Willing Suspension Of Disbelief Research Articles

Real human touch: performer-facilitated touch enhances presence and embodiment in immersive performance

Despite being an embodied medium, virtual reality (VR) prioritizes vision and sound over the other senses. While touch has been demonstrated to foster a sense of presence and embodiment, most haptic research in VR focuses on uncanny vibration motors or limited experiences of touch with simple props. Meanwhile, immersive performances such as Eve 3.0 incorporate performer-facilitated touch in novel ways to evoke a complete and social experience of human touch in VR. In response, we conducted a mixed-methods study to investigate the experience of performer-facilitated touch in a 360° video segment from the immersive performance Eve 3.0. Using a 3 × 2 factorial design, we compared touch from a diary prop and performer in festival and laboratory settings. We found that performer-facilitated touch increased realistic behaviours and questionnaire measures of social presence, embodiment, and tactile realism. The setting also had a significant effect with festival participants demonstrating significantly more behaviours indicating presence, particularly in the no-touch condition. Participant descriptions reveal that in addition to touch, a rich narrative and vivid visuals of social interaction were just as important in immersing participants in the experience and making them feel present. We find that participant experiences are a co-creation situated at the intersection of artefact and context that require a willing suspension of disbelief. The authentic setting and performance artefact afforded a deep understanding of the rich and complex experience of human touch in immersive performance.

Children’s Digital and Non-Digital Play Practices with Cozmo, the Toy Robot

Children’s Digital and Non-Digital Play Practices with Cozmo, the Toy Robot

Coleridge’s Notion of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: The Case of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Coleridge’s Notion of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: The Case of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Michael Tomko, Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien

Michael Tomko, <i>Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien</i>

The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2016

The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2016 David Bratman (bio), Jason Fisher (bio), John Wm. Houghton (bio), John Magoun (bio), Kate Neville (bio), and Robin Anne Reid (bio) Introduction [David Bratman] An ever-prolific J.R.R. Tolkien published two new books in 2016. The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun: Together with the Corrigan Poems re prints a long Breton-influenced narrative poem, which previously had appeared only in The Welsh Review 4 (Dec. 1945): 254–66, together with drafts, supplementary poetry, and commentary by editor Verlyn Flieger. A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages reprints a fuller text of the now-renowned essay on linguistic sub-creation from The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), also with supplementary material and commentary by the editors, Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins. The major anthology of the year in Tolkien studies was the two-volume The Return of the Ring: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Conference 2012, edited by Lynn Forest-Hill (Edinburgh: Luna Press, 2016), a collection of 36 papers on diverse Tolkienian topics, presented at a conference at Loughborough University in August 2012, sponsored by the Tolkien Society and marking the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit. The year also saw publication of a specialized anthology on the subject of that book, The Hobbit, edited by Stephen W. Potts, in the Critical Insights series (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2016); plus another theme anthology, Laughter in Middle-earth: Humour In and Around the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Thomas Honegger and Maureen F. Mann (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2016). Volume 13 of Hither Shore, the yearbook of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft, formed an anthology on "Tolkien's Philosophy of Language," edited by Thomas Fornet-Ponse, Thomas Honegger, and Julian T. M. Eilmann. Lembas Extra 2016 from the Netherlands group Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor, an anthology titled Tolkien Among Scholars, edited by Nathalie Kuijpers, Renée Vink, and Cécile van Zon, was originally announced as dated 2017 and has been postponed for consideration to next year. The most important monographs of the year were Tolkien, Self and Other:"This Queer Creature"by Jane Chance and Tolkien's Theology of Beauty: Majesty, Splendor, and Transcendence in Middle-earth by Lisa [End Page 179] Coutras, both of which have been finalists for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award. Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien by Michael Tomko and On Eagles' Wings: An Exploration of Eucatastrophe in Tolkien's Fantasy by Anna Thayer were also books of particular note and value. Journals of the year, besides the theme anthologies noted above, included volume 13 of the present journal, Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, and issue 57 of Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, dated Winter 2016. The open-access electronic Journal of Tolkien Research, hosted at scholar.valpo.edu, published its third volume over the course of the year, with a special theme issue titled Authorizing Tolkien: Control, Adaptation, and Dissemination of J.R.R. Tolkien's Works, edited by Robin A. Reid and Michael D. Elam, designated as issue 3. The Mythopoeic Society published two print issues of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, vol. 34.2 (whole number 128, dated Spring–Summer 2016) and vol. 35.1 (whole number 129, dated Fall–Winter 2016); back issues are archived online at dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/. The most active newsletters of the year were the Tolkien Society's bimonthly Amon Hen and the American Mensa Tolkien Special Interest Group's Beyond Bree. Coverage of these is selective for major material. General Works [David Bratman] Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings (Kent, OH: Black Squirrel Press, 2016) is the popular edition of Diana Pavlac Glyer's 2007 scholarly study The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (covered here in Tolkien Studies 7 [2010]: 351–52). About two-thirds the length of the original book, it eliminates its predecessor's massive endnotes (except for source citations...

