Anonymous Narrator Research Articles

N27 What people want! Exploring inflammatory bowel disease patients’ perspectives on healthcare professionals addressing sexual well-being

Abstract Background Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) affects every aspect of one’s life, yet no routine assessment for the impact on sexuality is made. Our aim was to explore patients’ perspective on healthcare professionals (HCPs) addressing sexuality/sexual well-being concerns. Methods This was a qualitative narrative study. Inclusion criteria were any sexual orientation and with known IBD for longer than 18 months. Data were collected via semi structured interviews and anonymous narrative accounts submitted via Google Forms. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Results Fourteen adults, 4 male and 10 female, took part. Eleven participants were from the UK, one from the USA of America and one for South Africa. The following main themes and subthemes were identified: I cannot imagine talking about my sex life (a difficult topic; there is not enough time), Those who talked about sex, talked badly (nobody volunteered information; badly handled conversations), Still living whilst unwell (sex is an important part of my life; sex issues break down relationships, medicalised body), IBD ruined my sex life (feeling unattractive; feelings of shame and embarrassment), I feel unheard (HCPs don’t open the discussion; sex not taken seriously), I’m a person, not my IBD (holistic approach to care; time, space and ways to talk about sex). The findings reflect the importance of sexual well-being to those living with IBD, the experiences of such conversations, barriers to conversations with HCPs on sexual well-being, and suggestions on how HCPs should address their unmet needs. The importance of discussing intimacy and sexuality was emphasised, as participants felt their sexual well-being was considerably affected by IBD. The majority reported that HCPs did not initiate discussions on sexual well-being, nor did they understand the impact of IBD on sexual well-being, with a distinct accent on the perceived lack of a holistic approach to their care. Therefore, participants made suggestions for practice, such as provision of information related to sexual well-being in the form of leaflets, additionally to HCPs raising the issue. Conclusion Our findings indicate that communicating on sexuality/sexual well-being is a problematic area of IBD care. HCPs must be cognisant of the sexual well-being concerns and needs of those living with IBD, who want this topic discussed routinely, as part of a holistic approach to their clinical care.

You're Not Alone: Sharing of Anonymous Narratives to Destigmatize Mental Illness in Medical Students and Faculty.

You're Not Alone: Sharing of Anonymous Narratives to Destigmatize Mental Illness in Medical Students and Faculty.

Evaluation of a Multi-Modal Radiation Oncology Elective for First-Year Medical Students

Given the paucity of exposure to radiation oncology in the undergraduate medical curriculum, it is important to provide alternative avenues for interested students early in their medical careers. The objective of this project was to evaluate student understanding of the role of radiation oncology in the treatment of cancer, interest in conducting summer research with radiation oncology faculty, and interest in future radiation (as well as medical and surgical) oncology education after completion of an elective course. First-year medical students received lectures derived from the Radiation Oncology Education Collaborative Study Group with additional lectures given by faculty presenting current research endeavors and clinical cases. In addition, medical students had the opportunity to participate in clinic and the treatment planning workflow. Pre and post-course student knowledge was assessed with multiple-choice quizzes. A survey was administered before and after the elective to evaluate both interest and self-perceived understanding of the field. Students also rated each component of the course and each speaker. We used paired t-tests to assess pre- and post-course differences in quiz/survey results. Interest in radiation oncology training was correlated to the rating of each aspect of the course using the Pearson Correlation. 25 students took the course and contributed data. Students scored significantly higher on the quiz after the course; the average score improved 20% (p < 0.05). We noted a significant increase in students' self-perceived understanding of: a) cancer treatment; b) the role of radiation therapy; c) limits and challenges of radiation therapy; and d) ability to discuss research topics in radiation oncology. The majority of students expressed an interest in pursuing the radiation oncology clinical clerkship (84%) and in pursuing additional oncology educational opportunities in medical school (100%), both before and after the elective. The course did slightly alter the distribution of interest in pursuing radiation oncology residency training. The number of students with moderate interest decreased after the course, while the number of students with very high or low interest increased. The course was rated highly with 84% of students recommending the class to others. Anonymous narrative feedback revealed enjoyment in the clinical shadowing experience, as well as a need to tailor course material to the level of a first-year medical student. A single-institution first year medical student elective enhanced understanding of the principles and research opportunities in radiation oncology. At the completion of the elective, most students expressed an interest in radiation oncology residency. It appears that the elective helped students determine whether a career in radiation oncology may be a good fit. We plan to improve this course by tailoring the lecture material to the level of the first-year medical student.

