Copenhagen Business School: CBS Open Journals

Duus, Henrik Johansen

Foo, Miriam Marquard

Larsen, Hanne Pico

Cumberland, Flemming

Nr. 28

1949-50, Beretning

Handelshøjskolen i København

1927-1928, Beretning for

1994, Årsberetning

1956-57, Beretning

1990, Årsberetning

The interest for user experience (UX) and usability in libraries has grown rapidly over the past years and has now become an essential tool for developing and assessing a library’s digital services and physical spaces. At Linköping University Library (LiUB) we are slowly moving towards a user-centered culture, where users are being observed interacting with both physical and virtual spaces, but this article will only focus on the library’s online presence. The main objective is to argue for continuous usability testing as a part of regular library activity

Friberg, Anneli

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Why continuous usability testing 
can and should be part of regular 
library activity  
– from a UX librarian’s point of view
The interest for user experience (UX) and usability 
in libraries has grown rapidly over the past years and 
has now become an essential tool for developing and 
assessing a library’s digital services and physical spaces. 
At Linköping University Library (LiUB) we are slowly 
moving towards a user-centered culture, where users 
are being observed interacting with both physical and 
virtual spaces, but this article will only focus on the 
library’s online presence. The main objective is to argue 
for continuous usability testing as a part of regular 
library activity.
 
Usability testing within the library sector is nothing new 
per se, but it is usually done in the process of launching 
a new or redesigned website/UI or implementing a new 
library system. Sometimes the tests are not conducted 
by library staff, but by external consultants. Our 
approach, however, is to use an in-house, continuous 
process which is applied not only to the library’s website 
structure, but also to other digital services.
Context
Linköping University (LiU) is one of 16 universities 
in Sweden. LiU has four campuses in three cities 
(Linköping, Norrköping, and Stockholm) and has four 
faculties: Science & Engineering, Medicine & Health 
Science, Arts & Science, and Educational Sciences. LiUB 
consists of four physical libraries, one on each campus, 
with approximately 90 staff members in total.
In order to make sure that LiUB contributes in a useful 
and valuable way to student learning and research, we 
have tried to find different ways to understand our users’ 
needs and behaviour. We use our insights to improve 
the digital library in order to provide a user-friendly 
and intuitive way for students and researchers at LiU to 
access the information they need for their studies and 
research.
The LiU Library Experience 
The groundwork for the library’s systematic user 
involvement was done within a web strategy project 
in the spring of 2014. The web strategy established 
usability and user benefits as central to the continuous 
web development process. In order to accomplish a 
user-centered library website, we decided to find a 
doable model for user-involvement. The book Rocket 
Surgery Made Easy: the Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding 
and Fixing Usability Problems by Steve Krug became our 
inspiration. The workflow for usability testing at LiUB is 
illustrated in Fig. 1.
 
 
 
We also decided to form a usability team at the library. 
The team consists of five people (of which three are 
librarians), including myself, with different skills and 
roles such as system manager, computer programmer, 
webmaster, UX expert, and cognitive scientist. Over the 
last 24 months, the usability team has gathered once a 
month to do testing.
For the tests we use randomly chosen employees and/
or students as test participants, three per session. In my 
experience, engaging face to face is the most successful 
way to recruit users. For example, I usually recruit 
students I meet in the library. Regarding employees we 
ANNELI FRIBERG,  LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, ANNELI.FRIBERG@LIU.SE
Fig. 1
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always recruit research or teaching staff such as PhD students, 
lecturers, university teachers, and professors. My experience 
is that most students and employees I ask are willing to help 
us as long as they can find the time for it. They all want to be 
part of a process that aims to improve the user experience.
When it comes to deciding what to test, we make a 
preliminary plan at the beginning of each semester. This plan 
sometimes changes during the semester. What we actually 
test depends on different projects in progress at the library. 
We never test systems or interfaces that we can’t alter or 
modify ourselves to some extent.
We conduct usability testing monthly during each semester, 
which gives us approximately eight test sessions per year. This 
enables an agile and iterative approach to assessing the users’ 
experiences of the digital library as well as helping in the 
development of our digital services.
On the test day, the usability team divides into two groups 
in two different locations: a test room (see Fig. 2) and 
an observation room (see Fig. 3). The facilitator and one 
observer go to the test room, while the rest of the team goes 
to the observation room. Often the latter are accompanied by 
other observers and stakeholders; sometimes colleagues from 
other departments within the university such as the division 
for IT Services, sometimes external such as librarians from 
other universities.
 
