. Some authors have another career as a journalist, medical specialist, academic, teacher or public figure that provides their main source of income.</p>
<p>Several authors wrote about the uneven timing of income from their work. One literary author wrote:</p>
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<p>It’s difficult to capture the life and income of an author because for up to five years nothing might happen except writing, then for about 18 months there is a flurry of (a tiny amount) of cash and editing, and then a month or two of publicity.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/white-female-and-high-rates-of-mental-illness-new-diversity-research-offers-a-snapshot-of-the-publishing-industry-189679">White, female, and high rates of mental illness: new diversity research offers a snapshot of the publishing industry</a>
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<h2>The difficulty of spending time to write</h2>
<p>We asked authors what prevents them from spending more time writing. Only 6% of authors reported no competing demands for their writing time. Domestic responsibilities affect almost two-thirds of trade authors (62%). One literary author wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I managed to devote regular time to writing alongside a full-time job pre-children but the addition of a baby (now toddler) to life has rendered those opportunities non-existent. I now meet my obligations to my publisher by taking annual and sometimes unpaid leave to work on my author duties. It has certainly slowed my career and I can no longer devote time to learning experiences, networking, or applications for prizes, grants and residencies.</p>
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<p>Insufficient income is a factor for over half of all authors. Some commented that their ability to spend time writing was enhanced by other sources of financial security. A creative non-fiction author commented:</p>
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<p>Having my first book published the year before I turned 60 meant I faced less financial issues due to owning my own home, superannuation and financial support from my partner. However, if I was less financially established it would be very difficult to live on what I make as an author.</p>
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<p>The financial insecurity inherent to the profession may contribute to the recognised lack of diversity of Australian authors: a <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/fewer-than-1-in-10-aussie-books-published-by-people-of-colour-report-finds-20221013-p5bpj4.html">recent report</a> found only 7% of books published in 2018 were written by people of colour. As the UK Society of Authors <a href="https://www.societyofauthors.org/News/News/2019/May/Report-on-authors-earnings-diversity-implications">noted</a> a few years ago, “people from less privileged backgrounds who want to write are less likely to have additional sources of household income”.</p>
<p>In the 2022 survey, we heard from established, prize-winning authors – including some who’d had a bestselling book earlier in their career – who were contemplating no longer writing books, due to dwindling opportunities for mid-list writers.</p>
<p>We all stand to lose if established authors leave the profession. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497454/original/file-20221127-22-pz0tzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The financial insecurity of being a book author makes it harder to enter – or stay in – the profession.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel Thomas/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic</h2>
<p>Like many Australians, the majority of authors experienced disruption and hardship due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Approximately one-third of authors reported large or modest increases in levels of financial stress.</p>
<p>Authors promote their books through live appearances in bookstores, schools, libraries, writers’ festivals and other events. Over half of authors experienced a reduction in promotional opportunities for their next book. One creative non-fiction author wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My book [was] released into closed bookstores and I still find myself questioning if there is anything I can do to improve sales, eight months on. It was, and is, devastating. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The lockdowns meant that over one third of authors experienced a large decrease in income from paid appearances. </p>
<p>We found it difficult to identify a single factor that meant authors were negatively affected by the pandemic. A range of factors could be influential: whether an author lived in a state which experienced lengthy lockdowns, whether they had a book released (and if so, if they had an established large readership base or not), whether they had carer responsibilities (which could include elderly relatives as well as children), and whether they were experiencing financial stress. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-entire-industry-is-based-on-hunches-is-australian-publishing-an-art-a-science-or-a-gamble-189621">'The entire industry is based on hunches': is Australian publishing an art, a science or a gamble?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Small, good news – and what’s next?</h2>
<p>One piece of good news is that authors are 10% more likely to be satisfied with their main publisher than they were seven years ago. Nearly one-third (31.6%) of authors are very satisfied with their main publisher – an increase from just 19.6% in 2015.</p>
<p>Authors, large and small publishers, booksellers and libraries are working on joint initiatives to promote Australia’s reading culture in 2023. The industry awaits the federal government’s national cultural policy with anticipation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195426/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Zwar receives funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Throsby receives funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Crosby receives funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.</span></em></p>
A new survey of Australian authors finds that while author incomes have (very slightly) grown, they remain perilously low – which makes it hard to find time to write.
Jan Zwar, Faculty Research Manager, Macquarie University
David Throsby, Distinguished Professor of Economics, Macquarie University
Paul Crosby, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, Macquarie University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/194069
2022-11-14T19:00:23Z
2022-11-14T19:00:23Z
Chokepoint Capitalism: why we’ll all lose unless we stop Amazon, Spotify and other platforms squeezing cash from creators
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494947/original/file-20221113-18-5ebjcc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C245%2C3580%2C1928&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2020, the independent authors and small publishers whose audiobooks reach their readers via Audible’s <a href="https://www.acx.com/">ACX platform</a> smelled a rat.</p>
<p>Audiobooks were booming, but sales of their own books – produced at great expense and well-reviewed – were plummeting. </p>
<p>Some of their royalty statements reported <em>negative</em> sales, as readers returned more books than they bought. This was hard to make sense of, because Audible only reported net sales, refusing to reveal the sales and refunds that made them up. </p>
<p>Perth-based writer <a href="https://www.susanmaywriter.net/single-post/audiblegate-the-incredible-story-of-missing-sales">Susan May</a> wondered whether those returns might be the reason for her dwindling net sales. She pressed Audible to tell her how many of her sales were being negated by returns, but the company stonewalled. </p>
<p>Then, in October 2020, a glitch caused three weeks of returns data to be reported in a single day, and authors discovered that hundreds (and even thousands) of their sales had been wiped out by returns. </p>
<p>Suddenly, the scam came into focus: the Amazon-owned Audible had been offering an extraordinarily generous returns policy, encouraging subscribers to return books they’d had on their devices for months, even if they had listened to them the whole way through, even if they had loved them – no questions asked. </p>
<p>Encouraged by the policy, some subscribers had been treating the service like a library – returning books for fresh credits they could swap for new ones. Few would have realised that Audible clawed back the royalties from the book’s authors every time a book was returned.</p>
<h2>Good for Amazon, bad for authors</h2>
<p>It was good for Amazon – it helped Audible gain and hold onto subscribers – but bad for the authors and the performers who created the audiobooks, who barely got paid.</p>
<p>Understanding Amazon’s motivation helps us understand a phenomenon we call <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/chokepoint-capitalism-9781761380075">chokepoint capitalism</a>, a modern plague on creative industries and many other industries too.</p>
<p>Orthodox economics tells us not to worry about corporations dominating markets because that will attract competitors, who will put things back in balance. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-to-boost-australian-writers-earnings-110694">Five ways to boost Australian writers’ earnings</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But many of today’s big corporations and billionaire investors have perfected ways to make those supposedly-temporary advantages permanent. </p>
<p>Warren Buffett salivates over businesses with “<a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-moat-etf-simple-explanation-for-how-he-invests-and-its-easy-to-replicate-2017-10-1005613232">wide, sustainable moats</a>”. Peter Thiel scoffs that “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536">competition is for losers</a>”. Business schools teach students ways to lock in customers and suppliers and eliminate competition, so they can shake down the people who make what they supply and buy what they sell.</p>
<h2>Locking in customers and creators</h2>
<p>Amazon is the poster child for chokepoint capitalism. It boasts of its “<a href="https://feedvisor.com/resources/amazon-trends/amazon-flywheel-explained/">flywheel</a>” – a self-described “<a href="https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-flywheel/">virtuous cycle</a>” where its lower cost leads to lower prices and a better customer experience, which leads to more traffic, which leads to more sellers, and a better selection – which further propels the flywheel. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494907/original/file-20221111-21-lnbmh1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>But the way the cycle works isn’t virtuous – it’s vicious and anti-competitive. </p>
<p>Amazon openly admits to doing everything it can to lock in its customers. That’s why Audible encourages book returns: its generous offer only applies to ongoing subscribers. Audible wants the money from monthly subscribers and wants the fact that they are subscribed to prevent them from shopping elsewhere. </p>
<p>Paying the people who actually made the product it sells a fair share of earnings isn’t Amazon’s priority. Because Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ famous maxim is “<a href="https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity">your margin is my opportunity</a>”, the executive who figured out how to make authors foot the bill for retaining subscribers probably got a bonus.</p>
<p>Another way Audible locks customers in is by ensuring the books it sells are protected by <a href="https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/digital-rights-management-drm">digital rights management</a> (DRM) which means they are encrypted, and can only be read by software with the decryption key.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-us-government-is-trying-to-stop-the-merger-of-two-of-the-worlds-biggest-publishers-but-will-it-help-authors-188364">The US government is trying to stop the merger of two of the world's biggest publishers – but will it help authors?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Amazon claims DRM stops listeners from stealing from creators by pirating their books. But tools to strip away those locks are freely available online, and it’s easy for readers who can’t or won’t pay for books to find illegal versions. </p>
<p>While DRM doesn’t prevent infringement, it <em>does</em> prevent competition. </p>
<p>Startups that want to challenge Audible’s dominance – including those that would pay fairly – have to persuade potential customers to give up their Audible titles or to inconveniently maintain separate libraries. </p>
<p>In this way, laws that were intended to protect against infringement of copyright have become tools to protect against infringement of corporate dominance. </p>
<p>Once customers are locked in, suppliers (authors and publishers) are locked in too. It’s incredibly difficult to reach audiobook buyers unless you’re on Audible. When the suppliers are locked in, they can be shaken down for an ever-greater share of what the buyers hand over.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494908/original/file-20221111-16-pua9cp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<h2>How a few big buyers can control whole markets</h2>
<p>The problem isn’t with middlemen as such: book shops, record labels, book and music publishers, agents and myriad others provide valuable services that help keep creative wheels turning. </p>
<p>The problem arises when these middlemen grow powerful enough to bend markets into hourglass shapes, with audiences at one end, masses of creators at the other, and themselves operating as a chokepoint in the middle. </p>
<p>Since everyone has to go through them, they’re able to control the terms on which creative goods and services are exchanged - and extract more than their fair share of value.</p>
<p>The corporations who create these chokepoints are trying to “monopsonise” their markets. “Monopsony” isn’t a pretty word, but it’s one we are going to have to get familiar with to understand why so many of us are feeling squeezed. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/monopoly">Monopoly</a> (or near-monopoly) is where there is only one big seller, leaving buyers with few other places to turn. <a href="https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/monopsony/">Monopsony</a> is where there is only one big buyer, leaving sellers with few other places to turn.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/theres-an-obvious-reason-wages-arent-growing-but-you-wont-hear-it-from-treasury-or-the-reserve-bank-122041">There's an obvious reason wages aren't growing, but you won't hear it from Treasury or the Reserve Bank</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In our book, we quote William Deresiewicz, a former professor of English at Yale University, who points out in his book <a href="https://www.chicagoreview.org/william-deresiewicz-the-death-of-the-artist/">The Death of the Artist</a> that “if you can only sell your product to a single entity, it’s not your customer; it’s your boss”.</p>
<p>Increasingly, it is how the creative industries are structured. There’s Audible for audiobooks, Amazon for physical and digital versions, YouTube for video, Google and Facebook for online news advertising, the <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/big-three-record-labels-2460743">Big Three record labels</a> (who own the big three music publishers) for recorded music, <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/">Spotify</a> for streaming, Live Nation for live music and ticketing – and that’s just the start. </p>
<p>But as corporate concentration increases across the board, monopsony is becoming a problem for the rest of us. For a glimpse into what happens to labour markets when buyers become too powerful, just think about how monopsonistic supermarkets bully food manufacturers and farmers.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494912/original/file-20221112-11-u879gw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494912/original/file-20221112-11-u879gw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494912/original/file-20221112-11-u879gw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494912/original/file-20221112-11-u879gw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494912/original/file-20221112-11-u879gw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1214&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494912/original/file-20221112-11-u879gw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1214&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494912/original/file-20221112-11-u879gw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1214&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/chokepoint-capitalism-9781761380075">Scribe Publications</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A fairer deal for consumers and creators</h2>
<p>The good news is that we don’t have to put up with it.</p>
<p><a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/chokepoint-capitalism-9781761380075">Chokepoint Capitalism</a> isn’t one of those “Chapter 11 books” – ten chapters about how terrible everything is, plus a conclusion with some vague suggestions about what can be done. </p>
<p>The whole second half is devoted to detailed proposals for widening these chokepoints out – such as transparency rights, among others. </p>
<p>Audible’s sly trick only finally came to light because of the glitch that let authors see the scope of returns. </p>
<p>That glitch enabled writers, led by Susan May, to organise a campaign that eventually forced Audible to reform some of its more egregious practices. But we need more light in dark corners. </p>
<p>And we need reforms to contract law to level the playing field in negotiations, interoperability rights to prevent lock-in to platforms, copyrights being better secured to creators rather than publishers, and minimum wages for creative work. </p>
<p>These and the other things we suggest would do much to empower artists and get them paid. And they would provide inspiration for the increasing rest of us who are supplying our goods or our labour to increasingly powerful corporations that can’t seem to keep their hands out of our pockets.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Chokepoint Capitalism: how big tech and big content captured creative labour markets, and how we’ll win them back is published on <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/chokepoint-capitalism-9781761380075">Tuesday November 15</a> by Scribe.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194069/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Giblin receives funding from the Australian Research Council and state and territory libraries for the Author's Interest Project (authorsinterest.org), the eLending Project (elendingproject.org) and Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project (untapped.org.au). She is a Fellow of the CREATe research centre at the University of Glasgow, and a member of the Author's Alliance and the Australian Digital Alliance. She has occasionally and intermittently used Audible's service since its inception (though has not been a subscriber for a very long time),buys goods and services from Amazon when she really has to, subscribes to Spotify (where she sometimes listens to music controlled by the Big Three record labels, and published by their Big Three music publisher subsidiaries), and sometimes watches videos on YouTube.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cory Doctorow is a consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. He is a visiting professor of practice at the University of North Carolina's School of Library and Information Science. He is a dues-paying member of the Free Software Foundation and FSF Europe. His books and audiobooks are published by Random House, Macmillan, Beacon Press, McSweeney's, HarperCollins, Hachette, and many other publishers. These are for sale on Amazon, Excerpts of his work are for sale on Audible. He runs a personal ebook store (craphound.com/shop) that compete with Amazon and Audible for ebook and audiobook sales. One of his books was favorably reviewed and endorsed by Jeff Bezos.</span></em></p>
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s new book reveals the tricks behind ‘Chokepoint Capitalism’ – how big corporations use low prices to lock in users and creators, while locking out real competition.
