Creation Of Persona Research Articles

Co-production of a stakeholder workshop to inform multimorbidity prevention research: working with public contributors to ask the right questions (the MELD-B experience)

BackgroundThe MELD-B project aims to identify childhood lifecourse targets for the prevention of early-onset, burdensome multimorbidity, and to characterise ‘burden’ for people living with multimorbidity. Drawing upon lived experiences and the expertise of policy and practice stakeholders can enrich the MELD-B project, inform data analysis, and contribute to meaningful and practical outputs. In pursuit of this collaborative approach, a stakeholder workshop, co-produced with PPIE members, was conducted to inform the MELD-B project. MethodsFive PPIE members with lived experience of multimorbidity co-produced the planning of the workshop, including the utilisation of a project-specific animation and the creation of imaginary persona illustrating the lifecourse concepts of multiple long term conditions. 25 stakeholders with lived experience and policy and practice expertise of the early life course, from backgrounds including integrated care boards, healthcare practitioners, academics, council employees and not-for-profit organisations attended the 2 h workshop, and contributed in an advisory capacity. The workshop aimed to identify critical time points and targets in the early lifecourse (from before pregnancy up until 18 years), for feasible and practical interventions to prevent or delay multimorbidity. The stakeholders were split into three groups each facilitated by two team members and Jamboard (an online interactive whiteboard) was used to collate ideas. Overarching themes were then identified from these Jamboards. A poll was administered at the end of the workshop giving choices to prioritise time points for interventions. FindingsA number of focus areas emerged from the workshop that will inform future research on utilising longitudinal data for the early life course prevention of multimorbidity. Overarching themes included: mental health, educational attainment and attendance, the early identification of conditions and neurodiversity, diet and nutrition, and wider family factors. Stakeholders suggested that family-targeted interventions maybe more important to prioritise in early childhood, however at secondary school age individual-focused interventions may become more significant. The poll that included four timepoints (birth, 5, 10, and 16 years) identified -by an equal split- the first three as the most important timepoints for interventions, with ages 5 and 10 years considered transitional ages at the start of primary and secondary school respectively. Later adolescence (age 16 years) was not voted as a priority compared to the other timepoints. InterpretationCo-production with PPIE experts and stakeholders needs to become an integral early part of shaping research questions around prevention of multimorbidity. Our workshop has led to the identification of multiple priority themes and important timepoints from the perspective on those engaging with families and young people in their everyday work. This informs our next step in modelling prevention interventions using routinely collected and national cohort data. FundingThis work is part of the multidisciplinary ecosystem to study lifecourse determinants and prevention of early-onset burdensome multimorbidity (MELD-B) project which is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR203988). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

Making Mary Magdelish

This article offers an autoethnographic account of the creation of my drag persona, Mary Magdelish. I argue that Magdelish is a rhetorically embodied text created by the intertwining queer and religious strains of my life in response to a traumatic moment in the Catholic Church. This article explores how embodiment, performance, and haunting come together through the art of drag to revise and reclaim the experience of coming out to my parish pastor. Framing haunting as a strategy of refusal, this article positions Magdelish as a rhetorical response to haunting that becomes its own haunting. As ghosts unbury violences of the past, Magdelish makes present the history of religious violence against queer communities. Simultaneously, she demonstrates a synergy between religious and queer performances that forces viewers to confront their own conceptions of religiosity and queerness. Ultimately, I argue that Magdelish’s performance creates a counternarrative in the Church that disrupts majoritarian stories surrounding queerness and Catholicism.

Relational Processes and Social Projections in Facebook Selfie-Quotation Juxtaposition: An Exploratory Study

Abstract The juxtaposition between selfie and quotation is an emerging user-generated Facebook content. This exploratory study is the first to show how Facebook users self-represent themselves through Relational Processes, based on the intertextuality between these verbal and visual modes. Relational Processes refer to the process of characterizing, identifying or describing a person or entity. In this study, 132 Facebook quotations were categorized into three types of Relational Processes based on the users’ selfies. The clauses were restated into I-expressions to center the users’ multimodal experiential and egocentric positioning. The findings revealed that Attributive Relational Processes, such as “I am happy,” predominated in the self-quotation juxtaposition. These relational processes are then discussed based on the potential social projections within the Philippine cultural circuit, namely: the Filipino culture of “inggit” (envy); crab mentality; being social climbers; and the neoliberal and neocolonial status of the Philippines as channeled through the Western-driven quotations. Overall, we argue that the juxtaposition of these two semiotic modes can lead to the creation of a new persona of the Facebook users, enhancing their digital self-remodeling and self-representation.

As Used by the Augusta: The Creation of Livia's Imperial Persona Through Endorsement of Pharmaceutical Recipes

Abstract: Scribonius Largus, in his collection of pharmaceutical recipes ( Compositiones ), describes ten as having been used by members of the imperial family, including Livia. A model from the field of modern consumer research reveals that Livia used such endorsements to create a persona of discernment and intellectualism, qualities hitherto largely overlooked. Réesumé: Dans sa collection de recettes pharmaceutiques ( Compositiones ), Scribonius Largus en décrit une dizaine comme ayant été utilisées par les membres de la famille impériale eux-mêmes, dont Livie. Un modèle tiré de la recherche actuelle sur les consommateurs révèle que Livie s'est servie de ce type de recommandation pour asseoir sa réputation de discernement et d'intellectualisme, des qualités qui ont jusqu'ici été largement négligées.

Mrs Frances Abington: An Eighteenth-Century Actress and Her Use of Imagery for Self-Promotion

The eighteenth-century actress Mrs Frances Abington left a legacy of images of herself, both as a woman of fashion and as a popular comedienne. At the height of her career in the mid-century, English society was experiencing accelerating changes in communication, both through printed media and imagery. Abington made full use of the popularity of the new public exhibitions and the growing market for printed images to actively promote herself to her supporters. This article places her in the context of mid-eighteenth-century London theatre and examines how she used imagery in the creation of a public persona.

Foreign Language Education as a Special Tool for the Creation of Successful Linguistic Persona

The article is devoted to the issues of foreign language education and its role as an effective means of building successful linguistic persona. Foreign language education in the article is considered as a reliable investment in human capital and a necessary skill for every modern specialist and citizen. The article also pays attention to the fact that foreign language education contributes to spiritually and culturally developed personas of a new generation with clear civic engagement. Special attention is also paid to the knowledge and skills of the digital society, which are formed under the influence of foreign language education.

Creating Connected Identities Among Japanese Company Employees: Learning to be Members of Department Store Work Communities

This paper looks at the meanings, values, and idioms associated with work for members of Japanese permanent employment jobs in a sector of society where this has not previously been well explored - large-retailing organizations. It discusses the boundary markers that distinguish members from outsiders and marginals, and explains the ambiguous identities of part-timers and "helper clerks." The initial year in a Japanese permanent employment job is presented as an intense training period and also a liminal period involving the creation of new social persona and their aggregation into corporate work communities. The paper shows how new department store employees are socialized through training programs, company retreats, and other practices, then discusses the ongoing channeling of employee identities into structured networks of senpai-khai (senior-junior) and entry-year cohort relationships. It also discusses cases of "individualists" who do not fit easily into the company as community ideology. Based on research conducted from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, the paper provides a comparative update to earlier ethnographies of Japanese work in the permanent employment System.

The birth of the author

The Sumerian hymn known as the The Exaltation of Inana, which was attributed to the Old Akkadian priestess Enheduana, is the earliest known depiction of literary authorship. Through a close reading of the text, the essay argues that the figure of the author is created by a number of individuals acting together, including the addressee, performers, and copyists of the poem. Their involvement is necessary for authors to become authors, and authorship can therefore be seen as a collaborative creation even when a text is attributed to a single person. This notion of co‐authorship, not as a collaboration between delimited individuals, but as the collective creation of an authorial persona, makes the author an inherently fluid entity—waxing, waning, dispersed, and regrouped over the course of the text. Having identified this form of co‐authorship in the Exaltation, the essay then traces its dynamics across a wider selection of poems.1

Possible and Impossible Dialogues: Interpreting Clarice Lispector’s Interviews for Manchete and Fatos e Fotos

Traces of Clarice Lispector’s experiences as an interviewer of public figures for popular magazines can be found in her literary texts, which are full of unanswered questions and searches for identity. Her characters also often yearn for an interlocutor who might understand and appreciate them, with whom they might establish a dialogue. The interviews themselves are interesting from a biographical and aesthetic point of view but also because the choice of interviewees, ranging from sportsmen to actresses and First Ladies, paints a portrait of Brazil at two key moments in history: the late 1960s, in the depths of dictatorship, and the late 1970s, when it was governed by a less repressive, but still authoritarian and military government. This article discusses recurring patterns and structures, and Lispector’s creation of an interviewer persona, paying particular attention to the interviews not yet published in book form.