Analyzing the philosophical features of existential nihilism and emerging topographies of pessimism in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Fiction

This research explores the Existential Nihilism amongst the people during the nineteenth century in Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground. The novels centrally focus on the tale of poverty and suffering of Russia and how it triggered the philosophical theory of Existential Nihilism amongst the people during the nineteenth century. The author uses Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov and the anonymous narrator from the underground as the representation of the nineteenth-century existential nihilist from Russia, St. Petersburg. Both of the characters radiate an extreme egocentric and arrogant attitude who prefers alienating themselves from society as they denied abiding by society&#39;s requirement due to their disdain attitude towards it. Not only the characters but the city of St. Petersburg as well as the supreme element that significantly features the emerging pessimism in Russia. The city is not merely a backdrop to these novels but an embodiment of misleading radical and moral ideas being introduced in Russia. It embodies the intense pessimism that condemned human existence during that time. Thus, the aim of this research is to explore and scrutinize the reasons and triggering factors of Existential Nihilism in Russia in the novels Crime and Punishment and Notes from the underground by scrutinizing Dostoevsky’s stand concerning social, political and moral state of affairs in Nineteenth-century Russia, his approach of sketching the characters of Raskolnikov and the underground man through their perceptions, actions and in addition the diction used in these novels.

What to Read Now: Rereading Demons and The Brothers Karamazov

WHAT DO TWO LATE masterpieces by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), have in common, apart from the technical fact that the action of both novels takes place in Russia in the late 1860s and early 1870s? Although their main common trait is quite evident, it goes unnoticed not only by ordinary readers but by the great majority of literary experts as well, even though it is indispensable in interpreting each of the novels. They are both narrated from the same perspective: from the point of view of a more (The Brothers Karamazov) or less (Demons) marginal character. That perspective , however, is not as simple as it usually is—and this is where the problems begin. Both Anton Lavrentyevich G. (Demons) and an anonymous narrator (Brothers) inform us—mostly firsthand—about the events they have personally witnessed. Then they provide us with secondhand accounts from various reliable sources. Thereafter the narration becomes less and less trustworthy: alleged happenings, gossip , suppositions based on general beliefs about somebody or something, etc.—all the way to the total impossibility of the two narrators having been able to learn what they are telling us. Curiously enough, both ordinary readers and literary experts very rarely, if ever, ask themselves the fundamental question: how our storytellers could have learned about events that, by their very nature, remained a total secret from everybody but the participants, who were either unable to disclose them (because, for example , they had died) or had no reason whatever to do so? The explanation for the absence of this elementary question is, of course, the literary genius of Dostoyevsky. He made the transitions from the possible to the impossible narrations so smooth, so imperceptible, that they remain invisible to all but the most attentive reader. For the rest, the mechanism of doubt that should always be triggered by an impossibility remains inactive. If you are not at the highest pitch of reading alertness, you accept what you are told by the two narrators at face value. This opens up a very important question: why did Fyodor Mikhailovich choose such a complex and ambiguous point of view in the first place, when he had at his disposal an old and straightforward narrative perspective in which there are no impossibilities of this kind—why didn’t he simply narrate his two great novels from the point of view of the omniscient narrator? Was he just experimenting with narrative perspectives for the sake of it, or did a more profound literary strategy and ambition lie behind it all? If the latter is the case, then for what higher purpose did Dostoyevsky introduce one of the greatest literary inventions of the nineteenth century: the unreliable narrator? I believe I know the answer to this question , but I wouldn’t be able to provide it here, in the very limited space that remains available to me after my long introduction . All I can give you is a hint in the form of a crucial question for each novel that hopefully should serve as an inspiration for you to reread, more attentively than before, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, and to try to decode for yourself why it was necessary —inevitable, in fact—for Dostoyevsky to tell his two great novels from the point of view of the unreliable narrator. Demons: What is the profoundly hidden motivation of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky for everything he has done? The Brothers Karamazov: Why did Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov commit suicide? Zoran Živković (b. 1948, Belgrade, Serbia) is the author of twenty-two books of fiction published in twenty-three countries, in twenty languages. With more than one hundred foreign editions, he is one of the most translated contemporary Serbian writers. Živković’s writing was featured in the November 2011 issue of WLT. Notebook what to read now Rereading Demons and The Brothers Karamazov by Zoran Živković 8 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 ...