Rebecca Giblin, ARC Future Fellow; Associate Professor; Director, Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, The University of Melbourne
Cory Doctorow, Visiting professor of computer science, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/191820
2022-10-12T12:17:48Z
2022-10-12T12:17:48Z
Anthony Bourdain and the farce of the ‘unauthorized’ biography
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489070/original/file-20221010-20-52iu9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=696%2C183%2C2083%2C1496&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The circumstances of Bourdain’s death were bound to arouse curiosity.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/anthony-bourdain-promotes-his-new-book-medium-raw-at-the-news-photo/808538412?phrase=anthony bourdain&adppopup=true">Ian West/PA Images via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“The agents of reticence,” wrote the English poet Ian Hamilton in “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Keepers_of_the_Flame.html?id=ZE5ZAAAAMAAJ">Keepers of the Flame</a>,” “have no truck with the agents of disclosure.”</p>
<p>Thwarted by J.D. Salinger as he tried to write the story of the novelist’s life, Hamilton was out for revenge when he penned this work on literary estate management and mismanagement. The title “Keepers of the Flame” was <a href="https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/keeper">a reference</a> to those in Victorian times who attempted to preserve pure images of the departed. </p>
<p>That was 30 years ago. Little has changed, as a new biography of chef, writer and television travel star Anthony Bourdain has demonstrated.</p>
<p>Written by journalist Charles Leerhsen, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Down_and_Out_in_Paradise/7yiJEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Charles+Leerhsen,+Down+and+Out&printsec=frontcover">Down and Out in Paradise</a>,” which publisher Simon & Schuster <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/dining/anthony-bourdain-biography.html">has deemed</a> the “first unauthorized biography” of Bourdain, has already elicited controversy.</p>
<p>The book’s publication has moved forward despite the best efforts of Bourdain’s brother, Christopher, and other friends and family members to torpedo Leerhsen’s work. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/dining/anthony-bourdain-biography.html">According to The New York Times</a>, Christopher Bourdain called for Simon & Schuster to halt publication until the book’s “many errors were corrected.” The publisher refused, responding, “With all due respect, we disagree that the material in the Book contains defamatory information, and we stand by our forthcoming publication.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.umb.edu/faculty_staff/bio/nigel_hamilton">As a seasoned biographer</a>, I’m not surprised by any of this. What gets my biographer’s goat, though, is the positioning of this battle as one conducted between “unauthorized biography” on the one hand and “authorized” biography on the other – the publisher, for hinting at scandalous content by casting the work as “unauthorized,” and the aggrieved, to think they have any power to “authorize” whether the biography gets published in the first place.</p>
<h2>No need to ask permission</h2>
<p>Biography traces its origins back to Classical times – and to the Roman historian <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Suetonius_the_Biographer.html?id=3H-KngEACAAJ">Suetonius</a>, in particular. </p>
<p>His “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Lives_of_the_Caesars/JsNxkG6Ai9sC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Lives+of+the+Caesars&printsec=frontcover">Lives of the Caesars</a>,” which recounts the biographies of 12 Roman emperors, from Julius to Domitian, offered Romans a stunning cornucopia of imperial tales, chronicling the rulers’ rise to power and their achievements, murders, assassinations, family troubles, frivolity, suicides and sexual perversions. It’s small wonder Seutonius <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-suetoniuss-the-twelve-caesars-explores-vice-and-virtue-in-ancient-rome-85608">was eventually banished from Rome</a>.</p>
<p>As long as there has been biography, there has always been pushback to writers’ prying into their subjects’ lives.</p>
<p>Among living subjects of biography, such a response is all too common. In the 1990s, the feminist Germaine Greer, author of “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Female_Eunuch/dtnbrx0pOI4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Greer,+The+Female+EUnuch&printsec=frontcover">The Female Eunuch</a>,” lambasted a fellow Australian writer, Christine Wallace, for daring to try to write a biography of Greer without her permission. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/18/the-life-of-germaine-greer-elizabeth-kleinhenz-review">Greer decried</a> Wallace as a “parasite” and a “brain-dead hack.”</p>
<p>Eventually, however, Greer – a professor of literature – <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Germaine/EDhrDwAAQBAJ?hl=en">accepted</a> that she was powerless to prevent herself from being written about.</p>
<p>After all, there exists no such thing as “authorized” or “unauthorized” biography, as both the “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encyclopedia_of_Life_Writing/pedJAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Encyclopedia+of+Life+Writing,+Jolly&printsec=frontcover">Encyclopedia of Life Writing</a>” (2001) and “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_ABC_of_Modern_Biography/p7kIuQEACAAJ?hl=en">The ABC of Modern Biography</a>” (2018) attest. </p>
<h2>The lost cause of libel</h2>
<p>Bourdain <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/anthony-bourdain-celebrity-chef-and-roguish-culinary-adventurer-dies-at-61/2018/06/08/7b6d7d7a-6b15-11e8-bea7-c8eb28bc52b1_story.html">died while working in France</a> in 2018. He was 61 years old when he took his life in the bedroom of his hotel room.</p>
<p>The circumstances of Bourdain’s death were bound to arouse curiosity. Given the tales of dysfunction and substance abuse that Bourdain revealed in his bestselling memoir, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Kitchen_Confidential.html?id=cocVLbFkgyQC">Kitchen Confidential</a>,” what more secrets are there in his life that might help explain his death? What secrets might his family try to suppress?</p>
<p>As Shakespeare noted in “<a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/full.html">Othello</a>,” a reputation is everything. And since good biography must critically examine its subject’s reputation, biographers are destined to find themselves on a collision course with those looking to protect the image of the subject.</p>
<p>If the book presents as distorted a life as Bourdain’s brother claims, could Bourdain’s family and associates go after Leerhsen for libel? </p>
<p>In short, no.</p>
<p>More than 50 years ago, Alabama police commissioner L.B. Sullivan sued The New York Times for defamation. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the Times and overturned <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/39">existing libel laws</a>, making it significantly more difficult for public figures to successfully sue for defamation during their lifetimes.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the protections of libel law <a href="https://splc.org/2019/10/can-you-libel-a-dead-person/">end with death</a> – and Bourdain is dead. </p>
<h2>Throwing sand in the gears</h2>
<p>Of all the other legal rights of defense, there is one that biographers most fear, whether in life or after death of the subject: copyright, or the law of “intellectual property,” which extends for <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf">70 years after death</a>. Bourdain’s legal heirs have the power to grant or deny use of the deceased’s written and spoken words. </p>
<p>For biographers, the quoting of a subject is as crucial as water to fish. How else is a biographer to bring that individual – a real individual, not a fictional one – back to literary life on the page?</p>
<p>Interviews with surviving witnesses are potential silver, certainly, but they will always be secondhand. By contrast, the words of biographical subjects are gold. They do not confer truth necessarily – often they confer the opposite, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/">lies</a> – but they do convey authenticity, without which the reader cannot judge fairly the account and portrait that is composed.</p>
<p>In “Down and Out in Paradise,” the “most revealing material,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/dining/anthony-bourdain-biography.html">The New York Times points out</a>, “comes from files and messages pulled from Mr. Bourdain’s phone and laptop, both of which are part of the estate.” </p>
<p>The executor of Bourdain’s estate – his ex-wife, <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/anthony-bourdains-daughter-ariane-will-inherit-bulk-of-his-estate/">Ottavia Busia-Bourdain</a> – could have attempted to restrict the use of this material. But for mysterious reasons, she didn’t.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman and man pose." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489071/original/file-20221010-23-i7qphj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489071/original/file-20221010-23-i7qphj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489071/original/file-20221010-23-i7qphj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489071/original/file-20221010-23-i7qphj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489071/original/file-20221010-23-i7qphj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489071/original/file-20221010-23-i7qphj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489071/original/file-20221010-23-i7qphj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anthony Bourdain’s ex-wife, Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, is the executor of his estate.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ottavia-busia-and-anthony-bourdain-attend-the-julie-and-news-photo/526122962?phrase=Ottavia%20Busia-Bourdain&adppopup=true">Lars Niki/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Either way, copyright control confers no legal right of “authorization” for a biographer’s work – there is no requirement to obtain permission from him or his heirs, beyond copyright permissions to quote authentic words. </p>
<p>In a perfect world, publishers wouldn’t resort to this advertising gimmick, so that the public – especially students – won’t be misled regarding the rights of biographers in our democracy. But I won’t insist. </p>
<p>Life’s too short. </p>
<p>And I have a biography to write.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191820/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nigel Hamilton has received funding from UMass Boston</span></em></p>
Bourdain’s brother, Christopher, has called for the publisher, Simon & Schuster, to halt publication until the book’s ‘many errors were corrected.’