Appetite, Anatomy, and Desire in Caroline Era Poetry and Theatre

The Caroline Era in early modern England was characterized by political instability and theological revolution. In response, there were ideological attempts to regulate desire and a distinct focus on the creation of a public persona. These crises led to anxieties about gender, performance, and the body. Literary production at this time was founded in political conflict and was both a response to and an escape from these events. In this article, I argue that early modern writers literarily regulate gender and bodies through the personal, political and theological happenings that they respond to within their work. John Donne’s metaphysical poetry and George Herbert’s The Temple express the anxiety of desire involved in the process of seeking God. These texts translate this through the language of eros, bodily sacrificial connection to the Divine Logos, and communion that focuses on digestion and inclusion in the corporeal universe as a means to achieve the divine moment. Similarly, John Ford’s The Broken Heart portrays anxieties about desire and appetite through female anatomization. The portrayals of desire, anxiety, and appetite in these texts (all first published in 1633) are representative of the historical, political, and religious ideological structures that informed their creation.

Norwegian black metal, transgression and sonic abjection

This article explores the music and transgressions of Norwegian black metal in the early 1990s. Facial and vocal masking, emblematic in corpsepaint and screaming, lay at the intersection between these two modes of existence, musical and criminal. Masking in black metal leads to the creation of a new persona, what I call the ‘black metal double’. This double enacts a splitting of subjectivity between personal and public personas, and the vocal scream comes to navigate the space between these personas. This bifurcated existence predicates an alternate, abject mode of being for black metal performers. Masking becomes a theoretical means for living two lives: one as private citizens and the other as black metal musicians who transgress criminal and musical limits. By collapsing the boundaries between abjection and subjection, black metal musicians create new spaces of political and cultural meaning-making through masking.

Reverie and Reading: Encounters with Modern Jewish Culture in the Work of Alan Mintz

Reverie and ReadingEncounters with Modern Jewish Culture in the Work of Alan Mintz Anne Golomb Hoffman In his last book, Alan Mintz described Agnon's creation of a narrative persona who is not so much "a consumer or a beneficiary of the tradition of sacred song that goes back to the Temple" as someone who is "himself a belated link in that chain."1 I'd like to highlight the belatedness of our friend, Alan, as fundamental to his critical practice: the concept of belatedness brings the writer or the critic into the long line of conversation—debate, interpretation, elaboration—that is so central to Jewish tradition. The very distance from the sources serves to energize the creativity of the writer or critic under the sign of belatedness. In fact, I think this awareness occasioned Alan's goal in undertaking his last unfinished project of an Agnon biography that would have included reflections on his own Jewish journey. I didn't know Alan in the years when he made the decision to leave Victorian literature and pursue Jewish studies, but I'm intrigued to imagine his deliberations as he came to choose modern Hebrew literature rather than midrash or the medieval piyyut. Modern Hebrew literature offered Alan a field of engagement with existential issues that were close to his heart. It positioned him, moreover, to highlight belatedness as a mode of critical reflection well suited to our modernity. From the vantage point of the twentieth-anniversary issue of Prooftexts in 2001, Alan looked back to his first encounter with Agnon as a college freshman writing a [End Page 430] paper in Hebrew on the novella Bilvav yamim (In the Heart of the Seas). He would translate this essay into English a few years later and rework it as a critique of American Judaism for the inaugural issue of Response, the journal he helped to create in 1967. Reflecting with some bemusement on his own youthful passion as a critic of American Jewish life, Alan nevertheless found, on returning to Agnon's novella in 2001, that his earlier encounter had been driven just as much by "the desire to experience the poetry of religion." Whatever his youthful frustrations with mid-century American Judaism may have been, returning to the novella gave Alan the pleasure of an experience of reading that made him feel again that he "was peering directly into the inner romance of faith and hearing its music in its original tones." Looking back, he found evidence in his earlier reading that "I was ready to listen, and grateful to be given the chance to seize through the reverie of reading what could not be given to me in life."2 The word "reverie" comes up occasionally in Alan's writing and suggests something of what literary experience made available to him. The phrase conveys awareness of a reader's absorption in a text as something that is outside and yet part of the self. In this instance, for Alan, the reverie of reading opened the potential space of absorption in Hebrew literature. As he noted elsewhere, Hebrew provided "the internal resources to negotiate the distance between old and new. Substitution, retrieval, containment, synthesis, reconciliation—all the dynamics of cultural change could take place within Hebrew literature because in that medium alone did the new meanings and old meanings exist simultaneously."3 In a 1984 essay on the siddur for the anthology Back to the Sources, Alan took note of the "roomy space of the synagogue service," highlighting its capacity to hold the currents of Jewish life.4 For Alan, Hebrew language and Jewish literary traditions offered spaces in which we might hear the voices of past and present mingling, arguing, and interacting in an ongoing conversation. This is abundantly evident in Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, a major opening move in a career devoted to the roomy spaces of Jewish textuality. Alan tells us that the motivation for the project grew out of the need to historicize the Holocaust. Yet, while his original intention may have been "to take the Holocaust literature of one interpretive community, Israeli culture and Hebrew literature, and read it against the...