Pulling Down the Sky: Envisioning the Apocalypse with Keith Haring and William S. Burroughs

Pulling Down the Sky: Envisioning the Apocalypse with Keith Haring and William S. Burroughs Lynn R. Huber Midway through Apocalypse by Keith Haring (1958‐1990) and William S. Burroughs (1914‐1997), an anonymous narrator tells John, the seer and author of the Book of Revelation, “don't bother…with all that junk” because “it's time.” Capturing the urgency of apocalyptic discourse, this 1988 collaboration, which includes ten prints by Haring and poetry by Burroughs, reverses the apocalyptic trajectory of its apparent, albeit distant, source text, Revelation. In lieu of depicting a recognizably male John being taken into heaven (Rev 4:1), Haring illustrates a hybrid woman/machine pulling down a tangled tape‐like sky. Burroughs writes: “Caught—burn—in New York beneath the animals of the village—with madness—the Piper pulled down the sky.” Through image and text these two artists queer the perspective of Revelation, replacing the otherworldly vantage point of apocalyptic with an earthly view, specifically from Greenwich Village, a center of queer culture in the 1980s. With this shift of perspective, we glimpse in the pages of this slim book both a queering of the ancient Book of Revelation, written in the first‐century CE, and a queer “revelation.” This queering of the text, which disorients Revelation's narrative and symbols, involves a critique of phallo‐centric culture, embodied in white, middle‐class religiosity. Moreover, rather than depicting John the Seer as an authority whose visionary account cannot be altered or amended (Rev 22:18‐19), Haring and Burroughs offer an ambivalent eschatology, vacillating between end‐time hope and anti‐social negativity. Engaging apocalypse queerly Not known for their subtly, Haring, whose pop art style captured the spirit of the late 1980s, and Burroughs, a founding figure of the 1960's Beat movement, borrow the title Apocalypse directly from the Book of Revelation, an apocalypse written in the late first‐century CE and the final book of the Christian Bible. The ancient text begins with the Greek word apokalypsis or “apocalypse,” when transliterated into English. “Apocalypse” serves as the text's title and is traditionally translated as “revelation.” Apocalypse also becomes a designation for a genre of literature for which Revelation is often thought of as a model. By adopting this title, Haring and Burroughs signal that their project revisions the canonical text. Biblical scholar Vincent L. Wimbush describes this type of appropriation as “signifying on” the text, a practice in which conventional and socially powerful scripts are leveraged, especially by those outside of the dominant culture, to address new contexts and create new meanings. There are a variety of reasons why interpreters signify on scripture, although the practice often involves using texts that have shaped a community's identity, for good or ill, to challenge and reimagine that identity. Through the practices of signification new scriptural traditions emerge, a phenomenon that Wimbush terms “scripturalization.” Focusing on African American biblical interpretation, Lynne St. Clair Darden explains that even scholarly analyses of texts function as scripturalization. This seems especially true when the scholar understands herself as a “carrier of cultural memory,” a process that entails both “looking (and talking) back while moving forward, reshaping identity construction and in so doing reshaping the discipline itself.” In other words, as a queer identified biblical scholar and as someone invested in queer cultural memory, my reading of Haring and Burroughs’ signification on Revelation makes me as much of a “scribe,” to use Darden's language, as Haring, Burroughs, and even John. By exploring Apocalypse as a scripturalization of Revelation in this essay, I effectively extend the queer canon, the ever‐shifting collection of texts and traditions with which queer communities engage. Making this claim is not intended to be an act of hubris; rather, it is an acknowledgment that I am embedded within an interpretive community and a recognition that my decision to engage Haring and Burroughs’ work is motivated by a sense of shared community with other queer readers of Revelation. The understanding of Haring and Burroughs as part of a queer community coalesces around a shared subversive affect, a “queer” posture toward social norms, especially vis‐à‐vis sexuality. Even before the emergence of the academic field of...