Nigel Hamilton, Senior Fellow, McCormack Graduate School, UMass Boston
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/190218
2022-09-12T12:13:56Z
2022-09-12T12:13:56Z
Barbara Ehrenreich helped make inequality visible – her legacy lives on in a reinvigorated labor movement
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483819/original/file-20220910-33476-urzf6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=185%2C38%2C2989%2C2027&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich in a 2005 photo.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObitBarbaraEhrenreich/94d9e557d24841718a544e81910d1472/photo?Query=%22barbara%20ehrenreich%22&mediaType=photo,video,graphic,audio&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=3&currentItemNo=1">AP Photo/Andrew Shurtleff</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Have you heard of <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/starbucks-union-jaz-brisack/">Jaz Brisack</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/24/amazon-apple-google-union-busting/">Liz Fong-Jones</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/04/02/1090353185/amazon-union-chris-smalls-organizer-staten-island">Chris Smalls</a>?</p>
<p>Those names might not be familiar to all Americans, but their recent accomplishments amount to a potential sea change in labor rights. </p>
<p>As union organizers or advocates for better work conditions at some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world – Starbucks, Google and Amazon, respectively – these three young people have highlighted just how far out of whack the balance between workers and organizations has grown.</p>
<p>I believe that their work, part of a <a href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/institute-work-and-employment-research/new-report-u-s-workers-organizing-efforts-and-collective-actions">surge in labor organizing</a> and other kinds of <a href="https://theconversation.com/building-something-better-how-community-organizing-helps-people-thrive-in-challenging-times-181397">community-building efforts</a>, has its roots in the <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/09/the-long-fight-of-barbara-ehrenreich/">scholarship and journalism</a> of <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/6/headlines/nickel_and_dimed_author_barbara_ehrenreich_dies_at_81">Barbara Ehrenreich, who died</a> on Sept. 1, 2022. </p>
<h2>Opening a window on inequality</h2>
<p>Ehrenreich is best known for her 2001 book “<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312626686/nickelanddimed">Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America</a>.” </p>
<p>It begins with a deceptively simple premise: investigating whether and how workers can live on what they earn from low-wage jobs. Operating essentially undercover by taking on retail jobs, cleaning houses and waiting tables, <a href="https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/8-2-analytical-report-trailblazer-barbara-ehrenreich">Ehrenreich chronicled her experiences</a> and observations as she <a href="https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/external/title/9780312626686/">roved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota</a>. She showed readers that it was virtually impossible to make a living with this work. </p>
<p>Once hired, Ehrenreich refused to rely on her savings or assets, instead paying for rent, food and utilities out of her hourly wages. She quickly found out that doing so left her uninsured, in poor health, sometimes hungry, often tired and always struggling. </p>
<p>“Nickel and Dimed” is an <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780805088380">unforgettable best-selling expose</a> that highlights what many low-wage workers already know: It’s impossible to get ahead when you can’t even break even.</p>
<h2>A model for sociologists</h2>
<p>I first read “Nickel and Dimed,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/books/barbara-ehrenreich-dead.html">one of 21 books she published</a> in her lifetime, in 2002 when I was finishing my coursework for a doctorate in sociology. Ehrenreich’s work <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_allsubj=all&as_sauthors=%22Wingfield%2C+Adia+Harvey%22&as_q=">resonated with me</a> because of her focus on the grind of low-paying jobs.</p>
<p>She earned her own <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/people/barbara-ehrenreich">doctorate in cell biology</a> and had no formal training as a sociologist. But she adopted what I like to think are the strengths of my discipline.</p>
<p>That is, she asked questions to help understand various groups’ experiences, as well as the relationships between institutions and individuals. She also forcefully recommended policy changes that could potentially improve the lives of people who are suffering due to powerful forces, such as corporations, the government and school systems.</p>
<p>In my view, Ehrenreich’s ability to document in clear, accessible prose exactly how low-wage work forced people into an unavoidable grind is the best kind of sociological research.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1565757561617391622"}"></div></p>
<h2>Opening a path</h2>
<p>Her work also set an example for many other sociologists studying workers, labor markets and the economy. Ehrenreich laid a clear path for sociologists who have examined the inner lives of employees, the obstacles they face and the strategies they use to survive. </p>
<p>Subsequent studies of how <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520283015/cut-loose">autoworkers try to thrive</a> in a declining industry, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0891243220948218">why workers blame themselves</a> when they struggle to find employment, or of the relationship between <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674725119">union decline and pay differences</a> for Black and white workers – all of that research followed Ehrenreich’s lead.</p>
<p>This body of work can push people to look at the consequences of these economic arrangements.</p>
<p>It also casts light on how “<a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/09/05/right-to-work-laws-impact">right to work</a>” laws hamper union operations in 27 states. In addition, this research is scrutinizing <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22651953/americans-gig-independent-workers-benefits-vacation-health-care-inequality">short-term, contract work</a> without job stability or benefits. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/business/economy/gig-work.html">growth of gig work</a> is adding to the gap between “good jobs” and “bad jobs,” and <a href="https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/269735/jobs-better-worse-workers-wellbeing.aspx">those with the bad ones are suffering</a>. </p>
<p>This research, like <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/09/bait-and-switch-interview-barbara-ehrenreich/">much of Ehrenreich’s work</a>, forces readers to ask why <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-inequality-debate">economic inequality has become so severe in the U.S.</a>, with wages stagnating while wealth concentrates among those with the most. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a red sweatshirt stands in front of an 'Amazon Labor Union' banner." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483822/original/file-20220910-7447-vt4wg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chris Smalls, a former warehouse worker, led the first successful U.S. union campaign for a group of Amazon employees.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/AmazonUnion/af8777f4d78742db85d828d4b16febc5/photo?Query=%22chris%20smalls%22&mediaType=photo,video,graphic,audio&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=49&currentItemNo=24">AP Photo/Seth Wenig</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New generation of labor leaders</h2>
<p>Brisack, Fong-Jones and Smalls, along with countless less prominent workers, know these things already.</p>
<p>Smalls <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/23145265/amazon-fired-chris-smalls-union-leader-alu-jeff-bezos-bernie-sanders-aoc-labor-movement-biden">built a labor movement at Amazon</a> based on his and other workers’ <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/amazon-workers-staten-island-christian-smalls">demands that the company do a better job protecting them from COVID-19</a> at the warehouse where he had been employed on Staten Island, New York. In April 2022, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/01/amazon-union-groups-see-hope-workers-vote-alabama-new-york">National Labor Relations Board certified</a> that the workers had prevailed in their efforts to form the first union to represent any of Amazon’s workers. </p>
<p>Brisack, likewise, objected as a Starbucks barista in Buffalo, New York, to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/12/rhodes-scholar-barista-fight-unionize-starbucks/">what she said were hazardous workplace conditions</a> that heightened employees’ exposure to COVID-19. In December 2021, the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/starbucks-union-vote-buffalo-stores/">campaign she organized</a> led her workplace to become the first of the company’s nearly 10,000 locations to be represented by a union. By the end of August 2022, <a href="https://sbworkersunited.org/new-page-2">some 230 Starbucks stores had voted to unionize</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html">Fong-Jones</a>, a former <a href="https://hub.packtpub.com/liz-fong-jones-reveals-she-is-leaving-google-in-february/">Google engineer who resigned</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22848750/whistleblower-facebook-google-apple-employees">became an activist</a> who supports the rights of women, trans people and people of color in tech industries, hasn’t unionized her former coworkers. Instead, she teamed up with others to establish a <a href="https://coworkerfund.org/about-the-fund/">nonprofit that supports tech whistleblowers and labor organizers</a>.</p>
<p>The many recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/america-is-in-the-middle-of-a-labor-mobilization-moment-with-self-organizers-at-starbucks-amazon-trader-joes-and-chipotle-behind-the-union-drive-189826">successes in organizing workers</a> to <a href="https://theconversation.com/building-something-better-how-community-organizing-helps-people-thrive-in-challenging-times-181397">demand collective changes</a> – safer workplaces, higher pay, better benefits – are right in line with what Ehrenreich always stood for. I hope she saw their achievements as an extension of her own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190218/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adia Harvey Wingfield does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The author, who died Sept. 1, 2022, inspired countless researchers to probe the injustices working people face.
Adia Harvey Wingfield, Professor of Sociology, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/181459
2022-05-05T12:43:51Z
2022-05-05T12:43:51Z
A white librettist wrote an opera about Emmett Till – and some critics are calling for its cancellation
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461045/original/file-20220503-12-jpgsmp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C22%2C2986%2C1976&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A faded photograph is attached to the headstone that marks the gravesite of Emmett Till in Chicago.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/faded-photograph-is-attached-to-the-headstone-that-marks-news-photo/1308512100">Scott Olson/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Are Black audiences, actors, and producers simply conditioned to having their stories told by white counterparts?” screenwriter and director <a href="https://www.ebony.com/entertainment/op-ed-the-problem-with-white-writers-writing-black-stories/">Darian Lane</a>, who is Black, wondered in a 2021 op-ed for Ebony. </p>
<p>On TV and in film, white authorship of Black stories has long been a point of contention, whether it was David Simon <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/11/us/who-gets-to-tell-a-black-story.html">writing about a Black neighborhood</a> in Baltimore for his series “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/">The Wire</a>” or Tate Taylor writing and directing “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/">The Help</a>.”</p>
<p>It was only a matter of time before this issue would beset the world of opera. Since “Emmett Till, A New American Opera” <a href="https://playbill.com/article/emmett-till-a-new-american-opera-to-premiere-at-john-jay-college">premiered at John Jay College</a> on March 23, 2022,
a <a href="https://www.change.org/p/cancel-a-new-american-opera-emmett-till-at-john-jay-college">Change.org petition</a> has circulated with 12,000-plus signatories calling for the production to never again see the light of day. </p>
<p>The reason?</p>
<p>A white woman named Clare Coss wrote <a href="https://www.uncoveringsound.com/difference-between-a-libretto-and-a-script/">the libretto</a>, or text, for the opera, which she based on an award-winning play she had written called “<a href="https://theaterlife.com/emmett-down-in-my-heart/">Emmett, Down in My Heart</a>” in 2015. </p>
<p>Coss concocted a fictional white female protagonist named Roann Taylor, who fails to call the police when she overhears the lynching of the 14-year-old Till. Eventually, she realizes that her silence has perpetuated injustice and she confronts the killers. </p>
<p>Critics claim the opera elevates the guilt of white audiences while capitalizing on Black trauma. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/03/22/emmett-till-opera-protest/">The Washington Post</a> notes that the production joins a slew of white-authored responses to the Emmett Till murder that didn’t sit well with the Black community, ranging from Bob Dylan’s “<a href="https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/5856">Death of Emmett Till</a>” to Dana Schutz’s painting “<a href="https://www.vulture.com/2022/01/dana-schutz-open-casket-emmett-till-painting.html">Open Casket</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Painting of boy in suit in casket." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460796/original/file-20220502-22-8flicq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460796/original/file-20220502-22-8flicq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460796/original/file-20220502-22-8flicq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460796/original/file-20220502-22-8flicq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460796/original/file-20220502-22-8flicq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460796/original/file-20220502-22-8flicq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460796/original/file-20220502-22-8flicq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dana Schutz’s painting of Till sparked protests during the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where it was displayed – with some people calling for its destruction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Casket#/media/File:Dana_Schutz_Open_Casket_2016_Oil_on_canvas.jpg">Dana Schutz, Open Casket (2016). Oil on canvas</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the one hand, I sympathize with the frustrating legacy of white artists telling Black stories. On the other hand, my 25 years of experience <a href="https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/0031Q00002QPtm6QAD/anita-gonzalez">teaching African-American theater</a> have made me acutely sensitive to the complications of authorship – especially when it comes to stage productions.</p>
<h2>Whom is the opera for?</h2>
<p>When artists develop new stories about Black experiences it matters who creates the story. How might their own background connect to the narrative? What sort of audience do they have in mind?</p>
<p>Social activist and cultural thinker W.E.B Du Bois published <a href="https://archive.org/search.php?query=sim_pubid%3A10994+AND+volume%3A32&sort=date">an essay in a 1926 issue of Crisis magazine</a> that set out to define what constitutes African American drama. He argued that they were plays that ought to be “about” Black communities, “by” Black authors, written “for” Black audiences and performed “near” Black neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Under this definition, Coss’ opera wouldn’t be considered African American drama. While it was a production about the Black community, it was composed, in part, to help white audiences empathize with Black pain. </p>
<p>And even though Coss has said the opera is intended for everyone, she’s also noted that the inclusion of a white character who recognizes her slow response to racial violence was <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2022/03/23/1088169711/a-new-opera-about-emmett-till-is-criticized-for-being-written-by-a-white-woman">important for predominantly white operagoing audiences to see</a>.</p>
<p>This is the rub. Many Black artists <a href="https://www.ebony.com/entertainment/op-ed-the-problem-with-white-writers-writing-black-stories/">are weary of products told from white perspectives</a> because there’s a tendency for the characters and conflicts to fall into familiar tropes. Lost are the ambiguities and inconsistencies of our unique cultural legacies.</p>
<p>Productions like George Gershwin’s “<a href="https://www.metopera.org/season/2021-22-season/porgy-and-bess/">Porgy and Bess</a>,” where the Black experience is reflected in old tropes, still draw huge crowds. The opera – which tells the story of Porgy, a disabled, downtrodden Black man who lives among drug dealers and addicts – perpetuates stereotypes of Black people as addicts who are incapable of self-sufficiency.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Older man using crutches sings on stage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461049/original/file-20220503-19080-6ru4ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461049/original/file-20220503-19080-6ru4ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461049/original/file-20220503-19080-6ru4ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461049/original/file-20220503-19080-6ru4ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461049/original/file-20220503-19080-6ru4ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461049/original/file-20220503-19080-6ru4ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461049/original/file-20220503-19080-6ru4ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 2019 dress rehearsal of ‘Porgy and Bess’ at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-baritone-eric-owens-performs-at-the-final-dress-news-photo/1179461251?adppopup=true">Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/us/george-floyd-protests-police-reform.html">In this moment of raised social consciousness</a>, it’s important to tell stories about Black injustices. But stories of joy, community, healing and wellness are just as important. </p>
