12th ESSE CONFERENCE
Home
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, The Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts
and SKASE (The Slovak Association for the Study of English)
want to thank you all for your participation in the
12th ESSE CONFERENCE
in
KOŠICE, SLOVAKIA
Friday 29 August – Tuesday 2 September, 2014
After the conference: reflections from our visitors plus some photos
http://kaa.ff.upjs.sk/…complishment
SPONSORS
SUPPORTERS
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
DEPARTMENT STAFF:
Zuzana Buráková
Myroslava Fabian
Štefan Franko
Renáta Gregová
Slávka Janigová
Grzegorz Kleparski
Stanislav Kolář
Lívia Körtvélyessy
Kurt Magsamen
Viktória Marcinová
Martina Martausová
Boris Mudrák
Viera Nováková
Renáta Panocová
Július Rozenfeld
Karin Sabolíková
Adriana Saboviková
Soňa Šnircová
Pavol Štekauer
Renáta Timková
Slávka Tomaščíková
PHD STUDENTS:
Veronika Babjáková
Silvia Baučeková
Alexandra Bikkyová
Petra Filipová
Ján Haláček
Matúš Hrubovčák
Pavol Hučka
Lenka Janovcová
Zuzana Naďová
Mária Vasiľová
Mariana Zeleňáková
WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Tim Caudery
Dagmar Hvozdovičová
Daniela Čorňáková
Jaroslav Hantke
Karol Chovančík
Igor Dohovič
Peter Balogh
HORNÁD Folk Ensemble
Conference venue
House of Arts, Moyzesova 66
August 29, 2014
Registration and conference info centre
Opening of the conference
Plenary lecture 1
Poetry reading
Concert for conference participants and accompanying persons
Welcome dinner for conference participants and accompanying persons
Rectorate, Šrobárova 2
1st Floor
Senate Meeting Room ✦ (SMR)
August 27, 2014 – ESSE Executive Meeting
August 28–29, 2014 – ESSE Board Meeting
August 30 – September 2, 2014 – Registration and conference info centre
Historic Aula ✦
September 1, 2014 – General Assembly
Public computers
Backyard
September 1, 2014 – Conference Barbecue
M5 ✦ M6 ✦ P5 ✦
August 30 – September 2, 2014 – Plenary and Sub-plenary Lectures
M5 ✦
August 31, 2014 – ProQuest Special Event
P5 ✦
September 2, 2014 – Conference Closing
Aristotle
Basement
Conference rooms – A1, A2, A3, A4
Public computers (2)
Ground Floor
Conference rooms – A5, A6, A7
Poster presentations
Public computers (2)
Coffee breaks
1st Floor
Conference rooms – A8, A9
Public computers (2)
Coffee breaks
2nd Floor
Conference room A10
Socrates
Ground Floor
Book Exhibition
Coffee breaks
1st Floor
Conference rooms – S1, S2, S3, S4, SLAB
Public computers (3)
Coffee breaks
2nd Floor
Conference room – S5
Public computers (2)
REGISTRATION
REGISTRATION NOW!
A flat fee will be charged for the entire Conference. There will be no daily rate. Please note that the fee includes the opening dinner and concert, the guided tour of Košice and the conference barbecue.
| ESSE members, early registration by 15 June 2014 | € 120 |
| ESSE members, registering on and after 16 June 2014 | € 200 |
| Non-ESSE members, early registration by 15 May 2014 | € 160 |
| Non-ESSE members, registering on and after 16 June 2014 | € 240 |
| Accompanying persons | € 40 |
Postgraduate Students | € 60 |
Complete the online registration form below and click to submit it.
Note that your first name, last name, affiliation and country will appear on the badge; the same information plus your e-mail will appear in the conference programme.
ONLINE REGISTRATION FORM
available here
PAYMENT METHOD
Note that your registration is not final until payment is received. For early bird registrations payment must be sent by the deadline date.
Payment method
There are two ways of making payments:
1. payment by bank transfer to the conference bank account:
Any fees charged by remitting banks are to be paid by the conference participants. It is the responsibility of the sender to ensure that the conference receives the full amount. Any amount deducted by the banks for charges will be charged in cash on the first day of the conference.
Bank details for transfers:
Beneficiary name: Progress CA s.r.o.
Beneficiary address: Krivá 18, 04001 Košice, Slovakia
Bank name: Sberbank Slovensko, a. s. Košice
Bank address: Mlynská 29, 043 73 Košice, Slovakia
Account number: 4350225857/3100
IBAN: SK 14 31 00 0000 0043 5022 5857
SWIFT/BIC CODE : LUBA SK BX
Please ensure that your transfer is identifiable by including the message „ESSE 14“ and your name, e.g. „ESSE 14 John Smith“.
2. payment by credit card
To pay by credit card, please download THE CREDIT CARD AUTHORIZATION FORM here and complete it, ensuring that you sign it. Note that a 5% credit card fee must be added to the total. Send a copy of your form by fax (+421–55–680–6156) or as a scanned file attachment by e-mail (gabriela.sujanova@progress.eu.sk).
Receipts
Reception of payment will be confirmed by e-mail. Printed receipts will be issued at the registration desk.
Cancellation
The registration fee will be refunded for cancellations made by the 30th June 2014 (bank charges to be borne by participant). No registration fee refunds will be made for cancellations after that date. Cancellations with refund requests should be made by e-mail to gabriela.sujanova@progress.eu.sk.
FEE WAIVERS
A number of delegates for whom attending the conference presents financial difficulties will be granted full or partial fee-waivers. Applications should be sent between 1 April and 30 April 2014 to esse2014info@upjs.sk. Applicants will be informed shortly thereafter whether they have been granted a fee waiver.
INSURANCE
Please note that neither Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, nor SKASE, nor ESSE will pay for, or accept liability for, travel, accommodation, living or other expenses incurred by lecturers, convenors, co-convenors, or those invited to participate in round tables, seminars, PhD sessions or posters, unless previously agreed in writing.
All conference participants should be aware that neither Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, nor SKASE, nor ESSE have or will accept any liability whatsoever for any damage or injury to visitors, to the university or to property, however such damage or injury may be caused.
Delegates are expected to be fully insured by their own institutions or through their personal insurance for personal health, accident/property coverage (also against claims made by third parties) during their participation in the Conference.
GETTING AROUND KOŠICE
How to travel to Košice
By air: The easiest way to get to Košice is flying via Prague (Czech Airlines), Vienna (Austrian Airlines), London Luton (Wizz Air) or Bratislava (Czech Airlines).
Košice is also connected with Budapest and Krakow airports by minibus service (approx. 3 hours’ bus journey).
By train: From Bratislava, Prague, Budapest, etc. there are IC and Express trains to Košice. You can find detailed information about current train services at www.slovakrail.sk.
By coach: From many European and Slovak cities and towns there are Eurolines and Express coaches to Košice. You can find detailed information about current coach timetables at www.cp.sk.
HOW TO GET AROUND KOŠICE
TO THE CITY CENTRE:
To reach the city centre from the airport, you can either call a taxi (see the taxi numbers listed below; note that it is cheaper to call a taxi – 7 to 10 euro – than to hail a taxi directly at the airport – 10 to 15 euro), or take bus number 23 (0.60 euro, you will also need a 0.60 euro ticket for each large item of luggage you are carrying, but hand-luggage size bags are free of charge) which leaves from the bus stop situated directly in front of the Arrivals hall. Continue for 5 bus stops and get off at the Liberation Square bus stop – “NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV”. The Aupark shopping mall and the Double Tree by Hilton Hotel will be in front of you. The Centrum Hotel will be behind you. To get to Main Street – “HLAVNÁ ULICA” – cross the road in front of you and continue straight ahead, passing the Double Tree by Hilton Hotel, which is the first building on “HLAVNÁ ULICA”. The Cathedral is about a 3-minute walk from the hotel.
The timetables of bus number 23 are reproduced below, and they can also be checked at imhd.zoznam.sk/ke and at www.dpmk.sk. The journey time is 15 minutes and tickets can be purchased from ticket machines (exact change required) at the airport bus stop for 0.60 euro or from the bus driver at 1.00 euro.
From the railway or bus station to the city centre
While there is a taxi rank in front of the railway and bus stations, walking to the centre is really quite quick and easy. The historical centre, with the majority of hotels, restaurants, stores and the enchanting Main Street – “HLAVNÁ ULICA” – is only a 7– to 9-minute walk from the railway and bus stations. If arriving by train, go out of the right-most doors of the station and walk straight along the pavement in front of you to the park. If arriving by bus, walk along the front of the railway station (which will be on your right as you exit the bus terminal) to the second set of doors and turn left to walk along the pavement towards the park. There is a tourist information centre just inside the second set of doors of the railway station.
As you walk, you will pass a tram stop (on your left). Continuing straight on, you will cross a street (cars don’t always stop for pedestrians at pedestrian crossings, so please be careful!) to walk down an alley of trees and fountains through the park. You should already be able to see the cathedral tower in the distance. Once you have crossed a pedestrian bridge, you will enter Mlynská Street – “MLYNSKÁ ULICA”. As you continue straight on, you will exit Mlynská Street at the Cathedral, which is actually in the middle of Main Street – “HLAVNÁ ULICA“.
Once you have reached “HLAVNÁ ULICA“, if you turn right, you should reach TESCO and the Peace Marathon Square – “NÁMESTIE MARATÓNU MIERU” – in less than 5 minutes; if you turn left, you should reach the
Double Tree by Hilton Hotel at Liberation Square – “NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV” – in the same amount of time.
The Peace Marathon Square – “NÁMESTIE MARATÓNU MIERU” – is easily recognisable by a clearly visible statue of a marathon runner on the left hand side as well as by two large buildings of the East Slovak Museum (yellow and cream respectively) located on the left and right sides of the square. Liberation Square – “NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV” – can be recognised by a large memorial to the soldiers of World War II and the new shopping centre AUPARK.
TO THE CONFERENCE VENUE – HOUSE OF ARTS AND RECTORATE:
Because of the numerous reconstruction works on our tram lines we recommend you to walk to the conference venue from your hotels unless the weather is really bad. It takes much less time to walk than to take a public transport. All hotels are within walking distance from the conference venue. The House of Arts, where the first day of the conference will be, is located 300 metres from Rectorate, where the rest of the conference will take place.
From the city centre to the conference venue:
Once you have reached the Cathedral, continue walking straight on, crossing the plaza beside the Cathedral, which will be on your left. Continuing to Alžbetina Street – “ALŽBETINA ULICA” – which faces the front of the Cathedral, proceed down the street until you reach the first set of traffic lights, which will be at the intersection of Alžbetina Street – “ALŽBETINA ULICA” – and Moyzesova Street – “MOYZESOVA ULICA”. Continuing along the road across the street, you will find the entrance to the Rectorate on your right. If instead of crossing Moyzesova Street you turn left and walk for another 300 metres, you will find the House of Arts.
From the railway/bus station to the conference venue:
Take bus number 17 leaving from the bus park directly in front of the railway station park and continue for 5 bus stops. Get off the bus at the Slovak Radio bus stop – “SLOVENSKÝ ROZHLAS” – and continue in the same direction from which you just came. Proceed down Moyzesova Street – “MOYZESOVA ULICA” – towards a small intersection in the distance (about 400 metres). The Rectorate will be on your right. If you continue walking for another 300 metres, the House of Arts will be on your left.
From the Peace Marathon Square – “NÁMESTIE MARATÓNU MIERU” – to the conference venue:
Take bus number 17 or 36 leaving from the side of the cream building of the East Slovak Museum and continue for 2 bus stops. Get off the bus at the Slovak Radio bus stop – “SLOVENSKÝ ROZHLAS” – and continue in the same direction from which you just came. Proceed down Moyzesova Street – “MOYZESOVA ULICA” – towards a small intersection in the distance (about 400 metres). The Rectorate will be on your right. If you continue walking along Moyzesova Street for another 300 metres, the House of Arts will be on your left.
From Liberation Square – “NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV” – Double Tree by Hilton Hotel to the conference venue:
Take the bus X7 leaving from a bus stop located in front of the shopping center Dargov (next to Double Tree by Hilton Hotel) and continue for 1 stop (“DOM UMENIA” – House of Arts). Get off at the stop “DOM UMENIA” – House of Arts. Continue straight along Moyzesova Street – “MOYZESOVA ULICA” for 2 minutes, and the House of Arts will be on your right. If you continue walking for another 300 metres, the Rectorate (conference venue) will be on your left.
TO THE HOTELS:
From the train and bus station to Centrum Hotel, Gloria Palac Hotel, and Double Tree by Hilton Hotel (5–10 min.):
The hotels are within walking distance of maximum 10 minutes from the train/bus station – “STANIČNÉ NÁMESTIE”. Alternatively, take the X7 bus and continue for 2 stops. Get off the bus at Liberation Square – “NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV”. You will see the Aupark shopping mall in front of you. The Double Tree by Hilton Hotel will be on your left, and the Centrum Hotel will be on your right, across the road. To reach the Gloria Palac Hotel, walk towards the Double Tree by Hilton Hotel, then continue straight along the side of Liberation Square – “NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV” (the Aupark shopping mall should be on your right). Turn left at the first crossroads into Bottova Street – “BOTTOVA ULICA” – and the Gloria Palac Hotel will be on your left.
From the train and bus station to Yasmin Hotel (15 min.):
Take bus number 16 or 27 and continue for 3 stops (7 min.). Get off the bus at Mlynska Bastion – “MLYNSKÁ BAŠTA”. You will see the Hotel Yasmin (a 10-storey building of an unusual golden colour) on your left, about 200 metres away.
From the train and bus station to TeleDom Hotel (15 min.):
Take the X7 bus and continue for 4 stops (10 min.). Get off the bus at the House of Arts – “DOM UMENIA”. Go along Moyzesova Street (the street with a tree alley on its left-hand side) for about 5–8 minutes until you reach a crossroads. Turn right and enter Timonova Street – “TIMONOVA ULICA”. The TeleDom Hotel will be on your left.
From the train and bus station to Pension Hradbová (20 min.):
Take bus number 17 and continue for 5 stops (12 min.). Get off the bus at Slovak Radio – “SLOVENSKÝ ROZHLAS”. Turn left and cross the road at the traffic lights. Continue straight along Poštová Street – “POŠTOVÁ ULICA”. At the first crossroads, turn right, entering Hradbová Street – “HRADBOVÁ ULICA”. Continue along “HRADBOVÁ ULICA” for less than 100 metres. The Pension will be on your left.
From the train and bus station to Garni Hotel Akadémia (15 min.):
Take the X7 bus and continue for 2 stops. Get off the bus at Liberation Square – “NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV” – and take tram number 3. Continue for 1 stop (2 min.), getting off the tram at “ASTÓRIA”. Turn left and cross the road. You will see a small athletics field in front of you. Turn right and walk along the street for less than 100 metres. The Garni Hotel will be on your left.
From the train and bus station to the TUKE University Guesthouse at Boženy Nemcovej Street (30 min.):
From the train/bus station – “STANIČNÉ NÁMESTIE” – take the X7 bus and continue for 11 stops. Get off the bus at the Botanical Gardens – “BOTANICKÁ ZÁHRADA” – which is also the terminus of this line. Proceed down Boženy Nemcovej Street – “ULICA BOŽENY NEMCOVEJ” – for about 400 metres. The Guest House will be on your left.
From the conference venue to the TUKE University Guesthouse at Boženy Nemcovej Street (10–15 min.):
After leaving the Rectorate in Šrobárova Street – “ŠROBÁROVA ULICA” – turn left and continue towards an intersection. Cross the street, turn left and find the “ALŽBETINA, REKTORÁT UPJŠ” bus stop. Take the X7 bus and continue for 6 stops (6 min). Get off the bus at the Botanical Gardens – “BOTANICKÁ ZÁHRADA” – which is also the terminus of this line. Proceed down Boženy Nemcovej Street – “ULICA BOŽENY NEMCOVEJ” – for about 400 metres. The Guest House will be on your left.
From the city centre to the TUKE University Guesthouse at Boženy Nemcovej Street (10–15 min.):
Once in the city centre, walk towards the Cathedral until you reach its entrance. Continue to Alžbetina Street – “ALŽBETINA ULICA”, which faces the entrance to the Cathedral, and proceed down the street until you reach the first traffic signal. Do not cross the road, turn right and find the bus stop “ALŽBETINA, REKTORÁT UPJŠ”. Take the X7 bus, continue for 6 stops (6 min). Get off the bus at the Botanical Gardens – “BOTANICKÁ ZÁHRADA” – which is also the terminus of this line. Proceed down Boženy Nemcovej Street – “ULICA BOŽENY NEMCOVEJ” – for about 400 metres.. The Guest House will be on your left.
X7 bus stops:
Botanical Gardens → Train/Bus Station:
BOTANICKÁ ZÁHRADA (Botanical Gardens) – TECHNICKÁ UNIVERZITA (Technical University) – ZIMNÁ ULICA (Zimná Street) – NÁMESTIE MARATÓNU MIERU (Peace Marathon Square) – RADNICA STARÉHO MESTA (Old Town Hall) – SLOVENSKÝ ROZHLAS (Slovak Radio) – ALŽBETINA, REKTORÁT UPJŠ (Rectorate) – DOM UMENIA (House of Arts) – NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV (Liberation Square) – SENNÝ TRH (Hay Market) – STANIČNÉ NÁMESTIE (Train/Bus Station)
Train/Bus Station → Botanical Gardens:
STANIČNÉ NÁMESTIE (Train/Bus Station) – JAKABOV PALÁC (Jacob`s Palace) – SENNÝ TRH (Hay Market) – NÁMESTIE OSLOBODITEĽOV (Liberation Square) – DOM UMENIA (House of Arts) – ALŽBETINA, REKTORÁT UPJŠ (Rectorate) – SLOVENSKÝ ROZHLAS (Slovak Radio) – RADNICA STARÉHO MESTA (Old Town Hall) – NÁMESTIE MARATÓNU MIERU (Peace Marathon Square) – ZIMNÁ ULICA (Zimná Street) – TECHNICKÁ UNIVERZITA (Technical University) – BOTANICKÁ ZÁHRADA (Botanical Gardens)
Public Transport Fares
Note that public transport tickets (valid for all buses, trams, and trolleybuses) can be purchased from ticket machines (exact change required) and from various magazine kiosks. The cost is 0.60 euro per 30-minute ride (transfers allowed) or 0.50 euro per 4-stop ride (maximum 4 stops, no transfers). A 24-hour ticket is available for 3.20 euro and a 7-day pass for 10.20 EUR. The ticket has to be stamped by a machine in the tram, bus or trolleybus.
Beware of pickpockets when on buses/trolleybuses and at the bus stops near the Double Tree by Hilton Hotel, as they are very frequent downtown.
A 60-minute ride can also be paid for by sending a blank SMS message to 1166 (only Slovak mobile phone providers), and the ticket has to be confirmed by a return message before getting on.
Regular fare tickets
| Fare Zone | Up to 4 stops | 30 min.* | 60 min.* | 60 min.** | 24 hrs | 7 days | Luggage (30×40×60cm, max. 50 kg) |
| T1 Košice | 0.50 € | 0.60 € | 0.70 € | 1.00 € | 3.20 € | 10.20 € | 0.60 € |
(*) not valid for night routes and on routes R1 – R8 and RA1 – RA8
(**) price for ticket purchased from the driver on board the bus (valid for day and night routes)
Reduced fare tickets
| Fare Zone | Payment | 30 min.* | 60 min* | 60 min |
| T1 Košice | Cash | 0.25 € | 0.30 € | 0.35 € |
(*) not valid for night routes
Reduced fare is for: Children aged from 10 to 16 years, Students of high schools, colleges and universities aged from 16 to 26 years, Pensioners. The discount requires a certificate or travel card issued by any Slovak transportation company.
For more information about fares and public transport timetables see http://www.dpmk.sk/node/2902 and imhd.zoznam.sk/ke/public-transport.html
TAXIS:
For transport within the city you can also call a TAXI at any of the following numbers:
Easy taxi +421 907 234 263, +421 902 122 224 (gets you anywhere in the city for 3 €)
Central taxi +421 948 362 111
VIP taxi +421 907 556 677
Hello taxi +421 911 434 343
CTC taxi +421 905 955 955
Maxi taxi +421 905 357 555
Radio taxi +421 907 163 333
Jerry taxi +421 915 500 557, +421 944 158 533
Lucky taxi +421 55 633 00 00
Avanti taxi +421 55 16886
Classic taxi +421 55 16880, +421 55 622 22 44
Yellow taxi +421 55 16111, +421 55 643 43 43
Taxi fares around the city range from 3 euro to 8 euro.
