Oxford University Press's Blog, page 898

Cheers to the local bar

By Christine Sismondo

“Where everybody knows your name.” Easily one of the best phrases ever written.

That string of five words summed up the idea of the “local,” a refuge from the dynamism of modernity where a small clutch of people get together nearly every day to shoot the shit over a pint — or four. At the time — it first appeared 31 years ago, on 30 September 1982 — the phrase succinctly introduced the basic premise of the show, Cheers, and, today, still brings Sam, Diane, Carla, Norm, Cliff and Coach to mind, the staff and regulars from what may be the best-known bar in the world.

Located at 85 Beacon Street across from Boston Common, this is the real neighborhood pub that inspired the popular 1980s sitcom of the same name. Photo by russavia, May 2012. CC 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The engine that drove the plot forward was the tumultuous and unlikely-seeming relationship between a former ball player-turned bar owner and his waitress, a pretentious graduate student who is at loose ends. The mismatched pair is, to say the least, from different worlds. But so is everyone else at Cheers: a tough-talking single mom; an underemployed accountant; a postal worker; an old-school, dim-witted baseball coach. This group would eventually be joined by a pompous psychiatrist and a sweet and innocent …well, bumpkin, from Indiana. It’s an eclectic group. And, yes, their differences sometimes produce conflict. But they are also community that looks after one another. Even Carla would defend her clan — especially if it was under threat from the gang at rival Gary’s Old Towne Tavern.

Cheers is a fictional show, of course. But anybody who has ever been a regular or worked in a neighbourhood bar knows that the show did a great job at capturing the spirit of the “local.” Funnily enough, though, the show’s debut came around the time that the neighbourhood tavern was becoming an endangered species. Ray Oldenburg, in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, would write about the rise of BYOFs (Bring Your Own Friend Bars) and how they were replacing taverns. Oldenburg argued that American cities were losing one of their important institutions in this transition, since, along with coffee shops, bookstores and barber shops, bars act as ventilation units in the modern urban landscape, where people establish community. Heading to the local is a very different activity from going out after work with the rest of the office (a valuable activity in its own right). The neighbourhood tavern encourages people to mingle with people from outside their regular work and social circles. Like they did in Cheers.

While plenty of local taverns still exist, their numbers have dwindled, largely due to the rise of car culture, which has meant that, for all but those of us who live in one of a handful of walking cities, bars are simply too hard to get to — or, rather, to get home from. Even in urban areas, where bars thrive, the majority of new bars — be they cocktail dens, faux-dives, or sports bars — are moving away from the model of cultivating a community of regulars and are instead aiming to become destinations in their own right. People don’t tend to go to these places on their own; they’re the new face of BYOFs.

And, hey, a range of options is great. I’m certainly never going to argue that the downside of gentrification is that I now have a bar with a great deejay, solid cocktails, and oyster nights at the foot of my street. But it’s too bad that it seemed to come at the expense of the local.

At the end of the day, they may have much better drinks than Sam Malone ever made, but nobody down there is ever going to know my name.

Cheers.

Christine Sismondo is a writer and lecturer in Humanities at York University in Toronto. She has written numerous articles about film, literature, drinking, and vice, as well as the book Mondo Cocktail, a narrative history of cocktails. She is the author of America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only food and drink articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Cheers to the local bar appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesQuickcast – AMERICA WALKS INTO A BARQuickcast – AMERICA WALKS INTO A BAR - EnclosureThe amended Constitution 

How to be an English language tourist?

By David Crystal

Hilary and I asked ourselves this question repeatedly when we were planning the tour that we eventually wrote up as Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain. Where can you find out about the places that influenced the character and study of the English language in Britain? How do you get there? And what do you find when you get there?

Places are often mentioned in textbooks and historical accounts, but you can get only so much out of such drab statements as ‘the Anglo-Saxons arrived at Pegwell Bay in 449 AD’, or ‘King Alfred defeated the Danes at Edington in 878′, or ‘ Dr Johnson compiled his dictionary in the attic of a house in Gough Square in London’. For textbook writers, that is usually the end of the story. For us, it was the beginning. What was that coastline like? What was the battlefield like? What was the attic like?

Pegwell Bay, Edington, Maldon, Lindisfarne, Lichfield, Stratford … We went to over 50 places where something important happened. Most of the time, we found that the relevance of the language to the place had been forgotten – if it had ever been realised. But there are a few spots where it is remembered. There is even the occasional monument. Our favourite is the memorial to English dialect-writers in Rochdale, Lancashire. A runner-up is the huge monument to Bible-translator William Tyndale, in North Nibley in Gloucestershire – though ‘runner-up’ is perhaps not the best way of describing it, as it is is on the top of a hill which takes some climbing.

The dialect writers’ memorial in Broadfield Park, Rochdale. The building to the left is the town hall. © Hilary Crystal.

That’s a point. If you want to be an English-language tourist, you have to be fit, or reasonably so, as some of the places where important things happened involve a bit of a walk, and sometimes over quite muddy and hilly countryside. So you should take boots too. But the outcome is always worth it. Even though I thought I knew some of the places very well, from my past reading and writing about the language, I was never prepared for what we found when we made the actual visit. The photographs often tell the story better than the words, and are an essential part of the narrative. It confirmed me in my feeling that the English language is not only diverse and fascinating, but unpredictable and exciting as well. For instance…

In Jarrow, up in the north-east of England, where Bede worked and wrote, we were not expecting to encounter a class of mini-monks all dressed in tiny habits. In Alloway, Scotland we were not expecting to see the worship of Scots national poet Robert Burns extend to his being portrayed in a mischievous re-creation of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’. In Old St Pancras churchyard in London, we were not expecting to find piles of gravestones to be part of the story of pronunciation lexicographer John Walker. In York, we were not expecting to find the aftermath of lead-thieves, when we visited the places where Lindley Murray wrote his grammar.

Murray’s summerhouse at The Mount School, York. His writing desk and wheeled invalid chair are preserved in the school. When we visited, the lead from the roof had disappeared for the third time, hence the temporary tarpaulin flapping dismally here. © Hilary Crystal.

With locations as far apart as the south-east of Kent and the Scottish lowlands, and from the west of Wales to the East Anglian coast, Hilary and I drove several thousand miles to compile what proved to be a somewhat unorthodox combination of English language history and travelogue. It was a hugely rewarding experience, though, which added a strong sense of place to our existing knowledge of language topics and personalities, and we strongly recommend doing the same sort of thing in your own locality, wherever you live, as a powerful way of making language study come alive. Field trips are not just for historians, geographers, and archaeologists. The English language lurks around every corner, in every country in the world, awaiting your call.

David Crystal is known throughout the world as a writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster on language. Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain by David and Hilary Crystal published on 26 September 2013 by Oxford University Press. Follow @davcr on Twitter and use #languagetourist to join the discussion. You can see an interactive map of British locations that shaped the English language on the OxfordWords blog.

This post originally appeared on The Lingua File and is reproduced with permission.