<p>So it’s refreshing to see newer musicals like Michael R. Jackson’s “<a href="https://strangeloopmusical.com/">A Strange Loop</a>,” which is now playing on Broadway. Jackson, who is Black, wrote a musical that plumbs the inner psyche of a character named Usher who struggles with anxieties about his queer identity and lifestyle. A chorus of colorful characters depicts his thoughts as he untangles his fraught family relationships and rebuilds his self-esteem. </p>
<h2>The complications of ‘by’</h2>
<p>The “by” of Du Bois’ argument is particularly complex in the case of both the Till opera and “Porgy and Bess.” Both productions feature white authors writing about Black experiences that are then depicted by Black performers. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Man in suit sits in chair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461052/original/file-20220503-17-8tt63g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">To W.E.B. Du Bois, a work needed to meet certain criteria to be considered African American drama.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dubois-waits-to-be-called-as-a-witness-at-the-federal-news-photo/514697730?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Is the author the writer, producer, director or lead performer? Many productions about the Black experience – Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088939/">The Color Purple</a>” is just one example that comes to mind – were originally authored by Blacks yet produced by whites to accommodate white sensibilities. At the time of its release, the film also <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2020/04/the-color-purple-debate-anniversary-1202217786/">elicited controversy</a> for depicting Black female experiences through the eyes of a white male producer and director.</p>
<p>The current controversy about the Emmett Till opera ultimately glosses over a complex collaborative processes. As with most performance projects, many artists participated in realizing the final product. Afro-Cuban composer <a href="https://www.tanialeon.com/">Tania León</a> conducted the score. The Harlem Chamber Players and Opera Noire International co-produced the work. </p>
<p>Most importantly, Mary Watkins, the composer, is Black. The composer is usually considered the core creative artist in an operatic work, and Watkins artfully uses emotional arias and music that mimics moans to draw listeners into the anguish of the mother’s loss.</p>
<p>“Even though there are many artists of color involved in this project, the critics are assuming that we have had no impact on the final shape of the piece and that the playwright has somehow forced all of us to tell her story,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/03/22/emmett-till-opera-protest/">Watkins wrote in an email interview</a>. “It is an insult to me as a Black woman and to the cast members who are African-American.” </p>
<h2>Performing race</h2>
<p>One of my students once pointed out that enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas naked and were then forced to don clothing provided by the enslavers. </p>
<p>We have been wearing garments and identities designed to conform to white sensibilities ever since. African American theater historians have long grappled with how to assess Black contributions in a country where white critics, by and large, evaluate our cultural productions. </p>
<p>Books like “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/african-american-performance-and-theater-history-9780195127256?cc=us&lang=en&">African American Performance and Theater History</a>” describe how double-conscious performance styles enabled Black artists to resist stereotypical representations on stage. <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/hattie-mcdaniel-gone-with-the-wind-oscars-autobiography">Hattie McDaniel</a>, for example, played the maid in “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film)">Gone With the Wind”</a> with tenacious spunk, using sassy comedy to humanize her servile “Mammy” role.</p>
<p>Newer anthologies, like my edited collection “<a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/black-performance-theory">Black Performance Theory</a>,” complicate notions of Black authorship and artistry. The book describes how Blackness circulates through cultural productions as vocal, physical and visual imagery which may or may not be aligned with Black bodies on stage. For example, in “Emmett Till, A New American Opera,” Watkins’ use of resonant open tones in the first few bars of Mamie Till’s lament, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kfwNzQyrDA&t=28s">My Son, My Child</a>,” evokes the choral singing of the African American gospel tradition.</p>
<p>To me, the backlash against the white librettist is ultimately a waste of time. Not only is there room for works done in collaboration with Black artists, but cross-cultural, interethnic collaborations also add to the richness and versatility of performed storytelling. </p>
<p>Du Bois wrote about Black performance as it existed within the confines of a segregated society. Theatrical performances by, for, near and about can certainly unite Black communities around collective storytelling. </p>
<p>But I also cherish the vibrancy of storytelling that includes a diversity of perspectives. I hope to see more operas, plays and musicals that encourage conversations about Black identities – without efforts to cancel those who have contributed to the effort.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181459/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anita Gonzalez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Many Black audiences are justifiably weary of works about their community told from white perspectives. But authorship isn’t always black and white.
Anita Gonzalez, Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts, Co-Founder/Director Racial Justice Institute, Georgetown University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/173900
2021-12-17T13:28:16Z
2021-12-17T13:28:16Z
bell hooks will never leave us – she lives on through the truth of her words
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438124/original/file-20211216-21-1uav45p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C257%2C4187%2C2911&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bell hooks' books provide a window into her hugely influential theories.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/author-and-cultural-critic-bell-hooks-poses-for-a-portrait-news-photo/1178375420?adppopup=true">Karjean Levine/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>I was introduced to the work of bell hooks for the first time when I was 14 years old, sitting on my Nana’s porch, complaining about the mosquitoes and the heat.</p>
<p>My Nana, who was probably frustrated by my endless complaints about being bored, stuck a copy of “<a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780861043798/aint-i-a-woman/">Ain’t I A Woman</a>” in my hand and told me just to “shut up and read.” I remember that summer because after I read that book, all we talked about was bell hooks and who she was and who I wanted to be. I said then that I wanted to be a writer, like bell hooks, and change the world with my words. </p>
<p>I took her words with me when I went off to college, and by then, I had my own dog-eared copies of some of her books. I went to her work whenever I needed to be reminded of my strength. The world felt much safer when bell hooks and <a href="https://theconversation.com/toni-morrison-american-literary-giant-made-it-her-lifes-work-to-ensure-that-black-lives-and-voices-matter-121527">Toni Morrison</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/maya-angelou-an-acknowledged-legislator-of-the-world-has-gone-27315">Maya Angelou</a> were on the front line, carving out a path to freedom and modeling what a Black woman’s resistance to a system hellbent on trying to make them small looked like. bell hooks’ words went with me everywhere, even while they kept taking me back to myself.</p>
<p>I, like countless others over the past 40 years, was inspired by bell hooks, who <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064509418/bell-hooks-feminist-author-critic-activist-died">died on Dec. 15, 2021, at 69</a>. As a leading Black intellectual, hooks pushed the feminist movement beyond the preserve of the white and middle-class, encouraging Black and working class perspectives on gender inequality. She taught us about white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values – giving both the words to define it and the methods to dismantle it. And unlike previous generations, she prompted Black women like myself to see ourselves, claim ourselves and love ourselves with an unapologetic fierceness.</p>
<p>“No Black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much,’” bell hooks <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805059106/rememberedrapture">once wrote</a>, “Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’… No woman has ever written enough.”</p>
<p>I used to read her words to my sons when I was holding them in my arms, determined to practice “<a href="https://rlstollar.com/2020/12/06/love-does-not-abuse-the-parenting-philosophy-of-bell-hooks/#:%7E:text=Liberative%20parenting%20is%20parenting%20that,evangelical%20parenting%20movement%20she%20helms.">liberative parenting</a>” and raise my Black sons as Black feminists.</p>
<p>I met bell hooks in person several times in my capacity as an activist, an officer of the National Women’s Studies Association and as a <a href="https://www.loyola.edu/about/community/faculty/whitehead">scholar of African American studies</a>. I have heard her lecture and have spoken with her, and every time, I was speechless. In her presence, I was once again the 14-year-old, sitting on the porch, diving into her words and finding myself on the other side.</p>
<p>Her words, like my Nana’s hugs, always bought me back to myself, telling me, coaxing me, pushing me to become who I was meant to be in this world. </p>
<p>I remember speaking her words to the wind, hoping that if I ever forgot who I was, the wind would remind me. Whenever I am hungry for truth, I turn to her work. When I need support or encouragement, I turn to her work. When I need to be reminded of how to love and fight, I turn to her work.</p>
<p>So when I heard, read, realized and finally accepted that bell hooks – genius, scholar, cultural critic, truth speaker, one who had the strength to call out and challenge white supremacy and racism time and time again – had run on ahead to see how the end is going to be, all I could do was sit and breathe.</p>
<p>I am not OK.</p>
<p>None of us – feminists, scholars, activists, truth seekers, survivors – who have ever been touched by her work and her words are OK. Not today. Not at this moment, and not for a minute. </p>
<p>It is not enough to say she saved me from cutting off my tongue, because unless you know her genius, you will think that this is just about violence and not about salvation.</p>
<p>It is not enough to say that she saved me from burning it all down, because unless you know her brilliance, you will never understand how her words taught me how to come through the fire and be better and stronger on the other side.</p>
<p>Because she wrote and published extensively, “bell hooks” the writer – a pen name that she borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks – will never leave us, but Gloria Jean Watkins, did. The sun is not shining as bright as when she was still with us.</p>
<p>My son called to mourn with me and wanted to know which books I would recommend to someone who did not know who bell hooks was and did not understand why we were in mourning. I told him that they should start with these three, and once they have recovered from the truth of her words, they should then read her other 30-plus <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2qGRWuYAAAAJ&hl=en">books and scholarly articles</a>.</p>
<h2>Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A book cover shows the symbol for female under the title 'Ain't I A Woman'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438126/original/file-20211216-13-1kaj2yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438126/original/file-20211216-13-1kaj2yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438126/original/file-20211216-13-1kaj2yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438126/original/file-20211216-13-1kaj2yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438126/original/file-20211216-13-1kaj2yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438126/original/file-20211216-13-1kaj2yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438126/original/file-20211216-13-1kaj2yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cover work for the first edition of ‘Ain’t I A Woman’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ain%27t_I_a_Woman.jpg">Wikimedia commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In perhaps one of her most provocative works, hooks provides a true and clear analysis of what it means to live and be a Black woman in a racist, misogynist world. If you want to understand what it means to be Black and a woman, you start here and then keep going.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.” – Ain’t I a Woman</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Feminist Theory: from margin to center (1984)</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A red cover with an abstract image with the title 'Feminist Theory'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438127/original/file-20211216-21-16v0hc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438127/original/file-20211216-21-16v0hc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438127/original/file-20211216-21-16v0hc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438127/original/file-20211216-21-16v0hc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438127/original/file-20211216-21-16v0hc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1243&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438127/original/file-20211216-21-16v0hc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1243&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438127/original/file-20211216-21-16v0hc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1243&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cover art for Feminist Theory: from margin to center.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_Theory:_From_Margin_to_Center#/media/File:Feminist_Theory,_From_Margin_to_Center.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When I was in college and struggling with understanding and defining what it meant to be a feminist, my professor <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/jane-bond-moore-41">Jane Bond Moore</a> gave me her copy of “Feminist Theory” and told me to use it as a blueprint and a guide. This book is bell hooks at her best, wielding her pen as a weapon and using it to call out and critique white feminism and white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Our emphasis must be on cultural transformation: destroying dualism, eradicating systems of domination. Our feminist revolution here can be aided by the example of liberation struggles led by oppressed peoples globally who resist formidable powers. The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist struggle.” – Feminist Theory</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Teaching to Transgress (1994)</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A yellow book cover with a small ladder above the title 'Teaching to Transgress.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438129/original/file-20211216-21-plmw1t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438129/original/file-20211216-21-plmw1t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438129/original/file-20211216-21-plmw1t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438129/original/file-20211216-21-plmw1t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438129/original/file-20211216-21-plmw1t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438129/original/file-20211216-21-plmw1t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438129/original/file-20211216-21-plmw1t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cover art for Teaching to Transgress.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-to-Transgress-Education-as-the-Practice-of-Freedom/hooks/p/book/9780415908085">Routledge</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a former middle school teacher and current professor, my goal was to learn how to teach students how to transgress and why they should transgress against racial, sexual and class boundaries. </p>
<p>“Teaching to Transgress” lights the way for anyone who wants to use the classroom as a starting place to help our students claim agency over their own learning.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We must continually claim theory as necessary practice within a holistic framework of liberatory activism.” – Teaching to Transgress</p>
</blockquote>
<p>[<em>Understand what’s going on in Washington.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/politics-weekly-74/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=politics-most">Sign up for The Conversation’s Politics Weekly</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/173900/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>president of the NWSA
secretary of ASALH</span></em></p>
bell hooks, the Black feminist writer and intellectual, died on Dec. 15 aged 69. Scholar and activist Karsonya Wise Whitehead provides a personal reflection on what bell hooks meant to her life.