All the taxi services available in Košice are listed at www.najditaxi.sk.
IMPORTANT CONTACTS:
Emergency telephone numbers:
112 (general)
150 fire brigade
155 ambulance
158 police
To dial Slovak phone numbers, use international code +421.
In case of emergency the phone number of Slávka Tomaščíková is +421 907 882 786, the phone number of Zuzana Buráková is +421 918 643 794 and the phone number of Julius Rozenfeld is +421 918 643 853 .
ACCOMMODATION
The following accommodation options are offered to conference participants and accompanying persons by the conference organizers in cooperation with the conference agency, Progress. These specially-negotiated conference prices are available only through Progress and only until 30 June. Bookings can be made online by filling in the Accommodation and Optional Trips Booking Form. All hotels are within walking distance of the conference venue. A map showing the hotels can be found below.
HOW TO BOOK YOUR ACCOMMODATION
Bookings can be made online by filling in and submitting the Accommodation and Optional Trips Booking Form here. Once your booking has been received, you will be contacted by Ms. Gabriela Sujanova with confirmation of your reservation and details of the amount to pay.
Hotel Yasmin**** Tyršovo nábrežie 1, Košice, www.hotel-yasmin.sk
€75.50 Mon-Thur / €72.50 weekend single room (including breakfast)
€97.50 Mon-Thur / €87.50 weekend double room (including breakfast)
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Internet, air conditioning
Hotel Double Tree by Hilton **** Hlavná 123/1, Košice, www.doubletree-kosice.com
€69 single room (including breakfast)
€89 double room (including breakfast)
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Internet, air conditioning
Hotel Gloria Palac*** Bottova 1, Košice 040 01, www.gloriapalac.sk
€59 single room (including breakfast)
€59 double room (including breakfast)
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Internet
Hotel Centrum*** Južná trieda 2054/2A, Košice, www.hotel-centrum.sk
€50 single room (including breakfast)
€65 double room (including breakfast)
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Internet
Pension Hradbova*** Hradbová 9, Košice, www.penzionhradbova.sk
€61 single room (including breakfast)
€81 double room (including breakfast)
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Internet
Teledom Hotel *** Timonova 755/27, Košice, www.hotelteledom.sk
€66 single room (including breakfast)
€83 double room (including breakfast)
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Internet, air conditioning
Garni Hotel Akadémia ** Južná trieda 10, Košice, www.hotelakademia.sk
€38 single room (including breakfast)
€57 double room (including breakfast)
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Internet
TUKE University Guest House accommodation* Boženy Němcovej 1, Košice,
www.tuke.sk/…ytovanie/bn1
The rooms are arranged in pairs of two rooms (one double room and one single room) connected by a corridor, sharing a shower and WC.
Prices: €20 per person in a double room occupied by two persons, €30 per person in a single room.
Municipality Tax: €1.50 per person per night
Breakfast can be arranged for €5 per person.
Internet, there is a fridge in each connecting corridor.
Payment method
There are two ways of making payments.
1. payment by bank transfer to the conference bank account:
Any fees charged by remitting banks are to be paid by the conference participants. It is the responsibility of the sender to ensure that the conference receives the full amount. Any amount deducted by the banks for charges will be charged in cash on the first day of the conference.
Bank details for transfers:
Beneficiary name: Progress CA s.r.o.
Beneficiary address: Krivá 18, 04001 Košice, Slovakia
Bank name: Sberbank Slovensko, a. s. Košice
Bank address: Mlynská 29, 043 73 Košice, Slovakia
Account number: 4350225857/3100
IBAN: SK 14 31 00 0000 0043 5022 5857
SWIFT/BIC CODE : LUBA SK BX
Please ensure that your transfer is identifiable by including the message ‘ESSE 14’ and your name, e.g. ‘ESSE 14 John Smith’.
2. payment by credit card
To pay by credit card, please download THE CREDIT CARD AUTHORIZATION FORM here and complete it, ensuring that you sign it. Note that a 5% credit card fee must be added to the total. Send a copy of your form by fax (+421–55–680–6156) or as a scanned file attachment by e-mail (gabriela.sujanova@progress.eu.sk).
Receipts
Reception of payment will be confirmed by e-mail. Printed receipts will be issued at the registration desk.
CANCELLATION POLICY
This cancellation policy is determined by the conditions set by the hotels.
Cancellations received no later than 60 days prior to check-in date – no cancellation charges.
Cancellations received between 59–45 days prior to check-in date – refund minus the cost of one night.
Cancellations received between 44–30 days prior to check-in date – 50% of the total price refunded.
Cancellations received less than 29 days prior to check-in date – no refund.
INSURANCE
Please note that neither Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, nor SKASE, nor ESSE can accept liability for travel, accommodation, living or other expenses incurred by lecturers, convenors, co-convenors, or those invited to participate in round tables, seminars, PhD sessions or posters.
All conference participants should be aware that neither Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, nor SKASE, nor ESSE have or will accept any liability whatsoever for any damage or injury to visitors, to the university or to property, however such damage or injury may be caused. Delegates are expected to be fully insured by their own institutions or through their personal insurance for personal health, accident/property coverage (also against claims made by third parties) during their participation in the Conference.
EATING IN KOŠICE
KOŠICE – A UNIVERSITY CITY AND EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE IN 2013
Košice is a city with an eventful and illustrious past and multicultural and colourful present. It is a seat of culture and education. During the university semesters students make the city their own, and one may find them at every turn: in the theatres, the museums, the galleries, the concert halls, the libraries, and the parks. Almost nine thousand future professionals in medical, legal, scientific, social, philosophical disciplines and arts study at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, further swelling the already large permanent population of the city of over 240,000.
Košice’s earliest documents date back to 1230 and refer to it as “Villa Cassa”. Its coat of arms is the oldest in Europe, a fact attested to by a letter dating from 1369. The city's historic sights – from various periods – are concentrated in the centre, the Urban Heritage Area. The recently reconstructed Main Street, lined by the houses and palaces of the burghers of the past, offers visitors a pleasant stroll, and is also the venue for many major events. Košice has always been known for its extraordinary mixture of cultures and dialects, a mixture that contributes greatly to the attractions of the city.
More about Košice at www.kosice.sk
Eating in Košice
Welcome to the beautiful city of Košice which offers hundreds of spectacular places for you to enjoy. Even though there are plenty of other restaurants, cafés, bars and clubs in Košice, we highly recommend the following selection which we consider to be among the best. We hope you will enjoy the wide variety of places that we have chosen for you. Most are situated right in the historical centre, so you do not have to spend much time finding them. Please do not hesitate to use the map with the places labelled by number from 1 to 52. Please notice that August 29th and September 1st are bank holidays in Slovakia, therefore many places will open later in the afternoon (17.00).
RESTAURANTS
All of the following restaurants offer a daily menu for reasonable prices between 11.30 and 14.00 usually including a starter, a main course and a dessert. We have decided to rate them for you with stars, even though it is not an official ranking.
1 Olive Tree, Hlavná 1, http://www.doubletree-kosice.com/restauracia/ ****
Mon- Sat 12.00–23.00, Sun 11.30–23.00
The restaurant in Double Tree by Hilton specializes in Mediterranean and international style cuisine with a range of high-quality wines.
2 Le Colonial, Hlavná 8, http://www.lecolonial.sk/ ****
Mon- Sun 11.00–23.00
A colonial style restaurant offering high-class delicious meals and a wide variety of drinks served by a professional staff.
3 Mediterran, Alžbetina 24, http://www.mediterranke.sk/ ****
Café 8.00–23.00, Restaurant 11.00–23.00
A Mediterranean style restaurant with loads of Croatian and Italian specialities and a charming atmosphere. The interior includes wooden furniture and a pond with colourful fish. The restaurant also serves as a café open every day from 8 a.m.
4 Golden Royal, Vodná 8, http://www.goldenroyal.sk/ ****
Mon- Sat 11.00–23.00, Sun 11.00–22.00
Situated in a charming Winter Garden with delicious international cuisine.
5 Levočský dom, Hlavná 65, http://levocskydom.com/ ****
Mon- Fri 10.00–22.00, Sat- Sun 11.00–22.00
It is the oldest restaurant in Europe with a great atmosphere placed in a 15th century gothic building serving high-quality food. It is also a great place for daily menus.
6 Hotel Yasmin, Tyršovo nábrežie 1, http://www.hotel-yasmin.sk/en/restaurant/ ****
Mon- Sun 6.30–23.00
The restaurant offers a diverse selection and variations of top cuisine from high-quality ingredients. The cooks of the Hotel Yasmin will capture you with their own recipes of unusual combinations and ingredients.
7 Passage to India, Kováčska 23, http://www.passage2india.sk/ ****
Mon- Sat 11.00–23.00
The only authentic Indian restaurant in Košice with professional Indian chefs and great food.
8 Villa Regia, Dominikánske námestie 3, http://www.villaregia.sk/sk/restauracia ***
Mon- Fri 11.00–24.00, Sat- Sun 12.00–24.00
One of the most popular restaurants in the city with a historical atmosphere, massive wooden tables, wooden statues, and a fire place. If you are a fan of steaks, it is the place for you.
9 Camelot, Kováčska 19, http://www.restaurant-camelot.sk/ ***
Mon- Fri 11.00–24.00, Sat- Sun 11.00–24.00
An outstanding restaurant inspired by the legendary Camelot castle offers great steaks, raw meat specialities and one of the best Czech beers in Košice.
10 Teledom, Timonova 27, http://restaurant.teledom.sk/sk/ ***
Mon- Fri 11.00–15.00 (Daily Menu)
This restaurant belongs to hotel Teledom and it offers fresh food of Slovak origin which you could also try also from daily menus. Extremely close to the conference venue.
11 Karczma Mlyn, Hlavná 82, http://www.karczmamlyn.sk/ ***
Mon- Thu 11.00–23.00, Fri 11.00–24.00, Sat 12.00–24.00, Sun 12.00– 22.00
A very popular and authentic Goral-style restaurant offering specialities from Slovak cuisine. The interior was originally furnished by historical folk tools, wooden furniture and impressive paintings. The staff serves food in costumes representing Goral folklore.
12 Keltská krčma, Hlavná 80, http://www.keltskakrcma.sk/indexx.html ***
Mon- Thu 10.00–23.30, Fri 10.00–1.00, Sat 12.00–1.00, Sun 12.00– 23.30
A unique Celtic tavern famous for its impressive atmosphere, traditional dishes from bygone times and a wide variety of beers and wines.
13 Rosto Steakhouse, Orlia 6, http://www.rosto.sk/ ***
Mon- Fri 11.00–23.00, Sat 12.00–23.00, Sun 12.00– 22.00
The only official steakhouse in Košice serves mainly delicious steaks, but also grilled fish and Oriental specialities. It also includes a charming summer garden.
14 Med Malina, Hlavná 81, http://www.medmalina.sk/ ***
Mon- Sat 11.00–23.00, Sun 10.00–22.00
A popular cosy village-style restaurant serving mostly typical Slovak meals like “Halušky” in a traditional decoration and nice staff.
15 Bamboo Sushi&Grill, Hlavná 78, http://www.bamboo-ke.sk/ ***
Mon- Fri 10.30–22.00, Sat 12.00–23.00, Sun 12.00–21.00
Bamboo Sushi&Grill offers specialities from Asian cuisine in a pleasant, decent and stylish interior. Besides sushi, the visitors can also taste Vietnamese and Thai cuisine.
16 Sushi Maiko, Hlavná 1, http://www.sushimaiko.sk/ ***
Mon- Sun 11.00–22.30
A modern sushi restaurant situated in Double Tree by Hilton offers a great selection of fresh sushi also available in the form of daily menus. Gluten-free dishes are also available.
17 Piano, Hlavná 92, http://www.piano-cafe.sk/home.html ***
Mon- Fri 11.00–24.00, Sat-Sun 17.00–24.00
Piano is not only a restaurant serving creative and fresh dishes which you can choose from rich daily menus, but also a café and a bar with several types of long drinks that you can enjoy on a terrace right on Main Street.
18 Burekas, Vrátna 58, https://foursquare.com/…88bf3a607a6a **
Mon- Fri 8.30–19.00, Sat- closed, Sun 12.00–19.00
A unique Jewish restaurant with a special menu including Falafel and Humus served by friendly staff. You can enjoy yourself in a beautiful garden space for low prices.
19 Ajvega,Orlia 10, http://ajvega.sk/ **
Mon- Fri 10.00–22.00, Sat- Sun 11.00–22.00
The first vegetarian restaurant in Czechoslovakia established in 1990 offering tasty vegetarian dishes.
20 Vincent, Alžbetina 6, http://www.vincent-restaurant.sk/ **
Mon- Thu 10.00–23.00, Fri 10.00–1.00, Sat 11.00–24.00, Sun 12.00–23.00
This restaurant decorated by some of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous paintings is an ideal place for quick lunches offering delicious daily menus for reasonable prices.
FASTFOOD
21 Pizza Hut, Hlavná 111, Sun- Thu 11.00–21.00, Fri- Sat 11.00–22.00
22 Pizza Borsalino, Hlavná 108, Mon- Sat9.00–5.00, Sun 12.00–2.00
A very popular place for late-night snacks for a special price of 1 Euro for a huge slice of delicious Italian pizza
23 Bagetéria, Hlavná 36, Mon- Thu 6.30–22.00, Fri 6.30–23.00, Sat 8.00–22.00, Sun 9.00–22.00
A wide variety of fresh white or cereal baguettes which you can put together with various fresh vegetables, hams, cheeses, etc. A perfect place for brunches
24 Mc Donald’s, Protifašistických bojovníkov, Open 24/7
25 Little India, Hlavná 47, Mon- Sat 11.00–22.00, Sun 12.00– 22.00
An Indian buffet style restaurant.
26 Aupark Foodcourt, Námestie osloboditeľov, Mon- Sun 9.00–21.00
The second floor of Aupark shopping centre includes various types of restaurants (Chinese, Mexican, Slovak), Kebab or the popular Subway sandwiches. Surrounded by cafés, lounges and beer places.
BREAKFAST
27 Raňajkáreň Rozprávka, Hrnčiarska 17
Mon- Fri 7.30–18.00, Sat- Sun 9.00– 16.00
The perfect place for healthy breakfast, freshly baked cakes, coffee, tea and homemade specialities in a beautiful interior inspired by Slovak fairy-tales.
28 Raňajkáreň Rozprávka Na Rohu, Hviezdoslavova 2
Mon- Fri 7.30–18.00, Sat- Sun 9.00–16.00
The perfect place for healthy breakfast, freshly baked cakes, coffee, tea, homemade specialities and egg omeletes in a beautiful interior inspired by Slovak fairy-tales.
29 San Domenico, Dominikánske námestie 3
Mon- Thu 7.00–20.00, Fri 7.00–22.00, Sat 8.00–21.00, Sun 8.00–18.00
Located in the centre of the historical town, San Domenico also offers a bio-breakfast with an option of lactose-free and gluten-free specialities.
COFFE, TEA, ICE CREAM, HOT CHOCOLATE
30 Smelly Cat, Zvonárska 6, Mon- Sat 14.00–24.00
Inspired by the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. song, this beautiful and cosy New York decorated café is very popular for its tasty Bruschetas, Paninis, cheesecakes, coffee and also for its evening atmosphere when you could enjoy some nice wine or beer.
31 Caffé Trieste, Uršulínska 2, Mon- Sat 7.30–19.00, Sun 8.30–19.00
High-quality coffee in a little cosy place right next to Main Street.
32 Cafe Frei, Hlavná 65, Mon- Thu 9.00–21.00, Fri 9.00–22.00, Sat 10.00–22.00, Sun 10.00–21.00
American, Brazilian, Caribbean, Chinese, Ethiopian, French, Indian/Pakistani, Italian, Mexican or Turkish are only some of the amazing coffee types this place offers. It is one of the most beautifully decorated cafés in Košice which you will definitely enjoy!
33 Republika Východu, Hlavná 31, Mon-Thu 6.59–22.00, Fri6.59–24.00, Sat 8.00–24.00, Sun 8.00–22.00
It is the first café with a theme of Eastern Slovakia where the menu and the products are listed in the dialect of Košice. Popular for its stylish interior, breakfast, crépes, sandwiches, vegetarian meals, good coffee and drinks.
34 Aida, Hlavná 44 and Hlavná 81, Mon- Sun 8.00–22.00
The oldest and most famous ice cream place in Košice serving delicious ice cream, cakes and coffee.
35 Cavearia Theatru, Hlavná 76, Mon- Thu 08.00–22.00, Fri 8.00–24.00, Sat 10.00–0.00, Sun 10.00–22.00
Situated right next to the “Small Scene” of the Košice State Theatre, ideal for breakfast or brunch and a drink at night.
The interior is impressively decorated, also having a summer terrace right in the centre of Main Street.
36 Kávy sveta, Hlavná 18, Mon- Fri 9.00–22.00, Sat- Sun 10.00–22.00
A great cafeteria offering hundreds of coffee specialities from all around the world.
37 Little Havana, Kováčska 13, Mon- Thu 8.00–21.00, Fri- Sat 8.00–22.00
A very stylish place to enjoy a glass of Cuban rum, whiskey, coffee or tea.
38 Bonbónik Chocolaterie, Hlavná 20, Mon- Sun 10.00–21.00
The only chocolaterie in the city offering delicious Belgian chocolate in manifold variations.
39 Dobrá čajovňa, Mäsiarska 42, Mon- Fri 14.00–22.00, Sat- Sun 17.00–22.00
An amazing tea house offering hundreds of tea types, dry fruit and shishas with a cosy decoration and the possibility to sit on the floor on Indian cushions.
BEER AND WINE
All of the places offer great Slovak and Czech beer and various types of high-quality wines. Most of the places also serve typical Slovak and Czech specialities to go with beer (cheese, sausages, Tartar steak, ribs) which you should definitely try!
40 Golem, Dominikánske námestie 15, Mon-Sun 17.00–24.00
41 The Beer House, Hlavná 54, Mon-Fri 14.00–2.00, Sat 16.00–2.00, Sun16.00–24.00
42 Česká Hospoda, Moyzesova 22, Mon- Wed 17.00–23.00, Thu 17.00–0.00, Fri-Sat 17.00–1.00
43 Pub U Kohúta, Hrnčiarska 23, Mon- Thu 11.00–23.00, Fri 11.00–1.00, Sat 18.00–1.00
44 Villa Cassa Vinoteque, Pri Miklušovej väznici 2, Mon- Fri 13.00–24.00, Sat 16.00–24.00
45 Vinoteque Loffler, Hlavná 90, Mon- Thu 14.00–22.00, Fri 14.00–24.00, Sat 17.00–22.00
46 Camelot, Kováčska 19, Mon- Fri 11.00– 24.00, Sat- Sun 12.00–24.00
47 Pilsner Urquell Pub, Námestie Osloboditeľov 1, Sun- Wed 11.00–23.00, Thu- Sat 11.00–1.00
48 Madrid, Vrátna 30, Mon- Sun 9.00–23.00
49 Bernard, Alžbetina 4, Mon- Fri 9.00-morning, Sat- Sun 15.00-morning
CLUBS
50 Jazz Disco Club, Kováčska 39, Tue- Wed 20.00–3.00, Thu- Sat 20.00–4.00
51 Retro Cult Club, Kováčska 49, Mon- Thu 21.00– 2.00, Fri 20.00–4.00, Sat 21.00–4.00
52 Cosmopolitan, Kováčska 9, Mon- Thu 15.00–1.00, Fri 15.00–2.00, Sat 18.00–2.00
53 Garibaldi’s, Hlavná 68, Mon- Wed 9.00–23.00, Thu 9.00–24.00, Fri 9.00–1.00, Sat 18.00–1.00, Sun 14.00–23.00
SPECIALITIES FROM SLOVAK CUISINE
“Bryndzové halušky” (Sheep cheese dumplings) is the national Slovak dish. Sheep cheese gives a unique flavour to the meal by itself, but it is even tastier with small pieces of bacon greaves and sour cream. It is usually served with a glass of sour milk called “Žinčica”.
“Kapustnica” (Cabbage soup) is a Slovak thick sauerkraut soup traditionally prepared at the end of the year for Christmas. Kapustnica can be prepared in a lot of ways (ingredients, length of cooking, etc.) and it differs from region to region. In some regions, Kapustnica may contain smoked meat, sausages and mushrooms, in some regions it is a much simpler soup.
Fried Cheese with French Fries is a very popular Slovak/Czech dish mostly served with French fries and Tartare sauce (Tatárska omáčka) and salad.
“Lángoš” (Deep fried bread) is originally a Hungarian food but it is also a favourite take-away in Slovakia. Sometimes you’ll find it in restaurants as a starter. It is usually served with garlic, cheese, sour cream or ketchup on top (you can choose whatever ingredients you like).
“Prívarok” (Prívarok) is a typical Slovak dish, similar to soups in its consistency but much denser. It comes in many variations depending on the ingredients – pumpkins, lentils, beans, potatoes, dill, etc. It is usually consumed with a slice of bread and sausages or fried eggs might be added on top.
P.J.ŠAFÁRIK UNIVERSITY
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice (UPJŠ) is the second oldest university in Slovakia. The history of higher education in Košice goes back to the year 1657, when the bishop Benedict Kishdy founded the Academia Cassoviensis, which was run by the Jesuits of Jesus’ Community. The University of Košice Golden Bull issued in 1660 by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I granted the Universitas Cassoviensis the same privileges as all the other universities of the Habsburg empire. The structure of Universitas Cassoviensis was similar to that of other universities, with faculties of Philosphy, Law and Theology, the last of these being the strongest. Study at the Philosophical Faculty was dedicated primarily to philosophy, history and languages, but the lectures – which were in Latin – also included presentations of the natural sciences: physics, mathematics, geography and botany. The Universitas Cassoviensis had its own library and a church, and it significantly influenced the advancement of science, educational attainment and spiritual culture in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In 1959 the traditions of the Universitas Cassoviensis were revived through the foundation of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice. It originally consisted of the Faculty of Medicine (in Košice) and the Faculty of Philosophy (in Prešov). Gradually the university was enlarged by the addition of new faculties:the Faculty of Science in Košice in 1963, the Faculty of Education in Prešov in 1964, Faculty of Law in Košice in 1973, the Faculty of Public Administration in Košice in 1998, and finally the Faculty of Arts in Košice in 2007.
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice is the second classical university of Slovakia. It ranks among the important and widely-recognized educational and research institutions not only in Slovakia, but also in Europe. Its key mission is to provide education and service to its students and the community by spreading knowledge based on the most recent scientific findings in an international context, as well as to conduct high-quality research. The UPJŠ also supports activities contributing to the education and culture of the public and it helps students develop greater wisdom, creativity, tolerance, critical and independent thinking, self-confidence, and both regional and national awareness.
At present the UPJŠ provides education at its five faculties to almost 9,000 students in more than 105 BA, 65 MA and 35 PhD programmes, with more than 700 lecturers and research staff who use the results of their own high-quality scientific research, the most recent experimental technology, the latest ITC and innovative methods of education.
The University has mainly focused on creating a permanent system of monitoring and improving the quality of education in all the accredited study programmes. Instead of extensive generating new study programmes and increasing the number of students, the emphasis has been placed on optimising the content and methods of implementation of the existing study programmes. The university policy is to promote maximum mutual openness and connectedness of courses, so that the students may benefit from the widest range of opportunities across the university, not just within individual faculties. Improving the quality of the education provided and of the university organization has required a focus on improvement of the physical infrastructure, particularly continuous modernisation and variation of teaching technology, specifically exploiting the Internet and new information technologies.
Students can use the services of the University Library, the Centre for Information and Communication Technologies, and the Botanical Garden. The UPJŠ has more than 2,500 accommodation places, and excellent catering services located near the city centre. The Institute of Physical Education and Sports offers education in the field of sports and recreation, training courses for students, physical education camps, and hobby sports activities for staff, students and public throughout the year, also organizing such events as University Days of Sport, the Wellness Day, or the Intervention Motion Programme.
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice has established itself in the European education and research arena. It is a member of the European University Association and a signatory of Magna Charta Universitatum. It is a seat of the European Documentation Centre, the Institute of European Law and the Austrian Library. Both education and scientific research at the UPJŠ are carried on in a broad international context and follow European trends. The research teams, led by internationally recognized personalities, use funding from both national and international sources; every year up to 200 research projects are funded (around 20 by foreign grants). The number of publications per staff member in high-quality international journals, the high proportion of papers registered in the Current Contents Connect database and the number of citations in registered databases rank the UPJŠ amongst the best research universities in Slovakia.
The development of the international dimension of the UPJŠ is closely related to the LLP/Erasmus mobility programme for staff and students and to mobility within the National Scholarship Programme of the Slovak Republic. The numbers of UPJŠ students who complete part of their studies abroad as well as the number of incoming students and staff are all growing. The UPJŠ has more than 230 Erasmus bilateral agreements with universities in 20 countries. For international Erasmus students, the International Office of UPJŠ regularly organizes EILC – Erasmus Intensive Language Courses – that enable incoming students to study the Slovak language, to understand the Slovak culture, and to become familiar with the academic milieu in Slovakia.
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice is also open to Free Movers.
For more information about the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, please visit www.upjs.sk.
ACADEMIC PROGRAMME
Please note that each conference participant may convene or co-convene one or more round table(s), seminar(s), and doctoral session(s). However, each conference participant may only present ONE PAPER during the conference – one lecture or one round table paper or one seminar paper or one poster, whether in the round table / seminar session that he or she convenes or in a different one.
Postgraduate students selected for the Doctoral Sessions may in addition present one other paper in a regular seminar.
ACADEMIC PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Slávka Tomaščíková (P. J. Šafárik University in Košice) (chair)
Işil Baş (Boğaziçi University)
Andreas H. Jucker (University of Zürich)
Lívia Körtvélyessy (P. J. Šafárik University in Košice)
Pierre Lurbe (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
Maria Socorro Suárez (Universidad de Oviedo)
Soňa Šnircová (P. J. Šafárik University in Košice)
Pavol Štekauer (P. J. Šafárik University in Košice)
PROGRAMME
12th ESSE CONFERENCE in KOŠICE, SLOVAKIA
Friday 29 August – Tuesday 2 September, 2014
Organised by Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia
Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts
and
SKASE (The Slovak Association for the Study of English)
To be held at P. J. Šafárik University in Košice, Šrobárova 2, Košice
Registration and conference information centre:
Friday 29 August 2014, from 9.00 to 18.00 at the House of Arts, Moyzesova 66, Ground Floor
Saturday 30 August – Monday 1 September 2014 from 9.00 to 18.00 at the Rectorate, Šrobárova 2, Senate Meeting Room, 1st Floor
Conference programme
Friday 29 August 2014 House of Arts, Moyzesova 66
09.00–18.00 Registration and conference information centre, Foyer, Ground floor
10.00, 11.30, 13.00 Free guided tours of Košice centre (groups of 20–30 people; tour begins and ends at the House of Arts)
14.30–15.30 Opening of the conference, Concert Hall, Ground Floor
15.30–16.30 Plenary lecture 1, House of Arts, Concert Hall, Ground Floor
USING Wmatrix TO ANALYSE CHARACTER CONTRASTS (AND THEMES AND FOREGROUNDED MOMENTS) IN BETRAYAL BY HAROLD PINTER
Professor Dr. Mick Short, Lancaster University, U.K. (Chair: Pavel Stekauer)
16.30–17.00 Coffee break, Foyer, Ground floor and 1st floor
17.00–18.00 Poetry reading by James Robertson, House of Arts, Concert Hall, Ground floor (Chair: Zuzana Buráková)
18.15–19.00 Concert for conference participants and accompanying persons, Concert Hall, Ground floor
19.00 Welcome dinner for conference participants and accompanying persons, Ground floor, 1st floor and 2nd floor
Saturday 30 August 2014 UPJŠ Rectorate and Campus, Šrobárova 2
09.00–18.00 Conference information centre, Rectorate, Senate Meeting Room, 1st floor
09.30–18.00 Book exhibition, Socrates, Ground floor
09.30–18.00 Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (posters only)
11.00, 12.30, 16.00, 17.30 Free guided tours of Košice centre (groups of 20–30 people, 60 minutes, begins and ends at the Rectorate)
| 09.30–10.30 Parallel lectures 1 |
|---|
Room M5 (Chair: Adrian Radu)
How Trauma Turns into Literature: Romanian-American Writers
Michaela Mudure
Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania mmudure@lett.ubbcluj.ro
Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic mmudure@yahoo.com
Room M6 (Chair: Lívia Körtvélyessy)
Can we arrive at an agreement on the compound status?
Stanislav Kavka
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia ca348439@tiscali.cz
Room P5 (Chair: María Socorro Suárez Lafuente)
A Life Sentence: Twenty Years of Convict Studies Research and the Female Factory Research Group, Tasmania
Susan Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain susan.ballyn@gmail.com
10.30–11.00 Coffee break, Aristotle, Sockrates + Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (authors at posters)
| 11.00–13.00 Seminars, Round tables and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
PhD CULT A, Room S2, CULTURAL AND AREA STUDIES – Convenors: John Corbett, María José Coperías Aguilar, Participants: Eszter Szép, Virginia Fusco, Martyna Bryla, Ela İpek Gündüz
Special RT gender, Room A1, INCREASING THE VISIBILITY OF GENDER STUDIES, EUROPEANIZING GENDER STUDIES – Convenors: Renate Haas, Işil Baş, Maria Socorro Suárez
RT5, Room S5, CANCELLED THE TRACE OF THE VICTORIANS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE: A REASSESSMENT – Convenor: Rosario Arias Doblas, Participants: Rosario Arias Doblas, Maria Grazia Nicolosi, Roberta Gefter Wondrich, Sonia Villegas López, Monika Pietrzak-Franger
RT6, Room S1, THE SHORT STORY IN EUROPE – Convenors: Ailsa Cox, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Participants: Michael Basseler, Jim Hinks, Alison MacLeod
SLITE2 A, Room A4, REVISITING THE NATION IN POST-WAR MODERNIST LITERATURE – Convenors: Armela Panajoti, Adrian Radu, Participants: Katharina Walter, Benjamin Keatinge, Armela Panajoti, Ozan Selcik, Strinyuk Svetlana
SLITE3 A, Room A3, INTERMEDIAL BODY POLITICS: TOWARDS A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF IMAGE/TEXT DYNAMICS – Convenors: Anna Kérchy, Catriona McAra, Participants: Dóra Csikós, Anna Kérchy, Erzsébet Barát, Anja Koletnik
SLITE7 A , Room S3, FEMALE RITUALS: COOKING AND EATING IN/AND WOMEN’S FICTION – Convenors: Nóra Séllei, Katarina Labudova, Participants: Eva Hrkalova, Pirjo Koivuvaara, Gabriela Boldizsarova, Maria Parrino, Katarina Labudova
SLITE11 A, Room A6, CONFORMISM AND ANTI-CONFORMISM RECONSIDERED: FROM POSTMODERNISM TO CONTEMPORARY SENSIBILITY IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ARTS – Convenors: Jaroslav Kušnír, Dan Popescu, Participants: Sigolène Vivier, Jaroslav Kušnír, Diana Benea, Dan Popescu
SLITE15, Room A8, MODERN SCOTTISH DRAMA AND HISTORICAL MEMORY – Convenors: Ian Brown, Daniele Berton-Charrière, Participants: Daniele Berton-Charrière, Dilek Inan, Gül Kurtuluş, Ali Altun
SLANG4 A, Room A2, WORD-FORMATION IN CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS – Convenors: Vladimir Ž. Jovanović, Jovanka Lazarevska-Stančevska, Participants: Monica Karlsson, Jacek Rachfał, Irina Petrovska and Jovanka Lazarevska-Stančevska, Miloš D. Đurić, Bledar Toska, Eva Sicherl
SLANG10 A, Room A9, INVESTIGATING ACADEMIC DISCOURSES: ENGLISH LANGUAGE USE AT EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES – Convenors: Vander Viana, Aisling O’Boyle, Participants: Vander Viana,
Paul Thomson, Chiara Nasti, Marco Venuti & Sole Alba Zollo
SLANG12, Room A7, REPRESENTATIONS OF (NEW) EUROPEANS IN PRIVATE, MEDIATED AND PUBLIC DISCOURSES – Convenors: Jan Chovanec, Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Participants: Jolanta Szymańska, Przemysław Wilk, Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Jan Chovanec
SLANG14 A, Room A10, CHANGING DISCOURSES, CHANGING WORKPLACES: POSTMODERN TRENDS IN INSTITUTIONAL COMMUNICATION – Convenors: Cornelia Ilie, Giuliana Garzone, Participants: Cornelia Ilie & Donatella Padua, Paola Catenaccio, Michela Giordano, Nils Braad Petersen & Constance Elizabeth Kampf
SLANG16 A, Room S4, LEXICAL BUNDLES IN ENGLISH NON-FICTION WRITING: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS – Convenors: Jukka Tyrkkö, Joanna Kopaczyk, Participants: Federica Barbieri, Jukka Tyrkkö and Joanna Kopaczyk, Joe McVeigh, Turo Hiltunen, David Brett and Antonio Pinna
SLANG32 A, Room A5, ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS – EXCEPTIONAL ENGLISH FOR EXCEPTIONAL LEARNERS? – Convenors: Ewa Domagala-Zysk, Edit Hegybiro Kontra, Participants: Edit H. Kontra, Katalin Piniel, Kata Csizér, Ewa Domagała-Zysk, Nuzha Moritz, Patricia Pritchard, Anna Podlewska, Anna Nabiałek
13.00–14.30 Lunch break
14.30–15.30 Plenary lecture 2, Room M5
WALTER SCOTT AND THE RESTORATION OF EUROPE
Professor Dr. Fiona Robertson, St Mary's University, U.K. (Chair: Soňa Šnircová)
| 15.45–16.45 Parallel lectures 2 |
|---|
Room M5 (Chair: Alison Waller)
Coleridge’s Daemonic Imagination
Gregory M. Leadbetter
Birmingham City University, the UK gregory.leadbetter@bcu.ac.uk
Room M6 (Chair: Lilla Maria Crisafulli)
“I tell you this, because I come from your country”. The popularization of science and the linguistic construction of reliability in nineteenth-century travelogues and ego documents
Marina Dossena
Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy marina.dossena@unibg.it
Room P5 (Chair: Karin Aijmer)
(Child)reign of Terror: Dangerous Child Régimes
Björn Sundmark
Malmö University, Sweden bjorn.sundmark@mah.se
16.45–17.15 Coffee break, Aristotle, Socrates + Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (authors at posters)
| 17.15–18.45 Seminars, Round tables and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
SLITE2 B, Room A4, REVISITING THE NATION IN POST-WAR MODERNIST LITERATURE – Convenors: Armela Panajoti, Adrian Radu, Participants: Valeria Polopoli, Sule Okuroglu Ozun, Aylin Atilla, Pavlina Flajsarova
SLITE3 B, Room A3, INTERMEDIAL BODY POLITICS: TOWARDS A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF IMAGE/TEXT DYNAMICS – Convenors: Anna Kérchy, Catriona McAra, Participants: Catriona McAra, Ágnes Strickland-Pajtok, Larisa Kocic-Zámbó, Eszter Katalin Szép
SLITE9 A, Room S2, SEMINAR ON ENGLISH MANUSCRIPT STUDIES – Convenors: Carlo Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen, Participants: Efterpi Mitsi, D. C. Andersson, Andrew James, Conny Loder
SLITE11 B, Room A6, CONFORMISM AND ANTI-CONFORMISM RECONSIDERED: FROM POSTMODERNISM TO CONTEMPORARY SENSIBILITY IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ARTS – Convenors: Jaroslav Kušnír, Dan Popescu, Participants: Anton Pokrivčák, Tibor Tóth, Péter Dolmányos, Judit Nagy
SLITE12, Room S1, THE RECEPTION OF VICTORIAN FICTION IN EUROPE – Convenors: Ebbe Klitgård, Alberto Lázaro, Participants: María José Coperías Aguilar, María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, Ebbe Klitgård, Alberto Lázaro
SLITE17, Room A8, WALTER SCOTT AND THE SHAPING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOVEL – Convenors: Ian Brown, David Clark, Participants: Alev Karaduman Jean Berton, Ian Brown
SLANG4 B, Room A2, WORD-FORMATION IN CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS – Convenors: Vladimir Ž. Jovanović, Jovanka Lazarevska-Stančevska, Participants: Vincent Renner, Alexandra Bagasheva, Vladimir Ž. Jovanović, Ada Bohmerová
SLANG6 A, Room A1, PHRASEOLOGY AND BUSINESS TERMINOLOGY: THE POINTS OF CROSSING – Convenors: Tatiana Fedulenkova, Yakiv Bystrov, Participants: Victoria Ivashchenko and Tetyana Stasyuk, Yulia Prodan, Yana Ignatovich, Liudmyla P. Naumenko
SLANG9 A, Room S5, INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE – Convenors: Libuše Dušková, Jana Chamonikolasová, Renáta Gregová, Participants: Brno group (Jana Chamonikolasová, Martin Adam, Martin Drápela, Irena Headlandová Kalischová, Lenka Stehlíková), Leona Rohrauer, Vladislav Smolka
SLANG10 B, Room A9, INVESTIGATING ACADEMIC DISCOURSES: ENGLISH LANGUAGE USE AT EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES – Convenors: Vander Viana, Aisling O’Boyle, Participants: Aisling O’Boyle, Rachel Germanier
SLANG14 B, Room A10, CHANGING DISCOURSES, CHANGING WORKPLACES: POSTMODERN TRENDS IN INSTITUTIONAL COMMUNICATION – Convenors: Cornelia Ilie, Giuliana Garzone, Participants: Junko Winch, Ahlam Mohammed Almohissen
SLANG16 B, Room S4, LEXICAL BUNDLES IN ENGLISH NON-FICTION WRITING: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS – Convenors: Jukka Tyrkkö, Joanna Kopaczyk, Participants: Anu Lehto, Jean-Louis Duchet and Olivier Chaulet, Gintare Grigonyte and Gerold Schneider, Gerold Schneider and Gintare Grigonyte
SLANG18, Room SLAB, CORPUS INTEROPERABILITY AND SPOKEN DIACHRONIC DATABASES : THE NECTE-DECTE CORPORA – Convenors: Nicolas Ballier, Karen Corrigan, Participants: Maelle Amand & Nicolas Ballier, Karen P. Corrigan and Adam J. Mearns, Esther Le Grézause, Philippe Martin, Raphael Salkie
SLANG32 B, Room A5, ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS – EXCEPTIONAL ENGLISH FOR EXCEPTIONAL LEARNERS? – Convenors: Ewa Domagala-Zysk, Edit Hegybiro Kontra, Participants: Joanna Falkowska, Zuzana Fonioková, Jitka Sedláčková Monika Malec, Marta Dick-Bursztyn, Beata Gulati
SCULT5, Room A7, ANGLICIST WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES OF CONTINENTAL EUROPE – Convenors: Renate Haas, Andrea P. Balogh, Participants: Dubravka Djurić, Milena Katsarska, Seda Gassparian and Gayane Muradian, Renate Haas
19.00 Visit to the Tokay cellars (see Social Programme)
Sunday 31 August 2014 UPJŠ Rectorate and Campus, Šrobárova 2
09.00–18.00 Conference information centre, Rectorate, Senate Meeting Room, 1st floor
09.30–18.00 Book exhibition, Socrates, Ground floor
09.30–18.00 Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (posters only)
11.00, 12.30, 15.00, 16.30 Free guided tours of Košice centre (groups of 20–30 people, 60 minutes, begins and ends at the Rectorate)
| 09.30–10.30 Parallel Lectures 3 |
|---|
Room M5 (Chair: Pierre Lurbe)
Eschatology and the motif of the vanities in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
Line Cottegnies
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, France line.cottegnies@free.fr
Room M6 (Chair: Libuše Dušková)
Lexical Mortality and Word-Formation in Early Middle English: The Case of ÆLFRICIAN Texts
Jan Čermák
Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic jan.cermak@ff.cuni.cz
Room P5 (Chair: Efterpi Mitsi)
Regarding Animals Regarding Humans
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece gounelas@lit.auth.gr
10.30–11.00 Coffee break, Aristotle, Socrates + Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (authors at posters)
| 11.00–13.00 Seminars, Round tables and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
PhD CULT B, Room S2, Doctoral Session: Cultural and Area Studies – Convenors: Martin Montgomery, Michel Prum, Participants: Petra Filipová, Reni Radkova, Andrea Bila, Elodie Gallet
RT3, Room S4, LITERARY JOURNALISM: EXPLAINING SECOND CITIES TO THEMSELVES – Convenors: John S. Bak, David Abrahamson, John S. Bak, David Abrahamson, Participants: Norman Sims, Lisa A. Phillips, Mateus Yuri Passos, Pablo Calvi, Mateusz Zimnoch
SLITE5 A, Room A3, INVESTING IN TIME: LITERATURE, CULTURE AND PERIODIZATION – Convenors: Mihaela Irimia, Jukka Tiusanen, Participants: Jason Finch, Thomas Kullmann, Martin Potter, Madalina Potter, Miroslawa Modrzewska
SLITE7 B, Room S3, FEMALE RITUALS: COOKING AND EATING IN/AND WOMEN’S FICTION -Convenors: Nóra Séllei, Katarina Labudova, Participants: Irene González Sampedro, Astrid Schwegler Castañer, Yasmina Djafri, Eszter Ureczky, Nóra Séllei
SLITE8 A, Room A4, NEW VISIBILITIES: THE RHETORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF VICTIMHOOD AND OTHER FORMS OF VULNERABILITY IN 21ST CENTURY BRITISH FICTION – Convenors: Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega, Participants: Jean-Michel Ganteau, Laurent Mellet, Maria Grazia Nicolosi, Susana Onega
SLITE18, Room A8, EDWIN MORGAN AND THE PROSPECT OF SCOTLAND – Convenors: Alan Riach, Silke Stroh, Participants: David Kinloch, Pilar Somacarrera, John Corbett, Aniela Korzeniowska, Alan Riach
SLITE22, Room A6, INTERDISCIPLINARY DICKENS – Convenors: Dominic Rainsford, Soňa Šnircová, Participants: Michael Hollington, Aleksandra Kędzierska, Loredana Salis, Edyta Świerczyńska, Jeremy Tambling
SLANG1 A, Room A9, PRODUCTIVITY IN WORD-FORMATION – Convenors: Mark Aronoff, Pavol Stekauer, Participants: Laurie Bauer, Paola-Maria Caleffi, Bożena Duda, Pavol Stekauer, Michael Bilinsky
SLANG6 B, Room A1, PHRASEOLOGY AND BUSINESS TERMINOLOGY: THE POINTS OF CROSSING – Convenors: Tatiana Fedulenkova, Yakiv Bystrov, Participants: Anahit Bagdasaryan, Darya Silina, Ekaterina Marycheva, Elizaveta Ilina, Tatiana Fedulenkova, Ekaterina Vishenkova , Ekaterina Volkova
SLANG9 B, Room S5, INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE – Convenors: Libuše Dušková, Jana Chamonikolasová, Renáta Gregová, Participants: Gabriela Brůhová, Jiřina Popelíková , Libuše Dušková, Lenka Kopečková, Renata Pípalová
SLANG14 C, Room A10, CHANGING DISCOURSES, CHANGING WORKPLACES: POSTMODERN TRENDS IN INSTITUTIONAL COMMUNICATION – Convenors: Cornelia Ilie, Giuliana Garzone, Participants: Giuliana Garzone, Olga Denti, Roxanne Barbara Doerr
SLANG22 A, Room A7, WRITING IN NON-STANDARD ENGLISH – Convenors: Isabelle Roblin, Linda Pillière, Jane Hodson, Participants: Julie Loison-Charles, Lynn Blin, Pop Titus, Michael Percillier
SCULT7, Room S1, EXPLORATIONS OF ETHNICITY AND GENDER: (DIS)COVERING/ (DE)CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY IN AMERICAN FICTION – Convenors: Cristina Cheveresan, Brigitte Zaugg, Participants: Imola Bulgozdi, Gabriela Tucan, Judit Ágnes Kádár, Eva Pelayo Sañudo, Elzbieta Rokosz-Piejko, Martina Koegeler-Abdi
SCULT11 A, Room A5, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN NEO-VICTORIANISM – Convenors: Georges Letissier, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Participants: Alexandra Cheira, Gordon J. Marshall, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Daný van Dam
SCULT20, Room A2, “1914” – Convenors: John Mullen, Wolfgang Görtschacher, Participants: Himment Umunc, Amy D. Wells, Wolfgang Görtschacher, John Mullen, Flavien Bardet, Trevor Harris
13.00 –14.30 Lunch break
14.30–15.30 Plenary lecture 3, Room M5
QUESTIONS OF LITERACY: EAST AND WEST
Professor Dr. Martin Montgomery, Universidade de Macau, China, (Chair: Slávka Tomaščíková)
15.30–16.00 Coffee break, Aristotle, Socrates, Aristotle, Ground floor + Poster presentations (authors at posters)
| 16.00–17.30 Seminars, Round tables and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
PhD LING A, Room S1, Doctoral Session: English Language – Convenors: Mark Aronoff, Cornelia Ilie, Participants: Michaela Šamalová, Cornelia Sus, Joanna Sycz
RT4, Room S4, DEBATES ON WORLD LITERATURE – Convenor: Jon Cook, Participants: Herbert Grabes, Jan Borm, Regina Rudaityte
SLITE5 B, Room A3, INVESTING IN TIME: LITERATURE, CULTURE AND PERIODIZATION – Convenors: Mihaela Irimia, Jukka Tiusanen, Participants: Elena Butoescu, Wojciech Drag, Anthony Johnson and Ilkka Juuso, Vassil Anastassov, Eszter Tory, Janina Vesztergom
SLITE8 B, Room A4, NEW VISIBILITIES: THE RHETORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF VICTIMHOOD AND OTHER FORMS OF VULNERABILITY IN 21ST CENTURY BRITISH FICTION – Convenors: Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega, Participants: Merve Sarıkaya, Eileen Williams-Wanquet, Svend Erik Larsen
SLITE9 B, Room S2, SEMINAR ON ENGLISH MANUSCRIPT STUDIES – Convenors: Carlo Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen, Participants: Roberta Grandi, Anunciación Carrera de la Red, Marcella Henderson-Peal
SLITE21, Room A2, CANADIAN LITERATURE IN A MULTI-CENTRIC WORLD – Convenors: Michelle Gadpaille, Vesna Lopicic, Participants: Monica Bottez, Natalia, Kaloh Vid, Michelle Gadpaille, Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly, Judit Molnár
SLANG1 B, Room A9, PRODUCTIVITY IN WORD-FORMATION – Convenors: Mark Aronoff, Pavol Stekauer, Participants: Jean Albrespit, Mark Aronoff, Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, Dóra Pődör, Tanja Säily
SLANG5 A, Room A1, COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF ENGLISH IDIOMS – Convenors: Lilli Tissen, Tatiana Fedulenkova, Natalia Potselueva, Participants: Zoia Adamia, Manana Shelia, Maia Marghania, Natalia Potseluyeva, Roman Voronin
SLANG9 C, Room S5, INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE – Convenors: Libuše Dušková, Jana Chamonikolasová, Renáta Gregová, Participants: Jarmila Tárnyiková, Silvie Válková, Sara Gesuato, Dorota Rut-Kluz, Astghik Chubaryan, Ruzanna Karapetyan
SLANG21, Room A6, GRAMMATICALIZATION, LEXICALIZATION, CONSTRUCTIONALIZATION – Convenors: Jan Čermák, Rafał Molencki, Participants: Hae-Yun Lee, Przemysław Łozowski, Jim Walker
SLANG22 B, Room A7, WRITING IN NON-STANDARD ENGLISH – Convenors: Isabelle Roblin, Linda Pillière, Jane Hodson, Participants: Jane Hodson, Izabela Szymanska, Linda Pillière, Isabelle Roblin
SLANG25, Room S3, IMPOLITENESS ACROSS LANGUAGES AND CULTURES – Convenors: Małgorzata Szymańska, Charles Bonnot, Participants: Yeliz Demir, Charles Bonnot, Malgorzata Szymanska, Jitka Vlckova
SLANG27, Room A8, ENGLISH IN EUROPEAN LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES – Convenors: Milan Ferenčík, Judit Szabóné Papp, Participants: Lydia Sciriha, Steven Coats, Judit Szabóné Papp, Milan Ferenčík
SCULT8, Room A10, ACCESSION & IMMIGRATION IN THE UK AND ITS IMPACT ON IDENTITY FORMATION AMONG THE NEW DIASPORAS – Convenors: Andrew C. Rouse, Julius Rozenfeld, Participants: Haluk Ucel, Andrea Bila, Julius Rozenfeld
SCULT11 B, Room A5, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN NEO-VICTORIANISM – Convenors: Georges Letissier, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Participants: Simonetta Falchi, Caterina Grasl, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Claire O’Callaghan, Louisa Yates
17.45–18.45 Proquest special event, Room M5
Literature Online and Other Resources for Literary Research from ProQuest
Speaker: John Pegum, Senior Product Manager, Humanities at ProQuest
19.00 Visit to the Tokay cellars (see Social Programme)
Monday 1 September 2014 UPJŠ Rectorate and Campus, Šrobárova 2
09.00–18.00 Conference information centre, Rectorate, Senate Meeting Room, 1st Floor
09.30–18.00 Book exhibition, Socrates, Ground floor
09.30–18.00 Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (posters only)
11.00, 12.30, 15.00, 16.30 Free guided tour of Košice centre (groups of 20–30 persons, 60 minutes, begins and ends at the Rectorate)
| 09.30–10.30 Parallel lectures 4 |
|---|
Room M5 (Chair: Martin Procházka)
Visual Challenges in Contemporary Poetry: Agon and Enablement
Rui Carvalho Homem
Universidade do Porto, Portugal rchomem@letras.up.pt
Room M6 (Chair: Przemyslaw Lozowski)
Studies of language, studies on literature: A cognitive rapprochement?
Henryk Kardela
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland henkar@klio.umcs.lublin.pl
Room P5 (Chair: Nóra Séllei)
History – Drama – Film: Theory and Practice in Cutural Representations of the Medieval Past
György E. Szönyi
University of Szeged & Central European University in Budapest, Hungary geszonyi@freemail.hu
10.30–11.00 Coffee break, Aristotle, Socrates + Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (authors at posters)
| 11.00–13.00 Seminars, Round tables and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
PhD LING B, Room S1, Doctoral Session: English Language – Convenors: Mark Aronoff, Cornelia Ilie, Participants: Cristina Blanco-García, Elisabeth Senft, Lenka Janovcová, MaƗgorzata Kaszak, Zuzana Naďová
PhD LIT A, Room S2, Doctoral Session: Literatures in English – Convenors: Martin Procházka, Dominic Rainsford, Participants: Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Boglárka Kiss, Aude Petit Marquis, Ana Laura González Hernández
RT1, Room A8, BIOGRAPHY THEORY – Convenor: Joanny Moulin, Participants: J. W. (Hans) Renders,
Christian Klein
SLITE4 B, Room S4, THE FICTION OF VICTORIAN MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES – Convenors: Elisabetta Marino, Adrian Radu, Participants: Eliana Ionoaia, Irina Presnakova, Marlena Marciniak,
István Szabadi
SLITE6 A, Room S3, FIGURES AND SITES OF MEMORY IN 19TH- AND 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE – Convenors: Irena Grubica, Tamás Bényei, Participants: Zdeněk Beran, Tomasz Niedokos, Brigitta Hudácskó, Irena Grubica
SLITE13 A, Room A10, MAPPING THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE IN THE NOVELS OF FEMALE DEVELOPMENT – Convenors: Soňa Šnircová, Milena Kostić, Participants: Cédric Courtois, Andrea Fernández-García, Lilijana Burcar, Yıldırım Özsevgeç
SLANG5 B, Room A1, COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF ENGLISH IDIOMS – Convenors: Lilli Tissen, Tatiana Fedulenkova, Natalia Potselueva, Participants: Lilia Linnik, Elizaveta Ilina, Guldarkhan Smagulova, Tatiana Fedulenkova
SLANG11 A, Room S5, CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC GENRES – Convenors: Karin Aijmer, Diana Lewis, Participants: Karin Aijmer, Lieven Buysse, Michaela Martinková a Markéta Janebová, Maria Pavesi, Magdalena Sczyrbak
SLANG15, Room A6, CORPORA OF ACADEMIC SPOKEN ENGLISH – ISSUES IN COMPILATION, TRANSCRIPTION AND USE – Convenors: Stefan Diemer, Maria Georgieva, Participants: Marie-Louise Brunner, Francisco Javier Fernández Polo, Stefan Diemer and Caroline Collet, Maria Georgieva, Šárka Ježková, Nuzha Moritz
SLANG24 A, Room A9, THE PRAGMATICS OF BORROWING: ASSESSING THE PRAGMATIC EFFECTS OF BORROWINGS FROM AND INTO ENGLISH – Convenors: Gisle Andersen, Cristiano Furiassi, Biljana Mišić Ilić, Participants: Gisle Andersen, Anne-Line Graedler, Henrik Gottlieb, Elizabeth Peterson
SLANG29, Room A3, LEXICAL ISSUES IN L2 WRITING – Convenors: Päivi Pietilä, Katalin Doró, Renata Pípalová, Participants: Renata Pípalová, Minoo Khamesian, Päivi Pietilä, Katalin Doró, Marja-Leena Niitemaa
SCULT1, Room A4, WOMEN’S LIVES, WOMEN’S WORKS, A TALE OF MUTUAL INFLUENCES – Convenors: Florence Binard, Julie Gottlieb, Michel Prum, Participants: Ágnes Beretzky, Mathilde Bertrand, Ágnes Györke, Lenke Németh, Julia Lajta-Novak, Marie-Annick Mattioli
SCULT2 A, Room A7, EUROPE FOOD INC.: EATING AND COOKING IN THE ARTS – Convenors: Nieves Pascual, Silvia Baučeková, Participants: Andrea Hübner, Ahmet Koç, Carmen Lara-Rallo, Silvia Baučeková
SCULT12, Room A5, PUBLICITY AND PROPAGANDA DISCOURSES IN THE MEDIA IN ENGLISH – Convenors: María José Coperías-Aguilar,Slávka Tomaščíková, Participants: Alice Byme, Marine Dasse, Smiljana Komar, Sławomir Kozioł, Edyta Rachfał, María José Coperías-Aguilar and Slávka Tomaščíková
SCULT14, Room A2, UNCANNY PRESENCES: THE PORTRAYAL OF EVIL IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND AMERICAN TV SERIES – Convenors: Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, Patrick Duggan, Participants: Christophe Den Tandt, Jimena Escudero, Iren Annus, Richard Schumaker, Serkan Sen, Julianna Borbély
13.00–14.30 Lunch break
| 14.30–16.30 Seminars, Round tables and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
PhD LING C, Room S1, Doctoral Session: English Language – Convenors: Mark Aronoff, Cornelia Ilie, Participants: Stephan Giuliani, Juraj Lukáč, Michaela Pankratz, Jitka Sedláčková
PhD LIT B, Room S2, Doctoral Session: Literatures in English – Convenors: Martin Procházka, Dominic Rainsford, Participants: Juan José Martín González, Daný van Dam, Sercan Hamza Bağlama, Andrea Fernández-García
SLITE4 A, Room S4, THE FICTION OF VICTORIAN MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES – Convenors: Elisabetta Marino, Adrian Radu, Participants: Burak Irmak, Feryal Cubukcu, Carla Fusco, Gönül Bakay
SLITE6 B, Room S3, FIGURES AND SITES OF MEMORY IN 19TH- AND 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE – Convenors: Irena Grubica, Tamás Bényei, Participants: Tamás Bényei, Jane Mattisson, Eva Antal, Judit Friedrich
SLITE13 B, Room A10, MAPPING THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE IN THE NOVELS OF FEMALE DEVELOPMENT – Convenors: Soňa Šnircová, Milena Kostić, Participants: Ángel Chaparro Sainz, Attila Dósa, Milena Kostić, Vitana Kostadinova, Soňa Šnircová
SLITE14 A, Room A6, THE CHANGING FACETS OF PARATEXTS – Convenors: Dorothee Birke,
Maxime Leroy, Participants: Sarah Herbe, Magdalena Ożarska, Mustafa Kirca, Ruth Menzies
SLITE16 A, Room A3, “THERE ARE BUT A HANDFUL OF STORIES IN THE WORLD”: J.M. COETZEE AND THE NON-ENGLISH LITERARY TRADITIONS – Convenors: María J. López, Kei Wiegandt, Participants: Angelika Reichmann, Kata Gyuris, Donald Powers
SLITE20 A, Room A2, THE UNEXPECTED IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S FICTION – Convenors: Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, Claude Maisonnat, Wieslaw Krajka, Participants: Joanna Skolik, Wieslaw Krajka, Armela Panajoti, Josiane Paccaud-Huguet
SLANG2 A, Room A4, SEMANTICS OF EVALUATIVE MORPHOLOGY – Convenors: Alexandra Bagasheva, Lívia Körtvélyessy, Participants: Lívia Körtvélyessy, Klaus P. Schneider, Antonio Fortin, Alexandra Bagasheva Daniela Katunar and Matea Srebačić, and Krešimir Šojat, Manana Topadze Gäumann
SLANG8 A, Room A1, CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PHRASEOLOGY – Convenors: Tatiana Fedulenkova, Victoria Ivashchenko, Participants: Leyla Apazheva, Svetlana Bashieva, Rosemarie Gläser, Anahit Hovhannisyan, Piotr Cymbalista
SLANG11 B, Room S5, CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC GENRES – Convenors: Karin Aijmer, Diana Lewis, Participants: Emmanuel Baumer, Hilde Hasselgård, Diana Lewis, Ivana Reznickova, Anna-Brita Stenstrom
SLANG24 B, Room A9, THE PRAGMATICS OF BORROWING: ASSESSING THE PRAGMATIC EFFECTS OF BORROWINGS FROM AND INTO ENGLISH – Convenors: Gisle Andersen, Cristiano Furiassi, Biljana Mišić Ilić , Participants: Sabine Fiedler, Eline Zenner, Dirk Speelman, Dirk Geeraerts, Cristiano Furiassi, Biljana Mišić Ilić
SLANG26 A, Room A5, EUROPEAN VARIATIONS IN ESP ACROSS THEORY AND PRACTICE – Convenors: Shaeda Isani, Alessandra Molino, Michel van der Yeught, Annalisa Zanola, Participants: Maria Tarantino, Catherine Resche, Joannna Kic-Drgas, Philippe Millot
SCULT2 B, Room A7, EUROPE FOOD INC.: EATING AND COOKING IN THE ARTS – Convenors: Nieves Pascual, Silvia Baučeková, Participants: Beatrice Laurent, Arie Sover, Orna Ben-Meir, Nieves Pascual
SCULT19 A, Room A8, F[R]ICTIONS OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE: REFRAMING “TERRORISM” IN LITERARY TEXTS AND FILMS – Convenors: Carla Sassi, Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, Participants: James Robertson, András Beck, Katherina Dodou, Adriana Kiczkowski, Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, Karen Bennett
16.30–17.00 Coffee break, Aristotle, Socrates + Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (authors at posters)
| 17.00–18.30 Seminars, Round tables, and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
PhD LIT C, Room S2, Doctoral Session: Literatures in English – Convenors: Martin Procházka, Dominic Rainsford, Participants: Ira Hansen, Péter Kristóf Makai, Veronika Végh, Anne-Sophie Letessier
SLITE6 C, Room S3, FIGURES AND SITES OF MEMORY IN 19TH- AND 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE – Convenors: Irena Grubica, Tamás Bényei, Participants: Éva Gyöngy Máté, Natalya Novikova, Martina Domines Veliki, Martin Stefl
SLITE14 B, Room A6, THE CHANGING FACETS OF PARATEXTS – Convenors: Dorothee Birke,
Maxime Leroy, Participants: Pierre Lurbe, Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, Jennifer K. Dick, Côme Martin
SLITE16 B, Room A3, “THERE ARE BUT A HANDFUL OF STORIES IN THE WORLD”: J.M. COETZEE AND THE NON-ENGLISH LITERARY TRADITIONS – Convenors: María J. López, Kei Wiegandt, Participants: Ottilia Veres, Fernando Galván, Gillian Dooley, Valeria Mosca
SLANG19, Room A10, DIACHRONIC CORPUS STUDIES OF ENGLISH – Convenors: Jan Čermák,
Rafał Molencki, Participants: Javier Calle-Martín and Jesús Romero-Barranco, Nikolaos Lavidas, Miroslava Podhajecka
SLITE20 B, Room A2, THE UNEXPECTED IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S FICTION – Convenors: Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, Claude Maisonnat, Wieslaw Krajka, Participants: Nathalie Martinière, Claude Maisonnat, Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska, Brygida Pudełko, Monika Majewska
SLANG2 B, Room A4, SEMANTICS OF EVALUATIVE MORPHOLOGY – Convenors: Alexandra Bagasheva, Lívia Körtvélyessy, Participants: Renáta Gregová, Angeliki Efthymiou, Marios Andreou, Olga Steriopolo, Nicola Lampitelli
SLANG8 B, Room A1, CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PHRASEOLOGY -Convenors: Tatiana Fedulenkova, Victoria Ivashchenko, Participants: Elena Ryzhkina, Nadezhda Rakhmatullaeva, Ekaterina Volkova, Maria Konnova
SLANG11 C, Room S5, CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC GENRES – Convenors: Karin Aijmer, Diana Lewis, Participants: Catherine Chauvin, Laura Hidalgo, Downing and Yasra Hanawi, Tereza Malčíková
SLANG26 B, Room A5, EUROPEAN VARIATIONS IN ESP ACROSS THEORY AND PRACTICE – Convenors: Shaeda Isani, Alessandra Molino, Michel van der Yeught, Annalisa Zanola, Participants: Fanny Domenec, Alessandra Molino, Olga Ranus, Shaeda Isani, Angela Andreani & Virginia Pulcini
SLANG28, Room A7, NON-WORDS, NONCE-WORDS AND MORPHOLOGY TEACHING – Convenors: Silvia Cacchiani, Christoph Haase, Participants: Elisa Mattiello, Silvia Cacchiani, Christoph Haase, Martha Lampropoulou
SCULT4 A, Room S4, GENDER AND POPULAR CULTURE – Convenors: Astrid M. Fellner, Viera Nováková, Participants: Irina Bodrow, Lea Gerhards, Leopold Lippert
SCULT19 B, Room A8, F[R]ICTIONS OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE: REFRAMING “TERRORISM” IN LITERARY TEXTS AND FILMS – Convenors: Carla Sassi, Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, Participants: Juanjo Bermúdez de Castro, Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, Colin S. Clark, Carla Sassi
18.45–19:45 ESSE General Assembly with Book Prize Ceremony (Historic Aula, Rectorate, 1st floor)**
20.00 Conference Barbecue, Rectorate, Backyard
Tuesday 2 September 2014 UPJŠ Rectorate and Campus, Šrobárova 2
09.00 –14.00 Conference information centre, Rectorate, Senate Meeting Room, 1st floor
09.30–14.00 Book exhibition, Socrates, Ground floor
| 09.30–10.30 Parallel lectures 5 |
|---|
Room M5 (Chair: Vitana Kostadinova)
Imagining the Fascinating Foreigner: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and Thomas Hope’s Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek Written at the close of the Eighteen Century (1819)
Ludmilla Kostova
University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria lkostova@mbox.digsys.bg
Room M6 (Chair: Biljana Mišić Ilić)
Politeness in the history of English: From the “courteisie” of the “parfit gentil knight” to the politeness of the Renaissance gentleman
Andreas H. Jucker
University of Zurich, Switzerland ahjucker@es.uzh.ch
Room P5 (Chair: Július Rozenfeld)
Boundaries and the crisis: cultural imaginaries, narratives, and political discourses
Lidia De Michelis
University of Milan, Italy lidia.demichelis@unimi.it
10.30–11.00 Coffee break, Aristotle, Socrates + Poster presentations, Aristotle, Ground floor (authors at posters)
| 11.00–13.00 Seminars, Round tables and PhD sessions, Aristotle, Socrates |
|---|
PhD LIT D, Room S2, Doctoral Session: Literatures in English – Convenors: Martin Procházka, Dominic Rainsford, Participants: Martin Štefl, Anikó Bach, Kata Gyuris, Lukáš Merz, Zsuzsanna Tóth
RT2, Room S1, CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACHES IN THE STUDY OF EAST EUROPEAN CINEMA – Convenor: Andrea Virgnás, Participants: György Kalmár, Zsolt Győri
SLITE1, Room A4, THE CHANGING REPRESENTATION OF THE JEWISH FAMILY IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE – Convenors: Stanislav Kolář, Zuzana Buráková, Participants: Luisa Juárez Hervás, Alistair Heys, Eniko Maior, Joshua Parker, Michaela Weiss, Zuzana Buráková, Stanislav Kolář
SLITE6 D, Room S3, FIGURES AND SITES OF MEMORY IN 19TH- AND 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE – Convenors: Irena Grubica, Tamás Bényei, Participants: John A Stotesbury, Ozan Selcik, Éva Pataki, Zuzana Klímová
SLANG3, Room S5, WORD-FORMATION AND TRANSPARENCY IN MEDICAL ENGLISH – Convenors: Pius ten Hacken, Renáta Panocová, Participants: Mariusz Górnicz, Szymon Machowski, Sevda Pekcoşkun, Renáta Panocová, Pius ten Hacken
SLANG8 C, Room A1, CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PHRASEOLOGY – Convenors: Tatiana Fedulenkova, Victoria Ivashchenko, Participants: Anna Stachurska, Sabirova L.V. and Sabirova L. A., Bożena Kochman-Haładyj, Yakiv Bystrov
SLANG17, Room A9, CORPUS PRAGMA-STYLISTICS – Convenors: Ursula Lutzky, Carla Suhr , Participants: Heather Froehlich, Gabriela Csulich, Michaela Mahlberg, Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz, Mariana Sargysan
SLANG20, Room A2, PRAGMATIC VALUES IN NON-DIALOGIC TEXTS: A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE – Convenors: Gabriella Mazzon, Minna Nevala, Participants: Sonia De Angelis, Daniela Francesca Virdis, Jukka Tyrkkö, Maija Stenvall
SLANG26 C, Room A5, EUROPEAN VARIATIONS IN ESP ACROSS THEORY AND PRACTICE – Convenors: Shaeda Isani, Alessandra Molino, Michel van der Yeught, Annalisa Zanol, Participants: Danica Milosevic, Caroline Peynaud, Silvia Molina, Viviana Gaballo, Hélène Laffont
SCULT3, Room A3, GENDER ACROSS THE MEDIA: 21ST-CENTURY MASCULINITIES IN FILM AND TV FICTION – Convenors: Marta Fernández, Martina Martausová, Participants: Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez,
Viera Nováková, Rubén Cenamor
SCULT4 B, Room A4, GENDER AND POPULAR CULTURE – Convenors: Astrid M. Fellner, Viera Nováková, Participants: Alexandra Bikkyová, Katharina Wiedlack, Veronika Babjáková
SCULT9, Room A8, THE PARTITION OF INDIA – BEYOND IMPROBABLE LINES – Convenors: Elisabetta Marino, Daniela Rogobete, Participants: Olivia Balanescu, Mehmet Ali Celikel, Alan Munton, Elisabetta Marino, Daniela Rogobete
SCULT18, Room A6, SCULPTING THE OTHER: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN LAW, LITERATURE AND CULTURE – Convenors: Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Chiara Battisti, Sidia Fiorato, Participants: Giampaolo Azzoni, Cristina Costantini, Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Christine Mangan, Cristiano Ragni
13.15–14.00 Closing of the conference, Room P5
Feedback from Plenary Speakers
Presentation of ESSE 2016 Galway
PLENARY SPEAKERS
Professor Dr.Fiona Robertson, St Mary's University, U.K., (Chair: Pavel Stekauer)
Saturday 30.8.2014 14.30–15.30 Room M5
http://www.smuc.ac.uk/…obertson.htm
WALTER SCOTT AND THE RESTORATION OF EUROPE
To mark the bicentenary of the publication of Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since in July 1814, this lecture will consider why and how a tale of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion came to redefine historical consciousness across Europe. It will analyse the most important components of Scott’s approach to historical fiction, emphasising his intellectual and artistic subtlety and originality. Taking key ideas from Waverley, the lecture will range across Scott’s works, anchoring his place in a wide European tradition. 2014 is also the year in which Scotland votes for or against independence from the United Kingdom, and so the theme of this lecture is one problematized at the end of Scott’s first novel, ‘restoration’.
The first part of the lecture will reflect on the implications of an intriguing passage in Chapter 4 of Waverley, in which Scott describes family tradition and genealogical history as ‘the very reverse of amber’. This, I argue, is an appropriately thought-provoking, ambiguous starting-point for Scott’s conflicted approach to historical fiction. I then go on to consider the concentrated fantasy of restoration which takes over the final chapter of Waverley, and reflect on the significance of this fantasy in the context of Europe in1814. ‘Restoration’ is a process of giving back, reinstating, re-establishing – bringing back to an earlier condition. As Scott shows, it is a historical impossibility and an aesthetic conundrum. ‘Replenished’, ‘replaced’, ‘renewed or repaired’ – the language of this closing chapter of Waverley draws attention to a difficulty which beset the declared political process of ‘restoration’ in the post-Napoleonic period (by which, for example, the Bourbon line in France was ‘restored’, but as a constitutional monarchy which incorporated the principles of revolutionary change). Of special interest is Scott’s description of how the house and gardens of Tullyveolan have been repaired ‘with the strictest attention to maintain the original character of both, and to erase, as far as possible, all appearance of the ravage they had sustained’.
Restoration – maintenance or erasure? – then directs a reading of Scott’s fictions after Waverley which will focus on the many ways in which Scott reintroduced across Europe a passionate but sceptical engagement with the past and its traces – in folk tradition, legend, the received historical record, buildings, landscapes, artefacts, and the fabric of the state.
Professor Dr. Martin Montgomery, Universidade de Macau, China, (Chair: Slávka Tomaščíková)
Sunday 31.8.2014 14.30–15.30 Room M5
http://www.umac.mo/…tgomery.html
QUESTIONS OF LITERACY: EAST AND WEST
It has almost become a cliché to say that we live in a period of unprecedented innovation in the technologies of communication. For sure, the pace of change is rapid; and we can see it most obviously in the changing character of the technical devices that we use on an everyday basis to communicate with each other.
The related rise of personal and social media cannot help but pose questions for us about the nature of the mediated public sphere, about its changing character and about how we access it. What are the dominant genres of the digital era, what kinds of literacies do they presuppose, and how are these re-shaping our older script and print-based literacies?
This talk will draw upon two case studies selected from contrasting mediaspheres, the United States and the People’s Republic of China, to explore the role of digital discourse in micro-blogs on social media platforms as an enactment or extension of the traditional public sphere. In both examples we will see an interaction between old media and new media, since a significant amount of participation in both the U.S. and China comes not just from members of the public but from established journalists accredited to what might be called ‘old’ media news institutions. Each episode, indeed, begins with what might be called an old media event: a televised debate in the US and a news report in the press in the PRC. But in each case the public response is widely dispersed through micro-blogging on social media.
The first case study is based on data from the second presidential debate of the U.S. Presidential Election, 2012, where the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, made an ill-judged reference to ‘binders full of women’. It explores how the phrase was immediately picked up on Twitter and became the focus for memes and threads in the days that followed. The second case study is based on data from China where a press photograph of a public official looking relaxed at the scene of a fatal accident led to widespread comment amongst China’s netizens, to such an extent that the official not only lost his position (as regional head of work safety), but was subsequently investigated for breaches of party discipline.
A comparison of these two cases leads to reflections on the potentialities of the mediated public sphere in the age of the internet. But it also deals with two kinds of body politic in process in two very different societies. Nonetheless, the comparison throws interesting light on how a similar mediated genre – the micro-blog – can be inflected in different ways and to different ends in the two major societies of our time.
Professor Dr. Mick Short, Lancaster University, U.K., (Chair: Soňa Šnircová)
Friday 29.8.2014 15.30–16.30 House of Arts, Concert Hall, Ground floor
http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/…6eb0%29.html
USING Wmatrix TO ANALYSE CHARACTER CONTRASTS (AND THEMES AND FOREGROUNDED MOMENTS) IN BETRAYAL BY HAROLD PINTER
In this paper I will explore the use of a corpus tool called Wmatrix (developed at Lancaster by Dr Paul Rayson) to compare two of the three characters, Jerry and Emma in Betrayal by Harold Pinter. Wmatrix analyses semantic fields in corpora being compared. I will explain in general terms how the tool works and how I used it to compare the speech output of the two characters. In spite of the fact that Wmatrix occasionally mis-assigns lexical items in the play to the wrong semantic fields and, at first sight, the semantic categories highlighted do not seem that interesting, in fact, they are related to important thematic preoccupations in the play.
Wmatrix also seems to point to interestingly to stretches of text that one would want to analyse for other reasons, if doing more traditional stylistic analysis on the play. It also highlighted for me a pattern of ‘somewhat spread’ repetition, which is interesting to consider as it does not seem to be easily accounted for by the traditional foregrounding model.
I will summarise the play (which innovatively starts at the end and works backwards) during my talk, but it will be easier to follow what I have to say if conferees have read the play (or have watched the DVD film of it, which follows the dramatic text closely).
SUB-PLENARY LECTURES
There will be 15 sub-plenary lectures (in parallel sessions with three lectures going on simultaneously).
LLITE1 Saturday 30.8.2014 9.30–10.30 Room M5, (Chair: Adrian Radu)
How Trauma Turns into Literature: Romanian-American Writers
Michaela Mudure,
Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania mmudure@lett.ubbcluj.ro
Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic mmudure@yahoo.com
Rerouted, derouted, uprooted Romanian-American writers suffer the consequences of leaving their homeland for years after they had made this decision. The specificities of this traumatic move are given by the writers’ personalities and by the historical moment when they leave Romania behind. We shall analyze comparatively the violence of the immigrant travel routes as they appear in the work of three Romanian voices in American literature: Domnica Rădulescu, Alta Ifland, and Petru Popescu. More precisely, we shall focus on Domnica Radulescu and her first novel Train to Trieste, on Petru Popescu’s novel The Deputy, and on Alta Ifland’s collection of short stories Elegy for a Fabulous Land. All these writers were born in Romania and were confronted with totalitarianism and its impositions upon individual identity. For many years escape was the main target of their personal identity politics. We have chosen these authors because they all write fiction and because their personal routes and literary achievements were, for ever, marked by the trauma of leaving Romania and then by the necessity to adapt to American culture.
LLITE2 Monday 1.9.2014 9.30–10.30 Room M5, (Chair: Martin Procházka)
Visual Challenges in Contemporary Poetry: Agon and Enablement
Rui Carvalho Homem, Universidade do Porto, Portugal rchomem@letras.up.pt
http://sigarra.up.pt/…ral.formview?…
This lecture will ponder the ways in which verbal art rises to the challenge posed by pictorial referents by looking into instances of ekphrasis in the work of three poets: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Sinéad Morrissey. I will predicate this inquiry on an awareness of the argumentative history generated by relations between verbal and visual – a history in which agonistic tropes have characteristically alternated with representations of a peaceful, “‘sisterly’” and benign rapport. My discussion of aspects of the work of Hughes, Heaney and Morrissey will aim to highlight the distinct conformations into which their poetics can bring those ‘“two opposed impulses, two opposed feelings’” that Murray Krieger identified long ago as ruling one’s expectations of how the dynamics of language can tackle the apparent stasis of a visual object: emulation or contrariety? This tension will also be critically articulated with the different ways in which the three poets fashion their authorial personae, a dimension of their writing that appears, at key points, to become closely related to a common fascination with portraits – of themselves, or of surrogate figures. The interest taken by these practitioners of the lyric in the representational possibilities afforded by a pictorial genre, the portrait, which is itself associated with selfhood and individuality will ultimately prompt a discussion of the extent to which the intermedial design can become a source of authorial enablement.
LLITE3 Saturday 30.8.2014 15.45–16.45 Room M5, (Chair: Alison Waller)
Coleridge’s Daemonic Imagination
Gregory M. Leadbetter, Birmingham City University, the UK gregory.leadbetter@bcu.ac.uk
http://www.bcu.ac.uk/…y-leadbetter
Drawing on the arguments presented in my book, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), this lecture will describe a new reading of the formative drama at the heart of Coleridge’s poetry and spiritual philosophy.
Beginning with a notebook entry of 1812, in which he applied the enigmatic figure of the ‘“Daemon’” to himself, I will discuss how Coleridge’s obsession with becoming – with ®evolutionary change – blended with his existential and spiritual imperative to know, and to be transfigured by the experience of knowing (for which I employ the term gnosis).
Specifically, Coleridge’s figures of daemonic becoming embody a knowledge of what he called the ‘“transnatural’”. I will summarise how this fascination with the transnatural, in the form of ‘“Metaphysics, Poetry, & ‘“Facts of Mind’”‘, found its mythic voice in the mystery poems of 1797–98: ‘“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”, ‘“Christabel’” and ‘“Kubla Khan’”.
Moreover, I will show how this vision did not leave the later Coleridge. His lecture ‘“On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’” (1825) reveals how high the stakes remained: there, he conceives the divine quickening of humankind, the generation of the Nous, or Reason, as a daemonic event, a version of the Fall myth – which in turn echoes the 1812 note on the Daemon and the mythopoesis of 1797–1798, in which Coleridge imagines the becoming of a new order of intelligence, power and being.
LLITE4 Tuesday 2.9.2014 9.30–10.30 Room M5, (Chair: Vitana Kostadinova)
Imagining the Fascinating Foreigner: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and Thomas Hope’s Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek Written at the close of the Eighteen Century (1819)
Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria lkostova@mbox.digsys.bg
While a lot has been written about denigrating and/or simplistic constructions of foreign parts and their denizens, literary representations that engage with foreigners in more complex ways and turn them into objects of readerly fascination have received relatively little attention. The proposed lecture attempts to make up for this omission by focusing on the central characters of two nineteenth-century novels. Both texts achieved considerable fame in the past but are mostly of academic interest today.
Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw introduced the format of the historical novel into the British context some 11 years before the publication of Scott’s Waverley. Paying close attention to historical details and the specificity of the Polish context, it presents a noble young hero whose chivalric behaviour by far surpasses anything that the novel’s positive English characters can do. In contrast to Porter’s admirable Pole, Thomas Hope’s Anstasius portrays a modern Greek whose behaviour and actions, albeit occasionally amusing, are morally ambiguous and whose chief aim appears to be personal survival in the conditions of a tottering Ottoman empire. Whereas the earlier book exalts heroism and invites sympathy with Poland’s tragic fate, the later one problematizes monologic, hero-centred accounts of national destiny and individual development. Both texts challenge us to re-map the ostensibly familiar terrains of literature and history. Significantly, they do so by representing life in foreign communities and projecting images of fascinating foreigners, thus also inviting us to explore the nature of readerly fascination.
LLite5 Sunday 31.8.2014 9.30 – 10.30 Room M5, (Chair: Pierre Lurbe)
Eschatology and the motif of the vanities in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
Line Cottegnies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, France line.cottegnies@free.fr
http://www.univ-paris3.fr/…e-29490.kjsp
According to art historian Alain Tapié, emblems of death and vanities constituted an art of memory, a ready-made “thinking machine” for the early-modern Christian. Emblems of death and the iconographical motif of the vanities are rampant in Shakespeare’s plays, most famously perhaps in the graveyard scene in Hamlet or in Richard II’s meditation on the tragic fate of kings. This paper focusses on the presence of such motifs in The Merchant of Venice, where, far from being mere citations of a popular iconographical tradition, they play a structural part. In this paper, I will look at the recurring motif of the vanity in the play, and show that it constitutes a meaningful network of images, all converging to make of Antonio’s mysterious melancholy and his profound death-wish the focus of our attention. Meanwhile, the casket scene will allow us to reflect on the secularization of the motif. This paper will look anew at the play as a sceptical meditation on life and death, manifesting contemporary tensions between Christian eschatology and the rise of capitalistic aspirations.
LLANG1 Tuesday 2.9.2014 9.30–10.30 Room M6, (Chair: Biljana Mišić Ilić)
Politeness in the history of English: From the “courteisie” of the “parfit gentil knight” to the politeness of the Renaissance gentleman
Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich, Switzerland ahjucker@es.uzh.ch
http://es-jucker.uzh.ch/
In his description of the Renaissance in England, Alexander (2007: 83) talks about the concept of courtesy and its origins.
„How does the new courtesy differ from the medieval ideal? Chaucer’s ‘“parfit gentil Knyght’” is curteis and his Squire has the physical and social skills; the 15th-century princes Charles d’Orléans and James I of Scotland were fine poets; the young King Henry VIII was a champion athlete who composed songs and motets, and also wrote a treatise in Latin. The Renaissance gentleman was more consciously Christian, more highly educated, more skilled in speech.“
In the thirteenth and fourteenth century, the English language had been heavily influenced by French, and it was at that time that a considerable number of courtesy related vocabulary, such as courteous, courteously, graciously, hende, and the distinction between ye and thou as pronouns of address for one addressee were adopted from French (see Jucker 2012 for an overview). It is plausible to assume that at the same time courtly – or courteous – behaviour was borrowed from the French nobility in England.
During the Renaissance there was another important development in the way that courteous and polite behaviour were conceptualized in England. The term “polite” with the meaning ‘“refined, elegant, scholarly; exhibiting good or restrained taste’ is first attested in the English language in c 1500 (OED, “polite”, adj. 2(a)). In 1561 Sir Thomas Hoby published his translation of Baldesar Castiglione’s book Il Cortegiano, originally published in 1528. It is a courtesy book that in a series of fictional conversations describes the perfect courtier, not only in terms of his language but also in terms of behaviour, gestures and bearing. This book had a considerable impact on how the English upper classes conceptualized courteous and polite behaviour, and its influence can clearly be seen in the works by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson (see Cunningham and Reich 2006: 330).
In this presentation, I shall contrast the Middle English concept of courtesy in Chaucer and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with the Renaissance concept of politeness in Shakespeare and in Jonson. It turns out that Middle English courtesy can best be described as deference politeness (Jucker 2012), while Early Modern English is characterised by a concern for positive politeness (in the sense of Brown and Levinson 1987).
References
Alexander, Michael. (2007) A History of English Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson.(1987) Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cunningham, Lawrence S., and John J. Reich. (2006) Cultures and Values: A Survey of Humanities. Belmont, CA.: Thomson Wadsworth.
Jucker, Andreas H. (2012) Changes in politeness cultures. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Traugott (eds). The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. New York: Oxford University Press, 422–433.
LLANG2 Saturday 30.8.2014 9.30–10.30 Room M6, (Chair: Lívia Körtvélyessy)
Can we arrive at an agreement on the compound status?
Stanislav Kavka, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia ca348439@tiscali.cz
The concept of compound is usually judged in the context of individual languages. The expression referred to as a ‘“compound’” in one language does not have to be ranked as a compound in another language. For good measure, there is a variety of relations existing within the expressions, both on the formal and the semantic levels; and the degree of variety will certainly differ in different languages, too.
In the belief that it is possible to find a common denominator for the compound concept I basically agree with those who regard compounds as a specific category of idiomatic expressions, be it collocations or genuine idioms; compounds, like idiomatic expressions, are highly conventionalized and context-bound, representing an ingenious ‘“texture’” of interrelations. These must be viewed, on one axis at least, as a continuum, a gradient, and on the other axis as a movement from the literal to the figurative reading. It is here that certain characteristic features shared by idiomatic expressions and compounds should be considered, such as compositionality (the product of the continual complex interplay of variability and literalness), and indivisibility (which is not synonymous to non-compositionality!). What I also believe in is the fact of continuity, or ‘“fluidity’”: the given expression can be limited in its variability, grows less literal, and as time passes, it becomes fixed and conventionalized in its new, figurative meaning. In other words, a junction of originally independent lexemes travels, as it were, along the scale of compositionality: the less compositional the given expression is, the more justifiable it is to call it a compound.
All these theses will be explained and illustrated by examples from Czech, German, and Spanish, with special emphasis on English prototypical ‘“compounds’” showing a cline: playground – stone-fish – lifeboat – red carpet – greybeard – white lie.
LLANG3 Sunday 31.8.2014 9.30 – 10.30 Room M6, (Chair: Libuše Dušková)
Lexical Mortality and Word-Formation in Early Middle English: The Case of ÆLFRICIAN Texts
Jan Čermák, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic jan.cermak@ff.cuni.cz
http://uajd.ff.cuni.cz/cermak
The Middle English word has been aptly described as torn between domestic and foreign, spoken and written, traditional and innovative domains. Against the backdrop of this competition, developments in derivational morphology appear to be less progressive than those in inflexional morphology. In the typology of Early Middle English word-formation, decreasing introflection goes hand in hand with diminishing inflection. Derivation as a word-formation strategy begins to employ fewer prefixes and suffixes (this decrease is to be compensated by borrowing from French and Latin later in the Middle English and Early Modern English periods). In the domain of suffixes, those of a more agglutinating nature (i.e. heavy-built, usually syllabic formatives) tend to prevail over those of a lighter, non-syllabic and typologically inflectional character. Lexical mortality has a devastating effect on a vocabulary organized on the etymological principle (Mathesius 1939–40) or associative principle (Kastovsky 1992).
Combining lexicographic and textual analysis in the framework of language typology, the talk will trace several structural tendencies in the demise of Old English vocabulary in Early Middle English. Comparing the evidence provided by electronic The Dictionary of Old English (A‒G) and The Middle English Dictionary (under the Middle English Compendium) with material from the corpus of Early Middle English copies of (mainly) homilies by Ælfric of Eynsham (ca. 955 – ca. 1010), attention will be paid to the interaction between lexical losses (in nouns, adjectives and verbs) and the marginalisation of some of the word-formation patterns employing typological introflection (mainly ablaut and mutations) and suffixes of an inflectional, rather than agglutinating, character. The processes described will be shown to testify to small, slow, gradual but perceptible beginnings in word-formation of the well-known large-scale typological reshaping of English in the course of its history from inflection (synthesis) to isolation (analysis).
References
Dictionary of Old English. A–G on CD-Rom (2008). The Dictionary of Old English, University of Toronto.
McSparran F. (ongoing). The Middle English Compendium. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Digital Library
Production Service. Retrieved from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/.
Kastovsky, D. (1992), “Semantics and Vocabulary”, in: Hogg, R. M. (ed.), The Cambridge History of the
English Language. Volume I: The Beginnings to 1066, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 290–409.
LLANG4 Monday 1.9.2014 9.30–10.30 Room M6, (Chair: Przemyslaw Lozowski)
Studies of language, studies on literature: A cognitive rapprochement?
Henryk Kardela, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland henkar@klio.umcs.lublin.pl
https://umcs.lublin.pl/pracownicy.php?…
Set in the context of the (inter)subjectivity research pursued in the general paradigm of cognitive science, the presentation undertakes to discuss the merits of cognitive theory in both linguistic and literary studies. Assuming, as cognitive linguistic and literary theorists do, that meaning and (text)interpretation emerge from a discourse or a text as a result of the speaker-hearer meaning negotiation process or through the reader’s interaction with the text (and with the author), respectively, we claim that the cognitive paradigm opens new vistas in both modern linguistic theory and literary analysis and thus can successfully replace the self limiting main-stream (generative) theory of language on the one hand and the (post) structuralist reader-oriented approach to literary analysis (Barthes 1967/1986, Eco 1962/1989) on the other. In particular, it is claimed that the (inter)subjectivity-related research pursued in the cognitive paradigm (cf. Zlatev et al. 2008), when placed in the framework of Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar (Langacker 2000, 2007, 2008) and combined with the theory of cognitive narratology (cf. Stockwell 2002, Semino and Culpeper 2002, Claassen 2012, Dancygier 2012), is capable of offering a common ground for the two strands of research to meet and thus allows for a uniform linguistic-literary textual analysis to be carried out.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1967/1986. The Rustle of Language. Trans. by Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dancygier, Barbara. 2012. The Language of Stories. A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: CUP.
Eco, Umberto. 1962/1989. The Open Work. Trans. by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Langacker, Ronald. 2000. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald. 2007. Constructing the Meaning of Personal Pronouns. In: G. Radden, K-M Koepcke, T. Berg, P. Siemund (eds.) Aspects of Meaning Construction. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 171–187.
Langacker, Ronald. 2008. Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Semino, Elena, Jonathan Culpeper (eds.) 2002. Cognitive Stylistics. Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics. An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Zlatev, Jordan, Timothy Racine, Chris Sinha, Esa Itkonen. 2008. The Shared Mind. Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
LLANG5 Saturday 30.8.2014 15.45–16.45 Room M6, (Chair: Lilla Maria Crisafulli)
“I tell you this, because I come from your country”. The popularization of science and the linguistic construction of reliability in nineteenth-century travelogues and ego documents
Marina Dossena, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy marina.dossena@unibg.it
http://www.unibg.it/…truttura.asp?…
According to the statistics on the website of the Oxford English Dictionary, more lexical items were first recorded in the nineteenth century than at any other time in the history of English; they mostly reflect the scientific discoveries, technical innovations and social and political novelties that characterized those decades, and they provide a clear indication of our indebtedness to Late Modern times. In addition, the changes that occurred in nineteenth-century English vocabulary are a function of the way in which new information was made available to the reading public: magazines and circulating libraries opened windows onto new worlds which elicited curiosity and the desire to know more, thus encouraging more publications. Also, the reports published in periodicals (or indeed presented as objective background descriptions in novels) could be supplemented with the narratives found in the letters sent home by emigrants, who strove to illustrate their new reality to readers who could only imagine such unfamiliar settings. Consequently, travelogues, autobiographies, letters and diaries make up a valuable set of documents by means of which we can investigate how geographical, geological and anthropological knowledge was popularized.
In my talk I intend to discuss how description, narration and evaluation appear to interact in texts pertaining to the representation of North America. This transatlantic perspective is in line with recent methodologies in diachronic studies of English, and its interest in popular writing is consistent with current trends in historical sociolinguistics. Specific attention will be given to Scottish texts, on account of their value in the transatlantic diaspora. My investigation will therefore centre on materials currently available in the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, the Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence, and other digital repositories, such as the Internet Library of Early Journals and the online collections of the National Library of Scotland.
LCULT1 Monday 1.9.2014 9.30–10.30 Room P5, (Chair: Nóra Séllei)
History – Drama – Film: Theory and Practice in Cutural Representations of the Medieval Past
György E. Szönyi, University of Szeged & Central European University in Budapest, Hungary geszonyi@freemail.hu
http://history.ceu.hu/…yorgy_szonyi
A common observation is that while our students tend to read less and less, courses on visual representations, especially “film studies”, have greatly increased in popularity. This student interest is only one symptom related to the rise of visual cultural studies: we cannot fail to notice that nowadays the scholarly examination of films as cultural representations has caught up with the practice of literary analyses. This relatively young but increasingly vigorous subdiscipline has reshaped the proportions within English Studies as well, and by today it has its own scholarly output with numberless monographs and significant periodicals. Within the subdiscipline of film studies, an equally fast-growing field is the study of historical films. But even within this sub-discipline there have emerged topical sub-sub-areas, such as the study of filmic representations of the Middle Ages. Examples are John Aberth’s A Knight at the Movies (2003), or Andrew Elliott’s Remaking the Middle Ages (2011).
In my lecture I will briefly survey the historiography of the study of historical films, while in the second part I will offer a few case studies in which films used various source materials, such as dramas of high literary quality (Shakespeare in Laurence Olivier’s and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V); little known medieval romances (Mel Gibson’s Braveheart); or occasion-prompted contemporary scripts (such as Ridley Scott’s 1492, The Conquest of Paradise, on the 500th anniversary of Colombus’s discovery). My case studies prove that there is no historical film which does not have a political or ideological agenda, thus speaking directly to the present. As Robert Burgoyne formulated it in 2008: “The historical film provides an emotional connection to history in a way that foregrounds the power and importance of the past in shaping the cultural imagery in the present” (The Hollywood Historical Film, 48).
LCULT2 CANCELLED
“Faust and the Credit Crunch”
Patrick Lonergan, National University of Ireland in Galway, Ireland patrick.lonergan@nuigalway.ie
http://www.nuigalway.ie/…onergan.html
In this lecture, I will embark on an exploration of how the global credit crunch has been met by a significant increase in new work that draws on the Faust motif, often directly taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Mann, etc. I will include new drama by writers such as the Irish playwrights Conor McPherson and Marina Carr, as well as the American dramatist David Mamet and the Scottish dramatist David Greig. I will also examine new American television series such as Mad Men, Damages and Breaking Bad. I see those works as direct responses to our changing understanding of issues such as indebtedness and austerity.
LCULT2 NEW LECTURE! Tuesday 2.9.2014 9.30–10.30 Room P5, (Chair: Július Rozenfeld)
Boundaries and the crisis: cultural imaginaries, narratives, and political discourses
Lidia De Michelis, University of Milan, Italy lidia.demichelis@unimi.it
http://www.unimi.it/…rsonaXML.jsp?…
While the discourse of neo-liberalism has been a privileged area of investigation in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2012) and cultural studies (Hall) since the 1980s, the dominant cultural scripts and idioms produced, and disseminated, by mediated political representations in order to define the current financial crisis have emerged over the last years as a growing concern in the interconnected domains of political communication, critical theory, critical sociology, media and discourse studies. Recently, these issues have gained increasing circulation and urgency also among scholars in the fields of literary and critical cultural studies (Grossberg), as is demonstrated by the number of conferences, books, and special issues devoted to these themes.
Disaster, meltdown, breakdown, collapse, are only a few of the “catastrophic” terms deployed by political and media discourse in order to describe the current crisis. Another equally popular cluster highlights notions of illness and viral contagion (sometimes occurring in its heightened version as “invasion”). Interestingly, most of these words entail an erosion, loss, contamination, or malign violation, of widely accepted and naturalized boundaries and cultural models. This same ability to bring about a “tearing down” of boundaries is, according to Beck (2006: 2), a defining characteristic of the global risk paradigm. Spectrality, and the haunting of the neo-liberal way of life by past economic choices form another salient metaphorical area. Conversely, according to critical media and discourse theory, hegemonic boundary-drawing is an essential constituent of political discourse, even though this process is usually obfuscated through ideological practices. Lastly, as is well known, “judging”, but also “separating” (which again evokes the erecting of boundaries), are among the etymological meanings of “crisis”, and “criticism”, to the point that Paul de Man (1983 [1967]) could maintain that “all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis” (see Crosthwaite 2011: 1–11).
Drawing on a range of interconnected approaches, but privileging a cultural studies perspective, my presentation investigates cultural imaginaries, and literary and political narratives of the crisis, according to the interfacing conceptual categories of “boundary-drawing” (and the “trespassing of boundaries”), and representation. Building on recent scholarship, such as, among others, Hayward (2012), Mahony and Clarke (2012), Grossberg (2010), and Crosthwaite (2011), I shall rely on novels, essays, films and discourses in an attempt to make meaning of what Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey (2013: 55) have recently defined a “conjuncture”, “a period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society and have given it a specific and distinctive shape come together, producing a crisis of some kind”. In this essay, their notion of conjuncture is directly indexed to an analysis of Thatcher and Thatcherism. In the light of Margaret Thatcher recent passing away, and the enduring divisive impact of her image, this link opens a window onto the issue of iconicity and the crisis, and allows for a diachronic perspective on the crisis of neo-liberalism.
References:
Beck, Ulrich, Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006.
Crosthwaite, Paul, ed., Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative, London, Routledge, 2011.
Fairclough, Isabela, and Norman Fairclough. 2012. Political Discourse Analysis: A method for advanced students. London and New York: Routledge.
Grossberg, Lawrence, “Modernity and Commensuration”, Cultural Studies, 24, 3 (2010): 295–332.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Hall, Stuart, and Doreen Massey, “Interpreting the Crisis”, in Rutherford, Jonathan, and Sally
Mahony, Nick, and John Clarke, “Public Crises, Public Futures”, Cultural Studies, iFirst article (2012), pp. 1–22.
Marsh, Nicky, Money, Speculation, and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction, London, Continuum, 2007.
Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen, eds, The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, London, Routledge, 1999.
LCULT3 Sunday 31.8.2014 9.30 – 10.30 Room P5, (Chair: Efterpi Mitsi)
Regarding Animals Regarding Humans
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece gounelas@lit.auth.gr
http://www.enl.auth.gr/…f/parkin.htm
In one of his late works, Jacques Derrida recreates a haunting scene in which he stands naked in the bathroom before the gaze of a cat, experiencing both its ‘intolerable proximity’ and the ‘absolute alterity’ of its point of view. Animals, he notes, have long been made a ‘theorem’, something seen but not seeing. To be confronted by their gaze, in your nakedness, is to face up to ‘the abyssal limits of the human’, to require ‘another thinking of life’.
With Derrida’s late seminars as a point of departure, the lecture will explore ways in gouwhich contemporary disciplines from ethology and cognitive neuroscience to biopolitics and the philosophy of mind are unsettling definitions of human subjectivity circumscribed since the Enlightenment to exclude other animals. The effect of much of this work has been the increasing erosion of the distinctions humans have awarded themselves in relation to other animals (speech, reason, the capacity to lie, to constitute oneself as an ‘I’, to have a relation to death ‘as such’, etc.). The need for new definitions of the human, it will be suggested, is shifting attention away from subjective individualisation towards modes of being which incorporate multiplicity, expropriation and the involuntary: Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘collective assemblages’, Agamben’s ‘whatever singularity’, Derrida’s ‘automaticity’. Examples from literature (Kafka, Coetzee, Dickinson, Hopkins, Hughes) will be given to illustrate the tensions and dislocations produced by the encroachment of the animal, with its uncanny proximity and alterity, upon the human domain.
LCult4 Saturday 30.8.2014 15.45–16.45 Room P5, (Chair: Karin Aijmer)
(Child)reign of Terror: Dangerous Child Régimes
Björn Sundmark, Malmö University, Sweden bjorn.sundmark@mah.se
http://forskning.mah.se/en/id/lubjsu
One of the cornerstones of the social order is the asymmetrical power relationship between the adult and the child. The details may differ, but essentially power and responsibility should be the prerogative of the adult, whereas dependence and obedience should necessarily be the lot of the child. If these fundamentals are altered or challenged, the social order itself is threatened. This is no doubt why, for instance, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) strikes such an alarmist note: if childhood as we know it is disappearing, is not our entire society on the brink of collapse? Conversely, Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society (1996) identifies the societal problems facing western societies with a lack of mature adults, where no one wants to be responsible, and life should be an extended teen ride. In other words, if either the adult category or the child category is taken out of the equation, the social order collapses. Furthermore, on another level, such a breakdown leads – at least temporarily – to the concept of child and/or adult being cast out of the symbolic order; that is, they become Kristeva’s abject, or the uncanny (in Freud’s parlance), or taboo (to use a Lévi-Straussian term). In fictional responses to such anxieties we find stories about changelings, or children who are possessed, or monstrous in other ways. What concerns me in this paper, however, is not abject individuals, but fictions where the social contract between the child and the adult has been irreparably broken, and where children have established their own regimes. Specifically, I am going to analyze Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” (1977), and “The Enemy” (2009-), a series of zombie apocalypse-books by Charlie Higson.
LCULT5 Saturday 30.8.2014 9.30–10.30 Room P5, (Chair: María Socorro Suárez Lafuente)
A Life Sentence: Twenty Years of Convict Studies Research and the Female Factory Research Group, Tasmania
Susan Ballyn, University of Barcelona, Spain susan.ballyn@gmail.com
In 1990 I was library fossicking and found references to free Spanish settlers in Australia in the early nineteenth century. It was then I began to think about the possibility that there might have been Spanish convicts as well. I was unaware I was about to discover an academic goldmine which has guided my research since then. Trawling through convict documents led me to look at Spanish, Portuguese, and Hispanic convicts together with Sephardic Jews and their descendents. Soon, I discovered the only extant biography of a Spanish convict: Adelaide de la Thoreza. This began a new research track which has lasted until today.