Image credits: Both images © Hilary Crystal, from Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only language articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post How to be an English language tourist? appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesChallenges of the social life of languageThree recent theories of “kibosh”Journalism: journey to an uncertain destination? 

Will young invincibles buy into the ACA?

By Stephen Gorin, PhD, MSW

Since its enactment in 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, has been the focus of controversy and heated debate. As the date for implementing the health exchanges approaches, the war of words has intensified. It is perhaps not surprising that in a recent poll for the Kaiser Family Foundation, 51% of respondents said that they lacked enough information to understand how the ACA would affect them and their families, and 44% were unsure whether the ACA was even law.

Despite this, the mechanics of the law are relatively simple. Beginning in 2014 insurers will be barred from excluding people due to preexisting conditions or increasing premiums based on health status or gender. At the same time, almost everyone will be required to have health care coverage. This will not be a problem for the approximately 80% of the population that already has coverage through a large employer (50 or more employees) or a government program like Medicare. As Larry Levitt, an executive of the Kaiser Family Foundation, put it, “the individual mandate will be a non-event” for the bulk of the population.

The real issue is how the ACA will impact the relatively small number of individuals who do not have or cannot afford coverage, or are dissatisfied with coverage they currently have through an employer, and previously had to rely on the unregulated individual insurance market. These people (estimated to number 22 million in 2014) will now be able to by coverage in health exchanges, or health insurance marketplaces.

Although critics of the ACA have argued that that some people will be forced to buy coverage they cannot afford, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 48% of those in the individual market will be eligible for tax credits, which will “reduce the premium for the second-lowest-cost silver plan by an average of 32% across all people now buying insurance in the individual market.” Some will also be eligible for cost sharing, which will further offset the cost of coverage.

These subsidies and cost-sharing reductions should make coverage available for many people. For example, in Texas, a family of four will be able to buy “the lowest bronze plan,” including a comprehensive set of essential health benefits, for $57 per month “after tax credits.” According to the US Department of Health & Human Services, some 95% of consumers “live in states with average premiums below earlier estimates.”

Averages of course can be misleading, and it would be disingenuous to argue that no one will be faced with “rate shock.” Some younger and healthier people will undoubtedly face higher, though still reasonable, premiums. It is critical that these people, often called the “young invincibles” participate in the new system.

To begin with, being young and healthy today does not guarantee one against disease or an accident tomorrow. As Reinhardt put it: the ACA gives young, healthy people “a call option that allows them to buy coverage at a premium far below the high actuarial cost of covering them when they are sicker.”

Second, health insurance is based on the principle that young, healthy people will compensate for older, less healthy individuals. If the former fail to buy coverage, the result will be “relatively bad risk pool, leading to high premiums that drive out even more healthy people.” This could eventually cause the system to become unsustainable, a point understood by some opponents of the ACA who are actively engaged in trying to persuade young people to defy the law and not buy coverage.

Persuading young people to reject coverage may be a difficult sell, however. Polling has found that young people “’value health insurance but cannot afford it.’” In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, only a quarter of respondents between ages 18 and 30 said they were healthy enough not to need health insurance.

The success of the ACA could well hinge on the ability of supporters to bring young people into it.

Stephen Gorin, PhD, MSW is a Professor of Social Work at Plymouth State University. He is the author of “Health Care Reform” in Oxford Bibliographies in Social Work and co-author of “Health Care Reform” in the Encyclopedia of Social Work.

This week we’re offering views and insights from Oxford University Press authors on the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act in anticipation of open enrollment beginning on 1 October 2013. Read previous articles including Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs: “What does health reform do for Americans?”, Andrew Koppelman’s “Politics, narratives, and piñatas in health care”, Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein’s “Who cares for those who care?”, and Tom Allen’s “Criticisms of Obamacare”.

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

The Encyclopedia of Social Work is the first continuously updated online collaboration between the National Association of Social Workers (NASW Press) and Oxford University Press (OUP). Over 400 overview articles, on key topics ranging from international issues to ethical standards, offer students, scholars, and practitioners a trusted foundation for a lifetime of work and research, with new articles and revisions to existing articles added regularly.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only social work articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Image credit: Medical Stethoscope on folded American Flag for US Health Care concepts. © jcjgphotography via iStockphoto.

The post Will young invincibles buy into the ACA? appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesCriticisms of ObamacarePolitics, narratives, and piñatas in health careNational Grandparents Day Tribute 

Émile Zola and the integrity of representation

By Brian Nelson

Émile Zola’s main achievement was his twenty-volume novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893). The fortunes of a family, the Rougon-Macquart, are followed over several decades. The various family members spread throughout all levels of society, and through their lives Zola examines methodically the social, sexual, and moral landscape of the late nineteenth century.

Advertisement announcing the publication of Germinal in the newspaper Le Cri du Peuple in 1885.

At the heart of Zola’s naturalism (as he called his form of realism) is a concern with integrity of representation. For Zola this meant a commitment to the idea that literature has a social function: to represent the sorts of things that preoccupy people in their daily lives. Industrialisation, the growth of the cities, the birth of consumer culture, the condition of the working class, crime, prostitution, the misdeeds of Government: these were the issues that concerned Zola and he wrote about them not simply forensically, as a would-be scientist, but ironically and satirically. Naturalist fiction represents a major assault on bourgeois morality and institutions.

But Zola’s work contains many contradictory strains. The bête noire of the bourgeoisie believed in the traditional bourgeois virtues of self-discipline, hard work and moderation. His great working-class novels, L’Assommoir (1877) and Germinal (1885), create a sense of tragic pathos in their portrayal of the lives of the poor; but the power of mass working-class movements aroused in him an equivocal mixture of sympathy and unease. Similarly, in his treatment of sex and marriage, Zola broke the mould of Victorian moral cant; on the other hand, he admired the bourgeois family ideal.

Zola is famous for his descriptions of the material world. These descriptions are informed by vast amounts of first-hand observation and research – in the great markets of Paris, Les Halles (The Belly of Paris, 1873), the slums (L’Assommoir), the department stores (The Ladies’ Paradise, 1883), the coal fields (Germinal), the railways (The Beast in Man, 1890), etc. Zola combines the approach of a reporter with the vision of a painter in his observation of particular milieus and modes of life.  His fiction acquires its power, however, not so much from its ethnographic richness as from its imaginative qualities.  The observed reality of the world is the foundation for a poetic vision.

Emblematic features of contemporary life — the market, the machine, the tenement building, the laundry, the mine, the apartment house, the department store, the stock exchange, the city itself — are used as giant symbols of the society of his day. Zola sees allegories of contemporary life everywhere. In The Ladies’ Paradise, the department store is emblematic of the new dream world of consumer culture and of the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the time. Through the play of imagery and metaphor Zola magnifies the material world, giving it a hyperbolic, hallucinatory quality. We think of Saccard, the protagonist of The Kill, swimming in a sea of gold coins, an image that aptly evokes his activities as a speculator; the fantastic visions of food in The Belly of Paris; the still in L’Assommoir, oozing with poisonous alcohol; Nana’s mansion, like a vast vagina, swallowing up men and their fortunes; the devouring pithead in Germinal, lit by strange fires, rising spectrally out of the darkness. Reality is transfigured into a theatre of archetypal forces. Human conduct for Zola is determined by heredity and environment, which pursue his characters as relentlessly as the forces of fate in an ancient tragedy.