Karsonya Wise Whitehead, Executive Director, Karson Institute for Race, Peace, & Social Justice, Loyola University Maryland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/172201
2021-11-25T14:36:05Z
2021-11-25T14:36:05Z
The Brontës, the Shelleys, Kingsley and Martin Amis: new research suggests literary relatives share similar writing styles
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433712/original/file-20211124-23-h33ebd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C25%2C4217%2C2796&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (c. 1834).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bront%C3%AB_family#/media/File:The_Bront%C3%AB_Sisters_by_Patrick_Branwell_Bront%C3%AB_restored.jpg">National Portrait Gallery, London</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From <a href="https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-200-years-on-why-we-still-love-her-heroes-heroines-and-houses-80451">Jane Austen</a> to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-need-to-write-much-to-be-the-worlds-bestselling-author-75261">James Patterson</a>, every author has their own way of writing. And that writing is often discussed in terms of “style”. Essentially, style refers to “how” something is written – it is more concerned with form than content. So when, for example, someone remarks that they “enjoyed the story” but “didn’t like how it was written”, they are commenting on the style. </p>
<p>If you want to see an example of different styles in action, just compare something like <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-hobbit-by-jrr-tolkien?gclid=CjwKCAiA4veMBhAMEiwAU4XRr7cigsxJpjSWLMLikwn2NxblATlqMVFk_t1WnvPNZqTvN-GgjSuXbxoCjJMQAvD_BwE">The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien</a> to <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-ulysses">Ulysses by James Joyce</a>. The Hobbit is written for a general audience, it’s a good old-fashioned story told through clear, accessible language. Ulysses is a more difficult read, full of obscure terms, complex phrasing, and cryptic references to other materials. </p>
<p>Obviously, Joyce still tells a story in Ulysses (and a great one at that), but he isn’t solely concerned with telling his tale. Joyce is also using the novel’s structure and language to experiment with form and challenge established ideas of what literature should look like.</p>
<p>But while style differs across authors, it would seem it doesn’t change so much across writers who are part of the same family. In <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">my recent research</a>, I looked at the literary styles of authors related to each other to see how their writing compared. Most members of the same literary families that I looked at tended to write in similar ways.</p>
<h2>Literary families</h2>
<p>Examining an author’s style based on their tendency to choose particular words is increasingly done with a process called “stylometry”. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wzrem5NkM">Stylometry</a> uses computers to statistically measure the most frequent words in a text. Authors are consistent with the regularity with which they use certain words, so counting words can give an indication as to how a particular author or group of authors tend to write. </p>
<p>Stylometry is most often used for authorship attribution, answering (usually unfounded) questions around who really wrote a particular novel, as has been the case with <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa031">Wuthering Heights</a> and <a href="https://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/70">Go Set A Watchman</a>.</p>
<p>But stylometry isn’t just useful in cases where a text’s authorship is disputed, it can also be used to analyse stylistic similarity more generally. And literary families present a unique opportunity to study why authors write in certain ways because relatives tend to develop within similar social environments. </p>
<p>In my <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">research</a>, I used stylometry to look at the writing styles of the following literary families: Kingsley and Martin Amis (father-son), Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë (sisters), William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley (father-mother-daughter), A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble (sisters), W. Somerset and Robin Maugham (uncle-nephew), John le Carré and Nick Harkaway (father-son). </p>
<p>The results show that relatives involved usually wrote in similar styles. Without exception, each of the authors tested clustered with the other members of their family. This means that the computer was able to tell different families apart, based on their respective writing styles, with 100% accuracy. The next stage would be doing a larger study with more families to see if this trend holds more widely.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">This recent experiment</a> was prompted by my previous <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa031">study on the Brontës</a> (perhaps one of the most famous literary families), which shows that, compared with a selection of their peers, the Brontë siblings all share a remarkably similar literary style. This is perhaps unsurprising when you consider the extent to which the Brontës are known to have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1179/1474893215Z.000000000148">collaborated</a>, but this trend also seems consistent across other families. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dendrogram showing stylometric clusters of literary families" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A stylometric analysis of several literary families represented on a ‘dendrogram’. Dendrograms use lines to represent the similarity between whatever is being measured. The shorter the line between authors, the more similar their style.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The creative collaboration seen with families like the Brontës is common practice among relatives who all write. But it’s still significant to see that familial influence is so strong that it can be detected using stylometric techniques. This could indicate that essential characteristics of an author’s voice might be inherently connected to their formative environments and upbringing. </p>
<h2>Nature v nurture</h2>
<p>But such findings also revive the (perhaps tired) debate between nature and nurture. Mary Shelley, who is best known for writing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/13/frankenstein-at-200-why-hasnt-mary-shelley-been-given-the-respect-she-deserves-">Frankenstein</a>, clusters alongside her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. </p>
<p>While the stylistic similarity between the other literary families analysed might be attributed to collaboration, Mary Shelley never knew her mother as she died ten days after Mary was born. And yet, they still share similar literary styles. </p>
<p>Her mother’s only novel was published before she began her relationship with Godwin, so it is unlikely that his influence is simply connecting the female members of his family. Again, perhaps Mary Shelley had a similar upbringing to Mary Wollstonecraft. </p>
<p>Or perhaps there is something else beyond nurture, something genetic that simply passed from mother to daughter. While such an explanation seems highly unlikely, what is undeniable is that Mary Shelley, without having known her mother, grew to resemble her literary style. </p>
<p>Perhaps then, being an author is just in one’s blood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172201/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James O'Sullivan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
New research shows that literary relatives tend to share a similar writing style.
James O'Sullivan, Lecturer in Digital Arts & Humanities, University College Cork
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/169583
2021-10-14T11:20:49Z
2021-10-14T11:20:49Z
Book sales have soared since the pandemic – but the industry must adapt to engage with new readers
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426411/original/file-20211014-25-1nlc1oq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=382%2C252%2C5838%2C3895&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Reading the room.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/@sevenshooterimage">Unsplash/Seven Shooter</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>One day each October, the UK publishing industry focuses its attention on a large number of high-profile new book releases. “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/08/john-le-carre-daisy-may-cooper-paul-mccartney-super-thursday-publishing">Super Thursday</a>”, as it is known in the trade, is the start of a seasonal promotion during which authors battle for space inside bookshops and under Christmas trees.</p>
<p>The timing is important, as the book-selling business is highly dependent on the festive season, with <a href="https://www.ingenta.com/blog-article/what-nielsen-bookscan-data-tells-us-about-ebook-sales-cycles-the-ebook-plateau-2/">the final quarter of the year</a> contributing substantially to annual sales. And while this year’s super Thursday (October 14) will see fewer publications than previous years, it still boasts <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/super-thursday-2021-packs-punch-1273899">nearly 300 new hardbacks</a>. </p>
<p>Major titles include a memoir from comedian Billy Connolly, a posthumous spy novel from John le Carré, and a children’s book from Julia Donaldson. And there is good reason for these writers and their publishers to be optimistic.</p>
<p>Although COVID-19 has meant challenges for the industry, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58802805">recent industry figures</a> indicate a marked increase in appetite for books and reading. Despite bricks-and-mortar bookshops being closed for much of 2020, over 200 million print books were sold in that year – the highest number since 2012. The <a href="https://www.publishers.org.uk/publishing-in-2020/">overall value of UK publisher sales in 2020</a> was £6.4 billion, 2% higher than 2019 figures.</p>
<p>A change in reading habits during lockdowns and periods of social restrictions may well have been responsible for this increase. Many people turned to <a href="https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/403/">books for entertainment</a>, with some <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/15/research-reading-books-surged-lockdown-thrillers-crime">doubling the amount of time</a> they spent reading. Genres including classic literature, crime and thrillers, self-help, cookery and hobbies proved particularly attractive. </p>
<p>But are these reading rates and soaring book sales sustainable as the world opens up again to other leisure activities? Certainly some of the signs are good, with a recent national “Bookshop Day” reportedly generating high footfall and <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/indies-celebrate-amazing-bookshop-day-1282974">record-breaking sales</a>. </p>
<p>Yet at the same time, there are serious <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/titles-pushed-back-and-more-printing-uk-supply-chain-issues-continue-1279634">supply-chain issues on the horizon</a>, exacerbated by both Brexit and COVID-19. The industry is also still dealing with the huge disruption caused by the <a href="https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/17181/9/TheDigitalPublishingCommunicationsCircuit.pdf">arrival of big tech companies</a> into the marketplace. </p>
<p>The biggest of these is of course Amazon, which swiftly moved from printed book sales and distribution to a seamless connection between e-book software and Kindle hardware. It has since evolved to provide self-publishing platforms, while it analyses reader-behaviour data using algorithms after <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/56575-amazon-buys-goodreads.html#:%7E:text=Amazon%20has%20acquired%20Goodreads.com%2C%20a%20Web%20site%20featuring,might%20start%20selling%20books%20directly%20from%20its%20site.">acquiring</a> the popular reading website <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/">Goodreads</a>.</p>
<h2>Page turner</h2>
<p>The publishing industry suffers from habitual anxiety that people are no longer interested in buying and reading books; an existential sense of crisis that the buoyant figures of 2020 and 2021 should at least partly dispel. </p>
<p>Yet threats from those “digital disrupters”, problems with production and distribution, and concerns about <a href="https://www.publishers.org.uk/save-our-books-campaign-launches-as-ipo-opens-consultation/">post-Brexit copyright law</a>, mean that optimism can be in short supply in the publishing industry, despite recent successes.</p>
<p>To assess whether the future for UK publishing is bright requires a finer-grained analysis. The publishers <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/irrational-numbers-1223800">that did particularly well in the conditions of lockdown</a> were the larger and longer-established ones. Smaller independent companies, against whom the <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12109-021-09811-y">odds are already stacked</a>, struggled more. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Bookshop shelves." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426398/original/file-20211014-24-gelg6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=102%2C78%2C3923%2C2939&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426398/original/file-20211014-24-gelg6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426398/original/file-20211014-24-gelg6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426398/original/file-20211014-24-gelg6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426398/original/file-20211014-24-gelg6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426398/original/file-20211014-24-gelg6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426398/original/file-20211014-24-gelg6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The industry still relies on the final months of the year.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/wpMtTNPg6vk">Unspalsh/Renee Fisher</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But these new companies are crucial to the continuing development of the industry. They are often <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030487836">more innovative</a> in terms of the types of books they commission, the authors they work with, and the audiences they cater to. </p>
<p>Publishing in the UK still has an overwhelmingly <a href="https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/rethinking-diversity-in-publishing-the-first-in-depth-academic-study-in-the-uk-on-diversity-in-trade-fiction/">white</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/DrDaveOBrien/status/1298896058345500672?s=20">middle-class</a> labour force, as well as being geographically centralised in southern England. </p>
<p>And while tech companies might unsettle publishing’s traditional business practices, they can also offer platforms to communities and voices that the industry’s gatekeeping practices only rarely let through. Self-publishing platforms such as Wattpad offer successful alternative models, which can lead to global audiences and business deals. </p>
<p>Wattpad’s <a href="https://company.wattpad.com/">own figures</a> indicate 90 million monthly users spending 20 billion minutes on the platform every month. But perhaps their most significant statistic is that 90% of the platform’s audience are readers under 40. </p>
<p>This level of engagement with such platforms suggests that writing and reading are far from dead, even if the emerging business models that attract some readers present a challenge to the traditional publishing industry.</p>
<p>To understand fully whether book publishing is sustainable, we need to think beyond economic considerations of mainstream business. Instead, we should take into account sociological patterns of writing and reading, and the platforms that enable or inhibit them. </p>
<p>As the pandemic has shown, reading is still an activity highly valued by millions of people, particularly in situations of stress and increased – but also constrained – leisure time. As the publishing industry emerges, it is undoubtedly sustainable – but the precise shape of its future is both uncertain and open to radical new forces.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169583/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claire Squires does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Traditional publishing needs to be more open to new voices.