We combine different methods like observation, think-aloud 
protocol, and capturing screen activity. By using different 
practices that complement each other, we avoid the 
uncertainty of using just one method. One of the benefits 
of triangulation of data is that we get a more complete 
picture of the usability issues that need to be addressed.
Each test person is given a specific assignment based on 
a common user scenario for the service to be tested. The 
test person attempts to complete the assignment while 
thinking aloud. If needed, the facilitator encourages the 
test participant to think aloud and describe what he/
she is trying to do. At the same time, the team in the 
observation room records what the test person says 
and does. Primarily, we use Camtasia to record screen 
activity, and we set up an Adobe Connect meeting to 
share screens between the test room and the observation 
room. Obviously, we do not record anything without 
permission from the users. Before we begin the test 
session, the test participant signs a written consent.
After the test, the facilitator and observer from the test 
room join the rest of the usability team in the observation 
room and a debriefing session starts. We then collect 
and discuss the usability problems we have noticed 
and put them together in an aggregated list of feasible 
improvements. We also prioritize the things on the list.
After each test session, the usability team starts to 
improve the things listed. Depending on what the 
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
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problems are and what has to be done, we involve different 
colleagues outside the usability team. The recordings have proven 
valuable for the analyses and development in between the test 
sessions. They are an essential complement to the observers’ 
notes.
Another valuable complement is so called guerrilla testing, which 
we do sometimes in between the monthly test sessions. This type 
of testing is both agile and flexible. It is a “low cost method of 
user testing. The term ‘guerrilla’ refers to its ‘out in the wild’ style, 
in the fact that it can be conducted anywhere […]”1 When we 
perform guerrilla testing, we approach people in the library and 
ask them to give quick feedback. This fits well with our thinking 
that some testing is better than no testing.
Outcomes
The improvements we have made as a result of what we have seen 
during our usability testing range from very small terminological 
changes to more structural changes on our website. One of the 
first things we tested was the information architecture for a new 
library website. For that, we used a tool called Treejack. We did 
one test session with students and one with employees. This 
enabled us to get valuable feedback on the site structure.
For several years, we had a tabbed search box on the library start 
page. Last year, we decided to renew the design, inspired by the 
design of the search box on the MIT Library’s website. Before 
we launched the new search box, we made a prototype which 
we used to perform both regular usability testing and guerrilla 
testing. The feedback we got gave us useful input to the design 
process.
We have also tested different features and new services for the 
discovery tool, such as a new search service for e-publications. 
We tested this service twice – once with undergraduate students 
and once with PhD students. In addition to getting feedback 
on what adjustments to do, we also learned that undergraduate 
students have quite a different attitude to journals than PhD 
students have. We have seen this in other situations, for instance 
when doing interviews as part of the web strategy project in 
2014, but seeing this again during usability testing confirmed our 
previous insights.
Things we have also tested and improved are terminology, 
holdings information, and link resolver user interface. Sometimes 
we make changes and then we do a new round of testing, but 
more often we get indirect feedback on changes we have done 
while testing new things.
1  GOV.UK. (n.d.). Guerrilla testing: Getting input into 
products and services. Retrieved 27 September 2016, from https://
www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/user-research/
guerrilla-testing.html
A bonus effect is that LiUB’s work has been noticed and 
recognized outside of the library, which has contributed 
to change the image of the library. Additionally, usability 
testing is an excellent way to make our services more 
visible to users.
Conclusion
A vast understanding about our users is the foundation of 
any user-centered development. By combining qualitative 
and quantitative methods and applying a UX-perspective 
we are better equipped to meet our users’ changing needs 
and behaviour. It allows a more agile workflow. The 
trick is to keep it simple. We do not consider ourselves 
researchers. What we do are continuous modifications 
based on input we get from real users. Our motivation 
is to enhance users’ experiences of the library’s digital 
services.
Based on our experiences from the last 24 months, 
we have found that systematic usability testing can 
and should be a part of the regular library activity 
and that it can encompass so much more than just the 
website structure. The key to success is the model itself, 
particularly when it is carried out monthly during the 
academic year. By involving real users continuously, we 
avoid getting stuck in our own internal assumptions of 
how users interact with the library’s digital services.


