Foretelling pathology: The poetics of prognosis

This paper examines a number of French middle-brow novels, usually called at the time romans de murs, from the period 1880-1910. It shows how, in these stories, doctors are shown to foretell the course of narrative through the diagnosis of certain pathologies, especially psychosexual ones. These pathologies are thus represented as implacable narrative programmes. In effect, most of these novels renounce the standard fictional resources of intrigue and suspense in favour of the relentless working out of their initial prognosis. The authority of medical discourse is therefore not just confirmed and disseminated: it is elaborated as fatality in the very terms of the novel. Copyright © SAGE Publications

A British Legacy?: The Empire Press Union and Freedom of the Press, 1940-1950

This paper aims to identify and analyse, in the first instance, those key developments that contributed to a resurgence of international debate over freedom of the press in the aftermath of the Second World War. For this purpose, the focus will be on the Empire/Commonwealth Press Union and its postwar conferences at London (1946) and Ottawa (1950) respectively. The renewed prominence given to issues of press freedom at these gatherings was not only a response to censorship and war-time changes, but reflected the onset of a new world order. The Empire Press Union, established in 1909, had previously held five major imperial conferences during the first half of the century. The Press Union enjoyed ongoing success in lobbying governments and companies to reduce high press cable rates across the Empire. Its conferences, normally convened at five year periods, were established forums for the discussion of ongoing imperial communication issues and were attended by British and Dominion delegations, comprising metropolitan proprietors and editors. Freedom of the press emerged as a conference issue in the wake of censorship by governments during World War One, albeit without the complexity or divisions which characterised the sustained debate of the 1946 and 1950 conferences. This article will argue that, during the latter gatherings, Australian conference delegates, rather than their British counterparts, emerged as the most vocal proponents of freedom of the press, reinforcing in the process a cultural divide between British-speaking empire loyalists like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada on one hand, and those member countries in which nationalist and independence movements were becoming prominent, most notably on the subcontinent

Murdoch’s flagship: The Australian newspaper two decades on

Commentary: The power of the print media lies not simply in its capacity to attack opponents, but in its unwillingness to grant timely or sufficient right of reply in its Op-Ed pages. Perhaps the greater regulation advocated by Finkelstein would begin to change this. Amid all the restructuring and the rivalry, the opportunity for a more comprehensive review of journalistic regulation, broached by Finkelstein, may well slip away in the cross currents of the Convergence Review, the prospect of new media mergers and acquisitions, precarious federal parliamentary politics, and the turmoil of the broadsheets themselves. Yet it is a debate that we have to have; like our protracted debt crisis, it cannot be postponed indefinitely