Claire Squires, Professor in Publishing Studies, University of Stirling
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/167474
2021-09-08T11:20:25Z
2021-09-08T11:20:25Z
Why we still need the Women’s Prize for Fiction
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420010/original/file-20210908-21-130simi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What makes a winning book?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/features/features/news/revealing-the-2021-womens-prize-longlist">Women's Prize for Fiction</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Every year since 1996, one of the most heralded of awards for women writing in English is announced annually. The prize formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Orange Broadband Prize, and Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, has – since 2018 – been anonymously supported by a “family” of sponsors, and known simply as the <a href="https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/">Women’s Prize for Fiction</a>. And the 2021 winner is <a href="https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/features/features/news/announcing-the-2021-winner-of-the-womens-prize">Susanna Clarke</a>, with her second novel Piranesi. </p>
<p>Clarke’s latest book was described by this year’s chair of judges and former Booker winner, <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-with-two-winners-its-a-double-edged-victory-perhaps-bernardine-evaristo-needed-the-recognition-more-125328">Bernardine Evaristo</a>, as a book that “would have a lasting impact”. It comes 17 years after Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which blends historical fiction with imaginative fantasy.</p>
<p>Every year, there is <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-we-really-still-need-a-women-s-prize-for-fiction-">some discussion</a> in parts of the press, and on social media, on the point of a prize for women writers. After all, the argument goes, Anglophone women writers have won such awards as the Booker – Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, for example, while many of those shortlisted are also women. Meanwhile, Doris Lessing and Alice Munro have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Do we need an award specifically for women? </p>
<p>Ever since the prize was first mooted in the early 1990s, many <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/james-marriott-brought-to-book/">have wondered</a> whether the prize is necessary, patronising, or even fair. A common position amongst its detractors is that the prize is sexist and discriminatory. English journalist and novelist, Auberon Waugh, (the eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh) famously called it <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4252011/Why-the-Orange-prize-is-a-lemon.html">the Lemon Prize</a>. </p>
<p>These debates about women writers have their origin, however, in the longstanding concerns and debates about the relationship between women, reading and writing: debates which are nearly as old as the history of the novel in English. </p>
<h2>The dismissal of women writers</h2>
<p>For example, the poet and priest Thomas Gisborne’s 1797 <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/conduct-book-for-women">conduct manual</a>, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, recommends to every woman “the habit of regularly allotting to improving books a portion of each day”. But Gisborne does not include novels among his “improving books” – like many of those <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Who-Read-Are-Dangerous/dp/1858944651">who have written</a> on the possible dangers of reading fiction for women.</p>
<p>This policing of the woman reader – and it is a short skip and jump here to the <a href="https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/">woman writer</a> – is far from an isolated occurrence. In January 1855, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne <a href="https://omeka.uvu.edu/exhibits/show/scribblingwomen/menu/">wrote to</a> his publisher that, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash – and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed”. Hawthorne was concerned with the subject matter of women writers – quite simply, it was not to his taste. </p>
<p>This dismissal of women writers continues today. In an interview at the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2011/06/vs-naipauls-declaring-them-inferior-men/351442/">Royal Geographic Society in 2011</a>, the British writer, V.S. Naipaul, was asked if he considers any woman writer his match, to which he replied “I don’t think so”. He claimed that he could “read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not”. Naipaul was clear that part of this recognition was because writing by women is “unequal” to him and his writing. Key to this is that the subject matter of women’s writing is often perceived as frivolous and unimportant. </p>
<h2>Separation and segregation</h2>
<p>This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not. The Women’s Prize for Fiction <a href="https://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/faqs">was set up</a> in response to the Booker Prize of 1991 when none of the six shortlisted books were by women, despite 60% of the novels published that year by women writers. </p>
<p>Not all potential entrants welcomed the new prize. A.S. Byatt (winner of the 1990 Man Booker Prize) refused to have her fiction <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-s-byatt-denounces-sexist-orange-prize-d3wpcjwtql7">submitted for consideration</a> for the new award, and trivialised the Women’s Prize for the assumption that there is something that might be grouped together as a “feminine subject matter”. But it is an indisputable fact that women have often been excluded from or dismissed by the literary establishment, by reviewers, and by the prize system. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman sitting in book store reading books." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419855/original/file-20210907-27-162bih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Being shortlisted makes a significant difference to the profile and sales of an author’s work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/">Pexels</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is not to say all women’s writing experiences are the same. There are challenges to the notion of awards for women’s writing – since they can still discriminate against different races, <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/open-letter-urges-womens-prize-and-gh-abandon-age-criteria-womens-writers-scheme-1275801">ages</a>, types of education, classes, disability and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/07/womens-prize-condemns-online-attack-on-trans-nominee-torrey-peters-detransition-baby">trans women</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/noentry_arts?lang=en">among others</a>. But what cannot be disputed is that all women (writers or not) are united by living in global and local societies that value, promulgate and prioritise the voice, identities and experiences of men over women. </p>
<p>The positions offered by Gisborne, Hawthorne and Naipaul are indicative of the expectations placed upon women in the literary marketplace and are very much tied to issues around the relationship between worth, taste and power. Who decides what text has “worth”, and how this worth has been arrived at, are questions that we might think are something for English literature students to grapple with at university. </p>
<p>But these are important questions for us all to consider. The humanities is broadly the study of what it is to be human and reading is a key marker of being human. We tell stories to ourselves, about ourselves, over and over again. We have entire industries built on reading, and on storytelling (whether books, films, games or more). We all need to think about who reads, and whose stories are told and re-told. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one way of ensuring that women’s stories are among those that are told and re-told.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167474/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stacy Gillis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not.
Stacy Gillis, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, Newcastle University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/149622
2021-01-31T18:54:42Z
2021-01-31T18:54:42Z
My favourite detective: Claire DeWitt’s personal loss and blackout hours make her weirdly compelling
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374686/original/file-20201214-16-ye0y2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C17%2C3970%2C2209&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1517129631177-ed179f64c81e?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=MXwxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHw%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=2689&q=80">Unsplash/Thom Milkovic</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/my-favourite-detective-95869">new series</a>, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>I’ve always preferred my fictional detectives on the weirder side. </p>
<p>Like the sour-tempered narrator of Derek Raymond’s <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/doors-closing-slowly-derek-raymonds-factory-novels/">Factory Series</a>. Everyone hates the bloke. But not as much as he hates them back. (He calmly addresses an uncooperative desk sergeant as “you cunt”.) Exiled to the Department of Unexplained Deaths he sets about obsessively solving mysteries no one but he cares about. There’s a higher purpose to his misanthropy. </p>
<p>That series was written in the 1980s, shortly before James Elroy came along and put the whole genre into meltdown. I found myself losing interest in the all-too acceptably transgressive detectives who followed. </p>
<p>Then a few years ago a <a href="http://www.iainryan.com/">writer friend</a> alerted me to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/50690.Sara_Gran">author</a> <a href="https://www.latimes.com/books/la-xpm-2013-jun-02-la-ca-jc-summer-books-gran-20130602-story.html">Sara Gran</a>, and her almost-impossible-to-describe detective, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9231999-claire-dewitt-and-the-city-of-the-dead">Claire DeWitt</a>. From precocious girl sleuth to drugged-up detective, she is complex yet dogged.</p>
<h2>Words to live by</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover: Claire deWitt and the City of the Dead" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374650/original/file-20201214-19-2k6dwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9231999-claire-dewitt-and-the-city-of-the-dead">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Claire’s background (we learn) is as a schoolgirl detective, in the Nancy Drew cosy tradition, one of three brainy Brooklyn teens inflamed by pulp novels, mystery comics and mail-order sleuthing paraphernalia. The girls quickly set about solving actual mysteries. Then one of the trio disappears, never to be seen again. That’s the backstory. </p>
<p>Present day Claire is a “detective”, although what that means is unclear. No office, no business cards, no website. She refers to herself as the unquestioned World’s Greatest Detective, and makes frequent mention of past cases, which have names like The Case of the Silver Pearl, The Case of the Omens of No Tomorrow, The Case of the End of the World, The Case of the Confused Academic — the way Dr Watson might refer to Sherlock Holmes’ famous cases. </p>
<p>Claire is never without her bible, Jacques Silette’s criminological masterwork, <em>Détection</em>. The fictitious Silette (I Googled him, just in case) is forever coming out with naff-deep pronouncements like, “Mysteries never end. We solve them anyway, knowing we are solving both everything and nothing”. Or, “No one is innocent. The question is how will you bear your portion of the guilt?” (Good question!) </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover: Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374693/original/file-20201214-19-19iktws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Silette could easily have been mates with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/30222818?seq=1">theory heavies</a> like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, dropping as he does such whacky bon mots as “Karma is not a sentence already printed. It’s a series of words the author can arrange as he chooses”.</p>
<p>The world of amateur detection, it turns out, is a deeply riven one, with a few beleaguered Silettians duking it out against the ruthless anti-Silettians. (The international detective scene, with its arcane controversies and obsessional characters is a little like the chess world in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342/">The Queen’s Gambit</a>, except with murders.)</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-detective-trixie-belden-the-uncool-girl-sleuth-with-a-sensitive-moral-compass-149624">My favourite detective: Trixie Belden, the uncool girl sleuth with a sensitive moral compass</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A weakness for weed … and the rest</h2>
<p>If this all sounds like a mighty piss-take on the Golden Age detective story, believe me it’s anything but. For one thing, Gran never, ever winks at the audience, never plays cute, never chases laughs. It’s all delivered utterly straight-faced. </p>
<p>For another, Claire is a total dope hog. If she happens upon a white powder or an amber fluid, or a pill, or something to smoke or sniff, she’s into it. </p>
<p>Sometimes the action will skip eight, ten hours or a whole day, then restart when a comatose Claire suddenly comes to with the breaking down of a toilet door by a terrified barman. People see her coming and they call the cops.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Young woman in gritty street setting" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374685/original/file-20201214-16-sc0t5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">If it’s mind-altering, Claire DeWitt is up for it, sometimes creating gaps in the narrative.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1549884894-c266f45fc144?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=MXwxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHw%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=2710&q=80">Unsplash/Artem Ivanchencko</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-complex-contradictory-pleasures-of-pulp-fiction-96206">Friday essay: the complex, contradictory pleasures of pulp fiction</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>She is very “street”. In one classic set piece, two obviously armed teenage boys stand between her and her truck door in the Lower Ninth Ward in post Katrina New Orleans. Attuned to such cues, Claire sees suicidal longing in the beautiful eyes of the boy standing in front of her. She doesn’t oblige him. </p>
<p>Later on she shares a joint soaked in a brown liquid — <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3568288/#:%7E:text=The%20most%20frequently%20reported%20method,mixed%20with%20phencyclidine%20(PCP).&text=The%20exact%20origin%20of%20tainted,were%20probably%20laced%20with%20PCP.">formaldehyde</a>? — with some anonymous street kid and they both slip into operatic hallucination, gaping in silence at the rising moon. That chemical delirium is kind of like what you feel when reading a Claire DeWitt novel. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover: Claire deWitt The Infinite Backdrop" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374695/original/file-20201214-17-1dwfdqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The stories race ahead, as tough and beautifully written as any crime fiction. And for all the drug snarfing, Claire remains a very reliable narrator. It’s reality that’s unreliable. </p>
<p>Gran confidently assembles this cosy yet hardboiled grunge-social-realist material-yet-trippily-archetypal world. Into it he adds Claire: its druggy, self-harming, hyper-intellectual, spiritually questing, maybe psychotic but thoroughly unrelenting outsider shamus. It’s a big ask but it works. </p>
<p>By the end of latest novel, the third in the series, the overarching mysteries which thread all three together have joined in a single weave. So maybe Gran has finished with Claire. I hope not. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I let my mind fill with the case. It was only a case. Only another case. Another sentence of words to rearrange. Maybe that was all there was to life. One long case, only you kept switching roles. Detective, witness, client, suspect. Then one day I’d be the victim instead of the detective or the client and it would all be over. Then I’d finally have a fucking day off. </p>
<p>— <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15814401-claire-dewitt-and-the-bohemian-highway?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=H8z5JEcjkg&rank=1">Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway</a></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-detective-kurt-wallander-too-grumpy-to-like-relatable-enough-to-get-under-your-skin-149277">My favourite detective: Kurt Wallander — too grumpy to like, relatable enough to get under your skin</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149622/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Doyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Just when you think you’ve had enough of detectives behaving badly, along comes Claire DeWitt. She is, frankly, a beautifully written mess.