Zola opened the novel up to entirely new areas of representation. The naturalist emphasis on integrity of representation entailed a new explicitness in the depiction of sexuality and the body. More interesting, however, is the ways in which Zola’s social and sexual themes intersect. In his sexual themes he ironically subverts the notion that the social supremacy of the bourgeoisie is a natural rather than a cultural phenomenon. The more searchingly he investigated the theme of middle-class adultery, the more he threatened to uncover the fragility and arbitrariness of the whole bourgeois social order. In Pot Luck (1882) he lifted the lid on the realities of bourgeois mores, exposing the hypocrisy of the dominant class. The bourgeois go to extreme lengths to maintain the segregation between themselves and the lower classes, whom they insistently portray as dirty, immoral, promiscuous, stupid — at best a lesser type of human, at worst some kind of wild beast. But class difference is shown to be merely a matter of money and power, tenuously holding down the raging forces of sexuality and corruption beneath the surface. We are left with a kind of stew, a melting-pot, a world where there are no clear boundaries at all.

Zola broke taboos. He was a public writer. It was entirely appropriate that, in 1898, he crowned his literary career with a political act: ‘J’accuse…!’, his famous open letter to the President of the Republic in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused of spying for Germany. Zola’s courageous stand in the Affair showed the public writer at his best. Squarely in the tradition of Voltaire and Victor Hugo, it anticipated the work of writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in the twentieth century.

Brian Nelson is Emeritus Professor of French and Head of the Department of Romance Languages, Monash University, Melbourne. He has translated and edited a number of Zola novels for Oxford World’s Classics, most recently The Fortune of the Rougons.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Image Credit: Advertisement announcing the publication of Germinal in the newspaper Le Cri du Peuple in 1885 [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Émile Zola and the integrity of representation appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesEdmund Gosse: nonconformist?A folklore and fairy tales reading list from Oxford World’s ClassicsAdapting Henry V 

Breaking Bad’s Faustian Cast

By Jessica Barbour

Note: this post contains many, many spoilers for Breaking Bad.

In a Reddit AMA session a few months ago, Bryan Cranston was asked when he thought his character on Breaking Bad broke bad. His response: “My feeling is that Walt broke bad in the very first episode. It was very subtle but he did because that’s when he decided to become someone that he’s not in order to gain financially. He made the Faustian deal at that point and everything else was a slippery slope.”

The story of Faust, the man who made a deal with the Devil, dates back many centuries and has taken many forms, from folktales to puppet shows to plays to novels. Since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe completed Part I of his play Faust in 1808, variations on the tragedy have inspired at least a dozen operas, as well as numerous art songs and concert works.

The tale’s lengthy heritage suggests that there’s always been something intriguing about watching a man freely sacrifice his soul for a chance at happiness. I’ll focus on works derived from Goethe’s telling of the story, both because it’s inspired so much music and because it’s the version I’ve actually read.

As we all anxiously await the final episode of Breaking Bad, it’s impossible not to wonder/theorize/obsess over how the story will end. Taking Cranston’s use of “Faustian” here further than he probably intended, I’m going to recast the main roles in Faust with characters from Breaking Bad, looking at each character through the lens of a Faust-based work from the classical music canon. The exercise might give us some clues about what will happen to these characters, or, failing that, provide something to mull over while waiting to see what actually happens.

Walter White: Faust

 


Faust is an unhappy scholar, a man suffering from extreme ennui who craves more than his life can afford him. After he comes close to killing himself (but decides against it), a demon, Mephistopheles, appears to him and guarantees that he can bring Faust whatever he desires. In a moment of hubris and greed, Faust agrees to a deal with Mephistopheles: the Devil will be his servant while he’s on earth, and Faust will be the Devil’s servant in hell. If Faust ever reaches a moment in which he is finally truly happy, the Devil will claim his part of the bargain.

Having watched all but one episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, I can’t help but feel like Walt has already arrived at the second half of Faust’s deal. As soon as Walt got everything he wanted—he’d retired from the meth business with tens of millions of dollars, his wife no longer appeared to hate him, and he could finally enjoy a leisurely outdoor meal with his extended family—it was all snatched away.

The piece: Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust (1846)

Click here to view the embedded video.

As has been the case for Breaking Bad, the critical acclaim for La Damnation de Faust outdistanced its popularity. Berlioz adored Goethe’s version of the tale, and his libretto is based mainly on Faust, but his narrative does have some variations. Berlioz sets the bargain at the end of the work, after Mephistopheles tells Faust that if he wants to save Margaret (more info on her below) he must sign a contract in which he agrees to become the Devil’s servant the next day. Faust signs it, and he and Mephistopheles ride back towards Margaret to save her—except, in reality, Mephistopheles is taking Faust straight to hell and does nothing to save Margaret.

If you’ve seen the Breaking Bad episode “Ozymandias,” the exchange above may remind you of the scene in which Walt tries to bargain with the neo-Nazis for the life of his brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Schrader, offering them $80 million in exchange for keeping Hank alive. The Nazis do take most of Walt’s money, but they also murder Hank. Walt must then return home through the desert, abandon his family members, who now fear and abhor him, and live out his remaining months as a hermit in the New England cold until his cancer kills him (or so he initially thinks).

Crystal Meth: Mephistopheles

Someone I told last week about this post asked how it would be possible for Breaking Bad to be Faust without a character on the show standing in for the Devil. In actuality, there have been several versions without the Devil—and in many versions of the Faust story the protagonist is not dealing with Satan himself, but one of his minions, e.g. Goethe’s Mephistopheles. We’ve seen Walt align himself with several representatives of the Business Partners from Hell while pursuing his goals (see Krazy 8, Tuco Salamanca, Gustavo Fring) but he’s somehow managed to escape them all until now (see Neo-Nazis).

Of course, despite its perennial snub at the Emmy Awards (not even a nomination!), the most important supporting character in Breaking Bad is methamphetamine. We see some incarnation of it in nearly every episode, and its introduction to Walter is what inspires him to change his life. Watching a news report about a meth-lab bust with Hank, Walt witnesses all the wealth the crystal meth business can yield, providing you (1) are decent with chemistry and (2) don’t get caught.

Meth offers him everything he wants, but is just as upfront with the eventual consequences of the deal as Mephistopheles. Walt ignores this fact, though—because of his recent lung cancer diagnosis, he figures he’ll be dead before he can be brought to justice.

The piece: Charles-François Gounod’s Faust (1859)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gounod’s Faust, while based on Goethe’s play, deviates greatly from its source material. According to Grove Music Online, “The main objection is that the librettists transformed Faust, a seeker for knowledge (or experience, or power), into an operatic lover; but this merely proves that composer and librettists understood the nature of the genre, and of opera as a business operation, better than their educated and literary critics.” The opera was a great success when it opened and remains immensely popular.

In Gounod’s version, Mephistopheles interrupts a man singing a song about a rat (which is sung in full in the Berlioz version—see below) to sing a song about the golden calf and mankind’s self-destructive devotion to money. (This replaces the song Mephistopheles sings Goethe’s Faust, about a king and his flea; this text was set to music many times, too.)

Meth as Mephistopheles (Methistopheles!) is cynically aware of what Walt truly wants—what he thinks the whole world wants—and offers it up to Walt, who gradually learns to ignore the difference between what’s truly right and wrong in order to accept it.

Skyler White: Margaret

The third character from Goethe’s Faust who needs to be accounted for is Margaret, aka Gretchen, the woman Faust loves. In Breaking Bad, we’re shown only two women with whom Walt has been in love: his wife, Skyler, and his ex-girlfriend, who happens to be named (gasp!) Gretchen.

Faust instantly falls in love with Margaret and seduces her with lavish gifts. Eventually, he persuades her to let him stay with her one night, giving her a sleeping potion that she can give her mother so they won’t be found out. Faust impregnates her that night.

She later tries to go to church to pray as usual, but is scared away from confessing her sins by a host of demons (bringing to mind the scene in last Sunday’s “Granite State” when the neo-Nazis invade the baby’s nursery in the Whites’ home to scare Skyler away from giving any information to the police). Later Margaret is imprisoned after accidentally killing her mother with the sleeping potion and, having gone insane, drowning her baby.

I’m loath to bring it up, but could this all bode ill for baby Holly? Breaking Bad has been ruthless and cold when deciding which of its characters to kill off. While I’m not convinced that Holly isn’t going to make it, the implication from Todd and co. is that if something did happen to either of the White children, it would be Skyler’s fault. (In a show with so much German thrown into characters’ names—e.g. Heisenberg, Ehrmentraut, Schwartz, Schrader—and which features a five-and-a-half-minute opening scene auf Deutsch, the fact that “Tod” is the German word for “death” might not be a coincidence.)

At the end of Goethe’s Faust Part 1, though, Margaret is saved by an angel chorus that exclaims “She is redeemed!” and calls her up to Heaven. So perhaps the ending for Walt’s family doesn’t have to be that bleak.

The piece: Franz Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (1814)

Click here to view the embedded video.

(For a translation of the song, click here.)

Schubert composed this song when he was 17 years old (more than halfway through his life). He was another Goethe devotee, and composed more than sixty lieder on texts from the writer’s oeuvre. This is one of his best known, and it quotes directly from a scene in Faust. In it, Gretchen sits at her spinning wheel (represented by the circular motif in the piano), thinking about Faust. She’s troubled by how overpowering his seduction of her is, and feels herself losing her mind and her inner peace while obsessing about how it feels to be with him.

I recently rewatched a disturbing scene from the fifth season of Breaking Bad in which Walter comes to Skyler in bed and begins foreplay with her while talking about the justification for all the horrible things they have done. This occurs as she looks away, horrified. She has absolutely no power to escape him, no matter how many times she’s tried. Her life is so tied up with his that severing herself from him seems, in this scene at least, impossible.

One key difference between the two stories is that Margaret never stops loving Faust, and never sees him as an evil man.

Jesse Pinkman: The rat

There is, of course, a major character missing a Faustian equivalent: Jesse Pinkman. I considered creating a parallel version of the cast that would assign Jesse to the part of Faust. However the last episode plays out, I think many Breaking Bad viewers would agree that Walt might not be Faust, but the Devil. He approaches Jesse when he’s vulnerable, promises to improve his way of life, then destroys every element of it.

But despite my desire to cast Walt as the Devil in this scenario, I’m not sure it fits. When I was watching La Damnation de Faust, however, there was one section that eerily reminded me of Jesse’s current predicament:

The piece: Branders’ song.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a story told via drunken bar patron about a rat who lived happily on fat and butter in a kitchen. The cook poisoned the rat, and the creature pathetically reels around the house, gnawing everything in sight and drinking from puddles to alleviate the feeling inside, which won’t go away. Eventually the rat simply runs into the stove and dies, and the cook laughs. The translation of the refrain “Als hätte sie Lieb’ im Leibe” is given as “as if it were in heat”, referring to the wild manner in which the rat reacted to the poison. The literal translation, though, and one that applies to Jesse, is “as if it had love in its body”.

As we discover in the final season, the lowest life form in the estimation of Walt (the meth cook) is that of a rat. And Jesse is never more prone to tragedy or despair than when he’s in love. Walt has been poisoning Jesse throughout the show’s story arc, and any time Jesse thinks his existence can’t get any worse, he dooms himself further.

The trouble with all of this, of course, is that there are so many different endings to the Faust story, at least in terms of the fate of the titular character. Margaret is consistently redeemed; the rat, when he’s mentioned, always dies; maybe we can count on these endings for Skyler and Jesse. But the fate of Faust himself is up to the composer—in this case, Vince Gilligan.

Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, “The 1812 Overture: an attempted narration,” “Baseball scoring,” “Glissandos and Glissandon’ts,” and “Wedding Music,”  and you can learn more about Berlioz, Schubert, Gounod, Goethe, Faust, and the operas mentioned above with a subscription to Grove Music Online.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Image credit: Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in Episode 15. Photo by Ursula Coyote/AMC. Source blogs.amctv.com/breaking-bad. Image used for the purposes of illustration. (c) AMC. All rights reserved.

The post Breaking Bad’s Faustian Cast appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesFrancesca Caccini, the composerCelebrating Women’s Equality DayTen surprising facts about the violin 

How film music shapes narrative

By Siu-Lan Tan

Reflecting on his futuristic 2002 film Minority Report, Steven Spielberg said “one of the most exciting scenes” he had to shoot was this action scene – in which two characters (John and Agatha) traverse a busy shopping mall with armed police in pursuit, relying on Agatha’s ability to see into the future in order to hide and successfully evade capture.

As the two figures enter the shopping mall, an instrumental rendition of Henry Mancini’s ballad ‘Moon River’ begins. The song can be heard faintly, playing over (what we may surmise to be) loudspeakers inside the mall. Over the distant music, we hear Agatha’s urgent instructions to John as they make their way through the mall, and the heavy footsteps of a pack of uniformed police clamoring after them. The leisurely, flowing ‘Moon River’ serves as a serene musical canvas to the winding tension and disjointed action of this scene.

But what if ‘Moon River’ were not playing within the fictional world of the characters, where John and Agatha reside, but as a dramatic score – accompanying the film scene?  How would the same piece of music work as dramatic scoring and would it change our impression or reading of the scene?

The fictional world proposed by the narrative is often referred to as the diegesis. Diegetic music is ‘music produced within the implied world of the film’ such as the music supposedly piped into the mall where John and Agatha are on the run. Nondiegetic music, in turn, refers to music external to this ‘narrative universe’, such as music mirroring the mood and action of a car chase. What if ‘Moon River’ were presented nondiegetically– as a dramatic score accompanying the scene, rather than playing inside the fictional world John and Agatha inhabit? How might diegetic versus nondiegetic presentation of the same piece of music shape our impressions of a film scene?