More than clothes hangers: cultural intermediaries in the field of fashion

PurposeThis paper aims to elucidate how cultural intermediaries shape the subjectivity of other marketplace actors in fashion, thus preserving the illusio underpinning this field of cultural production.Design/methodology/approachNarrative interviews were conducted with cultural intermediaries in the fashion industry. These were supplemented with non-participant observations, carried out simultaneously during the research process. Interview transcripts and field notes were analysed using a combination of holistic-content and categorical-content analysis.FindingsAs the fashion field is constructed around beliefs as to what constitutes value, the empirical data demonstrate how fashion models’ embody the illusio of the field and authenticate the values, meanings and identities inherent in it through aestheticised and rarefied styles of performance. These activities seduce other market actors and engender a willing suspension of disbelief that in turn mobilises affective intensities resulting in perceptions of legitimacy.Research limitations/implicationsThis research adds greater clarity to what cultural intermediaries do when they mediate between economy and culture. To do this, our research is analysed in terms of the ritual performance, the sensibility of the model, the use of the body and the performative fusion.Practical implicationsThe paper offers practical implications insofar as it deconstructs the two core ritualistic aspects of the fashion industry which each season yields significant tangible outputs in various forms. The combination of narrative inquiry with observation allows for a better understanding of how these events can be best channelled to mediate the illusio of this cultural field.Originality/valueTo date, there has been very little consumer research that explores cultural intermediaries and less still that offers an empirical glimpse of their performance. This research adds greater clarity to these embodied performances that legitimate other market actors’ suspension of disbelief while also demystifying the ambiguity with which cultural intermediaries are discussed in consumer research.

A Ludic Appreciation of Mechner’s Aesthetics

We can imagine many of our emotions in our family pet: hunger, fear, anger, lust, and even the bonding that we call love. But not the appreciation of a sunset, sonnet, musical passage, or good joke. Mechner takes on the gamut of such aesthetic appreciations, removed from the urgency of the primal ones, and gives us the first thorough attempt at a behavioral explication. Because he has been so thorough and apt, my commentary can add little value to his thesis, only subtract from it. Therefore, rather than critique, I exemplify, and then simplify. By reducing his voluminous report to two lines: a theorem and an equation, I thereby encapsulate aesthetics in a sweet pill of spire. Aesthetic appreciation of this note may require a willing suspension of disbelief.