Peter Doyle, Associate Professor of Media, Macquarie University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/149725
2020-11-17T18:50:10Z
2020-11-17T18:50:10Z
Unpacking the magic of Miffy, a simply drawn, bunny-shaped friend
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369513/original/file-20201116-21-r0wnz3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C9%2C2029%2C1422&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dick Bruna, Miffy at the gallery 1990. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy and © Mercis bv Amsterdam</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>She couldn’t get much simpler in visual terms. A white bunny cutout, dots for eyes and a little crisscross mouth. But Miffy is an enduringly endearing rabbit. </p>
<p>Called <em>nijntje</em> in the <a href="https://www.miffy.com/the-name-miffy">author’s native Dutch</a>, Miffy was originally created by Dick Bruna for his son. Now <a href="https://www.royaldutchmint.com/65-years-of-miffy-in-coincard/en/product/11603/">65 years on</a>, Miffy remains universally popular. </p>
<p>Miffy books are available in 50 languages and have <a href="https://www.miffy.com/a-global-success">sold millions</a> of copies around the world. A <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1614180/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">stop-motion animated television series</a> brought more world fame and a <a href="https://nijntjemuseum.nl/?lang=en">Miffy museum</a> in Bruna’s native Utrecht was established in 2016.</p>
<p>Bruna, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/17/miffy-creator-dick-bruna-has-died-aged-89">who died in 2017</a>, was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/feb/15/booksforchildrenandteenagers.lisaallardice#:%7E:text=Since%20her%20first%20appearance%20in,whom%20she%20was%20originally%20designed.">reportedly stopped daily near his home for selfies</a> with teenage fans and Miffy merchandise features heavily at popular <a href="https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/in-pref-chiba/in-chiba_suburbs/article-a0003116/">Japanese tulip festivals</a>. </p>
<p>An exhibition, <a href="https://www.artmuseum.qut.edu.au/whats-on/2020/exhibitions/miffy-and-friends">Miffy & Friends</a>, is soon to open at the QUT Art Museum Gallery. As its director Vanessa Van Ooyen <a href="https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/sponsored-content/museums/andrea-simpson/how-miffy-inspires-australian-avant-garde-artists-261374">has noted</a>, Bruna’s illustrations have a deceptive simplicity, which belies the artistry behind them. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/childrens-books-must-be-diverse-or-kids-will-grow-up-believing-white-is-superior-140736">Children's books must be diverse, or kids will grow up believing white is superior</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Shades of Mondrian</h2>
<p>It is that very simplicity which, in part, gives Miffy her long-lasting charm. The illustrations are instantly appealing, even for very small children. </p>
<p>Researchers have found that reliably <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5276997/">positive responses to simple curvilinear shapes</a> seem to be present early during development, before language is acquired. Researchers also hold that children associate more positive emotions, like happiness or excitement, with bright colours. Bruna seemed to understand this instinctively from the beginning. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Miffy bunny illustration in flowery dress" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369514/original/file-20201116-19-1ibhuct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dick Bruna, Miffy’s birthday 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy and © Mercis bv Amsterdam</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The blocks of colour — Bruna cited countryman <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-piet-mondrian">Piet Mondrian</a> and <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/henri-matisse-1593">Henri Matisse</a> as inspirations — have a universality to them. The settings are not country-specific and, when landscape is depicted, it too can be read as applicable to anywhere and everywhere. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/books/move-over-mondrian-its-miffys-turn.html">Bruna wrote</a> for a 2005 illustration exhibition: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I hope that the child’s imagination is stimulated to see things in their simplest form … so that life, with all its complications, becomes a little clearer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Miffy is <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/anthropomorphism">anthropomorphic</a>, a little white rabbit doing many of the everyday things that lots of children do. She was “born” when the author was on holiday with his family and <a href="https://www.miffy.com/about-miffy">started telling his son stories</a> about a little rabbit in the garden. </p>
<p>In story books, Miffy plays with friends, goes on outings with her parents, helps to paint her room, goes to the zoo and the beach and helps in the garden. There is a wholesomeness and innocent joy in the easily relatable tales.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A Miffy character postage stamp" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369508/original/file-20201116-23-18r17sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">You’ve got Miffy mail.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/holland-circa-2005-stamp-printed-260nw-96688879.jpg">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some of the books help make potentially difficult situations or experiences familiar and less frightening, such as when Miffy goes to hospital. Miffy is apprehensive but she is met by a friendly nurse who helps her undress and put on hospital clothes and gives Miffy a pre-operation injection, (which didn’t hurt as much as she had feared). When she wakes from the anaesthetic, Miffy is comforted by the presence of the nurse and then a visit from her parents. </p>
<p>Miffy’s school activities will be familiar to those children who have already started formal education and enticing and intriguing for those getting ready to start. </p>
<p>Friendship features strongly in the books. Miffy’s walk to school with friends is warm and exuberant and they are welcomed by the teacher when they arrive. Soon Miffy is enjoying learning to write, how to add up and — her very favourite — listening to the teacher reading a story.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Buffy draws simple pictures" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369516/original/file-20201116-23-170ss72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dick Bruna Miffy at school 1990.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy and © Mercis bv Amsterdam</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/5-reasons-i-always-get-children-picture-books-for-christmas-127801">5 reasons I always get children picture books for Christmas</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Easy reading for small hands</h2>
<p>The size of the majority of the Miffy books (16 centimetres square) makes them easy for small readers and pre-readers to hold. </p>
<p>The language is accessible but does not patronise young readers or “talk down” to them. The rhyme and structure of many of the stories gives them four lines on each page with the second and fourth lines rhyming. </p>
<p>This formula gives a welcome familiarity to the books. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A bunny soft toy in blue and white dress." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369515/original/file-20201116-13-cff831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cute and cuddly Miffy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bruna wrote and illustrated more than 100 books, many of them about Miffy. There are Miffy activity books, sticker books, board books, and special titles like <a href="https://www.miffy.com/news/miffy-x-rembrandt">Miffy x Rembrandt</a> which introduces children to the works of two Dutch masters: Rembrandt and Bruna. <a href="https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/miffy_s-123-by-dick-bruna/9781742975092">Miffy’s 123</a> and <a href="https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/miffy_s-abc-by-dick-bruna/9781742975108">Miffy’s ABC</a> books use the character as a stimulus for teaching foundational literacy and numeracy.</p>
<p>In addition to screen adaptations and the continuing popularity of the books themselves, there are many items of merchandise to keep Miffy’s appeal alive. The merchandise encourages book sales and reading and the reverse is true too. Miffy <a href="https://miffyshop.co.uk/collections/books">appears on everything</a> from clocks, cushions, keyrings, clothing and lunchboxes to lamps. </p>
<p>In her native Netherlands, Miffy likenesses are printed on babies’ bibs; there are plush toys in traditional Dutch dress and there is a Miffy room at <a href="https://keukenhof.nl/en/">Keukenhof</a>, the large flower gardens at Lisse. </p>
<p>Miffy is perfectly ubiquitous, her simply drawn face always friendly. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T7tCfCOtZ70?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Miffy, a sweet little bunny.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.artmuseum.qut.edu.au/whats-on/2020/exhibitions/miffy-and-friends">miffy & friends</a> is a free exhibition at QUT Art Museum from November 21 until until 14 March 2021. It will then tour to Bunjil Place Gallery in Melbourne from 3 April–13 June 2021.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149725/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Margot Hillel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Simply drawn, universally appealing. A new exhibition provides an opportunity to marvel at Miffy’s global success.
Margot Hillel, Emeritus Professor, Children's Literature, Australian Catholic University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/148829
2020-11-12T15:14:03Z
2020-11-12T15:14:03Z
J.P. Clark: the ‘pepper’ of the Niger Delta activism stew
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368773/original/file-20201111-17-42oa4c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nigerian poet J.P. Clark was activist in his writing.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Guardian Nigeria</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>All writers from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria are typically activists fighting for their communities. The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Pepper-Clark">late</a> poet John Pepper Clark was no different, with his lifelong dedication to improving the lives of people in the oil-rich region. Over decades of achievements, Clark amplified local culture in his works. He also highlighted the environmental degradation of the region, caused by oil production.</p>
<p>At 15, I was first thrilled by Clark’s <a href="https://peakd.com/hive-148441/@gandhibaba/the-awesomeness-of-culture-in-j-p-clark-s-poem-agbor-dancer">Agbor Dancer</a> in high school. Inspired by my birthplace Agbor, the piece conjured familiar images, painting them in words which felt increasingly animated with each new reading.</p>
<p>As a lover of literature, I found it impossible to avoid Clark in my university course work. I went on to study him for years, unearthing many of his published works across genres.</p>
<h2>Lessons from a master</h2>
<p>Clark’s work was intriguing. His two plays – <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/raft">The Raft</a> and <a href="https://guardian.ng/art/in-the-wives-revolt-women-demand-equal-opportunities-justice/">The Wives Revolt</a> – gave me fresh insight into the man, whom I thought was already familiar. In those plays, he expertly used humour to explore pressing concerns. Clark’s work was instrumental in the Niger Delta struggle against economic impotence and unequal distribution of the region’s crude oil.</p>
<p>Clark stopped short of predicting cracks in Nigerian society and a future revolution led by oppressed citizens. But his art did. Like a prophet with uncanny powers, he led the way for the reversal of the anticipated negative prediction – especially in the Niger Delta – by championing solutions to the region’s economic, social and environmental problems.</p>
<p>I met Clark in 2018 while attending the International <a href="https://guardian.ng/art/prof-jp-clarks-international-conference-begins-in-lagos/">Conference</a> on J.P. Clark, which was held in Lagos. On the opening night, I sat with him in a hall watching old clips from his production of The <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100259596">Ozidi</a> Saga – an epic folk tale from the Toru-Orua Ijaw area of the Niger Delta.</p>
<p>At the conference, Clark and I were focused on ecological activism. His poems, Night Rain and Home from Hiroshima, portrayed the possible effects of irresponsible environmental exploration on the people.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1101&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1101&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368778/original/file-20201111-19-1s17uwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1101&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Ozidi Saga is one of Clark’s most famous works.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lake Country Books</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Clark represented a class of writers who did not write for writing’s sake (art for art’s sake). Rather, he was committed to finding lasting solutions to contemporary problems. You cannot read Clark’s works without learning about the swampy nature of his hometown, and the adverse environmental effects of oil exploration. </p>
<p>When the Niger Delta struggle became militarised by militant groups, Clark vehemently rejected the use of arms. Instead, he championed art as an effective protest medium, with the power of influencing future generations. According to his logic, bullets may run dry and bombs routinely detonate. But words live forever. </p>
<h2>Writer as prophet</h2>
<p>Many years ago, Clark predicted that the world had a looming battle against multiple threats to the environment. He drew attention to the destruction of the environment and the effects it would have on future generations. And he was right. I am a victim of that battle. I am writing this tribute from a flooded home in the Niger Delta because little was done to heed that call. Now that the caller has passed on, are we going to jettison the message?</p>
<p>Let the environmental activism continue in the honour of the legendary J.P. Clark.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148829/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Idegbekwe, Destiny, Ph.D. is affiliated with the Department of English, University of Africa, Toru-Orua, Bayelsa State. He received funding from the French Institute of Research in Nigeria, Ibadan for data collection on Covid-19. </span></em></p>
The poet J.P. Clark was an environmental activist who stood up for his people in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region.
