The value of books : the fantastic flying books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and the social hieroglyphic of reading

The late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of new technologies of subjectivity and of the literary. Most obviously, “the novel as a literary form appeared to embody and turn into an object the experience of life itself” (Park), and the novel genre came to both reflect and shape notions of interiority and subjectivity. In this same period, “A shift was taking place in the way people felt and thought about children and the accoutrements of childhood, including books and toys, were implicated in this change” (Lewis). In seeking to understand the relationships between media (e.g. books and toys), genres (e.g. novels and picture books), and modes of subjectivity, Marx’s influential theory of commodity fetishism, whereby “a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things”, has served as a productive tool of analysis. The extent to which Marx’s account of commodity fetishism continues to be of use becomes clear when the corollaries between the late eighteenth-century emergence of novels and pictures books as technologies of subjectivity and the early twenty-first century emergence of e-readers and digital texts as technologies of subjectivity are considered. This paper considers the literary technology of Apple’s iPad (first launched in 2010) as a commodity fetish, and the circulation of “apps” as texts made available by and offered as justifications for, this fetish object. The iPad is both book and toy, but is never “only” either; it is arguably a new technology of subjectivity which incorporates but also destabilises categories of reading and playing such as those made familiar by earlier technologies of literature and the self. The particular focus of this paper is on the multimodal versions (app, film, and picture book) of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which are understood here as a narrativisation of commodity fetishism, subjectivity, and the act of reading itself

Productive Anxieties: Lostness in The Arrival and Requiem for a Beast

The classic Australian children’s story Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) opens with a quintessential scene of lostness: Little Dot had lost her way in the bush. She knew it, and was very frightened [...] she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking her home. [...] The thought of being lost and alone in the wild bush at night took her breath away with fear, and made her tired little legs tremble under her. (Pedley 1982, p. 1) In part, Dot’s anxiety derives from her knowledge of children lost before her. She remembers the loss and death of a neighbour child whose mother ‘never saw that little boy again, although he had been found’ (Pedley, p. 2). The allusion to lostness as a state especially threatening to children informs Dot’s fear, so that Dot and the Kangaroo both draws on and extends what has been influentially described as a particularly ‘Australian anxiety’ (Pierce 1999). The same landscape which gave rise to mythologies of frontier-like hardship and survival posed real threats to anyone who might become lost in it. Accordingly, the capacity of the Australian environment to consume people infused the cultural productions of a relatively young and sparsely populated colonial society

The art of interpretation: Tracing logics of evaluation in Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2000) and Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2010)

Celebration (and the celebritisation) of the Australian-ness of children’s authors who enjoy critical or commercial international success, and especially of those who win international prizes speaks to a desire to partake in both national and international cultural spheres. Prizing is often presumed to both guarantee and emerge from a creator's reputation at home and abroad. Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan has received a wide array of cultural and literary prizes, ranging from Australian book awards, to an Academy Award, to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize. This paper considers logics of evaluation and interpretation as they can be traced in the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual codes of Shaun Tan’s picture book, The Lost Thing (2000), the animated film adaptation of The Lost Thing (2010). It further considers the ways in which the desire for a global audience may necessitate an erasure of the national culture which is traded on in a global market

An investigation of heavy metal tolerance and reproduction in Nereis diversicolor with reference to their use for biomonitoring

Industrially-derived heavy metals are increasingly responsible for contamination of coastal and estuarine waters. All stages of metal production are sources of contamination, the main contributors being acidic mine drainage waters and smelting works. Other major sources are industrial water discharges, sewage sludge, the atmosphere, shipyard paints and electricity power stations (Bryan, 1984).The most contaminated sites are the rivers and estuaries that directly receive the industrial outfalls. It is a common misconception that metal wastes are simply washed out to sea and dispersed. Estuaries are in fact efficient traps of heavy metals. The scrubbing processes of precipitation, chelation and adsorption onto particulate materials ensure that only small amounts of metals escape to the open sea (Turekian, 1977). The accumulation of heavy metals in estuaries raises the question; at what levels do metals have a detrimental effect on the biota