Michael Tomko, Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien

Michael Tomko, <i>Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien</i>

Envoyée special by Jean Echenoz

Echenoz,Jean.Envoyée spéciale.Paris: Minuit,2016.ISBN 978-2-7073-2922-6.Pp.313. 18,50 a. In his latest novel, Echenoz returns, with a great deal of brio, to the kind of genre fiction that made his reputation as a writer. It is a form less immediately concerned with genre than with fiction itself, one that wagers heavily on second-level discourse, and one wherein we readers are well advised to keep our wits about us. For the record, the genre in question here is the spy novel, and Echenoz subjects it to a variety of stresses, testing its possibilities and turning it to his own particular purposes. His experimentation is more sustained in this case than elsewhere in his work (this novel is significantly longer than any of its predecessors), and his narrative pace is a bit more dilatory, as well. I mean that latter remark in the best sense, for Envoyée spéciale is an example of what Ross Chambers has termed “loiterly literature,” that is, a text that takes its time, and invites us to take our time, too. There is a principal plotline here, to be sure, devolving upon nothing less than the security of the Free World; but it is by no means ortholinear and unwavering. To the contrary, that plotline is frequently interrupted, to strategic and ludic purpose, by digressions, excurses, and embedded narratives of different ilks. Though most of the action takes place in Paris, one is as likely to find oneself ensconced in the command cabin of a wind turbine in the Creuse; or in a Range Rover Sport V8 idling outside of a nightclub in Pyongyang (of all places); or in the mangrove flats of the Ivory Coast, fishing for “la saupe dont on se méfie car elle se nourrit d’algues hallucinogènes, l’inconsommable uranoscope, le pagre combatif ou l’aveugle beaux-yeux” (255). Throughout, Echenoz plays with his readers broadly and unabashedly.At times, he draws us into the fable, seductively deploying a narrative nous intended to make us feel that we are part of things and that we have a significant role to play.At other times however, he obliges us to step back and shake off our willing suspension of disbelief for a moment, in order better to consider the story he is telling as a carefully constructed artifact. Both kinds of gestures are unmistakable, clearly labeled for what they are; and granted that, both serve to make us reflect upon our own reading protocols and what we seek in this novel—or indeed in any other. In short, what Echenoz is really up to in this book is a meditation on fiction and its uses, a meditation cast as a fiction and availing itself of fiction’s own discursive norms, but whose critical and theoretical dimension is not diminished by virtue of that. The fun begins when we sign onto that project, reading the text in multiple ways, trying not to lose our footing as we follow the pleasingly baroque narrative peripatetics that Echenoz limns for us here, there, and pretty much everywhere. University of Colorado Warren Motte 204 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 ...

From ‘ontological metaphor’ to semiotic make-believe: giving shape and substance to fictive objects of conception with the ‘globe gesture’

Speakers are moving cognizers who engage in bodily acts of conceptualization. The “globe gesture” is among the most spectacular forms of “manual thinking” (Streeck 2009) used in formal talk. A characterization of the kinesic action typical of the “globe gesture” is first provided that shows how “the image of a bounded, supportable object” is created (McNeill 1992) and set up in gesture space. As conceptual objects are created and masses of semantic substance fashioned, visible shape is given to shapeless mental representations. A powerful semiotic trick is performed with a simple cognitive artifact. Interestingly, a willing suspension of disbelief is required of speakers and listeners who must temporarily give up their rational conceptions of visibility, materiality and palpability to watch the symbolic manipulation of invisible objects. The basic expressive properties of the “globe gesture” are next characterized: outlining and isolating objects of conception; neutralizing semantic specification; establishing a joint focus of attention and imagination; shaping, displaying and unifying content; creating a sense of reality and existence through physical presence. Iconic modifications of the standard metaphoric hand configuration, virtuosic elaborations and creative blends are finally examined before reporting the results of an experimental study of the globe gesture’s heuristic properties in a controlled environment. 14 students attending a multimodal “kineflective” seminar used the hand configuration to engage in “choreographic thinking” (Forsythe 2009) and develop a haptic understanding of derivation, nominalization, substantivation, conceptual reification. The globe gesture acted as a facilitator so long as a high degree of generality was maintained but was promptly discarded when words with a strong emotional appeal were introduced (e.g. sadness, madness). Emblems and iconic gestures were spontaneously performed instead.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film (review)