Surprisingly, a search of the film music research didn’t uncover any related studies along these lines. Indeed, almost all film music studies have focused solely on the effects of nondiegetic music. Diegetic music has been largely neglected in the research. So my colleagues Matthew Spackman (Bringham College) and Elizabeth Wakefield (Kalamazoo College) and I set out to investigate.

We selected the 85-second shopping mall sequence from Spielberg’s Minority Report described above, found at 1:35:33-1:36:57 on the 2002 DVD. We prepared three versions:

The Original Diegetic version was the unaltered Spielberg version with the Henry Mancini ‘Moon River’ ballad sounding as if it were playing over speakers inside the shopping mall.
The Nondiegetic ‘Moon River’ version was one we created – by purchasing the same Henry Mancini ‘Moon River’ as a single, and mixing it louder and clearer to sound like a dramatic score. Speech and sound effects from the original were retained, still crisp and audible.
Nondiegetic ‘chase music’:  As the ‘Moon River’ music is incongruent with the mood of an action sequence, we created another nondiegetic version with John Williams’ music from Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun which was scored for a chase sequence at 0:39:49 on the 2001 DVD. The music was taken from the CD soundtrack (Track 10, 2:03-2:30 and 2:42-3:42). Speech and sound effects were retained.

A total of 245 college students participated in our study. We told them that the aim of our study was ‘to examine how people understand story lines of film scenes’. We didn’t hint that the focus was on film music, as it was important not to direct their attention to the music. Each participant watched only one version of the film excerpt, and answered questions – including 10 scales about the scene and film characters. They indicated their responses by drawing an ‘x’ along a horizontal line. (Later, during coding, we gave each response a numerical value by measuring from the left end of the line to the center of the ‘x’ in millimeters.)

Scale Example

When we analyzed the responses of the 111 participants who reported that they had not seen Minority Report before this study, we found that their impressions differed dramatically – depending on which of the three versions they had seen. In effect, each of the three soundtracks created its own narrative, coloring the perceptions of the audience with respect to some of the most important aspects of scene and storyline:

Results Graph

Most strikingly, the greatest contrasts were found for responses to the diegetic versus nondiegetic version of the same piece of music: the ‘Moon River’ ballad sounding as if inside the shopping mall (depicted by the solid red line) and the same song as an accompanying dramatic score (dashed red line).

Participants who watched the original diegetic version (created by Spielberg) rated the scene as significantly more tense and suspenseful, perceived the relationship between the two characters to be more antagonistic and hostile and less romantic, and assumed more negative intentions of the characters toward each other than those who had watched either of the two nondiegetic versions (especially nondiegetic ‘Moon River’). To a less dramatic degree, the fast-paced and more dissonant nondiegetic ‘chase music’ and more melodious, flowing nondiegetic ‘Moon River’ ballad also led to somewhat different impressions of the scene and characters. However, the differences among responses were largely a function of the diegetic/nondiegetic conditions (and not ‘chase music’ versus romantic ballad, as one might expect).

While film directors and composers have keen instincts about how nondiegetic and diegetic music will play in a particular scene, to the best of our knowledge, our 2008 paper was the first published study that addressed the question in an empirical fashion. (The results reported here are only a small part of the more extensive study.) As is true of any single experiment, our study has limitations and leaves questions warranting further research. In particular, the loudness of the music varies with diegetic and nondiegetic conditions in this scene in Minority Report; the faint, distant-sounding quality of the music serves as the main cue that the music is supposedly playing over the speaker system inside the mall. These variables must be teased apart in a future study.

For instance, the iconic ‘Danny Boy’ sequence in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing provides a contrasting example in which (initially) diegetic music is played very loudly. Unlike Minority Report, in which the source of the music is only implied, the source in Miller’s Crossing (a gramophone player) is not only prominently shown but the stirring vocal music itself (‘O Danny Boy’, a traditional Irish song) is selected by a character. In essence, the diegetic music does not simply reside in the fictional world but the musical score has been ‘selected’ by one of its inhabitants. Showing Albert Finney’s character listening to the record while lying in his bed and directing our attention to the source of the music brings the diegetic music into the conscious foreground as opposed to the sensory background of the crowded shopping mall in Minority Report. Interestingly, later as Finney’s character in Miller’s Crossing jumps out of the window to escape an assassination attempt, the lush music seems to follow him down the street at full force, without fading — a seamless transition from diegetic to nondiegetic.

While the Minority Report scene employed Henry Mancini’s prerecorded music, ‘Danny Boy’ was recorded while performing to the film scene for Miller’s Crossing. Composer Carter Burwell recounts: singer “Frank [Patterson] would watch the film with us, and Joel and Ethan would say, ‘Now if you could hit the word ‘bend’ here and hold it till the car explodes…’” Both selections of music may be described as somewhat incongruent with the mood of an action sequence and yet do not soften it, pointing to what film theorist Claudia Gorbman has referred to as “the special expressive effect of diegetic music … to create irony in a more ‘natural’ way than nondiegetic music.” Both ‘Moon River’ and ‘Danny Boy’ have long histories and carry rich associations, evoking schema from other stories, films, and cultural and autobiographical memories. Through the connotative power of music, a scene may echo with multiple narratives.

While the expressive qualities of the music seem to be juxtaposed with the action, both songs are anchored to their scenes through their lyrics. The lyrics to ‘Danny Boy’ linger on the theme of death. The ‘Moon River’ lyrics (though not included in the looped instrumental version) resonate with the situations on the screen such as ‘two drifters’ ‘wherever you’re going, I’m going your way…’ as Agatha steers the pair’s flight through the mall. The lyric ‘rainbow’s end, waiting round the bend…’ coincides with the appearance of a bouquet of colored balloons coming around the corner, to resolve the scene.

It is not our intention to draw any grand conclusions about the definitive and predictable effects of diegetic versus nondiegetic music. Music interacts in dynamic and probably irreproducible ways within the complex ecology of any film scene. The specific effects of migrating a piece of music from diegetic to nondiegetic depend on the unique interplay of music and moving images.

However, our study suggests that the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction is perceptually salient to a general film audience. In some cases, it may lead to dramatically different perceptions of the tension of a scene, the attitudes, motives, and relationships of characters, and other judgments fundamental to one’s understanding of the unfolding film narrative. Further, we have demonstrated a case in which diegetic versus nondiegetic presentation of the same piece of music produced more powerful effects than switching to a different musical soundtrack of contrasting character.

Looking to the horizon, we hope to inspire more discourse and inquiry on diegetic film music — a topic largely neglected by researchers, who have strongly privileged nondiegetic music for analysis. What do you think are the most powerful moments of diegetic music in film? What makes them particularly compelling and memorable? And what questions would you encourage psychologists, neuroscientists, and other researchers to pursue on diegetic film music?