English

Why continuous usability testing can and should be part of regular library activity - from a UX librarian’s point of view

Huang, Alicia

Reviews 
Peter Swirski, American Political Fictions: War on Errorism in Contem-
porary American Literature, Culture, and Politics. New York: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2015. 214 pages. ISBN 978-1-13751-888-0. 
The taxpayers are, of course, reluctant to pass judgment on the economists, because they 
feel—and are made to feel—that they are not smart enough to wrap their heads around 
the math and the jargon. As a result, when a microphone is shoved under their noses, John 
and Jane Doe fall back on soundbites about the invisible hand or about less government 
in business and more business in government. Meanwhile, deregulation of banking and 
financial markets paves the way for meltdowns that regularly wipe out trillions of dol-
lars in shareholder value and reveal palliatives about free market for what they are: great 
American fictions.
This excerpt of Peter Swirski’s latest monograph American Political Fic-
tions: War on Errorism in Contemporary American Literature, Culture, and 
Politics unpacks just one of a myriad of errors, myths, and outright lies 
that abound in American politics. Interestingly, as Swirski spares no effort 
to document, they are produced and circulated in equal proportions by the 
political elites and by the public.
As the subtitle of this brilliant book suggests, Swirski wages a war 
against these errors and he does it in provocative and enlightening ways—
just as popular political art he dissects does. He purposely selects a wide 
range of American fictions for dissection, from left to right, from lowbrow 
to nobrow, and not least from the Hill to the White House, all of which of-
fer him a vantage point for a critical look at American political literature, 
American political culture and American politics. Coming in the wake of 
his Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010) and American Utopia and Social 
Engineering (2011), which were reviewed and praised on both sides of the 
Atlantic and across the political spectrum from the arch-conservative Fi-
nancial Times to the arch-liberal Howard Zinn, American Political Fictions 
cements his reputation as one of our most interesting critics and scholars of 
contemporary American literature and American elitist politics.
128 American Studies in Scandinavia, 49:1
Beginning with Joseph Heller’s “novel as history” Picture This, the book 
launches a comparative discussion of Periclean Athens, the seventeenth-
century Dutch Republic and the USA under Reagan and Bush administra-
tions. In the process it develops a panoramic picture of American demo-
cratic imperialism. Fortified by evidence from congressional hearings to 
strategic documents of national security and economic statistics, the chap-
ter reveals how war and money twine to form the bedrock of human nature 
across centuries.
Swirski then asks what happens when religion is grafted onto politics 
and education and casts a critical eye over the apocalyptic fiction series Left 
Behind and its deep impact on American public life. He unravels a tangled 
web of links between Christian fundamentalism and America’s mainstream 
political platforms, which include displacing democracy by charismatic 
leadership, polarizing electorate at the expense of collaboration and com-
promise, and openly advocating mass behavioral control. Although not in-
tended as such, the chapter reads as a great satire. Sections such as “Apoca-
lypse Now”—which confronts the fuzzy logic and dissociated theology of 
fundamentalists—or “Idiot Nation”, “The Texas Textbook Massacre”, and 
“Team America” document the anti-intellectualism of the Bible-thumpers 
and the sorry state of what passes for American education.
Other than the evangelical version of apocalypse, is there another ver-
sion of doomsday that hangs over our heads? In Chapter 3, Swirski di-
rects the spotlight on Alistair Beaton’s A Planet for the President in which 
benevolent American hegemonists kill seven billion people and create a 
planet for POTUS alone. Aided by personal interviews with Beaton, Swir-
ski scrutinizes the affinities between Obama and Bush, muckrakes the gap 
between Obama’s bark on election trail and his bite in office, and warns of 
homegrown fascism enabled by the expanding power of the President and 
erosion of citizens’ constitutional rights.
In “(R)hyming (A)merican (P)oetry” Swirski passionately argues that 
rap is the quintessentially American genre of poetic and musical expres-
sion. He brings out rap’s lyrical complexity, its social and aesthetic appeal 
and its political credentials, which enjoy cross-racial appreciation and turn 
political rap into “the CNN for young people all over the world”. Always 
entertaining and often downright funny, Swirski documents how “politi-
cal” rap (the kind you will never hear on MTV) transcends the common 
perception of hip-hop as a lowbrow mass entertainment. The lyrics that 
Swirski quotes, full of “street vernacular”, manifest in themselves the “liv-
129REVIEWS
ing expression of authenticity in American speech”, which is absent from 
political rallies and mainstream corporate media. It is no wonder that H. 
Bruce Franklin enthusiastically endorses American Political Fictions from 
the back cover with the remark that “the chapter on rap alone is worth the 
price of admission”.
Coming last, Chapter 5 delivers perhaps the strongest message. Al-
though Swirski acknowledges the impact of The West Wing on Ameri-
can political life as the “civics and history classroom”, he criticizes the 
award-winning show for reinforcing the stale myths of American democ-
racy—the sanctity of the presidency and the representational system of 
government among them. In an alternative to the current American po-
litical establishment, like de Tocqueville Swirski initiates a debate about 
the nature of democracy in America, which he defines as “power to the 
people”. He not only pinpoints the illusions of people’s power instilled by 
mechanisms like presidential campaigns, but also analyzes Swiss, Cali-
fornian, and European Union’s practices of initiative and referendum, and 
sheds the light on the premises of direct democracy: open access to infor-
mation and education.
In a nutshell, Peter Swirski is a great storyteller. His brilliant stories 
about artists and con-artists, fictions and facts surrounding American poli-
tics are written with wit and humor that make his arguments compelling and 
a pleasure to read.
Alicia Huang University of California, Berkeley
Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transforma-
tion of the Democratic Party. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
2015. 392 pages. ISBN 978-0-691-15723-8.
The suburbanization of the United States in the decades following the end 
of the Second World War marked a profound economic, political, and cul-
tural shift in American history. Though achieved through Eisenhower’s ac-
ceptance of the New Deal consensus and the government’s broad role in 
society, the change has historically been understood as a part of the growing 
political strength of conservatism. In Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals 
and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, Lily Geismer complicates 
this partial understanding of suburban politics.