Reviewed by: Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film Richard A. Kallan Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film Anthony J. Ferri. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, 103 pp. It is commonplace for film scholars to talk about the “willing suspension of disbelief ” when discussing the role of audience and the nature of the film viewing process. Yet little attention has been given to placing the concept in historical context or considering how it might further inform film theory and criticism. Anthony J. Ferri’s Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film offers an antidote to this void in the literature. A short, but cogently written book of fewer than 100 pages, Ferri’s work is organized into seven chapters: Chapter 1 explores the historical context that gave rise to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, which introduced the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” A poet and critic, Coleridge sought to explain how readers experience poetry and the hypnotic process whereby they willingly allow themselves to be transported from story spectator to story participant. Coleridge, notes Ferri, “could not have imagined that the concept would be applied by so many for so many years to describe what happens to audiences in movie theaters throughout the world.” After summarizing various theoretical approaches to film viewing from the perspective of how they shed light on Coleridge’s concept (chapter 2), Ferri compares films that effectively engage the audience’s willingness to suspend their disbelief with those that seemingly violate the audience’s poetic faith (chapter 3). In the latter case, “the film viewer becomes aware of his or her incredulity. It’s as if the lights have been brought up and the magic in the theater has ended. . . . They are aware that they are watching.” To illustrate his point, Ferri turns his attention to some notable contemporary films, offering short but perceptive critiques that nicely support his argument. Chapter 4 discusses empirical approaches to film viewing. It includes the author’s attempt [End Page 65] to empirically map what happens when viewers watch a film. Ferri’s study, a survey of 222 viewers as they exited eight different theaters in Las Vegas, demonstrates that it is possible to document the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief—a process “composed of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors”—but such documentation remains a complicated undertaking, further layered by the convergence of media technologies and the rise of newer-type viewing experiences (the focus of chapter 5). In chapter 6, Ferri proposes a broad model for mapping how audiences process film. The model, Ferri concedes, becomes worthwhile to the extent that “scholars and industry members explore the territory through empirical, historical, and critical research.” Ferri posits three questions for future researchers: “What elements of the willing suspension of disbelief can be measured? What differences occur between single viewers and coviewers (couples, groups)? What differences in viewing presence occur under developing technologies?” The last chapter restates and amplifies Ferri’s argument that Coleridge continues to offer key insight into how audiences experience film today, as well as how they will tomorrow, because “while viewing varies according to culture,” Ferri concludes, “the basic act of viewing remains the same.” Just as Coleridge envisioned a reader wanting to be cognitively transported to another world, Ferri affirms that the film audience welcomes the same. Willing Suspension of Disbelief is impeccably researched, the author excelling at synthesizing relevant literature. Although at times I would have preferred less summary and more analysis, the book still emerges as a useful work that raises intriguing questions and research possibilities about the nature and function of viewer imagination. It will appeal to readers interested in how audiences experience film and how that process gives film its meaning and import. Richard A. Kallan California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Spider-Man? Sure! The neuroscience of suspending disbelief

When 'transported' by stories or plays or movies, we feel no skepticism at, say, Spider-Man's webbing his way among the skyscrapers. Following Coleridge, we have called this phenomenon, the 'willing suspension of disbelief'. Psychological experiments show, however, that during our experience of any narrative, we do not suspend disbelief. We believe, and then we partly disbelieve. Our brains link reality-testing to action and the possibility of action to change what we are perceiving. If we cannot change it, our brains need not test its reality, and they don't. When responding to works of art, Kant and other aestheticians point out, we are 'disinterested'. We know that we cannot or will not act to change artworks. We therefore accept such unrealities as Spider-Man. In situations where we must act (hypertext) or can act (watching DVDs), we may not experience the same lack of skepticism.