Siu-Lan Tan is Associate Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College. She served as an editor and author of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, newly published by Oxford University Press (2013). Born in Indonesia and raised in Hong Kong, she completed degrees in piano and music and attended Purdue University, Oxford University, and Georgetown University to complete an MA and PhD in psychology. The full, referenced version of this article appears on the World Science Festival Blog. The author retains all rights to the content of this post.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only health and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Image credits: By Siu-Lan Tan, 2013. Do not reproduce without permission.

The post How film music shapes narrative appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesThese days do we really need a Man of Steel?Journalism: journey to an uncertain destination?Ten surprising facts about the violin 

Criticisms of Obamacare

By Tom Allen

The start of implementation of Obamacare has triggered a renewed, fiercer response from its critics. During my 12 years in Congress there was no comparable effort to undermine a recently enacted law, including President Bush’s prescription drug bill, which almost all Democrats opposed. Why are Republican Governors and House members—with no plan to replace Obamacare—so determined to destroy it? Why did Senator Ted Cruz say that implementation must be blocked before people become “addicted to its subsidies?” If people are going to like Obamacare’s benefits, why try to blow it up?

Opponents argue that the Affordable Care Act will hurt small business, raise health care costs and reduce economic growth. But if you listen carefully to their arguments, you can detect the underlying fear: if millions more Americans have health insurance, they will be more “dependent” on government. In short, opponents really believe that the country will be worse off if health insurance becomes available for 25 million people who don’t have it today.

To most Democrats this makes no sense. People with health insurance get medical attention more quickly and have healthier lives; the health care system will be more efficient without cost-shifting from the uninsured to commercial insurers and their customers. But right-wing Republicans are convinced that government by its very nature infringes on personal liberty and induces “dependency.” They hate Obamacare precisely because it may cover 25 million people. To libertarian-leaning activists “dependency” on government is a fate worse than having no health insurance at all.

If the ongoing debate about Obamacare was really about cost, access and quality (the health care policy trifecta), the opposition would be less intense and more specific. After all, the core ideas of (1) state-based exchanges regulating competition for beneficiaries by private insurers and (2) an individual mandate to acquire health insurance had a conservative birth. In 1989 Stuart Butler included both ideas in the Heritage Foundation’s proposal for comprehensive health care reform. Twenty-four years ago some conservatives took the need for expanded coverage and reduced costs seriously. The absence of any conservative proposal to “replace” Obamacare is compelling evidence that is no longer true.

Republicans and Democrats are facing a lot of tension as the implementation of Obamacare moves forward.

In health care as in the other issues covered in my book, compromise between Republicans and Democrats in Congress is impossible because the two sides have incompatible worldviews about what Americans should do together through their governments and what they should do as individuals. Those worldviews, which I describe as grounded in either individualism or community, leave the two camps unable to understand the other and, therefore, unwilling to believe the opposing views are honestly held.

Obamacare was enacted without a single Republican vote, yet in time it will be broadly accepted as an historic change that expanded coverage and held down costs for tens of millions of Americans. The real fear of conservatives is that Americans will be grateful for the specific, concrete benefits of Obamacare and ignore the ideological, unquantifiable “dependency” that is so vividly compelling to the right.

Tom Allen, author of Dangerous Convictions: What’s Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress, is a former U.S. Congressman representing Maine’s 1st District from 1997 to 2009. He is currently President and CEO of the American Association of Publishers

This week we’re offering views and insights from Oxford University Press authors on the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act in anticipation of open enrollment beginning on 1 October 2013. Read previous articles including Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs: “What does health reform do for Americans?”, Andrew Koppelman’s “Politics, narratives, and piñatas in health care”, and Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein’s “Who cares for those who care?”.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: Unofficial Republican Elephant and Democratic Donkey icons. These images have been created for general use to illustrate editorial content about politics in America, 2011. Graphic by Donkeyhotey. CC 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Criticisms of Obamacare appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesPolitics, narratives, and piñatas in health careWho cares for those who care?The amended Constitution 

2013 OHA will be much more than OK

By Troy Reeves

Thanks to a professional development grant, I spent a few days earlier this month visiting colleagues in Oklahoma and Texas, hoping to steal — I mean borrow! — ideas and procedures to improve the UW-Madison oral history program. Two of the scholars I met with, Stephen Sloan and Todd Moye, will also help lead next month’s Oral History Association annual meeting in Oklahoma City. So while learning about their oral history programs, I also picked their brains about the upcoming conference.

Both Sloan and Moye were enthusiastic to describe how all the meeting’s content should spark attendees’ interest. When I reminded them that I had only 500 words, not 5,000, to preview the conference, they graciously focused on some specifics. (Mary Larson, the third scholar with whom I met, has served as OHA’s president for the last two years. Curiously, this led her to say that while she knows she will love the content at this year’s event, her favorite moment will arise when she hands the presidential gavel to Sloan at Sunday’s business meeting!)

Sloan wants readers to be aware of a new aspect of this year’s conference: interest groups. In response to feedback from previous meetings, attendees with have the opportunity to attend one of eight concurrent sessions on early Thursday afternoon. Sloan hopes that this will give folks a chance to meet in small groups, and in a setting less formal than the typical 90-minute session. While interest or affinity groups have occurred before, Sloan believes this iteration could start a concerted, long-term effort to make such gatherings a permanent part of subsequent annual meetings. He also hopes it will facilitate the creation of groups to inform OHA’s executive director, council, and committees year round.

Oklahoma History Center. Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Moye says that in addition to a typically strong lineup of concurrent sessions and plenaries, he is excited about the slate of workshops and special events, particularly those occurring outside the hotel. These events — the Presidential Reception and a special Friday evening session — and their locales — the Oklahoma History Center and the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum — will offer special, place-based content, not just an excuse to hold an event or two outside the hotel’s environs.

In concert, these two acknowledge the great work that Moye’s program co-chair, Beth Milwood, has done as the third member of the program leadership trio. They also want me to note the Wednesday Reception, which will honor Milwood and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall for their years of service to the Southern Oral History Program.

Finally, I take author’s prerogative here to conclude by plugging the Oral History Review’s presence at the conference. As always, there will be the editorial team’s information table and our annual book table — this year staffed by new Book Review Editor David Caruso. On Wednesday morning, Kathy Nasstrom, Doug Boyd, and I will lead a half-day workshop, “Thinking and Writing Digitally” that I hope you will attend. Additionally, Jennifer Abraham Cramer will be keeping her eye out for non-print media; and Steven Sielaff, newly hired at Baylor’s Institute for Oral History, will be serving as our conference editorial assistant.

For more information about the conference, go to the OHA’s landing page for the 2013 annual meeting. And I hope to see you there!