Writing Underground: Ralph Ellison and the Novel

In 1952, Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man to acclaim, though the novel’s subterranean ending has inspired critical debate. For over forty years afterward, he worked on his second novel, unfinished when he died in 1994. This article considers what was at stake for Ellison both in publishing as a novelist and in sustained composition. Through paying close attention to Ellison’s compositional style in Invisible Man, in addition to his work in the essay form, this account shows that despite Ellison’s desire to publish the novel, his approach to novel-writing indicates his investment in something more ongoing. Tying Invisible Man’s contentious ending to this conversation allows us to glimpse the shared, complex value of the anonymous narrator’s underground circumstances and Ellison’s creative process.

Narratives of harmful clinical supervision

ABSTRACTGiven the alarming prevalence rates for harmful clinical supervision, it is surprising that scant accounts (i.e., narratives) of supervisees’ experiences of harmful supervision exist in the literature. Hence, this article presents without commentary the 11 anonymous narratives written by supervisees from multiple disciplines and countries who experienced harmful supervision. Presuming that readers have read the introductory article to the Special Issue in which the authors delineate the rationale for and procedures utilized in obtaining the collection of narratives, this information is not repeated here.

Narratives of harmful clinical supervision: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACTDespite the ethical mandate “do no harm,” harmful clinical supervision seems to be occurring internationally among mental health disciplines at an alarming rate. Harmful supervision appears to be largely unacknowledged, unrecognized, and not understood, especially from the supervisees’ perspective. This Special Issue presents 11 anonymous narratives written by supervisees across four mental health disciplines and four continents, plus three reaction articles from supervision experts. The introduction article delineates the rationale for and procedures utilized in obtaining the narratives. The closing article synthesizes the Special Issue contributions, offering conclusions, implications, and recommendations to address harmful supervision systemically across disciplines and internationally.

The Uses of Geography in Youssef Ziedan's Azazeel

Youssef Ziedan's controversial novel Azazeel follows an anonymous narrator's journey from Upper Egypt to Aleppo during the first half of the fifth-century AD. This article argues that descriptions of landscape enable the narrator to articulate personal and historical crises otherwise censored or repressed. By incorporating geographical features into his identity, the narrator creates a poetic version of himself free from the hegemony of the dominant religious discourse. The search for a free, private space shapes the novel's aesthetic as well as political concerns. Overall, Azazeel is an important novel because of its literary value, its denouncement of geopolitical definitions of God, and its ability to place the history of religious violence in Egypt within the global context.