Sincerity, authenticity and profilicity: Notes on the problem, a vocabulary and a history of identity

This essay attempts to provide a preliminary outline of a theory of identity. The first section addresses what the sociologist Niklas Luhmann has called ‘the problem of identity’, or, in other words, the mind–society (rather than the mind–body) problem: In how far can the internal (psychological) self and the external (social) persona be integrated into a unit? The second section of the essay briefly defines a basic vocabulary of a theory of identity. ‘Identity’ is understood as the existentially necessary formation of a coherence between the ‘self’ (the ‘I’ as it is experienced in thoughts and feelings), its body and its social ‘persona’ (the individual person with its social attributes). Three different major paradigms of identity formation are distinguished from one another: a sincere identity is constructed through a firm commitment of the self to its social roles; an authentic identity is constructed through the creation of a social persona on the basis of one’s unique and original self; a ‘profilic’ identity, as we call it, is shaped by successfully presenting a personal profile under conditions of second-order observation as they prevail, for instance, in the social media, but also in other contemporary social systems. In the third section of the essay, we present a sketch of the historical sequence of these three paradigms of identity. Although these paradigms are not mutually exclusive and can coexist, it seems that sincerity flourished in pre-modern society, while authenticity came to prominence along with the functional differentiation of modern society and is now, along with the increased significance of second-order observation, gradually overshadowed by the influence of profilicity.

Meeting “Me”: Charles Dickens's Moments of Self-Encounter

Abstract In short stories and novels ranging from A Christmas Carol (1843) to Great Expectations (1860–61), Charles Dickens again and again reiterated close encounters between his fictional characters' adult and childhood selves. Turning to the journalistic context of The Uncommercial Traveller essays, this article identifies moments of self-encounter that are similar but staged between adult Dickens and avatars of his child or adolescent self. Drawing on research into media studies, temporality, and form, I argue that Dickens developed the new formal technology of the self-encounter in response to the pressure of his desire to connect personally with a mass audience, a cultural politics and marketing practice that Juliet John has termed “intimate publicity.” I propose a skeptical reading of Dickens's moments of self-encounter that finds evidence of the author's vexed approach to autobiographical form and a resulting pivot outward to his audience. Through a logical doublethink that sanctions the narrator's recognition of the child as simultaneously me and not me, these self-with-self-encounters create both ironic detachment and sentimental irony, while leaving the task of calibrating their tonal balance to the reader. Attending to these artful moments of self-encounter carries insight into the creation of Dickens's public persona and to the reception of his novels.