Troy Reeves is the Oral History Review’s Managing Editor (though, thus far, no one has been as impressed with that title as Reeves thinks they should.) He also oversees the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s oral history program, which is housed in the UW-Madison Archives. In his spare time, he tries — quite unsuccessfully — to teach the OHR’s Social Media Coordinator about 1970s and 1980s Americana.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post 2013 OHA will be much more than OK appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesCSI: Oral HistoryFall cleaning with OHRIntersections of sister fields 

Slum tourism and its discontents

By Sonia Tsuruoka

This is how rich, curious Westerners fritter away the summer months: not yachting along the Côte d’Azur or strolling arm-in-arm through Mediterranean villas, but navigating the hectic, crime-ridden slums of Kibera, Dharavi, and Rocinha in an assortment of developing countries like South Africa, India, and Brazil. “Slum tourism,” or the recreational visiting of impoverished, urban communities, is curiously gaining traction as a form of foreign leisure, raising questions of intent and provoking fiery discourse on the ethics of the popularly embraced social practice. Is “slumming,” as its advocates insist, a fruitful exercise in cultural immersion, fostering awareness, empathy, and potential action? Or is it a voyeuristic — and fundamentally invasive — enterprise that exoticizes slum residents like caged animals in a zoological exhibition?

Photo by Chico.Ferreira, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.

“How the other half lives” has been a topic of perverse fascination for the upper and middle-classes, even prior to Jacob Riis’ groundbreaking photojournalistic study of Manhattan’s tenement- and sweatshop-ridden Lower East Side in 1890. Consider the loaded, etymological origins of the word slumming, and its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884. Around this time hordes of blue-blooded Londoners — leaving their lavish abodes in Mayfair and Belgravia — were rumored to flood London’s squalid East End for everything from amusement to philanthropy. This “fashionable London Mania” found its way from Victorian-era England to the streets of New York City, as wealthy foreigners increasingly engaged in “slumming parties,” which typically entailed “a tour of the Bowery winding up with a visit to an opium joint or Harry Hill’s.” A recognizable tension between slumming as reform enterprise and twisted voyeurism emerged, blurring the boundaries between slum tourism as a form of entertainment for the privileged class and a spirited call to action for well-intentioned missionaries, social activists, politicians, journalists, and philanthropists.

Twentieth-century innovations in transportation and technology, coinciding with an emergent sense of internationalism, changed the scope — but not the substance — of slumming as modern practice. Gone were the logistical difficulties of accessing far-flung destinations like Mumbai and Soweto. Foreign countries, once considered terra incognita to the average Joe, were now little more than an e-reservation away. Cheaper, faster transportation methods gave rise to an entirely new generation of globe-trotters, in what John Urry might call a massive “reconfiguration” of the “tourist gaze.” International tourist arrivals surpassed 1 billion for the first time in history last year and are expected to show unprecedented growth in 2013. Even more momentous is the cultural zeitgeist motivating much of these predominantly North American and European travelers. Just as 19th century writers of modernist literature advanced the perspective of the “common individual” in masterpieces like Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, 21st century artists have similarly rendered the heart-wrenching plights of “real people,” except this time their gaze is global. Slumdog Millionaire’s rags-to-riches narrative brought thousands to Mumbai, resulting in 25% increase in business after its release, just as the Academy-Award-nominated City of God attracted hordes of tourists to Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished favelas.

From township tours in post-Apartheid South Africa to hutong tours in China, the relation of the “average Westerner” to the “rest of the world” has changed in the wake of changing cultural, technological, and global dynamics. By physically extracting themselves from their comfort zone and immersing themselves in foreign slum life, Western tourists seem, in one sense, to transgress pre-conceived social, economic, political, and even racial boundaries. What might otherwise appear alien or otherworldly to the Western tourist becomes not only familiar but humanly recognizable through the activity of slumming. What might otherwise appear as a “foreign problem” seems much closer to home than previously imagined. Bridging the geographical gulf between the haves and have-nots, some scholars argue, is the first stage in narrowing the figurative gulf of understanding between the developed and developing worlds.

Photo by Colin Crowley, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.

Yet there is something parasitic — and even vaguely sinister — about the relation of the slum tourist to the slum-dweller. What if their worlds do not intersect at all, but parallel each other? And what if such an experience as a whole is more exploitative than equalizing? Consider Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia and its star-studded cinematic adaptation as illustrations of slum tourism’s most disconcerting implications. Endeavoring to “explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of [three countries],” Gilbert embarks on a pre-paid intercontinental getaway, whisking herself from the sprawling streets of Rome to a four-month meditation in a Guru’s ashram near Mumbai and a mountainside retreat in Ubud, Bali. Though it reads as a stylish “travel-brochure paradise,” the memoir “never loses the sour whiff of unexamined first-world privilege,” attributing a kind of parasitism to the jet-setting Western tourist. Even as Gilbert vividly experiences the world-at-large, she does so at a philosophical remove, from the comfort of an imperceptible vantage point. Navigating the outer limits as a third-party observer, she extracts the material and immaterial from their cultural contexts, assembling her own sampler plate of foreign scenery as she moves from one place to the next. Of particular interest is the impartiality with which Gilbert regards her surroundings: more consumptive than immersive, and exclusively in service of her own introspection, rather than in the interest of penetrating a foreign milieu.

Like Gilbert, the Western tourist regards the developing world from a vantage point: only ever through tinted shades, half-cracked windows, and muted camera shutters. Even at the moment of their physical meeting, such experiential barriers permanently relegate the tourist and the slum-dweller to parallel worlds, preserving rather than narrowing the gulf of understanding between the developed and developing worlds. An afternoon of slumming becomes something to be added to the tourist’s catalog of foreign travels and “real-world” parables, a fleeting encounter “experienced momentarily” but “escaped from permanently.” Of course, as its proponents contend, slum tourism can provide a sympathetic counter-narrative for the criminalized poor, as “crime is rarely blamed upon poverty…[and] rather lumped together with everything ‘bad’ – evil qua evil.” While it refutes sensationalized news reports of urban communities, however, it departs from its original premise: what it intended to humanize, it has obscenely commoditized. No wonder its critics liken slum tourism to “gazing at people in poverty as if they were animals in a zoo,” considering unaddressed questions of residential privacy and consent. One woman in an South African township, observing a motor coach packed with tourists, confided in one researcher that she felt as if she were “treat[ed] like an animal, as if they’re on safari.”

Of course, it’s arguable that the newfound visibility of marginal populations to mainstream society, made possible by slum tourist activity, could advance a powerful context for social empowerment, economic improvement, political incorporation, and systemic change. These benefits, both material and immaterial, can be difficult to gauge due to the complexity of social relationships within struggling communities, though slumming in many cases provides ample opportunities for the purchase of locally-produced goods and encourages donations to charitable organizations, local or otherwise. A number of tour companies, like the Dharavi-based Reality Tours and Travel, donate as much as 80% of their profits to local organizations and charities — though it is presently unclear whether such a corporate policy is the exception or the rule. Rather, we should assess slum residents’ quality of life by addressing less quantitative factors, including the distribution of wealth, overall access to state resources, and the sustainability of their economic framework as a whole. All this cautions against regarding slum tourism as a means to a charitable end, for access to industry profits seems overwhelmingly uneven. “If [tour operators] say they help the poor, tell them to come and talk to us,” challenged one community association president in Rocinha. “What we have here is a lot of bad intentioned people who come here to exploit Rocinha, put the money in their pockets and walk away.”