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent by Gregory Mahrer

Reviewed by: A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent by Gregory Mahrer Rebecca Patrascu (bio) Gregory Mahrer. A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent. Fordham University Press. A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent is Gregory Mahrer’s first full poetry collection. The book was chosen as a winner of the Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud series by John Yau and is an exploration of internal and external landscapes—notable for the breadth of the author’s imagination and the beauty of his language. Mahrer’s style is a mélange of narrative, elegiac, and lyric: the poems are histories of longing and loss, told with compelling syntax and imagery. The book is introduced by Yau and is presented in a square format that serves the dual purpose of suggesting an atlas and allowing room for Mahrer’s poems to stretch, as in the opening “Red City,” whose variable line length, indentation, and spacing mimic the ragged outline of a land mass. Mahrer also uses space to emphasize content in “An Unaddressed Envelope Fills with Snow,” “Camera Obscura,” and “Whiteout,” the text of which is appropriately diffuse, describing a muzzling of both the natural world (“The sun too is dying”) and human language (“In place of the alphabet, / a small government stipend”). The settings of the poems are vague, although titles like “Hinterland,” “Empty Square, Twilight,” “Colony,” and “Icelandia” tease us into the idea of place. Mahrer lives alternately in California and Mexico, thus it is not surprising that A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent includes a handful of Spanish words. Each of the book’s sections also contains a piece that reads like an excerpt of a conquistador’s memoir (“Ciudad de Oro,” “Ciudad de Plata,” and “Ciudad de las Manos”). But ultimately, the book is a cartography of an unknown country: To a man we felt the bruise of placemissing its address: the far districts strung togetherby imagined filaments, broken and hungry horsessinking beneath a column of air.What voices remained read as an iambic shout. Nor does Mahrer limit his examination of loss to a time or tense. Some poems reference the distant past, with men feeling the places in their bodies, “where the Pleistocene had laid down its long / ribbons of mud,” with “Miocenian grasslands,” [End Page 183] and “alluvial bodies.” The pluperfect is used as a vehicle for examining motives or cataloguing regrets, as in “Refrain” with its, “All along we had wanted the next thing,” or “Itinerary of Fire,” in which the speaker observes, “Had we been given a simpler itinerary / we might have come to a different door.” Present-tense poems describe failed expeditions; even those set in the future are caution-ary, as in “Understory”: Beyond the declarations of paperor the prurience of strung birdsour disappearance will be as unheraldedas the sleep of trees,as irreversible as inbreath and outcast. These are poems of ash and water, of roads traveled and cities discovered, destroyed, abandoned. The language is dense, complex, and often startling. In his introduction, Yau draws a connection between A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent and the writings of Henri Michaux and Jorge Luis Borges. Like the work of Michaux, Mahrer’s poetry elicits the surprise often inherent in surrealism. Like Borges (who is directly addressed in one of the poems), Mahrer calls into question the distinction between the waking state and that of dreams. However, as intellectual as Mahrer may be, his collection is neither prohibitively elusive nor exclusively ethereal. The poet offsets grand, cosmic references—sun, sea, sky, ice, cloud, and the passing of eons—with a fabular attentiveness to concrete details and the persistent presence of a human witness. Thus we encounter lines like, “Even a child’s clay top / outlasts childhood by a millennium or two,” and, “A man with a cane walks from one century to the next.” Mahrer also counteracts the potentially distancing effect of an anonymous narrator by using invitingly intimate and vulnerable imagery, as with, “In the half-open room a thin drift of flour covers the table. / Olives, still vatted and brined, await each guest” (“Itinerary of Fire”) or “Your blue scent...

Anonymity and Jewishness as forms of alienation: Israel Rabon’s The Street

Anonymity and Jewishness as Forms of Alienation: Israel Rabon’s The Street The article discusses Israel Rabon’s novel The Street (1985), which was originally published in Yiddish in 1928. The novel is set in post-World War I Łodź, Poland and narrates a series of events, whose central figure is an anonymous narrator – a discharged war veteran who aimlessly drifts through life. The textual absence of personal information situates the narrator in a communal void, which parallels his alienation not only from the society, but from the world at large. The heart of the narrator’s account is the blight of post-war society, which is corrupted by the trauma of war. Rabon’s protagonist is representative of the fate of many Polish people who tried to restore their lives in the struggling Polish economy, which was destroyed by the war. The experience of war is presented as responsible for shattering their dreams and thwarting their prospects of a comfortable life. The discordance between the protagonist’s far-fetched expectations and the grim post-war reality highlights his sense of alienation, not only from the world around, but also from his inner self. Jewishness is another factor which provides a form of detachment, and which informs the protagonist’s position against the social fabric of the post-war Polish society. He is presented as an assimilated Jew whose religiosity has largely been eroded. No longer part of ancestral culture, nor fully accepted by Polish society, he is shown as suffering from double alienation. The Street is not an ethnicspecific depiction of the East-European Jewish community, but a general story about the post-war world as characterized by the pervading sense of alienation.