Itinerario poético del cuerpo en vértigo: el personaje de Alejandra Pizarnik y el valor ontologizador de la despersonalización del yo poético

El objetivo del presente trabajo es estudiar la relación entre el cuerpo y la palabra en la obra de la poeta argentina, Alejandra Pizarnik, con especial atención al fenómeno de la despersonalización del yo poético. La principal línea de investigación parte del concepto del valor ontologizador del lenguaje poético, puesto que es precisamente la relación que el sujeto tiene con el lenguaje la que define las tensiones principales de la poética de Pizarnik. El trabajo obsesivo sobre el lenguaje vincula a la poeta al concepto de fatum, el destino poético del sujeto, que introduciremos en nuestro análisis a partir del libro titulado La escritura invisible: El discurso autobiográfico en Alejandra Pizarnik publicado por Patricia Venti (2008a). La autora utiliza este concepto en relación con la creación poética pizarnikiana para demostrar que la poeta determina su destino poético a través de la imposibilidad del lenguaje, lo que conduce al sujeto hacia su disolución y a la poeta al suicidio.

Mulher Brasileira Em Primeiro Lugar: Um Breve Estudo da Imagem da Mulher Brasileira em Revistas Generalistas Portuguesas

From the concept of visual identity that establishes the form as a determinant, the study looks at the human body as an object that can be designed and demonstrates that public people, especially actors, become objects of consumption built from a project. Through these concepts, the study analyses images of two Brazilian actresses taken from two Portuguese generalist magazines and verifies the intention to attribute to the brazilianness of the represented actress characteristics that do not correspond to her persona. The concept of persona used is that of cinema in which the public imagination of the actor influences the construction of a certain character and this may be changed for each role of the actor, the persona is therefore a supporting actor in the composition of the character, but is also modified by it. The intertextuality related to the creation of the actor's persona leaked to other representations, including that of the woman, is the conductive line of the study. The work is the result of the author's doctoral thesis entitled As representacoes nas vossas cabecas: sobre o estereotipo da mulher brasileira que habita o imaginario portugues, defended at FBAUP in June 2016, oriented by Professor Heitor Alvelos and co-supervised by Prof. Luiz Antonio Luzio Coelho.

Dress up and what else? Girls' online gaming, media cultures and consumer culture

In order to investigate how online activities and digital cultures mediate children's socialisation to consumer culture, this paper discusses the findings of a research project on online games for tweens which focus on fashion. Popular websites for girls include a variety of games centred on fashion; these are mainly paper dolls sites, which engage girls in a drag and drop activity of clothes and fashion items on sexualised bodies, at times of celebrities. Some reproduce fashion and beauty ideals in settings such as catwalks, hairstyle and beauty saloons, etc. Others, such as Stardoll.com, offer more complex environments, integrating dressing up activities with the creation of an online persona, combined with social networking. Drawing on analysis of online dress up games and websites, and a set of group interviews with young girls aged 9-13, the paper explores how tweens engage with these games and, more generally, how they appropriate, negotiate and resist consumer culture through the practice of dressing up themselves and their online personas. The aim of the paper is therefore threefold: 1) reconstruct the meanings and uses of online paper dolls websites, and their symbolic value in everyday interactions; 2) investigate how these games contribute to shape young girls' engagement with digital cultures, consumer and celebrity culture; and 3) understand how stereotyped representations of young girls as consumers circulated in media, consumer and celebrity culture are socially made sense of by tweens in their peer cultures.

Learning Affect, Embodying Race: Youth, Blackness, and Neoliberal Emotions in Latino Newark