Peter Swirski's American Political Fictions: War on Errorism in Contemporary American Literature, Culture, and Politics

Christiansen, Steen

135REVIEWS
Mark Bernard, Selling the Splat Pack: DVD Revolution and the Ameri-
can Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 216 
pages. ISBN 9780748685493.
Studies of film usually focus on auteur filmmakers, the consolidation and 
cultural significance of various genres, or cinematic trends, whether the-
matic or aesthetic—all approaches that are typically textually intrinsic. For-
mal devices take pride of place as symptoms of broader cultural changes. 
Mark Bernard, Instructor of American Studies and Communication Studies 
at the University of North Carolina, instead focuses on all that is extrinsic 
to the movies themselves, paratexts in other words, and paints a convinc-
ing picture of why such an approach provides significant insights that are 
otherwise overlooked or obscured.
Bernard’s basic argument is that films have always been understood in a 
broader context than the films themselves, and that much of how we under-
stand films and their impact, comes from this extra-textual territory. How-
ever, much like the movie brats of New Hollywood (Scorsese, Coppola, 
Lucas, Spielberg and more) revolutionized American filmmaking with a 
deep understanding of film history, both American and European, so a new 
generation, is Bernard’s claim, is revolutionizing American film again, this 
time through a deep understanding of the home movie market, online cul-
ture, and horror fandom.
This so-called Splat Pack, consisting of Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, James 
Wan, Alexandre Aja, and more, is less cohesive than the New Hollywood 
brats. Instead, their approach to filmmaking and especially the film industry 
is similar: they knowingly target home audiences rather than cinema-goers, 
because this allows a different form of filmmaking. Bernard operates with 
three main categories, industry, technology, and audience reception. Since 
the 2000s, audience reception has not been solely located in the filmtext but 
also in DVD special features and commentary tracks. Here, both filmmak-
ers and audiences vie for control and insight into film meaning in ways that 
go far beyond typical spectatorship.
Working from a political economy perspective, Bernard delineates the 
ways in which contemporary American horror cinema is not a coherent 
political machine, nor is there any reason to understand these films within 
a reflectionist paradigm. Bernard argues against understanding contempo-
rary American horror films as symptoms of the War on Terror, 9/11 trau-
ma, or any direct cultural connection. However, Bernard’s argument is not 
136 American Studies in Scandinavia, 49:1
that these readings are wrong in and of themselves, but more that such 
approaches obscure the actualities of film production, often conflate quite 
diverse films, and ignore the central fact of all films: that they are com-
modities. 
The cohesion of the splat pack is therefore not ideological stance, or a 
desire to use horror films as forms of social critique, but rather that these 
directors have been successful in navigating the film industry, finding an 
audience that is willing to buy their films on DVD, and otherwise ‘giving 
the audience what they want’ without any sense of that being pejorative. 
More than a coherent genre or aesthetic form, the splat pack directors have 
found a production format that works exceedingly well and have made suc-
cessful cult directors of them all. Bernard’s approach also convincingly ex-
plains how a director like James Wan can make films as different as Saw, 
The Conjuring, and Furious 7: he works the industry rather than a specific 
genre or aesthetic form.
If we stay with the Saw franchise, Bernard also gives a much-needed dis-
cussion of film seriality and how audiences understand franchises. Moving 
away from the tired notion of ‘authorial voice’ Bernard shows that audience 