Comics Online: Detention and White Space in “A Guard’s Story”

This paper explores the intersections between online comics, biopolitics, and the experimental form in “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story”. It begins by noting the domestic Australian context in which the comic is published, and the risks taken by the anonymous narrator in sharing the experience with the story’s creators. The analysis argues that the narrative intervenes in the visual archive by bringing to light encounters between guards and detainees who are mostly excluded from recognition in the broader mediascape. The paper suggests that in this way, the narrative draws attentions to ‘states of exception’ that repress knowledge about the plight and rights of refugees and asylum seekers, by depicting some of the traumas experienced by detainees and their guards. By undertaking a detailed examination of the mechanics of ‘A Guard’s Story’, including the use of white-space, and scrolling, the paper establishes the way in which the narrative seeks to intervene in the visual archive in relation to asylum seekers and refugees. Through this analysis, the paper demonstrates the productive capacity of comics to explore, and provoke, questions about aesthetics and the representation of biopolitics and human rights, particularly in the digital domain.

Collector of doubtful debts of tradition: Thersites as a model for the character of narrator in the 'Cyclops' episode of Joyce's Ulysses

Following the path of contemporary analysis of Ulysses' intertextual potential in the framework of possible influences of classical literature on the emergence of the novel, the paper pursues an argument that Joyce's creation of the character of anonymous narrator in the 'Cyclops' episode was mainly grounded on the literary tradition assembled around the figure of Homeric Thersites (Iliad, B 211-277). The main starting points for this hypothesis can be found both in the testimonies considering writer's biography and various stages in the creation of Ulysses, as well as in the complex referential network within which the relations to Thersites can be analyzed on the diachronic level, from Homeric episode, via menippean satire and Shakespeare's interpretation of the figure in Troilus and Cressida, until this day. Using a combination of biographical, hermeneutic and comparative method, the paper aims to point out the fact that, while creating his anonymous narrator in the 'Cyclops' episode, Joyce hadn't remained in the terms of the antiheroic problematic of 'thersitism' that was initiated by Homer and thoroughly elaborated by Shakespeare. Instead of that, he provided the character with a new dimension, while placing him in the conditions of a non-heroic existence, an existence that was completely embodied only in the worlds of the modern novel.

Writing Resistance: Anonyma's Narration of Rape in &lt;em&gt;A Woman in Berlin&lt;/em&gt;

The 2003 republication of A Woman in Berlin incited widespread interest in post–World War II German rape victims. This essay argues for a close reading of the memoir’s narrative craft to counter existing scholarly debate that instead foregrounds the work’s historical accuracy. The autobiography’s anonymous narrator employs two semantic strategies for coping with the Red Army’s sexual violence: first, using language to reconcile with her new reality, and second, using humorous anecdotes to foster community among fellow female victims. With reference to Elaine Scarry’s theories on torture, this essay will demonstrate how the narrator uses language as a buffer between her commanding mind and abused body to preserve her agency while under attack. This is followed with a close analysis of how A Woman in Berlin ignores taboos surrounding rape jokes in its depiction of a female subculture fortified by self-irony and the creative exchange of humorous rape stories. What makes the autobiography so remarkable is not that the narrator tells rape but how she tells it.

At the Margins of Utopia: Jamaica in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall

What does Jamaica contribute to Sarah Robinson Scott’s Millenium Hall? The narrator says little about the colony, andmodern readers exaggerate its prominence by reading the opulentplanter of The History of Sir George Ellison into the anonymous narrator of its predecessor. Yet the peripheral presence of Jamaica in a novel is often rich in implication. In Pamela, the place of that island in the Sally Godfrey story qualifies Mr B’s assertion of absolute class superiority. Although the wealth derived from England’s Caribbean slave colonies was widely if uncomfortablyacknowledged, some people nevertheless opposed slavery. Its protagonist every inch the repatriated colonial planter, Sir George Ellison would ameliorate an intractably inhumane institution. Its narrator a returned merchant planning independence on a modest (even feminine) scale, Millenium Hall accepts that capital is tainted but imagines, radically but locally, that a few gentlewomen if not servants and slaves can become proprietors instead of virtual possessions. A marginal presence, Jamaica enables a social critique by voices usually silenced.