Life, Movement and the Fabulation of the Event

This article provides a full account of Bergson's vitalist theory of the Event, centring on his concept of Tabulation' first forwarded in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Though the term connotes artifice and fabrication, fabulation is neither unnatural nor unfounded for Bergson. Indeed, the fabulation of events offers a sociobiological explanation to the 'paradox of fiction', to the problem of why we feel real emotions for unreal people and the events that befall them. The answer from Bergson is that fiction makes events come alive for us, not just in make-believe, but at a very present and real level of our perception of movement. Anything that moves (literally or metaphorically) is given life. And this is especially true of the moving-images found in cinema. Filmed fiction is an exemplary instance of fabulation because it exploits the main condition, movement, for such a 'willing suspension of disbelief' in a literal fashion. It is the moving-image, central to the art of cinema, which entices us to turn fiction into a living reality. The article tackles this topic first by introducing Bergson's notion of fabulation (Section One). It then connects fabulation with the concept of the Event, in particular, the event of disaster, which, for Bergson, is another essential pre-requisite for the fabulation of any set of processes into a single, living event: every event has its roots, no matter how distant, in a memory of past, stressful processes, movements of disaster (Section Two). Section Three will then shift to Film Theory to discuss themes (such as Other Minds) that pertain both to the theory of fabulation and to current thinking within Film Theory. The fourth and final section brings these ideas together through a discussion of disaster films and in particular an empirical study of a central scene from James Cameron's Titanic. It discovers that cinema is able to bring events to life through a direct engagement with our own essences as moving beings.

"Norteño" Imaginary Spaces: A Typology of the Fictional Towns of Guillermo Arriaga, David Toscana, and Alfredo Espinosa

Narrative space-real or imaginary-is essential for the realization of a novel. An examination of fictive space in three contemporary Mexican norteno writers reveals they share certain commonalities. Also, the novels aregenerally set in small fictional towns that tend to be manifest in one of two forms: a realistically depicted place that doesn't exist in the real world either by name or location, or an existing town with a name change. Information on its founding or the detail given to its physical description aids the reader's willing suspension of disbelief in order to accept the invented place as a real community and to subsequently identify with and relate to it.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Optimism

AbstractOptimism is embedded in every form of psychotherapy practice, from psychoanalysis to behavior modification. Our goal is to help clarify where Gestalt therapy's theory and practice place it on the therapeutic spectrum. After first outlining our theoretical background, we explore various definitions of optimism, differentiating it from pessimism, hope, and courage. We then describe why we believe that psychotherapy is an inherently optimistic enterprise. Finally, after surveying the emerging field of positive psychology, specifically focusing on the work of Seligman, we discuss optimism using a Gestalt frame.We conclude that optimism is inherent in the Gestalt approach which, at its core, is about how to approach and embrace the unknown.

Signs of the post‐rural: marketing myths of a symbolic countryside

Geography is currently in the midst of reinterpreting the ‘rural’. There are calls within tourism studies, rural geography and cultural geography for further investigation into the new meanings represented in rural places, their emergent rural identities, and the need to take postmodernism and the construction of the rural more seriously. This paper presents a critical interpretation of the format, content and signs used to represent, commodify and promote as countryside a landscape adjacent to the eastern coast of Lake Huron in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Following a brief review of the place promotion literature and the postmodern cultural context of contemporary tourism, the socio‐semiotic approach employed in the analysis is explained. Using 210 pieces of printed place promotional material, gathered at tourist information booths along a provincially designated tourist route, the slogans, logos (icons), and place myths used to differentiate the rural from the urban are identified, and their role in constructing, commodifying and marketing a symbolic countryside is made clear. It is argued that the tourist landscape signified in the promotional material is a symbolic cultural landscape that draws upon dominant Anglo‐American ideals of the countryside to give identity to the material landscape. The advertising discourse is thus a symbolic space where an imaginary, mythical countryside is situated; here the ‘rural’ is commodified and sustained by ‘uneasy pleasures’: the tensions created between a consumer's willing suspension of disbelief and their knowledge of an advertiser's persuasive intentions. These signs of the ‘post‐rural’ constitute a ‘rural’ that is a transferable brand name—a free‐floating signifier—used to give meaning, value and character to any place commodity in need of a marketable identity.