interaction is far more significant, pointing to how the special features of 
all the Saw films produce a ‘clickable space’ for the audience to engage 
with. Such reenactment and reconfiguration also permeate the entire notion 
of film franchises. For the Saw franchise itself, this notion of reconfigu-
ration is pushed even further with the films’ central concept of playing a 
game. The DVD special features are both designed to look like games and 
to invite the audience to keep playing. In other words, the attraction of the 
films can be continued on the DVD and will prolong the enjoyment of the 
primary text.
Bernard’s book is particularly useful for American studies scholars be-
cause it provides invaluable context for its specific area—contemporary 
American horror—but also for its method. Bernard does not discredit close 
reading models but does insist that cultural products—of any sorts—are 
always more complex, always embedded in a larger context. Significantly, 
many of the conventional arguments made about the splat pack directors—
the extremely graphic nature of their films, their sleazy orientations, the di-
rectors’ maverick status—are not so much countered as shown in a broader, 
more detailed light. Rather than naively accept statements made by the di-
rectors themselves or their producers, Bernard reveals how myth building 
and deliberate framing are part of marketing these films and their directors. 
137REVIEWS
While some may argue that only commercial directors and fads lend 
themselves to this form of study, I would love to see critical studies of 
recent movements such as slow cinema, smart cinema, and other artistic or 
critically acclaimed movements of recent years. Any cinema, in any form, 
is always embedded in a commercial environment, and although Bernard’s 
book is very different, it is a worthy successor to Thomas Schatz’s The Ge-
nius of the System. The study of production, industry, and technology holds 
a lot of promise for future research.
Steen Christiansen Aalborg University
Ryan Bishop. Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film. Edin-
burgh University Press, 2014. 192 pages. ISBN 9780748698042.
What is film comedy? If you ask Ryan Bishop, laughter is only half the 
picture. Instead, comedy, particularly film comedy, should be regarded as 
an irruption, a challenge to the visual field and visual culture. Comedy be-
comes a way to question the very techne of film and visual technologies 
through exposing their inner logics. If this seems like a heady thesis for 
an often overlooked and ignored genre, Bishop argues it with convincing 
vivacity. We should not, Bishop argues, ignore comedy’s capacity for re-
vealing our culturally hoodwinked perception by making us appear foolish. 
At heart, Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film is not a con-
ventional genre study. Bishop neither discusses genre histories, repetition 
and variation, nor the accretion of formal conventions. His errand is com-
pletely different and the book is stronger for it. Bishop outlines three ways 
in which he adds to the body of research on film comedy: 1) comedy stages 
cultural criticism; 2) comedic film addresses technology and techne head-
on and so inevitably addresses the visual culture comedic film generates 
and questions; 3) adds to questions regarding the comedic in a critical the-
ory vocabulary, rather than the psychoanalytic and representational debates 
that have dominated issues of comedy.
Bishop brings some much needed cultural critique into comedy, but at 
the same time this critical shift comes at the expense of moving slightly out-
side comedy proper. Bishop shifts between “comedy” and “comedic film” 
and other variations that seem to point to the same subject but in fact are 
slightly different. For Bishop, Bowling for Columbine is comedic, although 


Mark Bernard's Selling the Splat Pack: DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film

Ullén, Magnus

Reviews 
Jeanne Cortiel, With a Barbarous Din: Race and Ethnic Encounter in 
Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Heidelberg: Univer-
sitätsverlag Winter, 2016. 281 pages. ISBN: 978-3-8253-6557-8.
‘Triangulation,’ the American Heritage Dictionary informs us, is “the 
establishment of a political position that differs from two existing or 
opposing positions, especially in being moderate.” In politics, in other words, 
it names a practice that seeks to persuade by minimizing the differences 
between two choices. In the academy, in contrast, it has increasingly come 
to be seen as a term promising an escape from the suffocating tyranny of all 
kinds of binaries. As such a positively loaded term, “triangulation” figures 
prominently in Jeanne Cortiel’s With a Barbarous Din: Race and Ethnic 
Encounter in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By introducing 
“ethnicity” into the study of representations of racial relations in mid-
nineteenth-century American literature, Cortiel wants to enable “a reading 
of nineteenth-century American literature that looks beyond Anglo-Saxon 
monoculturalism and the bipolarity of a slavery-based race system” (15). 
To that end, she offers readings of five different texts published around 
1855: Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Frederick Douglass’s My Bond-
age and My Freedom, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second anti-slavery novel 
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, the first edition of Walt Whit-
man’s Leaves of Grass, and finally John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Ad-
ventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. These are 
very different texts, but Cortiel highlights their similarity rather than their 
singularity: all “engage with contemporary delimitations of ‘race’ but also 
find ways to transcend their terms” (32). More specifically, her method, 
Cortiel declares, is that “of reading ahistorically through the structural op-
position between race and ethnicity” (34). 
In practice, this means that Cortiel ignores not history so much as def-
initional clarity. Throughout, race is “conceptualized […] as a scientific 
concept grounded in a basic dualistic opposition or binary” (242), even 
116 American Studies in Scandinavia, 49:2
though race clearly is not a binary category but allows for multiple catego-
ries. Cortiel notes as much herself when discussing Louis Agassiz’s Types 
of Mankind (which lists eight different races), but makes light of this cir-
cumstance, claiming that “even in the context of categorization of multiple 
‘races,’ the black/white binary as a shaping force in American culture at the 
time is the overriding organizational paradigm of Types of Mankind as a 
whole” (27). That may well be true, but that does not mean that race per se 
is best seen as a binary. It is difficult to escape the impression that Cortiel 
casts race as a binary simply to make ethnicity seem a comparatively more 
nuanced concept.
“Ethnicity,” Cortiel claims, “becomes productive both as a term that 
names a textual structure and as a way of looking at a text that focuses on 
its aesthetic – and erotic – qualities while at the same time being ground-
ed in a political history of difference and identity” (19). Frustratingly, but 
characteristically for the writing style throughout, Cortiel fails to explain 
what this “textual structure” that ethnicity names looks like. Nor is it by 
any means clear how the aesthetic and erotic qualities of a text supposedly 
relate to each other, or how ethnicity “as a way of looking at a text” differs 
from other ways of looking at aesthetic aspects of texts.
unsurprisingly, given the definitional fuzziness of the study’s central an-
alytical term, Cortiel’s study is rich in jargon, but poor in genuine insight. 
When we are told that in “both ‘Benito Cereno’ and My Bondage and My 
Freedom, the author’s body is either radically absent (in Melville’s case) or 
fully present (in Douglass’ case)” (121), I cannot help but think that surely 
the author’s body is not present in either of these texts, and that even had it 
been metaphorically present in one of them, it would have made more sense 
to say so than to claim that it is either present or absent in both. Other times, 
Cortiel would have the text say something it demonstrably does not. Dis-
cussing Dred, for instance, she claims that the novel’s “epigraph points to 
an undefined ethnic encounter in the chaotic space of the dismal Swamp” 
(143), when in fact there is no encounter to be encountered in the two stan-
zas from Thomas Moore’s “A Ballad. The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” in 
question; they speak only of a man who enters a place where “man never 
trod before.”
Cortiel would also have us believe that Dred in its entirety is informed 
by a “gap between the narrator and the authorial presence in the text” 
(153), that diminishes “the authority of the narrator” (155), and throughout 
“demonstrat[es] the limits of the narrator’s imagination” (148). If one wants 
117REVIEWS
to make the case for Stowe as a super-sophisticated author, who – decades 
ahead of Henry James – would have the reader spot the difference between 
the narratorial voice and her true authorial intention, one needs to have 
a strong argument indeed. Cortiel bases her case for the unreliability of 
Dred’s narrator on the fact that Milly, one of its principal African Ameri-
can characters, is said to remind “one of the Scripture expression ‘upright 
as a palm-tree’.” To Cortiel’s mind this shows that the narrator slips “into 
popular biblical misinterpretation,” since the phrase in its original context 
describes idols that can do neither harm nor good. It hence “conveys just 
a hint of incompetence on the part of the narrator, which distinguishes her 
from the theologically competent authorial presence in the text” (149). But 
why should it be beyond Stowe to use a colorful biblical expression locally, 
without taking account of the full implications of the phrase in its original 
context? After all, when Tiff, one of the characters Cortiel claims escapes 
“narratorial control” (152), does so in merging “Old and New Testament in 
his prayer” (147), Cortiel praises his reading as “emblematic for his func-
tion as breaker of binaries” (148). Why not extend the same generosity to 
the narrator who recounts what Tiff and all the other characters do? One 
could much more plausibly argue that in contrast to what is the case in 
Henry James, or even Herman Melville (who is the more immediate point 
of comparison in this study), the functionality of Stowe’s text depends upon 
the fusion of narratorial and authorial voice. Thus Stowe makes no effort at 
all to distinguish herself from the narrator in her Preface to Dred, but makes 
a point of emphasizing that the “writer has placed in the mouth of one of 
her leading characters” (my emphasis) the words of a historical figure. Ev-
erything suggests that to Stowe’s mind at least, the author of Dred is also 
its narrator.
Cortiel takes no note of such obvious characteristics of the text in her 
readings, but prefers to hunt down far-fetched potential significations 
through tracing transtextual relations. These are occasionally illuminating, 
but not sufficient to convince this reader, at least, that the texts analyzed 
consistently exhibit “the relinquishment of epistemological control on the 
part of the narrator or speaker” (241), nor that they all perform the same 
kind of cultural work. For regardless of what she reads, Cortiel finds the 
same things: “subversive triangulations that destabilize the validity of the 
binary opposition between whiteness and blackness reappear in all of the 
texts that I analyze here” (37). Indeed, Cortiel admits to finding such trian-
gulations even when the binary in question is not present, for while Joaquín 
118 American Studies in Scandinavia, 49:2
Murieta “omits African American characters, it draws on a similar discur-
sive contest between race and ethnicity as “Benito Cereno,” My Bondage 
and My Freedom, Dred, and Leaves of Grass” (40). 
The upshot of Cortiel’s protracted procedure, then, is that the works dis-
cussed all seem to work in the same way, and say the same thing. Precisely 
what they say, is another matter. Cortiel favors the grand sounding state-
ment over the precise point. “As in ’Benito Cereno’ and My Bondage and 
My Freedom, an ethnic multiplicity becomes possible in Dred at precisely 
those moments in which the cultural space of the other is recognized as a 
semantic system that operates outside the comprehension of the speaker” 
(155; my emphasis), Cortiel informs us in a characteristically imprecise and 
ideologically supercharged turn of phrase. This is the kind of writing that 
gives academese a bad name. A reader may be forgiven for thinking that 
Cortiel comes awfully close, here, to saying: something desirable becomes 
possible in Dred at precisely those moments in which something desirable 
is recognized as something desirable, just as it does in any text read that 
way.
Cortiel tells us in conclusion that “all of these very different texts are cen-
trally concerned with negotiating a fundamental duality that is confronted 
with a multiplicity structured around relational triangulations” (238). She 
also makes clear that in her view it is these confrontations between “dual-
ity” and “multiplicity” that we should thank for everything that is good and 
progressive about the novels she has discussed. Each of them she claims, 
is informed by a “narrative unreliability.” Precisely how this term is to be 
understood is not explained, but the gist seems to be that readers should feel 
free to ignore what texts actually say, and come up with whatever they want 
them to say by setting them in relation to other texts available at the time. 
Perhaps I am being unfair; but to judge by With a Barbarous Din, the 
academic practice of triangulation much like its political counterpart tends 
to close down rather than open up possibilities.
Magnus Ullén Karlstad University


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Jeanne Cortiel's With a Barbarous Din: Race and Ethnic Encounter in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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