Turned Back: Mad Men as Intermedial Melodrama

This essay draws on definitions of gesture (Giorgio Agamben and Peter Brooks) and catachresis (Peter Brooks, Jacques Derrida) to examine the primacy of non-verbal signifiers as communicators of meaning in AMC’s Mad Men. Beginning with an analysis of Mad Men’s credit sequence, it draws attention to Mad Men’s use of gesture and catachresis in relation to melodrama’s privileging of non-verbal and naturalistic expression and its persistence as an intermedial mode that has moved back and forth between various media (theatre, novel, cinema, television and now digital formats). It argues that Mad Men’s melodramatic aesthetic is one that obliquely, and via a gestural and rhetorical ‘turned back’, communicates its relation to the past and the present

Turned Back Mad Men as Intermedial Melodrama

In the opening, animated sequence of AMC's 'Mad Men', a silhouetted figure - a businessman - appears with his back turned towards us. In business suit, briefcase in hand, this figure is shown entering an office that, almost immediately, begins to melt. As wall pictures, a desk, chairs and office fan dissolve, the black-suited figure is now reeling through the air, having jumped or fallen from the office skyscraper. As his body drops and turns during the fall, it passes giant billboards of 1960s advertising images and slogans. Over the blonde head of a glamorous model is the promise that you will 'enjoy the best America has to offer' and that 'it's the gift that never fails'. The cartoon credit sequence ends with the falling figure, not reaching ground zero, seated on a couch - his back again turned towards us - looking into a blank, white distance with his arm outstretched in an (overly) familiar gesture of business confidence

Queer Objects and Intermedial Timepieces: reading s-town (2017)

This paper takes as its queer object a serialized podcast. With its story about John B. McLemore, a clockmaker from Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town is a blockbuster success from the producers of Serial (2014–16) and This American Life (1995–present) (the seven-part series was downloaded 16 million times in the first week of its release, with that number now exceeding 40 million; see Hess, “‘S-Town’ Attains Podcasting Blockbuster Status,” New York Times 5 Apr. 2017). Against both affirmative and negative reception of S-Town – responses that tend to position the podcast either as transcending or as reproducing the idea of a backwards or lagging South – this paper argues that S-Town is an intermedial narrative incorporating various media that themselves comprise competing temporalities. Indexing these alternative temporalities are the intricate designs of clocks and sundials that tell of mythological time and seasonal and diurnal rhythms. There are also tattoos and other inscriptions that mark both bodies and sundials. My argument attends to the animate and inanimate forms narratively contained within the podcast, touching on Rebecca Schneider’s idea of “inter(in)animation” and Elizabeth Freeman’s challenges to “chrononormativity” in the process. From within this intermedial structure, John emerges as an intermediary whose engagement in processes of self-objectification and historical re-enactment complicates a normative timeframe and confounds conventional subject/object relations. Through a consideration of what I call the queerly intermedial form of the S-Town podcast, the essay looks beyond both discrete forms and regional/national concerns to gesture toward the significance of broader networks and spheres for thinking about time, space and being

Stages of development: remembering old Sydney in Ruth Park\u27s \u27Playing Beatie Bow\u27 and a Companion Guide to Sydney

Ruth Park\u27s Playing Beatie Bow (1980) can easily be read as a bildungsroman, a novel of self-development or apprenticeship. Falling between the child and the Young Adult category, it is the story of an adolescent girl who comes to terms with the part she plays in a family romance. This plot, in keeping with other Oedipal dramas, matches personal development with issues of social, cultural and national importance. However, in tension with this thematic of personal and cultural progression is Park\u27s exploration of the contradictory role that the fetish plays in a female coming-of-age narrative. This essay analyses Park\u27s deployment of the fetish object as a medium that introduces her protagonist to working class life in Old Sydney but, at the same time, points to the unreliability of this form of signification. In doing so, the question of whether Park depicts The Rocks as a stage for a story that mythologises personal, cultural and national origins is explored. Is Playing Beatie Bow another narrative about self and cultural maturation that, via recourse to an Irish working-class history in The Rocks, legitimises colonial and postcolonial desires for belonging? Addressing this question is my reading of the novel as a captivity narrative, as well as a bildungsroman. This essay highlights the role of the female as fetish in the captivity narrative. Contrasting fetishism to other, more institutionalised and enshrined, memorial processes, it contests the notion that authorial fascinations with the colonial past are necessarily concerned with totalising ownership claims and/or revisionist historical practices. Finally, Park\u27s cultural performance as travel writer, in her The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973), is linked to Playing Beatie Bow\u27s deployment of the fetish as an object through which capture of the past is always partial and unreliable

Visions of Blindness: Narrative Structures in 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Snow Falling on Cedars'

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926) and David Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars (1995) are both novels that thematise the act of murder. The narration that unravels the murderous events in each novel is complicated through the creation of perspectives that are essentially unstable. The Great Gatsby utilises Nick Carraway’s singular narration as the primary though unreliable viewpoint to tell the story of Jay Gatsby and his adulterous and tragic affair with Daisy Buchanan on Long Island in New York City. This affair leads to the manslaughter of Tom Buchanan’s mistress Myrtle Wilson, the murder of Jay Gatsby and the suicide of George Wilson. By contrast, Snow Falling on Cedars builds narrative through a set of multiple, fragmented perspectives, although the primary viewpoint belongs to the white journalist Ishmael Chambers. The narration is partly structured through the genre of courtroom drama in which the murder case involves a Japanese American, Kabuo Miyamoto, who has been accused of killing Carl Heine, a German American fisherman. Carl Heine’s death by drowning would have been assumed to be an accident if not for the racist assumptions made by the detective and the Coroner, and by the close-knit and racially divided community of San Piedro Island. In each novel, the narrator is compelled to form a judgement regarding the accused, and in each novel the unequivocal location of blame in any one individual is made problematic. Both novels utilise gendered, racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotype as a way of exploring the themes of blame and judgement

Wake In Fright

Abstrac

Introduction: Common Readers and Cultural Critics

Introduction to JASAL Special Issue: Common Readers and Cultural Critic

Dendritic cells are crucial for maintenance of tertiary lymphoid structures in the lung of influenza virus–infected mice

Tertiary lymphoid organs (TLOs) are organized aggregates of B and T cells formed in postembryonic life in response to chronic immune responses to infectious agents or self-antigens. Although CD11c+ dendritic cells (DCs) are consistently found in regions of TLO, their contribution to TLO organization has not been studied in detail. We found that CD11chi DCs are essential for the maintenance of inducible bronchus-associated lymphoid tissue (iBALT), a form of TLO induced in the lungs after influenza virus infection. Elimination of DCs after the virus had been cleared from the lung resulted in iBALT disintegration and reduction in germinal center (GC) reactions, which led to significantly reduced numbers of class-switched plasma cells in the lung and bone marrow and reduction in protective antiviral serum immunoglobulins. Mechanistically, DCs isolated from the lungs of mice with iBALT no longer presented viral antigens to T cells but were a source of lymphotoxin (LT) β and homeostatic chemokines (CXCL-12 and -13 and CCL-19 and -21) known to contribute to TLO organization. Like depletion of DCs, blockade of LTβ receptor signaling after virus clearance led to disintegration of iBALT and GC reactions. Together, our data reveal a previously unappreciated function of lung DCs in iBALT homeostasis and humoral immunity to influenza virus