AbstractThis article examines everyday constructions of racial subjects, the affective worlds of those subjects, and the potential material consequences behind emotional ethos that are oftentimes in alignment with the interests of state and market imperatives. Under neoliberalism, there has been an intensification in the cultural standardization and organization of feelings and sentiments (Haskell 1985). I examine how feelings and sentiments intersect with everyday evaluations of racial difference and processes of racial learning, particularly among Latin American migrant and U.S.‐born Latino youth. What do individuals’ affective worlds tell us about multi‐scale experiences of race, racial ideologies, and racialization practices? What kinds of emotional work do embodied practices of learning race require? How does becoming a transnational racial subject in the United States alter one's affective world and perspectives on the emotional subjectivities of racialized others? I approach these questions by drawing from ethnographic materials gathered from fieldwork conducted in public high schools in the Puerto Rican area of North Broadway and the largely Brazilian Ironbound, two predominantly Latino neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, between 2001 and 2008. To a lesser extent, I also draw from research conducted in private and public high schools in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Santurce, Puerto Rico, over several months in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I argue that Latin American and Latino populations in urban areas of the United States navigate unfamiliar racial situations through the development of a quotidian emotional epistemology; that is, through the deployment of a set of rules and assumptions about affect and its adequate expression, interpretations of how others feel or should feel, and the creation or performance of an affective persona. As I demonstrate in the essay, these rules and assumptions are informed by transnational racial ideologies, social practices around performances of Blackness, socioeconomic hierarchies, and expectations of belonging on multiple scales, like the neighborhood, nation state, and the market. I am particularly attentive to how Latin American migrant and U.S.‐born Latino youth engage in a process of racial learning that renders them “street therapists” dedicated to observing and correcting “defective” forms of Blackness, developing appropriate feeling rules, and hesitantly embracing a docility valued in an exploitative service sector economy.

Complex Pseudonymity: Annius of Viterbo's Multiple Persona Disorder

Complex Pseudonymity:Annius of Viterbo's Multiple Persona Disorder Walter Stephens (bio) Annius of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni, 1432-1502) was the most innovative literary forger of all time. In the collection of forged texts that he published in 1498, he not only rewrote the entire history of the world, but did so through the most elaborate complex of authorial pseudo-identities the world had seen. His masterpiece (for such it was) contained eleven pseudo-antique chronicles, each attributed to a different ancient author, and featured a number of secondary presences. All these many personae were masks of a single creator. In many ways, the mechanics of his hoax are still unsurpassed. A closer look at the ways in which pseudonymity and anonymity are conventionally used to describe textual artifacts will prepare us to clarify the complex strategies by means of which the forger hoped to elude exposure. We refer to a "nom de plume" when a pseudonym is essentially transparent; the proper (etymologically the "own"), historical, or "empirical" identity of a writer is assumed either to be known to readers in general, or to be easily discovered by more than a few of them.1 A true pseudonym implies the difficulty or impossibility of establishing proper identity, and can take one of three forms. The first, and least personalized, is anonymity: it is the degree zero of Foucault's [End Page 689] "author-function," that is, a way of referring to texts by characterizing and anthropomorphizing their distinctive features.2 We refer to that nameless person who transcribed the text in the form we now read as "the Beowulf-poet." Since very little biographical contextualization can even be conjectured, anonymity is essentially a pseudonym—actually a metonymy—for the text itself. If we subsequently discover another text showing very similar traits, then the term "Beowulf-poet" becomes synonymous with a style, in the same way in which art historians refer to "the Master of Flemalle" or "the Master of the House-Book." As a pseudo-proper noun, "Anonymous" is encountered mainly as a bibliographic placeholder in older scholarship to designate the implied authors or redactors of less celebrated texts or of fragments; nowadays any unattributable text will be alphabetically designated by its title, rather than by recourse to "Anonymous."3 The second stage of pseudonymity involves the creation of an authorial persona via the attribution of a pseudo-proper name: François Rabelais attributes his early works to the anagrammatic "Alcofrybas Nasier," who appears in the texts as both narrator and actant within the diegesis. It is often difficult to determine the difference between a second-stage pseudonym and a simple nom de plume; but I will define the discriminator as the degree of attention paid to creating and cultivating a distinct authorial persona behind the pseudonym. "Alcofrybas Nasier" is a distinctly less reliable narrator and author-persona than "Françoys Rabelais, Docteur en Médecine," his successor from the Third Book onward, who more nearly resembles what is known about the empirical author Rabelais.4 A third-stage pseudonym entails the transfer of authorship to a historical personage, one whose name is usually known to the intended audience. In many cases, a third-stage pseudonym is the marker of texts reviled as forgeries. Curzio Inghirami, the early seventeenth-century teenage forger, attributed his pseudo-antique texts to an imaginary Etruscan priest named Prospero.5 In this, he was adapting [End Page 690] a template famously described by the ancient authors Pliny the Elder, Livy, and Plutarch, who recounted the fraudulent discovery of books attributed to Numa Pompilius, a historical personage (fl. ca. 700 BCE) who was the second king of Rome and the legendary founder of its Etruscan-derived religion.6 In extreme cases, the attribution of authorship might be functional to libel, or even satire, if the assumed name should belong to a living contemporary. Obviously, the attribution must be made by someone. This someone, this attributor, can be referred to as the sponsor.7 The sponsor is the mirror-reversed image of the third-stage pseudonym. As we shall see below, it (or "he") denies authorial responsibility by transferring it elsewhere, and assuming the pose of textual...

