Regimes of Prestige and Power: Transnational Authorship and International Acclaim in Rutu Modan\u27s Exit Wounds

This essay will examine the reception of Rutu Modan’s international-award-winning graphic novel Exit Wounds (2007) in the massive cultural centers of the United States and France by situating its success within the inter/transnational dynamics of the contemporary comics market, or what James English would term an “economy of prestige.” My essay reconsiders Exit Wounds beyond its popular status as an international phenomenon—that is, one that crosses national borders but which maintains distinctions between those nations it enters and its home state—by considering it a transnational work—one which blurs the lines between nation-states in its form, function, and reception. To do this, I examine the work formally, narratively, and in its cultural context. Formally, I examine the graphic novel’s indebtedness to nationalistic artistic styles (Franco-Belgian ligne-claire and McCay’s American analogue drafting style); narratively, I discuss Exit Wounds as a narrative that defamiliarizes its reader from representations of the real, an aesthetic choice that disrupts extratextual encouragement (from award committees, for example) to read the work as journalism instead of fiction; and culturally: rather than act as “entitled Other” who might speak about national heritage or Israeli-Palestinian hostility leading up to the Gaza War, Modan, I argue, shifts attention away from international politics by privileging individual struggles and marginalizing violent international upheavals. Ultimately, I conclude that despite these deeply subversive transnational border crossings in style, story, and setting, the work’s reception and valorization as a narrative of place (that is, the relative “cultural backwater” of Israel) disrupts the important transnational consciousness that Exit Wounds embraces. By championing the work in France (as the winner of an until-then exclusively Francophone comics award, which required translation into French) and in America (an also then-exclusively American award) in 2008, the two primary peacekeepers in Gaza reinforced inter-national relations and widened the gulf between cultural centers and cultural peripheries. Here, rather than taking Exit Wounds for its expert storytelling and exacting artistic style, French and American purveyors of comics prestige focus instead upon national heritage, credentialing Modan as an Israeli artist, to be uplifted and supported by cultural metropolises. It is a move that declaws Exit Wounds, mitigating its stinging critique of nationalist traditions that have led to the very conflict it circumscribes and reinstating it as an exemplar of Israeli life by an Israeli artist

When Players Feel Helpless: Agentic Decay and Participation in Narrative Games

The ergodic (participatory) element of games is often cited as the core barrier to overcoming a perceived divide between good ludic (gaming) design and powerful storytelling. The present study examines two Indie games, Braid and Actual Sunlight, and their nuanced treatment of player participation in service of effective storytelling. These games in particular test the limits of player agency by asking the player to make ethically and morally problematic decisions, such as killing the main character, en route to completing the narrative. Such unusual narrative methods allow Braid and Actual Sunlight‗s game designers to unveil the mechanisms that afford, constrain, and ultimately revitalise the player‘s agency within the bounds of ergodic interaction. Narrative here, rather than restricting gameplay, instead enhances it, offering a tragic moment of cathartic relief as the player is exculpated for his or her decisions during the game. The insights drawn from these two examples and larger-studio offerings like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed suggest a deeply traditional mode of storytelling at work in many narrative video games, an assertion that allows the ludological/narratological divide to be reknit and sets up ergodic media as a whole (video games, physical roleplaying games, interactive books, and more) for critical reconsideration

Outsiders to Whom? Reimagining the Creation of Young Adult Literature in the United States

The study of young adult literature has become widespread within Children’s and Young Adult Literature specifically and literary studies as a whole. However, the term “young adult” which defines and focalizes both the literature itself and the ostensible readers for whom it is produced remains a poorly-examined area. The present study examines the creation of one branch of what we now call “young adult literature” from its roots in the United States in the early twentieth century to its emergence as a dominant literary form in the mid-to-late 1960s. In doing so, it seeks to reconcile emerging professional, psychological, sociological, pedagogical, cultural, and ideological discourses concerning adolescence and young adulthood with works of fiction prepared specifically for their consumption. It also seeks to position the changing role of adolescent subjects into the larger framework of American Studies by examining how these texts reflected, tested, and reinforced dominant paradigms of thought surrounding how adolescents would become actualized American subjects. At the same time, it broaches concerns within these dominant paradigms that have been overlooked in constructing historical approaches to the development of young adult literature, and it suggests a few methodologies by which to recover these undiscussed threads

Association of Serum Albumin with Markers of Nutritional Status among HIV-Infected and Uninfected Rwandan Women

The objectives of this study are to address if and how albumin can be used as an indication of malnutrition in HIV infected and uninfected Africans.In 2005, 710 HIV-infected and 226 HIV-uninfected women enrolled in a cohort study. Clinical/demographic parameters, CD4 count, albumin, liver transaminases; anthropometric measurements and Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA) were performed. Malnutrition outcomes were defined as body mass index (BMI), Fat-free mass index (FFMI) and Fat mass index (FMI). Separate linear predictive models including albumin were fit to these outcomes in HIV negative and HIV positive women by CD4 strata (CD4>350,200-350 and <200 cells/µl).In unadjusted models for each outcome in HIV-negative and HIV positive women with CD4>350 cells/µl, serum albumin was not significantly associated with BMI, FFMI or FMI. Albumin was significantly associated with all three outcomes (p<0.05) in HIV+ women with CD4 200-350 cells/µl, and highly significant in HIV+ women with CD4<200 cells/µl (P<0.001). In multivariable linear regression, albumin remained associated with FFMI in women with CD4 count<200 cells/µl (p<0.01) but not in HIV+ women with CD4>200.While serum albumin is widely used to indicate nutritional status it did not consistently predict malnutrition outcomes in HIV- women or HIV+ women with higher CD4. This result suggests that albumin may measure end stage disease as well as malnutrition and should not be used as a proxy for nutritional status without further study of its association with validated measures

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead