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The main thing is to tell a story. / It is almost / very important.-Frank O'Hara, "Fantasy" (1964)'A leading designer of video games might seem an unlikely exponent of the purity of genres and media (attitudes more commonly associated, as Marcie Frank notes in her introduction to this issue, with high modernism), but Jeffrey Kaplan, former design-team chief of the extremely successful video game World of Warcraft, sounded very much like an advocate of just such separatisms as he reproved his fellow game makers for what he called their "medium envy" at the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Rather than concentrating on what he sees as the specific and singular capacities of the video game, Kaplan argued, his colleagues were allowing their work to be driven by their alleged envy of writers and writing, consequently "drowning the player[s]" of their games in "reams of dialogue and narrative." Kaplan stated bluntly, "[W]e need to stop writing a fucking book . . . [when we design a] game because nobody wants to read it," and concluded, "We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game."2It is striking that despite Kaplan's disdain for print narrative as a model for video-game design, story is still his way of specifying what it is that he and his fellow designers have to offer those who play their games. This is consonant with Walter Benjamin's pronouncement in "The Storyteller" that "what distinguishes the novel from the story ... is its [i.e., the novel's] essential dependence on the book," on the medium of bound print. "The dissemination of the novel becomes possible only with the invention of printing," Benjamin goes on. For Benjamin, no such relation of medium dependence binds "story" to (printed) book. In the mediascape that emerged in the twentieth century, novels-remediated as films, television series, graphic narratives, etc.-frequently became something other than their native genre. "Story" generally names a number of the kinds of things that novels became. As Kaplan presents it, "story" is entirely compatible with what he calls "uniquely video game" modes of production-what he argues his fellow designers will have succeeded in doing when they have "stop[ped] writing a fucking book."Story is also a term that has circulated widely in the twentieth century for screenplay, soap opera, and other extended nonnovel narrative forms. It is the long-arc serial narrative-as it has informed a number of genres across several media, ranging from the seventeenthand eighteenth-century comedy of intrigue to nineteenth-century melodrama to twentieth-century sitcom and soap opera-that I intend to focus on in these pages. In looking at a somewhat different (although at some points overlapping) set of media archives from those that Frank considers in her introductory essay, I want to consider some of the ways in which certain genres and media forms have drawn extensively on the traditions of melodrama production, performance, and reception: both those that we ordinarily think of as obviously and essentially melodramatic (radio and TV soap operas, for chief examples) and those that we tend to think of as distinctly other to and different from melodrama (radio and TV sitcoms and newspaper comic strips).One route that I want to follow takes up the distinction that Frank discusses in her introduction-the distinction made by Gilbert Seldes in 1924 between early cinema, which he saw as emerging from melodrama and newspaper comic strips, and the cinema that succeeded it. As Seldes sees it, film took a catastrophically wrong turn in shifting away from the most popular entertainment forms of the time toward putatively prestigious forms of drama and "serious" theater for its models. In saying this, Seldes sounds somewhat like Kaplan at the Game Developers Conference in 2009, warning his fellow designers away from a tendency to imitate print too closely, urging his colleagues to "accept that we are not Shakespeare [or] Tolstoy. …

I knew Ian Watt, the author of The Rise of the Novel (1957), a little in his later years, and he once told me a story about his having been one of the Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s who had invited Gertrude Stein to the university to speak. The responsibility of meeting Stein's train and entertaining her until time for her lecture fell to Watt, and he said he was a little concerned beforehand about whether as an undergraduate he was quite up to interacting with Stein, who was by that time a famously formi dable person. So he was relieved on meeting her to discover that she seemed entirely agreeable and good natured; he probably did not know at the time that Stein had made a career not only of very much making her own way as an artist but of helping the ambitious young men around her—Ernest Hemingway, Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles, Sam Steward, Thornton Wilder, and many others—make theirs. Stein was a dab hand of long experience at drawing out bright young men by the time she met Watt.

OTAKU FOR QUEER THEORY AND MEDIA THEORY Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito" Tamaki, translated by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 20 1 1 . Pp. 2 1 3 + xxv. $60.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.In 2004, in the initial phases of trying to write a book about Henry Darger and his little-girl combatants, I was intrigued to come across an online review of a book on otaku - hardcore fans of "fighting girl" manga and anime - by a Japanese Lacanian in which Darger was a central figure.1 For the next several years, this one review was all I could learn about Tamaki Saito's take on Darger and otaku and the figure of the "beautiful fighting girl." (The review I'd seen was entitled "Attack of the Phallic Girls.") Then I heard a couple of years ago that J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson had completed a translation of the full text of Saito's book and that it was in press. In his book Beautiful Fighting Girl (first published in Japanese in 2000), Saito" analyzes the culture and sexuality of otaku, the mostly young male participants in one of the principal thriving consumer-collectorconnoisseur subcultures that has formed around manga and anime.With the publication of the present volume, non-Japanese-speaking scholars and fans of anime and manga, as well as students of sexuality and media, can now form our own responses to Saito's account of the meaning and significance of the sexuality of otaku and of the erotic charge of the highly mediated "warrior girl" figures who fascinate them. As cotranslator J. Keith Vincent attests in his invaluable, extensive introduction, it is "quite a baggy monster of a book" (xii), comprising chapters that range in kind from psychoanalytic theory to interviews with individual otaku and analyses of the workings of temporality in anime and manga. But Vincent goes on to make a compelling case that, taken together, the parts of Saito's book still have much to offer readers across a broad range of disciplines and interests, especially readers and practitioners of queer theory.Indeed, Beautiful Fighting Girl has generated as much heated debate as it has largely because of its author's insistence on putting otaku sexual desire and behavior - their strong emotional and/or erotic attachment to comics-and-cartoon depictions of cute girls in and out of battle - at the center of his analysis of otaku. Other commentators have tended to de-emphasize sexuality in their accounts. A book, published in Tokyo in 2001, in response to Saito's, by Hiroki Azuma, another prominent culture critic in Japan, has already been published in translation by the University of Minnesota Press (Otafyt: Japans Database Animals, 2009). Azuma's book foregrounds political and social trauma and recurrent US cultural invasions as primary factors in explaining otaku. He also deprecates Saito's focus on otaku sexuality and his pioneering attention to the kinds of highly networked, mediated, Internet-pervaded sexualities that have only become more widespread, and more controversial, in the decade since his book was first published.And yet, as Vincent points out in his introduction (xiv), sexuality, and specifically an extreme form of allegedly perverse sexuality, had been placed at the center of public debate on otaku over a decade before Saito's and Azuma's respective books first appeared. That occurred in 1989, with the arrest of twentysix-year-old Tsutomu Miyazaki, a Tokyo serial killer, for the murder and sexual molestation of four girls, aged 4-7. Before his arrest, the media had referred to Miyazaki as "The Little Girl Murderer," but, soon afterwards, the discovery (or planting - the debate about that appears to be unresolved) of anime as well as slasher films in his reportedly vast video collection (over five thousand titles) led to the media's rechristening him "The Otaku Murderer." The notion that watching too much video - too many slasher and anime films - had directly caused Miyazaki to commit his crimes gave rise to a full-blown moral panic in which the otaku subculture was "exposed" and demonized repeatedly as a breeding ground for deranged and violent pedophiles. …