Understaffing: A Risk Factor for Infection in the Era of Downsizing?

Francis Bacon observed that is power. There must be few uses of power more gratifying than to stop an epidemic of bloodstream infections, as demonstrated in the accompanying article by Fridkin et al.1 Catheter-related bloodstream infections are particularly troublesome because of dramatic morbidity, a case fatality rate of 14%,2 and their iatrogenic nature. Detection of an epidemic of infection depends on the method of surveillance employed, as well as the definitions being used. Fridkin and colleagues make it clear that the rate they would have preferred to calculate was unavailable because of the lack of surveillance data regarding catheter days. For this reason, TPN days was used as a rough surrogate. It should also be noted that the diagnosis of catheterrelated bloodstream infection using definitions employed by the National Nosocomial Infection Surveillance (NNIS) System,3 as done in this study, may not be quite as rigorous as in research publications regarding catheter infections, as previously discussed by Maki.4 The method of collecting blood cultures before and during the outbreak, for example, is not stated, perhaps because NNIS definitions do not make such distinctions. It remains possible that clinicians drew blood cultures more frequently from indwelling catheters during the outbreak, resulting in a higher rate of contamination.6 It also is possible that clinicians became increasingly more disposed to treat when there was a single blood culture positive for a coagulase-negative Staphylococcus. A clinician's decision to treat would result in a diagnosis of bloodstream infection according to NNIS definitions, even if several other sets of simultaneous blood cultures were negative.3 It is not stated whether the method employed for catheter segment cultures was the same as that recommended by Maki,7 and, if so, why a CFU count >15 was not used (as recommended by Maki) rather than qualitative grading of microbial growth. If, however, we accept that the epidemic was due to valid bacteremias and not to overdiagnosis (employing Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief'), and that the epidemic extended for almost 2 years, then we must conclude that this was an important outbreak to understand and control. Much knowledge has been gained about the epidemiology and prevention of catheter-related bloodstream infections over the past several decades that could be applied to reduce the rate of infections during an epidemic. Multiple studies have shown that much of the risk for infection of a central venous catheter relates to the manner of insertion of the catheter. Armstrong et al showed that the risk for significant colonization of the catheter (ie, > 15 colonyforming units on semiquantitative culture of a catheter segment) was significantly related to the cumulative experience of the physician inserting the catheter.8 The outbreak described by Fridkin et al occurred in a university-affiliated Veterans Affairs medical center, and, although there is no direct statement regarding the level of experience of those inserting the catheters, the reader would assume that