Playing by the Rules

worldliteraturetoday.org 29 crime & mystery In 1926, when Agatha Christie published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, she ignited a huge controversy that in many quarters continues until today. The long history of the question, “Does Agatha Christie play fair with the reader?” began with her pulling off one of the most famous—or, if you prefer, notorious—tricks ever perpetuated on readers. In the nearly four decades since the first Sherlock Holmes story had appeared, the narrative pattern Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe had become the common way to construct the detective mystery. The point of view of Poe’s genius detective, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin, would reveal too much of the significance of clues. It would deracinate the tension derived from challenging the reader to match Dupin’s thinking process. By using an anonymous narrator to describe Dupin’s enigmatic behavior, Poe avoided this. Doyle improved the strategy by adding personality to the narrator’s role, creating Watson, who stands in for the reader in trying to decipher the clues and in reacting to Holmes’s insights. A great detective and his admiring narrator became the standard way of setting up the mystery game. Baroness Orczy’s irascible Old Man in the Corner elucidates crimes to journalist Polly Burton; Lord Peter Wimsey has his Harriet Vane. There are dozens of others. Some authors varied the pattern a bit, but by the publication of Roger Ackroyd, such a narrative strategy was a standard modus operandi. Christie, however, pulled a fast one. Hercule Poirot, a standardly oddball Holmes with a waxed mustache, frequently had a Watson in the character of Arthur Hastings, a Great War veteran who is the narrator of Christie’s first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), seven later novels, and many of her Poirot short stories. Perhaps chafing at the tradition of setting out to distinguish herself, she experimented with the conventional strategy and in Roger Ackroyd introduced a narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, a resident of the village who is revealed in the next-to-last chapter to be the murderer. In the last chapter, Sheppard leaves a suicide note explaining how he carried out his deceptions. Readers were stunned. Yes, the narrator was the murderer . Can you believe it? Watson had done it! Playing by the Rules by J. Madison Davis That there is a controversy at all implies that a mutual conspiracy of publishers, authors, and readers has created a set of rules that crime novels are obligated to obey. above David Suchet portrays Hercule Poirot in the PBS production of Masterpiece Mystery: Series X. 30 wlt may / august 2015 The kerfuffle that resulted from this trick—not to mention her mysterious disappearance that same year— helped make Christie one of the most famous writers in the world and, ultimately, the best-selling novelist of all time. Christie was never averse to manipulating readers’ expectations. In Murder on the Orient Express, she dispensed with the single murderer after taxing the reader through a list of suspects who, as expected, all have a good motive for wanting Mr. Ratchett dead. She certainly was not the first or only writer to play with the pattern. Doyle himself had written his 1917 Holmes story, “His Last Bow,” in third person with no narrator, but it is one of his least memorable efforts and had no impact compared to Christie’s novel. Many writers credit Roger Ackroyd with opening up the artistic possibilities in crime fiction, preventing the Holmes-narrated-by-Watson pattern from stultifying and degrading the genre, even though it carries on to this day in the many popular cop and sidekick stories in all media. In 2013 the Crime Writers Association of the UK voted Roger Ackroyd the best crime novel of all time. I certainly would not agree, but it is yet another testimony to its influence. That there is a controversy at all, however, implies that a mutual conspiracy of publishers, authors, and readers has created a set of rules that crime novels are obligated to obey. The existence of a genre implies a set of expectations in readers. Writers, by inclination or with an eye toward economic well...

Mälukultuur ja moraalne tunnistus: Teise maailmasõja mäletamine Bernard Kangro Tartu-romaanides