My research has become part of that done by the Female Convicts Research Centre (FCRC), Tasmania, in which interdisciplinary researchers and family genealogists have come together enabling the international profiling of convict studies, in particular female convicts transported to Tasmania. The FCRC stands at the cutting edge of its field and exemplifies how interdisciplinarity of expertise is absolutely necessary in researching any material in this area. The extraordinary database set up by the FCRC and the wealth of documentation it contains is now part of UNESCO´s Memory of the World Register; Australia, together with the recognition of UNESCO World Heritage awarded to the Convict sites extant in Tasmania today.
The FCRC has enabled the reconstruction of convicts’ biographies from the time of conviction, or before, to their deaths and their descendents, where possible. In this presentation I would like to trace a map of where
I am now with my research and how on my journey of enquiry with the FCRC surprising elements have come to light. I would like to highlight how working with this group of researchers has led me to a point of committed interdisciplinarity which is the hallmark of Cultural Studies
SPECIAL EVENTS
POETRY READING Friday 29.8.2014 17.00–18.00 House of Arts, Concert Hall, Ground floor, (Chair: Zuzana Buráková)
Reading by James Robertson, a Scottish writer who grew up in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire. He is the author of several short story and poetry collections, and has published five novels: The Fanatic, Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack, And the Land Lay Still, and The Professor of Truth. The Testament of Gideon Mack was long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Robertson also runs an independent publishing company called Kettillonia, and is a co-founder (with Matthew Fitt and Susan Rennie) and general editor of the Scots language imprint Itchy Coo, which produces books in Scots for children and young people.
Special Round Table Saturday 30.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A1
INCREASING THE VISIBILITY OF GENDER STUDIES,EUROPEANIZING GENDER STUDIES
Convenors:
Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany, haas@anglistik.uni-kiel.de
Işil Baş, Boğaziçi University Istanbul, Turkey, isil@boun.edu.tr
Maria Socorro Suárez, Universidad de Oviedo, lafuente@uniovi.es
Anglicist Gender Studies has seen a remarkable development, in some places a simply brilliant one. Its visibility, nevertheless, leaves much to be desired, and the economic crisis has often entailed serious cuts. The panel, therefore, focuses on the question of how Gender Studies can be better established by energizing European connections, including connections within the context of ESSE. The question can and will be addressed on 1) an organizational-practical level and 2) on a theoretical level.
In order to start the discussion on the first level, several possibilities will be presented briefly (e.g. a Women’s Caucus, a Gender Studies Corner on the ESSE homepage, an ESSE Gender Studies Award). A concise survey of what has already proved particularly effective in national or local contexts may also be useful.
On the second level, a short presentation will be made with its starting points in the fact that equality opportunities and gender diversity have become a crucial European project (and not only in politics), and the idea that the discipline dealing with the continent’s main lingua franca can play a more important role in these processes than it has played so far.
The aim is for a lively discussion with tangible results.
Proquest Special Event Sunday 31.8.2014 17.45–18.45, Room M5
Literature Online and Other Resources for Literary Research from ProQuest
Speaker:
John Pegum, Senior Product Manager, Humanities at ProQuest
ROUND TABLES
The list of speakers for each round table has already been proposed by its convenor(s). In round tables the convenor chairs the session and the participants discuss scholarly or professional topics of wide general interest. Round table topics are therefore geared to encouraging audience participation.
RT1 Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A8
BIOGRAPHY THEORY
Convenor:
Joanny Moulin, Aix-Marseille University, France, joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr
Participants:
J. W. (Hans) Renders, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, j.w.renders@rug.nl
Christian Klein, University of Wuppertal, Germany, chklein@uni-wuppertal.de
Biography, considered as both an object and a method of research, has gradually gathered impetus, so much so that it is now emerging on the international academic scene as a field of study in its own right. This results from a convergence of historical factors, among which the development of life writing, but also a growing interest for the biographic in history and the social sciences. The current debate revolves around the elaboration of a theory of biography, which is bound to distinguish its aims and methods from those of collateral disciplines, although it can only proceed from transdisciplinary dialogues.
RT2 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S1
CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACHES IN THE STUDY OF EAST EUROPEAN CINEMA
Convenor: Andrea Virgnás, Sapientia University, Romania, avirginas@gmail.com
Participants:
György Kalmár, University of Debrecen, Hungary, gykalmar@yahoo.com
Zsolt Győri, University of Debrecen, Hungary, gyorizs@yahoo.co.uk
Our round table discussion introduces the interdisciplinary research methods of cultural studies into the field of Eastern European screen studies, with special attention to post-communist cinema and television. Our comparative explorations are partly based on the study of significant materials from British, American, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and Serbian audiovisual archives. We strongly believe that the transnational tendencies of Central and Eastern European screen cultures, as discussed by Dina Iordanova and others in connection with finance, production, distribution, reception, etc. may be fruitfully introduced – as the monographs and edited volumes of Anikó Imre demonstrate – in the study of such contemporary social phenomena: the screen is studied for the representation of minorities, genders, subcultures and communities carrying the traumatic wounds of the past.
RT3 Sunday 31.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S4
LITERARY JOURNALISM: EXPLAINING SECOND CITIES TO THEMSELVES
Convenors:
John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine, France, john.bak@univ-nancy2.fr
David Abrahamson, Northwestern University, U.S.A, d-abrahamson@northwestern.edu
Participants:
Norman Sims, University of Massachusetts, U.S.A., sims@honors.umass.edu
Lisa A. Phillips, State University of New York, U.S.A., Brazil, phillipl@newpaltz.edu
Mateus Yuri Passos, Universida de Estadual de Campinas, mateus.passos@gmail.com
Pablo Calvi, Ithaca College, U.S.A., pcalvi@ithaca.edu
Mateusz Zimnoch, Jagiellonian University, Poland, mateusz.zimnoch@gmail.com
The idea of the nation-state remains compelling, and with it the role of the capital city as the centre of a nation’s political, economic, intellectual, sociocultural and religious life. Yet the concept of the second city – Chicago to New York, Manchester to London, even Košice to Bratislava – has been both a robust theme and a critical setting in much literary journalism, a genre of nonfiction prose that lies at conceptual intersection of literature and journalism. The proposed session will focus on the ways in which literary journalism has encountered and employed “second city-dom,” with particular emphasis on how various representations have explicated notions of identity, ideology and values, as well as the resulting tension between belonging-ness and other-ness.
RT4 Sunday 31.8.2014 16.00–17.30 Room S4
DEBATES ON WORLD LITERATURE
Convenor:
Jon Cook, University of East Anglia, U.K., J.Cook@uea.ac.uk
Participants:
Herbert Grabes, University of Giessen, Germany, herbert.grabes@anglistik.uni-giessen.de
Jan Borm, University of Versailles, France, jan.borm@uvsq.fr
Regina Rudaityte, University of Vilnius, Lithuania, reginarudaityte@hotmail.com
In this session we will map some of the recent critical interventions in the renewed debate about the nineteenth century idea of a world literature. These will include the analysis of world literature as a distinctive mode of literary circulation and its characterisation as a highly competitive race for “literary legitimacy”, one that now threatens the very idea of a distinct realm of literary value. We will take up the question of the role of translation in the development of world literature and address the possibility that the trend towards literary globalisation, far from abolishing an engagement with national and local literatures is, in fact, renewing interest in them.
RT5 Saturday 30.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S5 CANCELLED
THE TRACE OF THE VICTORIANS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE: A REASSESSMENT
Convenor:
Rosario Arias Doblas, University of Málaga, Spain, rarias@uma.es
Participants:
Rosario Arias, University of Málaga, Spain, rarias@uma.es
Maria Grazia Nicolosi, University of Catania, Italy, mariagrazia.nicolosi@tin.it
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, University of Trieste, Italy, gefter@units.it
Sonia Villegas López, University of Huelva, Spain, villegas@dfing.uhu.es
Monika Pietrzak-Franger, TU Braunschweig, Germany, m.pietrzak-franger@tu-braunschweig.de
Over the last few years the “trace” has acquired an important place in many critical discourses. Exceeding the philosophical domain, whence it emerged as a fascinating notion for Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur, this concept has proved to be compelling in Neo-Victorian Studies. In Seminar 12 at the Istanbul ESSE Conference, the “trace” yielded suggestive insights into the fluid relationship between the Victorians and us, inflecting in original ways critical categories like spectrality and adaptation. This round table will test out the relevance of the “trace” for the analysis of contemporary literary and cultural interventions into the Victorian age.
RT6 Saturday 30.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S1
THE SHORT STORY IN EUROPE
Convenors:
Ailsa Cox, Edge Hill University, UK, ailsa.cox@edgehill.ac.uk
Michelle Ryan-Sautour, University of Angers, France, michelle.ryan-sautour@univ-angers.fr
Participants:
Michael Basseler, University of Giessen, Germany, Michael.Basseler@anglistik.uni-giessen.de
Jim Hinks, European Short Story Network, www.theshortstory.eu, and Edge Hill University, UK, jim.hinks@commapress.co.uk
Alison MacLeod, University of Chichester UK, and Thresholds short story forum, http://blogs.chi.ac.uk/shortstoryforum
European scholarship has promoted research into the short story form, both during a time of relative neglect and during its much-vaunted revival in the 21st century – especially through journals such as the Journal of the Short Story in English (founded 1983); through regular conferences dedicated to the form; and through many other European-based initiatives, including festivals, publications and online resources. This panel consists of individuals who have been at the forefront of these initiatives, and launches ENSFR, the European Network for Short Fiction Research. We’ll be discussing the specific contribution of European-based research, both theoretical and practice-based, to short fiction research in the 21st century.
POSTER SESSIONS
POSTER SESSIONS
Aristotle, Ground floor
Saturday 30.8.2014, 10.30–11.00 and 16.45–17.15
Sunday 31.8.2014, 10.30–11.00 and 15.30–16.00
Monday 1.9.2014, 10.30–11.00 and 16.30–17.00
Tuesday 2.9.2014, 10.30–11.00
Poster 1:
On the Development of Intensifiers in English and Armenian: Grammaticalization and Delexicalization Processes
Yelena Yerznkyan, Yerevan State University, Armenia, yerznkyan@ysu.am
Susanna Chalabyan, Armenian State University of Economics, Armenia
Lena Ghazaryan, Yerevan State University, Armenia
Poster 2:
Discourse Markers in Everyday Communication and in Texting: Functional Perspective
Hasmik Mkhitaryan, Yerevan State University, Armenia, hasmik_mkhitaryan@yahoo.com
Poster 3:
Phonetic Convergence in Spontaneous English Speech: Focusing on Korean Learners of English
Sejin Oh, Chung-Ang University, South Korea
Yongeun Lee, Chung-Ang University, South Korea, yelee@cau.ac.kr
Poster 4:
Legal English Communicative Competence of Czech Lawyers – Pilot Research Results
Veronika Tománková, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, Veronika.Tomankova@email.cz
Poster 5:
Experience of a Playwright in Aphra Behn’s Prose Writings
Violetta Trofimova, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, violet_trofimova@mail.ru
Poster 6:
Oral Interaction Between Teachers-Learners in Mexican EFL Classrooms: a Discourse Analysis
Edgar Emmanuell García Ponce, University of Birmingham, U.K., EEG216@bham.ac.uk
Poster 7:
The Construction of Good and Evil along the Lines of Eating and Not Eating in Hannibal and The Vampire Diaries
Katalin Schmidt, ELTE, Budapest, Hungary, cornwallmist13@yahoo.com
Poster 8:
The Depiction of Armenian Soul in Saroyan’s Works
Anahit Galstyan, Yerevan State University, Armenia, anahit_chutik@yahoo.com
Armine Matevosyan, Yerevan State University, Armenia, arsacmel@yahoo.com
Poster 9:
Trauma in Too Much Happiness
Eider Gomez Sainz, University of the Basque Country, Spain, pdcemtbh@hotmail.com
Poster 10:
Translating Literature for Children between Tradition and Innovation
Cristina Chifane, Dunarea de Jos University, Galati, Romania,
cristinachifane@yahoo.com
DOCTORAL SESSIONS
Young scholars who are writing their PhD theses in English Studies and are at least in the second year of their studies at the time of ESSE Conference in Košice will make a brief presentation of their work-in-progress at one of three doctoral sessions in the fields of English Language, Literatures in English, and Cultural and Area Studies. These presentations should deal with the issues addressed or hypotheses tested in the thesis, the results so far obtained, and above all the methodology applied, with the purpose of gaining feedback from peers and established scholars in the field. Each presentation will last 10 minutes, followed by 15 minutes’ discussion.
Each workshop will be coordinated by two international experts, who will act as co-convenors and will make a selection from the applications received. Note that PhD students attending the doctoral sessions may attend the full ESSE Conference at a reduced fee. Presentation at a doctoral session is not incompatible with participating in and presenting at other seminars at the Conference.
The overall organiser of the doctoral sessions: Professor J. Lachlan Mackenzie
(VU University Amsterdam, NL and ILTEC, PT), lachlan_mackenzie@hotmail.com
Co-convenors for the different fields of research:
English Language:
Prof. Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook University, NY, USA, mark.aronoff@stonybrook.edu
Prof. Cornelia Ilie, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates, cornelia.ilie@gmail.com
Literatures in English:
Prof. Martin Procházka (Czech Republic) martin.prochazka@ff.cuni.cz
Prof. Dominic Rainsford (Denmark) dominic.rainsford@hum.au.dk
Cultural and Area Studies:
John Corbett (Scotland UK/Macao PRC) JCorbett@umac.mo
María José Coperías Aguilar, University of Valencia, Spain, Maria.J.Coperias@uv.es
Martin Montgomery, Universidade de Macau, China, mmontgomery@umac.mo
Michel Prum, Université Paris Diderot, France, prum.michel@wanadoo.fr
English Language
Convenors:
Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook University, NY, USA, mark.aronoff@stonybrook.edu
Cornelia Ilie, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates, cornelia.ilie@gmail.com
PHD LING A Sunday 31.8.2014 16.00–17.30 Room S1
TRANSLATION – STRATEGIES AND GOALS
Michaela Šamalová, Mararyk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 183825@mail.muni.cz
Using Pedagogical Translation in English Language Teaching
The present paper introduces a research design focused on the influence of pedagogical translation on learners’ language skills. The aim of the study is to answer the following research question: What influence does the use of pedagogical translation in English Language Teaching (ELT) have on the development of learners’ language skills? The research was designed as a pretest-posttest control group quasi-experiment and it is primarily based on quantitative research methods. The experiment is going to test the influence of systematic use of pedagogical translation, as a method of foreign language instruction, on learners’ language skills. The measure is going to be based on standardized language tests and the analysed sample is going to include 200–250 learners of secondary schools in the Czech Republic. In order to control the extraneous variables (textbook; year of study; learners’ level in the English language – CEFR A2-B1; teachers’ individual teaching style and the amount and the method of using pedagogical translation in both experimental and control groups), the choice of the research sample is non-random. Teachers involved in the experiment are going to attend a series of seminars on using pedagogical translation in ELT before the commencement of the experiment. The length of the experiment is going to be 5 months. A replication study of the experiment is going to be carried out on a different sample. Since the assigned experimental condition is going to be based on pedagogical translation, for the purpose of our research we decided to construct a model of pedagogical translation which reflects the following aspects: i) the goals of contemporary foreign language instruction (incl. the goals stated in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages); ii) theoretical research in the field of theories of second language acquisition (cross-linguistic influence and similarity); and iii) recent studies in the field of second language acquisition.
Cornelia Sus, University of Poitiers, France, corneliasus@yahoo.com
Modality and ambiguity in the legal text of contracts written in Romanian, English and French
The core of the thesis is the linguistic analysis of both the creation of documents and legal translation, more precisely the analysis of contracts written in English, French and Romanian. We are going to focus the study on polysemantic terms, false-friends, modal verbs and the syntax ambiguity of legal texts.
The notions of obligation and latitude expressed at linguistic level through verbal markers have a frequency, a definition and a different context of use in the three languages that we have chosen. Obligations are expressed by a variety of verbs, periphrases, and modal adjectives that will determine the type of legal clauses and the type of obligation in the contract. The research will focus at the same time on the use of modals in English, French and Romanian and on the choice of verbs.
We are going to study certain obligations and we will try to find out in what measure the modal verbs used by legal professionals in relation to negation, restriction, and latitude might create ambiguity when the legal text must be translated or applied.
The analysis is done on a corpus formed out of similar contracts. The research corpus comprises different conventions like sales contracts, international contracts, lease contracts, rental agreements, loan contracts etc. written in English, French and Romanian. It allows us to analyze in comparative manner the expression of modality and ambiguity keeping in mind the idea that different types of contracts have different legal roles and create different types of obligations between parties.
The corpus of the study consists of representative samples of legal texts from the three languages. The selection of these texts is mainly guided by the widely accepted norms of text typology and classification and where modal concepts are realized. All documents are already included in a database.
We focus on:
What are the areas of similarities and contrast between English, French and Romanian with regard to the realization of modality?
What types of modalities are commonly found in legal texts?
With reference to the problems and questions mentioned above we intend to carry out a contrastive analysis of the linguistic realization of modality in the three languages and point out the points of contrast and/or similarity between the three languages.
Joanna Sycz, University of Silesia, Poland, joannasycz@gmail.com
Information behavior of trainee translators in the course of legal translation
The aim of this PhD research project is to look closely at the process of consulting sources during translation of legal texts from English to Polish. Widespread computerisation has significantly changed translators’ working environment. Today, they have multiple electronic and Internet sources at their disposal. This study is to reveal how the new technological solutions have influenced information behaviour of novice translators. In particular, the study seeks to answer:
What factors contribute to popularity of some sources and rejection of other?
What type of information is sought and why?
What information-retrieval strategies prove to be most effective?
Why are participants dissatisfied with the search result?
Do they interact with different sources in a different way?
What problems arise during use of particular sources?
What are most common mistakes?
The study adopts research tools previously used by Atkins and Varantola (2008), yet with numerous modifications. It is limited to legal discourse due to its unique character (multitude of legal systems, terminological incongruency). The methodology combines three methods of data retrieval: real-time observation, performance tests and think-aloud protocols. Participants are divided into pairs. One participant (Translator) is to translate a legal text, while the other (Observer) is to record on a special Observation Protocol all sources consulted by the Translator, as well as look-up results and motives behind the Translator’s decisions. The participants have access to various printed publications as well as Internet sources. The experiment is recorded via Camtasia Studio software in order to complement the information provided in Observation Protocols.
This research has been preceded by a pilot study, which revealed high rate of unsuccessful consultations of sources. The detailed presentation of data and preliminary conclusions can be found in Sycz (2012).
References
Atkins, B.T.S. and K. Varantola (2008) Monitoring Dictionary Use. In: Fontenelle, T. (ed.) Practical Lexicography: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sycz, J. (2012) Consultation of Sources in the Course of Legal Translation – an Empirical Study. In: Ł. Bogucki, M. Deckert (eds.) Teaching Translation and Interpreting: Advances and Perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 39–54.
PHD LING B Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S1
CORPUS LINGUISTICS; ENGLISH AND CROSS-LINGUISTICS SEMANTICS
Cristina Blanco-García,University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, cristina.blanco3@rai.usc.es
Ephemeral adverbial subordinators in the history of English: A corpus-based study
My doctoral dissertation focuses on so-called “ephemeral” adverbial subordinators in English (cf. Kortmann 1997: 301), i.e. those which did not survive beyond the period at which they were added to the language or lasted for only a short time afterwards. This tendency was particularly frequent, though not exclusively so, in the Early Modern English period (16th – 17th centuries). My main aim is to trace the history of a number of such subordinators from the concessive, conditional and causal domains, as well as to determine the possible reasons for their ephemeral history. Moreover, I will analyse the prototypical subordinators for each of the selected interclausal relations, that is, causal because, conditional if and concessive (al)though, in order to compare them with the corresponding ephemeral subordinators, among others causal whiles (that), conditional when if and concessive howbeit.
My study will adopt a variationist approach, tackling among other issues the position of the subordinate clause, the combination of the subordinator with pleonastic that and its distribution across text-types. Attention will also be paid to the process of grammaticalisation undergone by these connectives.
The corpora and databases used for this diachronic study include the following:
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Middle English Dictionary (MED).