"Bury My Heart in Recent History": Mark Twain's "Hellfire Hotchkiss," the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and the Dime Novel Western

"Bury My Heart in Recent History"Mark Twain's "Hellfire Hotchkiss," the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and the Dime Novel Western Michelle Ann Abate While many authors recognize the importance of names, Mark Twain had an especially astute awareness. From the pseudonym that he chose for himself to the appellations that he created for his fictional characters, he was keenly attuned to the symbolic significance of a name. Given the centrality of names and naming in Twain's life and work, the topic has been the subject of sustained scholarly attention. Literary biographies such as Justin Kaplan's classic Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain and Everett Emerson's recent Mark Twain: A Literary Life discuss the author's creation of a writerly persona though various pennames. Likewise, critical articles, including John Livingston's "Names in Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger" and Laura Smith's "Fictive Names in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson," investigate the memorable monikers that appeared in his writing.1 In spite of the longstanding attention that this issue has received, one of Twain's most distinctive and arguably most unusual character names has largely escaped scrutiny: Hellfire Hotchkiss, from his 1897 narrative fragment with the same title. Echoing a query that has been asked of many of Twain's other characters, this alliterative appellation prompts the question: Of all the nicknames that the author could have selected for his central character, why this one? Given the author's awareness of the importance of names, what literary, cultural, or symbolic meaning did "Hellfire Hotchkiss" possess? Did the author's choice of this moniker have anything to do with his unwillingness and/or inability to complete the story? This essay explores answers to these and other questions by bringing together a series of disparate biographical, literary, and historical threads. One of Twain's most memorable and unusual appellations, "Hellfire Hotchkiss" [End Page 114] may also be one of his most coded and significant. Rereading the narrative fragment in light of the author's awareness about the importance of names, his longstanding connection to the West, and his acute interest in current events, the name assumes new symbolic weight and added cultural significance. Far from an accidental or inconsequential choice, "Hellfire Hotchkiss" may be a complex and multivalent moniker that embeds a reference to one of the most tragic and widely-publicized events of his day: the massacre at Wounded Knee seven years before. In what has become an oft-retold account, on 29 December 1890, nearly five hundred troops from the U.S. Seventh Cavalry killed around three hundred Lakota men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.2 Although accounts vary about who started the fighting and why, conditions quickly became chaotic and many exchanges of gunfire occurred at close range. While some Lakota were able to flee the violence, many died from exposure in the harsh conditions of South Dakota. The military enlisted a group of local civilians to bury the Indian dead, but a severe snowstorm hampered their efforts. When the frozen and—because of the frigid temperatures—often grotesquely contorted bodies were finally recovered, they were simply placed in a mass grave. Resituating "Hellfire Hotchkiss" in the context of the massacre at Wounded Knee adds another facet to Twain's oft-discussed interest in historical events while it complicates generic understandings of the narrative. "Hellfire Hotchkiss" subverts not only the common gender coordinates of the dime novel western by presenting a gender-bending female figure, but perhaps more importantly its stereotypical racial ones. Written in the wake of one of the most brutal slaughters of American Indians by federal troops, the narrative eschews the longstanding practice in dime novel westerns of showcasing the extermination of "savage" frontier Indians by "noble" white forces. In doing so, "Hellfire Hotchkiss" embodies a previously overlooked coordinate on the map of Twain's complex attitudes about the nation's indigenous tribal peoples and national mythologies about the West. Although Twain apparently never mentioned the massacre at Wounded Knee in any of his letters, notebook entries, or published writings, he hardly could have been ignorant of the conflict. Throughout January and February 1891, the massacre remained a...