A French company is slated to complete the construction of a 300 million dollar cable-car system over Rocinha that will provide “panoramic views of the sprawling slum and the Atlantic beyond,” but not without passionate objection from community associations. The project, mirrored after the sky-high transportation system built over Complexo do Alemão in 2011, serves as a real-word metaphor for the dismal costs of slum tourism. “The focus is on tourism, not residents,” says Alan Brum, an NGO director for Raizes em Movimento (Roots in Movement), later adding that “the cable car [in Alemão] only serves 7% of the population of around 140,000 people.” Both projects, despite being lavished with high praise, illustrate  the consequences of placing profits over people. For slum communities, education and health resources, as well as those for basic sanitation and garbage collection, will remain few and far between as governmental funds dwindle. Tourists, on the other hand, will be able to “see Rocinha from above without putting their feet on the ground.”

Sonia Tsuruoka is a social media intern for the Oxford University Press, and an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications, including Slate Magazine and the JHU News-Letter.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Slum tourism and its discontents appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesPrivate equity, hedge funds must be understood to be regulated effectivelyWhy do the French insist on their ‘cultural exception’?Who cares for those who care? 

Journalism: journey to an uncertain destination?

By Ian Hargreaves

Returning to any book script created a decade ago involves lexical shock. When the subject is journalism and the decade the one just gone, the effect is more that of lexical implosion.

My Very Short Introduction to Journalism (2005) was an abridged version of Journalism Truth or Dare (2003), written in transition from work as a full-time journalist to a new base at Cardiff University.

The decade that followed my move has seen the evisceration by the Internet of the advertising-based industrial model which made newspapers such profitable and influential businesses in the 20th century, resulting in newspaper closures, diminished publishing schedules and the loss of many thousands of journalists’ jobs, especially in the old, advanced economies of Europe and North America.

When it comes to the detritus of anachronisms tossed aside in this digital deluge, my own 2003/2005 text provides a plentiful source. Who, these days, speaks of a “personal digital assistant”, a millennial fashion accessory, even though the enhanced versions of such machines today are more personal and no less digital.

A decade ago, I entitled the chapter devoted to understanding the technological outlook for journalism, Matt’s Modem: tomorrow’s journalism: (who today knows or cares what a modem is?) a reference to the work of Matt Drudge, who made himself famous in 1998 by publishing on the Internet the first clear, public charges concerning President Clinton’s relationship with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

What most caught my eye about Matt Drudge was his public encounter with the journalistic establishment of the National Press Club in Washington, where he told a rather stiff audience that we had now entered “an era vibrating with the din of small voices” when “every citizen can be a reporter and can take on the powers that be.” When the President of the National Press Club challenged Drudge to explain his views on “the professional ethic of journalism,” Drudge replied: “Professional. You see, the thing is you are throwing these words at me that I can’t defend, because I am not a professional journalist. I am not paid by anyone.”

Today, as things have turned out, Drudge is paid. His blog offers a lively outpouring of facts, gossip, conjecture, and opinion and he is associated with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News television channel. Drudge, in short, has a business model which works in the digital age, unlike the scores of small town American newspapers which have put up their shutters for the last time, having lost their advertising revenue to search engines and list services.

So, here is journalism’s most profound lexical conundrum of the digital age. Could it be that the Internet, by undermining established business models of journalism, and simultaneously facilitating self-publication on an unprecedented scale, is radically re-defining our understanding of what ‘journalist’ is or even portending, in some sense, the death of journalism?

Is someone who publishes a news blog from their living room, such as my friend and colleague Dave Harte, a journalist or not? Dave and I are part of a research group trying to think some of this through with regard to areas of civic life beyond journalism. How do journalism’s traditional definitions apply to the activist tweeting pictures from Tahrir Square or to the community group campaigning for a better high street? To be a ‘real’ journalist, do you have to be paid for your work? And if you are paid, should you, or even must you, embrace a code of professional ethics?

My trusted, if decidedly analogue Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1987) tells me that journalism is: “the occupation or profession of a journalist.” But journalists, especially British ones, have luxuriated over the years in debating whether they are willing to be considered members of a profession, given that professional status in other occupations, such as medicine or law, involves codes of practice and consequent penalties for their breach which extend to loss of the right to practice. This sanction, in the view of many journalists, myself included, implies an unacceptable threat to freedom of expression and so the freedom of the news media in a democratic society. It invokes the notion of a ‘licensed’ press, of the sort which exists in non-democratic societies.

In truth, we are on a journey of uncertain destination, to discover whether what Yochai Benkler has called “the networked public sphere” will incorporate and extend what, for the last 200 years or so, we have thought of as “journalism”. Or will this new information system, sometimes called the ‘fifth estate’, simply overwhelm the ‘fourth estate’ of the press and kill off professional journalists, including those who don’t like the concept of a profession?

A survey of UK journalists in which I was recently involved sought to establish, among other things, whether the number of people who think of themselves as journalists has gone up or down in the last ten years. It concluded that the number hasn’t changed that much (at roughly 60,000) but that an increasing number of journalists today enjoy other forms of paid employment, such as working in universities (“hackademics”), marketing, speech-writing and activities in many other branches of growing communications industries.

My own hunch is that the differentiation between amateur journalists, who have always been part of journalism, and those who get paid for their work will find new ways of expressing itself. Here is Daniel Defoe’s description of a coffee house in 1728, where we get an early glimpse of the professional reporter at work:

“Persons are employed …. To haunt coffee houses and thrust themselves into companies where they are not known; or plant themselves at convenient distances to overhear what is said …. The same persons hang and loiter about the publick offices like housebreakers, waiting for an interview with some little clerk, or a conference with a door keeper in order to come at a little news, or an account of transactions; for which the fee is a shilling, or a pint of wine.”

In that sense, the culture, practices and ethics of the press, or indeed the culture, practices and ethics of online sleuths like Matt Drudge, really haven’t changed in three hundred years, as Lord Leveson is discovering, no doubt to his considerable disappointment. At the same time, the “networked public sphere” is entirely allowing new forms of on-line distribution and collaboration which uncover hidden facts (a form of reporting sometimes called ‘data journalism’), along with an uncountable array of opinion-givers and debaters, some of them cranks, some of them globally renowned experts.

Will I be writing an updated Very Short Introduction to Journalism? Or a Very Short Introduction to the Networked Public Sphere?

Ian Hargreaves is Professor of Digital Economy at Cardiff University. Previously he was Editor, the Independent; Editor the New Statesman; Deputy Editor of the Financial Times and Director of BBC News. He is current revising and updating Very Short Introduction to Journalism.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to on Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS


Subscribe to only media articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS


Image credit: Toowat satellite modem by Axlsite (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Journalism: journey to an uncertain destination? appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesVery Short Introductions go onlineWhen are bridges public art?On the Man Booker Prize 2013 shortlist