Okies by Gerald Haslam

BOOK REVIEWS Okies. By Gerald Haslam. (New West Publications: Penngrove, California, 1973, reissued 1974, paperback, 113 pages, $2.95.) Gerald Haslam’s Okies captures the reader immediately. Scenes and characterization suggest a vision that is sympathetic and affirmative, realistic and unafraid. The conclusion, for this reader, is that Haslam’s short stories are both powerful and delightful. That’s an unusual combination. Usually, in so many contemporary films for example, the attempted combination is undercut by a betrayal of anyone willing to respond to the humanistic appeal: a willing suspension of disbelief is mocked with cynical violence. Not so with Haslam, who can make the humanistic overture to his readers, drive his stories on through scenes of selfishness and violence, and achieve a tough-minded realism which does not betray the reader. The subject is the second-generation Okie, those who fled the Oklahoma dust bowl of the 1930’s as children or who were born in California, many of them as another kind of “Okie,” the Chicano, the migrant farm laborer, the job-to-job laborer in the oil patch. Victims of prejudice, though in various stages of becoming middle-class themselves, these people struggle against the fearful elite, against one another, with their own capacities for love and hate. Typically, Haslam begins with an innocent situation which catches the reader, immediately, because of the remarkably concrete and effective style. Internal monologue, for example, is often used very skillfully to establish character and motivation while the plot continues to move along swiftly. Soon, in ways that are always intrinsic to the characters and their situation, the threat of violence or evil arises. The threat will be mythic in character but not in personality. Haslam does not go to books or to other cultures to find a latent power: the threat of evil or violence is always home-grown. No footnotes are needed, though connections with archetypes could be made by those who like to make them. “Rite of Passage” may be an exception. Admittedly, I once “lived” the 310 Western American Literature story myself, so did my son, and so have millions of others; but it seems a bit contrived to me, and I can only hope my reading of the story was not prejudiced by the academic title. “California Christmas” may track a bit too closely the Biblical story of the loaves and the fishes; “Smile” is an effective portrait of a wino whose internal monologue is an abuse of others for what are actually his own failings too, but it is a one-note story; “Sally Let Her Bangs Hang Down” and “Compañeros” hit as hard as any short stories I have read in a long, long time, but both, in the end, seem to hang fire, lacking a resolution strong enough to measure up to the stories them­ selves. Such reservations, however, are a comment on art and not on Haslam. Structure, I think, must be the most difficult of all the difficult things an artist must achieve to create great art. (Witness Hawthorne for example.) And such reservations — even if valid — are outweighed by excellence. This is, in my opinion, a truly fine group of short stories. “The Doll” and “Before Dishonor” are especially strong, and my personal favorites are “Wild Goose” and “Cowboys.” Although it ismost obvious in the latter two stories, Haslam often uses a joke as a powerful, complicated, and successful way of dramatizing the connection between the commonplace and the universal. In “Cowboys” for example, the most sophisticated of the stories in this selection, the reader is set up to expect a Hollywood shootout to be a practical joke in revenge for an earlier practical joke. As in “Wild Goose,” “The Doll,” and others, however, the final joke — without any tricks by Haslam — is real. And the result is that unusual combination mentioned earlier: both delight and power. MAX WESTBROOK, The University of Texas OSCEOLA: The Unconquered Indian. By Wm. and Ellen Hartley. (N.Y.: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973, 293 pp., $8.95.) In 1970, the Indian Claims Commission offered the Seminole Indian tribe $12,347,500 for lands taken by the LI.S. Government during the period known as...

Melville's Use of Marquesan

H ERMAN MELVILLE'S HUMOR has been shrewdly characterized by one critic as exhibiting a tone of pervasive tolerant geniality.' Another way of saying the same thing would be to remark that the brooding sensitivity to the depravity of man's inner nature which pervades Melville's works is counterbalanced by his instinctive tendency to present philosophical attitudes in his writings in compassionate and sympathetic terms. In his novels of the South Seas, as one method of introducing tragicomic ambiguity of the kind he later wove with such deft artfulness into the fabric of Moby-Dick, Melville experimented with the device of consciously and consistently rephrasing or even purposely misusing the Marquesan vocabulary he employed in his text.2 By such linguistic license the possibilities for the outrc proved in fact so appealing to his robust sense of humor that Melville utilized Marquesan in these novels on more than one occasion merely as a better means to gull his audience. The spirit of good-humored indulgence that results from his manipulation with language, however suspect it may be from an artistic point of view, served the added function, too, of enabling Melville to bring what might otherwise have seemed incongruous in these works into closer harmony with the explicable and the real. For the apprentice writer must have become keenly aware from time to time that his reader's willing suspension of disbelief was growing dangerously dependent upon injections in some form or other of humor and comedy into the body of his given material; and in his efforts to achieve this end, Melville evidently did not feel bound to adhere strictly to the truth with his Marquesan any more than with his facts. Insofar as the finished products are concerned, the consummate skill with which Melville handled his offbeat material is everywhere so evident that the reader must learn from other sources that the author's residence in the