Destiny Idegbekwe, Lecturer, Department of English, University Of Africa, Toru-Orua
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/143240
2020-08-06T12:24:19Z
2020-08-06T12:24:19Z
Jim Thompson is the perfect novelist for our crazed times
<p>Crime fiction often thrives in periods of social and political tension, when readers long for both justice and stability. So it’s no wonder that as the pandemic took root, crime fiction <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/07/fiction-boom-as-book-sales-rocket-past-2019-levels">sales</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/">rose</a>. </p>
<p>As I explain in my new book, “<a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/detectives-shadows">Detectives in the Shadows</a>,” many of the protagonists of hard-boiled crime fiction, from <a href="http://www.thrillingdetective.com/marlowe.html">Philip Marlowe</a> to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2357547/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Jessica Jones</a>, are models of moral authority, humility and empathy.</p>
<p>Doggedly pursuing justice, they defend those in distress, earning little for their efforts. </p>
<p>In 1945, novelist Raymond Chandler famously <a href="http://www.en.utexas.edu/Classes/Bremen/e316k/316kprivate/scans/chandlerart.html">defined the hard-boiled hero</a> as “a man … who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid… He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”</p>
<p>These were reassuring characters who served as models of competent leadership and ideal authority figures. But it didn’t exactly paint the full American picture. In truth, no matter how many Marlowes or Joneses came to the rescue, signs of America’s deranged underbelly were always lurking just beneath the surface. </p>
<p>One crime author, the singularly harrowing <a href="https://www.crimetime.co.uk/cigarettes-and-alchohol-the-extraordinary-life-of-jim-thompson/">Jim Thompson</a>, gave this unique brand of American craziness center stage.</p>
<h2>Unreliable, deceptive and sadistic</h2>
<p>Author of more than 20 novels including “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/298663.The_Killer_Inside_Me">The Killer Inside Me</a>,” “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19161888-pop-1280">Pop. 1280</a>” and “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19161914-the-grifters">The Grifters</a>,” Thompson created a sinister army of corrupt police, cunning con-artists and psychopathic murderers. </p>
<p>“The Killer Inside Me,” published in 1952, is his best-known novel. Its narrator is Lou Ford, a 29-year-old Texas sheriff who pretends to be a bland and boring rube but ends up committing every murder in the novel.</p>
<p>Unlike classic hard-boiled characters who understate their own misfortunes but have compassion for others, Ford exults when others suffer. He claims spiritual authority and a superior intellect but displays an “aw-shucks” helplessness to seem innocent. </p>
<p>Unreliable as a narrator, he talks in populist clichés – saying things like “haste makes waste” and “every cloud has a silver lining!” – while confiding in the reader that he “should have been a college professor or something like that.” He sometimes references his “sickness,” hinting he is <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1819.1999.00584.x">schizophrenic</a>, but he shows no signs of psychosis – only psychopathy. </p>
<p>Most of all, he consistently and calculatingly shirks responsibility, making sure others take the fall for his misdeeds. When a man witnesses him brutalize a town prostitute, he bullies that witness before murdering and framing him. </p>
<p>“Don’t you say I killed her,” he warns the terrified witness. “SHE KILLED HERSELF!”</p>
<h2>The gaslit 1950s</h2>
<p>The novel arrived at a period in American history that was rife with demagoguery, paranoia and manipulation.</p>
<p>In 1950, the National Security Council paper <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/NSC68">NSC 68</a> advised a massive buildup of military power in response to the threat of the Soviet Union. <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-2.htm">The report remarked</a> that “a democracy can compensate for its natural vulnerability only if it maintains clearly superior overall power in its most inclusive sense,” and warns against our “tendency to expect too much from people widely divergent from us.” It would soon become apparent that retaining power – and a readiness to mistrust those deemed too different – were becoming fundamental to the country’s foreign policy.</p>
<p>Condemning others while behaving badly seemed to be a specialty of the early 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Conspiracy_So_Immense/738dzm-R-5EC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=senator+joseph+mccarthy+university+press&printsec=frontcover">anti-communist crusade</a> was ruining lives with sensational and unsubstantiated allegations. In 1951, McCarthy accused former Secretary of State <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-C-Marshall">Gen. George Marshall</a> of a “<a href="http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/marshall/aa_marshall_mcarthy_2.html">conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man</a>,” arguing that his <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/marshall-plan">Marshall Plan</a> was helping and appeasing the country’s enemies.</p>
<p>It’s no wonder that American novelist Norman Mailer called the 1950s “<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1353950503Mailer_WhiteNegro.pdf">years of conformity and depression</a>,” while “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Homeward_Bound.html?id=O5KLUxbqtT4C">Homeward Bound</a>” author <a href="https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/mayxx002">Elaine Tyler May</a> described the decade as one of “containment,” with fearful insularity as characteristic of American society as it was of foreign policy.</p>
<p>When Jim Thompson published “The Killer Inside Me,” Lion Books nominated it for the National Book Award, calling it “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Savage_Art/YMOSDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=authentically%20original">the most authentically original novel of the year</a>.” An editor at the New American Library found in his books “the passions of men and women revealed in their naked, primeval fury.” Thompson’s characters, from the gloating gaslighter Lou Ford to the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Pop_1280/_tfD2GBkwEsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=pop+1280&printsec=frontcover">messianic delusionist Nick Corey</a>, echoed the paranoid thoughts, delusions and deceptions already patent in 1950s politics. </p>
<p>The writer’s fiction dismantles point-by-point the classical hard-boiled heroes whose word was good and whose ethics were reliable. Its real bleakness comes from the vacuum that replaces any sense of accountability, empathy or reliability. </p>
<p>His novels are chilling precisely because they smash the beloved American illusion that with rugged individualism comes rugged integrity.</p>
<h2>Echoes today</h2>
<p>“The Killer Inside Me” is a testament to moral accountability exultantly shredded, and its resonance today is uncanny.</p>
<p>America has long embraced the figure of the unhinged or explosive person in <a href="https://www.tvguide.com/news/charlie-sheen-behavior-1029895/">entertainment</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml6S2yiuSWE">advertising</a>, <a href="https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2009128-a-reporters-tale-the-john-rocker-story-15-years-later">sports</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/">politics</a>. </p>
<p>But today’s craziness has reached another level. From <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-shoppers-pull-guns-hit-police-with-car-over-mask-policy-2020-7">Walmart</a> to the <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/transcript-fox-news-sunday-interview-with-president-trump">White House</a>, Americans are claiming to be both completely righteous and entirely blameless. </p>
<p>Whether it’s the Florida man advancing on fellow Costco shoppers, bellowing “<a href="https://miami.cbslocal.com/2020/07/08/florida-man-fired-mask-meltdown-video-costco-viral/">I feel threatened</a>!” the <a href="https://6abc.com/montclair-monclair-dispute-neighbor-confrontation-white-confronts-couple/6292198/">New Jersey woman trying to have innocent neighbors arrested</a> for building a patio on their own property, or the president insisting that he takes no responsibility as over <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases">150,000 Americans die of COVID-19</a>, our current moment is the nightmarish version of society that Thompson envisioned. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1280332929613398017"}"></div></p>
<p>As Stephen King famously wrote in the introduction to a 2011 edition of Killer, “In Lou Ford, Jim Thompson drew for the first time a picture of the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Killer_Inside_Me/5DOmGjVmuPUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=great%20american%20sociopath">Great American Sociopath</a>.”</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>In a sense, the conduct is not new, even if it now readily goes viral on social media. Men have long <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/harvey-weinstein-reacts-rape-conviction-1202213203/">complained of blamelessness while harming women</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007159234/amy-cooper-dog-central-park-police-video.html">whites of both sexes</a> have simulated fear while attacking people of color. The wealthy have long encouraged the poor to <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-02-16-mn-8585-story.html">take personal responsibility for privations they themselves caused</a>. Individuals historically most called to account are curiously those who have the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-29/congress-600-unemployment-pay">least to answer for</a>. </p>
<p>Those in power readily <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trumps-ask-china-response-to-cbss-weijia-jiang-shocked-the-room--and-was-part-of-a-pattern/2020/05/12/a04bed28-947d-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html">pass the buck</a>, even managing to seem innocent or misguided. The contrived specter of helplessness – combined with claims of absolute conviction – create chaos and dissolve accountability. That Thompson did all this in a book famous for its bleakly sociopathic vision testifies to the insanity and abusiveness that surround us.</p>
<p>A torrent of lies and injustice has demoralized Americans much as it dejected Ford’s victims. To me, we are living in Thompson’s world and can only dream of such fundamentals as honesty, empathy and accountability.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143240/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susanna Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The author’s novels, famous for their bleakly sociopathic depiction of American culture, testify to the insanity and abusiveness that surround us.
Susanna Lee, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/132348
2020-06-23T04:30:36Z
2020-06-23T04:30:36Z
Collaboration made easy: 6 ways to build a writing relationship
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318506/original/file-20200304-66089-8vk09g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=34%2C34%2C5716%2C3794&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alexis Brown/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Writing is a pastime best conducted on your own — or so common wisdom would have it. Yet writing teams exist, and in many realms they are expected. Take television, where the writers’ room is the norm. Or the academy: one physics paper has <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-more-than-5-000-authors-1.17567">5,154 authors</a>. </p>
<p>In literature, collaborations are more common than you might realise. For every superstar Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett team-up (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12067.Good_Omens">Good Omens</a>), there might be an F. Scott Fitzgerald and his <a href="https://theconversation.com/thanksfortyping-the-women-behind-famous-male-writers-75770">uncredited</a> wife Zelda, or a “James S. A. Corey” (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8855321-leviathan-wakes?from_search=true&qid=FTf9lrwfqW&rank=1">The Expanse</a>) being the pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. </p>
<p>Although new writers such as the <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2016/05/the-bronte-siblings-how-their-childhood-shaped-their-novels-life-and-legacy.html">Brontë siblings</a> may collaborate, the practice seems to fall away with age, perhaps because writing relationships can be as fraught as familial ones, with as many pitfalls to navigate. </p>
<p>Add to this a collaboration nearly always proves to take as long as a solo work and any monies might have to be divided among the contributors. Why would anyone willingly share their art with someone else for little to no benefit?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/10-commandments-of-writing-129069">10½ commandments of writing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In my experience, collaborating can be creatively stimulating, educative, motivating, productive, and revitalising. Plus, it’s great to have a friend to keep you company on a publicity tour.</p>
<p>Here are six techniques to help would-be co-writers take their first steps in this direction.</p>
<h2>1. The chain</h2>
<p>This is the simplest method, one of two that require first settling on what your story will be and then breaking the writing of it into bits completed separately, in chronological order. </p>
<p>There are many ways to serially tackle the discrete tasks that will combine to form a glorious whole. Some teams might choose to write alternate scenes, chapters or sections; others might alternate whole drafts, giving each participant long stretches of time to work on solo projects. </p>
<p>Whichever way you tear it down, every member of the team has a professional obligation to deliver. Break one link in the chain and it falls apart. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343348/original/file-20200623-188916-1nqaj0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343348/original/file-20200623-188916-1nqaj0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343348/original/file-20200623-188916-1nqaj0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343348/original/file-20200623-188916-1nqaj0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343348/original/file-20200623-188916-1nqaj0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343348/original/file-20200623-188916-1nqaj0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343348/original/file-20200623-188916-1nqaj0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The chain method can give each writer long stretches of time to work on solo projects.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brad Neathery/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Parallel processing</h2>
<p>The second way to devolve an outline requires trust and communication beyond that required of ordinary collaborative relationships. </p>
<p>In parallel processing, you divide characters among authors, so one provides the voice of X, another Y, and so on. Each arc is written separately, then edited together when complete. If X or Y diverge too much from their expected paths, plotting and structural problems can arise, but the powerful juxtaposition of distinct voices can outweigh the risk.</p>
<h2>3. The hothouse</h2>
<p>An extreme version of serial collaboration, this method used to require being physically in the same room as your writing partner(s). One starts writing and keeps writing until they get stuck. They then tag in the next writer, who takes over. Repeat until done. Food and sleep are optional. </p>
<p>The benefit of this method is the words are guaranteed to keep coming. </p>
<p>These days the “in person” requirement is greatly relaxed. Google Docs is just one platform allowing writers to work on the same document at the same time, no matter where they are. </p>
<h2>4. The undertakers</h2>
<p>Brainstorming what a story will contain is, for many collaborators, the fun part — providing they can agree on a final project.</p>
<p>One method of achieving this agreement is by giving one of the co-writers a veto to be exercised when consensus can’t be reached.</p>
<p>Another method requires every element of the final project must be agreed to by every collaborator. This can be time-consuming to achieve but avoids any lingering resentment if someone is outvoted or overruled.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318478/original/file-20200304-66060-1clq5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C677%2C2558%2C2236&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318478/original/file-20200304-66060-1clq5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318478/original/file-20200304-66060-1clq5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318478/original/file-20200304-66060-1clq5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318478/original/file-20200304-66060-1clq5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318478/original/file-20200304-66060-1clq5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318478/original/file-20200304-66060-1clq5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">To avoid any lingering resentment, every decision can be agreed on by every collaborator.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Toa Heftiba/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More generally, every shared undertaking should have a binding agreement in place before serious work commences, covering issues such as whose name goes first, which agent will sell the work, how any resulting IP will be divided, and so on. </p>
<p>It is much better to have these agreements in place and not need them than the other way around.</p>
<h2>5. The Marxist Manifesto</h2>
<p>Collaborators should have common ambitions but complementary skills, otherwise you might as well work alone. The way roles are divided in the working relationship can reflect those skill sets – which might, of course, lie in non-writerly areas such as business or marketing.</p>
<p>To some, the perfect collaboration is one in which every participant’s weaknesses are covered by strengths in their fellows. Everyone contributes and everyone learns by example. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318472/original/file-20200303-66056-zce723.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=378%2C796%2C3089%2C2051&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318472/original/file-20200303-66056-zce723.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318472/original/file-20200303-66056-zce723.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318472/original/file-20200303-66056-zce723.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318472/original/file-20200303-66056-zce723.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318472/original/file-20200303-66056-zce723.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318472/original/file-20200303-66056-zce723.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Not everyone needs to write. Someone on the team might have the perfect brain for business or marketing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Helena Lopes/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>6. Resurrection of the dead</h2>
<p>Finally, the easiest and safest way to audition a potential co-writer is to give them a failed draft and see what they accomplish with it. If it’s a success, great: the original author gains a new collaborator and a finished work. </p>
<p>Should this (or any of these methods fail) the author is no worse off. </p>
<p>They can just revert to writing alone – for some their natural habitat.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/132348/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Writers are often seen as solitary creatures, but there can be great benefits to collaboration.
Sean Williams, Senior Lecturer, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.