This article deals with how remembering the Second World War is conveyed in Bernard Kangro’s last three Tartu novels, The Stone Bridge (1963), The Black Book (1965) and Whirlfire (1969). The Second World War is a memory topos that has, more than anything else, divided the memory politics of European countries. If memory politics in Western Europe is focused predominantly on condemning Nazi crimes, primarily the Holocaust, then Eastern Europe, in addition to the legacy of Nazism, has to deal with the additional criminal legacy of Communism. To bridge the gap between Eastern and Western European nations’ collective memories, discussions started in 1990 about the European memory that should help form the basis for a unified European identity. In the opinion of Jan-Werner Muller, European memory assumes one of two processes. The first is linked to unifying the stances toward memory politics of various European nations; the second with unifying the contents of various collective memories. Although Kangro’s last three Tartu novels are among the peripheral works of Estonian cultural memory, they nevertheless deal with themes that have become relevant in the twenty-first century, on the one hand linking collective memory and national memory politics, and on the other hand, addressing the concept of European memory. Using Kangro’s Tartu novels, I first analyse the problematic aspects of national memory politics as they relate to remembering the Second World War in Estonia. Secondly, I point out the implicit criticism in the Tartu novels of the more inflexible and homogenizing form of European memory. For this I focus more closely on the formative stories of three characters – Benno Maran, Naatan Uirike and Juku Leebram. Benno Maran is one of the narrating voices in these novels, together with an anonymous narrator, an italicized narrator from a different time, and another character, named August September. Quotes from Benno’s diary dating from the days of the Russian and German occupations Russian and German occupations of Estonia are used extensively in the novels’ texts. These quotations overlap considerably with the inscriptions in Kangro's own diary from the period. This circumstance and the italicized narrator’s role as a witness to pivotal events in history enable Kangro’s Tartu novels to deal with moral witness, as explained by Aleida Assmann. According to Assmann, moral witness is the grievance of a forgotten historical injustice as well as an elegy which has no political objectives. What emerges from the italicized narrator’s text is that Kangro’s objective is to deliver a moral witnessing, as well as demonstrate the difficulty in bearing such witness: having participated in the events, he is responsible for the reality he remembers and portrays, and the impression he conveys of the people whose suffering he recounts. The process of bearing witness becomes the theme of these novels through the thoughts, comments and confessions of the italicized narrator; at the same time he distances himself from the narrated tale and characters, thus emphasizing the relative nature of the portrayal. The second characteristic keyword of the Tartu novels is pluralism, demonstrated by both their structure and subject matter. Namely, by using multiple characters, Kangro portrays very different Second World War experiences that are inconsistent with nationalistic memory politics as well as too conflicting for transnational memory politics. One example is theology student Juku Leebram’s life story. Juku collaborates with those in power during the Soviet occupation and takes part in the deportations, then turns traitor by fleeing to the German side, but is captured by the Germans and dies in jail. However, after the war, rumours circulate that Juku escaped and has become a Forest Brother. Thus, in the communicative memory of the Estonians in the homeland, Juku first becomes a martyr and then a resistance fighter and national hero.

“If She Escapes She Will Publish Everything”: Lady Sale and the Media Frenzy of the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842)

This article explores British literary responses to the conflict in Afghanistan. Using the quantitative methodologies of book history, it sheds light on the public responses to this disastrous war, centring on the media storm surrounding Florentia Sale, whose bestselling Journal was published by John Murray. Though she was feted as “the heroine of Kabul” in the press, I reveal the private letters, anonymous narratives and unpublished journals of other eyewitnesses, which contradict her claim to have written the only contemporaneous account of the war recorded “not only daily … but often … hourly.”

Domesticating Ivoirité: Equating xenophobic nationalism and women’s marginalisation in Tanella Boni’s Matins de couvre-feu (2005)

Tanella Boni, an author engaged with African women’s emancipation, has written cautionary essays since the 1990s decrying the xenophobic nature of government-sanctioned ivoirité in the Ivory Coast. Forced into exile owing to the subsequent strife (2000-2010), she wrote Matins de couvre-feu (2005), an allegorical novel in which the woman’s status as a second-class citizen is equated with that of a foreigner in a xenophobic state. This representation plays on the domestic / public space dichotomy, considered by feminist discourse to be a social barrier to women’s equal citizenship. Drawing on Boni’s own ‘feminist’ monograph, Que vivent les femmes d’Afrique? (2008), this article explores the internalisation of national politics (the public sphere) through the ‘domestication’ of an anonymous female narrator who is placed under house arrest. Thereafter an analysis of Kanga Ba, a character who is a victim of xenophobic nationalism, is used to substantiate the equation of the woman’s social and political marginalisation as being that of the foreigner. The argument concludes that Boni’s representational framework ultimately subverts the very notion of a public / domestic dichotomy through narrative strategies that illustrate the porous nature of both spaces, thus eliding the separation between private and national experiences.