As a base line, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and ARCHER, two multigenre corpora that cover the whole history of English, complemented by some specialised corpora for various periods and genres.
So far, I have been working on the concessive domain and have examined four concessive subordinators, namely howbeit, albeit, notwithstanding and how(so/some)ever). My analysis has confirmed the ephemeral character of these four connectives, particularly howbeit.
References
ARCHER 3.1= A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. 2006.
Northern Arizona University, University of Southern California, University of Freiburg, University of Helsinki, and Uppsala University.
Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial Subordination: A Typology and History of Adverbial Subordinators Based on European Languages. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
MED = Middle English Dictionary. <http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med>
OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online <http://www.oed.com>
Elisabeth Senft, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Elisabeth.Senft@uibk.ac.at
Emerging modal items in non-native varieties of English. A corpus-based investigation
In line with developments within the modal system itself, research on modality has undergone a shift away from its traditional description of the semantic and syntactic characteristics of what are called the ‘central modal verbs’ (i.e. can, could, may, might, will, would, must) and towards a more extended concept of modality, which is also concerned with other verbal as well as non-verbal means of expressing modality.
The object of my PhD project is therefore to pick up this still fairly young branch of linguistic research in English and to take modality away from its traditional conception. The centre of attention is a quantitative as well as qualitative investigation of what Krug (2000) terms ‘emerging’ modal verbs (have got to, have to, want to and be going to, with their respective phonologically weakened forms gotta, hafta, wanna and gonna) as well as other verbal (e.g. might as well, had better, adhortative Let’s/Lets etc.) and non-verbal items (e.g. adverbs like really, probably, possibly, necessarily, etc.). Taking semantic, syntactic and pragmatic characteristics as well as aspects of grammaticalization into account, this project aims at providing further insight into ongoing change in the English modal system.
Recognising ‘the prevailing reality of English’ (Berns et al. 2009: 377), this study goes beyond the limits of British and American English and takes second and foreign language varieties of English, which in fact constitute the largest number of speakers of English, into account. In its initial stage, this PhD project draws on already existing corpora such as the International Corpus of English (ICE) as well as the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). The latter represents the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and bears the potential to meet new demands within the study of World Englishes which are currently emerging from processes such as sociolinguistic globalization.
References
Berns, Margie, Jennifer Jenkins, Marko Modiano, Barbara Seidlhofer and Yasukata Yano. 2009. “Perspectives on English as a lingua franca”. In Hoffmann, Thomas and Lucia Siebers (eds.). World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects. Selected papers from the 13th IAWE conference. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 369–384.
Lenka Janovcová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia, janovcova.l@gmail.com
The influence of cognitive abilities on compound interpretation
The thesis deals with prediction of meaning of context-free novel compounds in English. According to the meaning predictability theory (Štekauer, 2005), possible interpretations compete and one or two of them become dominant. This theory emphasizes the importance of extra-linguistic factors for interpretation of new naming units. Several studies suggest that certain sociolinguistic factors have an impact upon the compound interpretation, for example educational level of language users (Gleitman and Gleitman, 1970). The results of Janovcová (2012) suggest differences in interpretation of potential primary compounds between the university students belonging to different fields of education (humanities and natural sciences).
The present research studies the influence of cognitive abilities of language users on meaning prediction of English compounds. The research concentrates on verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities of the participants. These abilities are tested by General Ability Tests by Smith and Whetton (1988). The meaning predictability of different readings (interpretations) of studied potential compounds is compared using Predictability Rate (PR) and Objectified Predictability Rate (OPR) designed by Štekauer (2005). The experimental data consist of ten potential noun-noun compounds whose predictability rates vary on a scale from high predictability level to unpredictability level – Štekauer (2005, p. 153) classifies lexical units into four levels depending on the value of the PR of their most predictable reading: 0–0.25 unpredictability level; 0.26–0.5 low predictability level; 0.51–0.75 medium predictability level; 0.76–1 high predictability level.
It is hypothesized that there are differences between the students with prevalent verbal cognitive abilities, students with prevalent non-verbal cognitive abilities, and students whose verbal and non-verbal abilities are approximately equal. Moreover, it is hypothesized that the differences are more apparent for the potential words belonging to higher levels of predictability. The studied data have been collected in the form of questionnaires, but the results have not been analysed yet.
References
Gleitman, Lila R. – Gleitman, Henry. 1970. Phrase and Paraphrase: Some Innovative Uses of Language. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1970.
Janovcová, Lenka. 2012. ‘Influence of the field of education on meaning predictability of novel compounds’. In SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2012, vol. 9, no. 2. Available online <http://www.skase.sk/…f_doc/02.pdf> [Cit. 13. 2. 2014].
Smith, Pauline – Whetton, Chris. General Ability Tests. ASE NFER-NELSON, Great Britain, 1988.
Štekauer, Pavel. Meaning Predictability in Word-formation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005.
MaƗgorzata Kaszak, University of Gdańsk, Poland, malgoskakaszak@gmail.com
The prime mover of for, pour and dla – benefactive or malefactive phrases
The dissertation will revolve around the phrases involving the particle for and their equivalents in Polish and French with regard to their semantic potential as regards the benefactive/malefactive effects of the action/state described by the sentences in which they occur. Phrases of this kind are prime movers of actions performed by an agent, which can be either beneficial for or detrimental to a patient/affectee/beneficiary, and can refer to the agent’s state, also internal, as in, e.g. his health in “He moved to the seaside for the sake of his health”.1 I have also been analyzing the malefactive and benefactive for+verb pattern, exemplified by such lexemes as the verbs forbid,2 forgive3 and forsake with the particle for prefixed to them. When it comes to the methodological paradigms constituting the basis of the present work, the main theories that will be exploited are: Bolinger’s (1971) theory concerning prepositions and particles, Brugman’s (1981) theory of the polysemy of a preposition as a radial category, and Keizer’s account on English prepositions (2008). The point of my analyses is that the semantic information concerning the malefactive or benefactive intentions of the referent of the subject noun seems to be signaled by the prepositional adverb4 for with its equivalents in Polish and French as indicated by examples excerpted from the British National Corpus.
1 So far, I have been concerned with analyzing the prepositional phrase “for…’s sake” as a self-sake benefactive construction (as I suggest to term it), where the agent noun refers to a human being and the object noun refers to an internal state of agent. In this case a certain co-referentiality between the nouns functioning as the subject and the object of the prepositional phrase can be observed.
2 The referent of the subject can also be a malefactor as exemplified in the sentence “He forbade the crew to bathe”, where the referent of the indirect object is negatively affected as a result of the agent’s action. The agent and the object in the aforementioned expressions are distinct entities.
3 The referent of the subject in this kind of construction can be a benefactor, as in the sentence “He forgave her her sins”, where the referent of the indirect object is positively affected as a result of the agent’s action.
4. The term is Dwight Bolinger’s.
Zuzana Naďová,Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia, zuzana363@gmail.com
Reduplication in Cross-linguistic Perspective
The research focuses on reduplication as a word-formation process1 which is studied in a genetically and areally stratified sample of approximately 100 languages. The thesis combines the approach of canonical typology with a large-scale research of reduplicative constructions across the sampled languages. The objective of the thesis is twofold.
Reduplication has often been assessed as “a difficult phenomenon” since it “is one of those phenomena which appear to be interwoven with so many related phenomena that they do not readily let themselves to a clear-cut definition“ (Stolz 2012: 9). In order to circumvent the “Correspondence Problem“ (Corbett 2012), the thesis employs the approach of canonical typology which allows identification of the domain of research by means of “constructing a theoretical space of possibilities in which a particular phenomenon can be calibrated“ (Bond 2012: 20). Through a set of converging criteria associated with the base (two sets of criteria were identified: formal and semantic), the clearest or canonical instances of reduplication were identified and other examples of reduplication were calibrated out from the canonical.
The second part of the thesis is to provide a cross-linguistic analysis of reduplication from the perspective of the onomasiological theory of word-formation.2 Adopting the onomasiological approach to word formation enables to find out how onomasiological (cognitively grounded) categories are linguistically represented through reduplication and its various formal subtypes (complete, partial preposing, partial postposing, partial infixing, echo reduplication, reduplication accompanied with stem modification, suffixation and compounding). Following Štekauer et al (2012) the semantic categories are divided into four basic groups: nominal (agent, patient, instrument and location), evaluative (augmentatives and diminutives), verbal (causative, intransitive and transitive, frequentative and intensive.) and word-class changing.
The presentation covers the application of canonical approach to reduplication as well as the onomasiological analysis of reduplication conducted on a smaller subsample of the sampled languages.
1 In line with the approach of Štekauer et al. (2012), the term word-formation is used as synonymous with morphological derivation or derivational morphology. Reduplication as a word-formation process can thus be characterized as “a process with semiotic and cognitive foundation which serves the purpose of formation of new linguistic signs“ (Štekauer 2012:237).
2 The onomasiological approach studies the ways in which speakers/hearers construe and then represent cognitive-conceptual domains in individual languages.
References
Bond, Oliver. A Base for Canonical Negation. In Corbett, Greville, Brown, Dunstan and Marina Chumakina. Canonical Morphology and Syntax. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Pp. 20–48
Corbett, Greville, Brown, Dunstan and Marina Chumakina. Canonical Morphology and Syntax. Oxford: OUP, 2012.
Stolz, Thomas, Stroh, Cornelia, and Urdze, Aina. Total Reduplication. The Areal Linguistics of a Potential Universal. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011.
Štekauer, Pavol, Valera, Salvador, Kortvelyessy, Lívia. Word-Formation in the World`s Languages. A Typological Survey. Cambridge: CUP, 2012.
PHD LING C Monday 1.9.2014 14.30–16.30 Room S1
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND PRAGMATICS
Stephan Giuliani, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Stephan.Giuliani@uibk.ac.at
Discourse Markers and Their Pragmatic Functions in Late Modern English Dialects. An Exemplification through the Analysis of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary and other Corpora
The present dissertation project focuses primarily on the evaluation of the electronic version of the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD; EDD Online), thus touching upon the fields and methods of dialectology, (historical) pragmatics and corpus linguistics.
A key aspect of the dissertation is the complex discussion of discourse markers (DM) and their role in pragmatics. DMs as features of predominantly spoken contexts take on different pragmatic functions and thus provide information on the attitude of the speaker towards both the participants and the content of discourse. These pragmatic categories can include a wide range of functions which will be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively based on the data provided by the EDD Online and other corpora.
With regard to the diachronic analysis of DMs, linguists face various challenges due to the lack of oral data. In such cases, historical linguistics has to rely on written transcripts which hold different degrees of orality, depending on the genre of a document and the period in which it was written. Following this line of thought, the EDD offers itself as a ground for research in this area of “written orality”. It contains not only all “standard” lexicographic information about dialect terms, but also additional information on the context(s) in which these terms were used, including concrete examples of utterances. Thanks to its electronic edition, research can now be extended to speech-like features. Therefore, this project constitutes a first exploration of DMs in spoken English dialects in the 18th and 19th century.
Research has produced a detailed contextualisation of the renewed interest in 19th-century English dialects and dialectal literature. In addition – against the background of the different sources in the EDD – attention has been paid to the above-mentioned topic of “written orality”. A first categorisation of the pragmatic categories based on the interjections available in the EDD has also been produced.
Juraj Lukáč University of Prešov, Slovakia, jurajlukac@rocketmail.com
Sociosemiotic Aspects of Electronic Communication
The dissertation aims to map the state of the art in politeness research and utilise its achievements in the analysis of the data from a sociocultural environment which has not yet been covered systematically by politeness research. Thus, the ambition of my project is three-fold; firstly, it will apply the theory of relational work (Locher 2004, Locher and Watts 2005) to the corpus of data of electronically mediated communication and look for the patterns in the understandings of (im)politeness by the parties involved; secondly, it will attempt to involve other theoretical frameworks that have recently emerged in politeness theorising so that they would work jointly towards getting a more adequate picture of the nature of the examined sociolinguistic reality; and thirdly, it will examine a dataset from a culture that is still waiting to be systematically studied from the (post-modern) politeness research perspective. The results and conclusions of the project are expected to be a contribution to the state of the art in pragmalinguistic research in general, and to the developing of this research strand in Slovakia, by focusing on a specific sociocultural reality in a particular community of practice in Slovakia. With regard to the methodology of the project, I will examine the data I have received from students in the last 18 months (more than 1000 emails in total). I will identify the individual speech acts and by way of the framework of relational work (Locher 2004; Ferenčík 2010; Kadar and Haugh 2013; Haugh 2010; Mills 2009; Watts 2003; Eelen 2001; Searle 1975/6), cooperative principle (Grice 1975) and language as a social semiotic (Halliday 1978) I will study the evaluations of (im)politeness as demonstrated by the participants themselves. Concurrently, I will make every effort to draw conclusions about how relationships are negotiated and, more importantly, devise a formula which the participants of this research use for negotiating a relationship (there may be variations that will be consonant with the characteristics of the speech act at play). All findings will be explicated with respect to their contextual dependencies.
Michaela Pankratz, University of Regensburg, Germany, Michaela.Pankratz@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de
The Linguistics of Media Hypes
1. In recent years, the number of, and public interest in, so-called ‘media hypes’ has apparently increased sharply. In (English) linguistics, however, this topic is still a research desideratum. By conducting a thorough analysis of the media hypes about BSE, Bird Flu, Swine Flu and Horse Meat Adulteration, my thesis attempts to meet this research gap.
First of all, I examine how and – if possible – also why these hypes came about. According to Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær (2009), only events with particular qualities have the potential to trigger media hypes. In my thesis, I study these qualities and work out differences and similarities between the examined hypes. In addition, I am especially interested in whether media hypes show any (linguistic) characteristics particular to them and if they can even be considered a separate genre.
2. To do this, I combine aspects of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. (ref. e.g. Baker et al. 2008) This way, initial in-depth analyses of the hypes offer starting points for quantitative studies, through which emerging hypotheses can be tested and common patterns can be detected.
3. So far, relevant articles from The Sun have been compiled in a corpus. In the future also articles from The Guardian will be considered, as I expect to find differences between tabloid and broadsheet reporting on media hypes.
4. A pilot study on the horse meat discourse in 2013 showed that it contained many negatively loaded words (e.g. scandal*, contaminate*, risk* etc.) as well as many numbers and percentages. Particularly striking was the frequent use of the modal auxiliaries could and may, which hinted at potential threats. This contradicts the common assumption that modal auxiliaries are uncommon in newspaper writing (Biber and Conrad 2009) and implies that ‘hype discourse’ is indeed different from ‘regular’ newspaper discourse.
Jitka Sedláčková, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic,
jitkasedlackova@mail.muni.cz
English as a Foreign Language for Deaf Students: Investigating Reading Strategy Instruction Benefits for Reading Comprehension in English Classroom
My doctoral project deals with the reading skills development of deaf learners within instruction in English as a Foreign Language. Its aim is to study the reading process of deaf learners when reading in English as their foreign language and investigate the impact of explicit reading strategy instruction on the process of as well as on learners' attitudes to reading. Empirical and theoretical research findings support involving explicit reading strategy instruction particularly with at-risk and low achieving readers to assist the development of reading comprehension in both the first or a foreign language (McAnally, Rose & Quigley, 2007; Grabe, 2010; Trezek, Paul & Wang, 2010). Reading comprehension has long been recognized as a challenge for deaf learners and in a foreign language; the issue is further complicated by the achieved level of communicative competence as well as the question of skill transfer between languages, including languages of different modality.
With regard to the aim and the character of the research subject, the research assumes a qualitative approach with case studies of 3 deaf learners. The design consists of a pre-test stage followed by an intervention stage and completed by a post-test stage. The intervention consists of explicit reading strategy instruction introduced within a semester-long practical English course. The pre-test and post-test stages include collecting data using written verbal protocols during reading tasks, interviews and standardized reading comprehension and use of English tests. The impact of the reading strategy instruction will be investigated particularly on learners' reading process practice in English and interview responses, supported by reading comprehension results.
The methodology was tested in a pilot study which brought interesting findings both on the data collecting process and also on reading strategies used by deaf readers.
References
Grabe, W. (2009). Reading in a Second Language. Moving from Theory to Practice. New York: CUP.
McAnally, P. L., Rose, S., & Quigley, S. P. (2007). Reading Practices with Deaf Learners. Austin: Pro-Ed, Inc.
Trezek, B. J., Wang, Y., & Paul, P. V. (2010). Reading and Deafness. Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: Delmar Cengage Learning.
Literatures in English
Convenors:
Martin Procházka (Czech Republic) martin.prochazka@ff.cuni.cz
Dominic Rainsford (Denmark) dominic.rainsford@hum.au.dk
PHD LIT A Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S2
IDENTITIES 1: GENDER
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, kowalcze.pawlik@gmail.com
The Voice of Vengeance: Women and Violence in Early Modern English Drama
The aim of this project is to create a new, transdisciplinary model of interpretation of revenge in the early modern English drama. The new interpretative framework takes into account complex issues that have so far been neglected in the existing research or treated in isolation from one another:
- valorisation of vengeance depending on the gender of the avenger, especially its devaluation in the case of women;
- the complicated religious and political context of the time that would condition the existence of two mutually exclusive approaches to revenge: one affirmative and the other derogatory;
- Renaissance beliefs on the psychophysiology of emotions, most of all anger and grief after the loss of one's beloved.
All of these research areas had a critical role in the construction and reception of the revenge motif in the English drama, and were gender-dependent. The proposed interpretative framework employs the most recent critical reflection on the English Renaissance tragedy that treats it as a secular mourning ritual allowing for a display of emotions which was otherwise considered to be a sign of impiety and effeminacy. The new model of revenge is based on the interpretation of female vindicators in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: these are avengers that have not drawn much attention in the critical reflection on the representations of revenge in the English literature.
Methodology
Critical analysis of the primary sources is conducted on two different planes: 1. analysis and interpretation of female avengers in the Shakespearian drama as well as in other less known plays, both onstage productions and closet drama, (e.g. The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda by Thomas Kyd, The Tragedy of Mariam Elizabeth Carey), 2. analysis and interpretation of the cultural context in which Elizabethan and Jacobean drama functioned (among the sources to be considered in the project are the Renaissance querelles des femmes, medical treatises and theological works on the validity of revenge in the light of the doctrine of divine anger and mercy). The obtained research data is processed with the use of methodology based on the third-wave feminist criticism, in particular Judith Butler's oeuvre. Her multidimensional philosophical reflection concentrates on the issues that are directly connected with the proposed research project, namely with the discursive construction of personal identity, the ethical dimension of violence, law and lawlessness, the tragic fate of an individual entangled into the operations of the state as well as the notion of female agency.
Boglárka Kiss, University of Debrecen, Hungary, kiss.boglarka@arts.unideb.hu
Monstrous Identities in 1960s Women’s Poetry
The main topic and issues, including the thesis proposed/hypothesis defended
The dissertation investigates the oeuvres of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton from the point of view of how certain senses of monstrosity are presented in their texts. The dissertation locates monstrosity in four spheres in terms of the identities constructed in these poetries: how these senses of self are problematised in psychic and bodily terms, and how they define themselves in the context of myths and historical epochs that cast them as monsters. By focussing on these issues the dissertation points out the biopolitical stake involved in the four scenarios: who claims agency, responsibility and power over these subjectivities, by what means and for what reasons, and why it is in their interest to make sense of these identities as monstrous.
The methodology (theoretical tools and standpoints)
The analysis relies on close readings of individual poems. The conceptual framework of the dissertation is based on Butlerian notions of discourses pertaining to the body, Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of “volatile bodies” and Margrit Shildrick’s, Jane Gallop’s and Michel Foucault’s theories of monstrosity, while it also tackles theories of confessional poetry.
The corpus under consideration
The oeuvres of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
The results so far obtained
I have completed a chapter on the topic of the problematisation of the body in the poetry of Plath and Sexton, with special emphasis on the topic of the reproductive female body as monstrous; as well as a sub-chapter on the topic of suicide as identity construction in these poetries. These results have been published and presented at various conferences.
Aude Petit Marquis, University of Nantes, France, aude.petit1@googlemail.com
Representations of maternal figures and discourses on maternity in George Eliot’s and Elizabeth Gaskell’s works of fiction
This dissertation aims at drawing a parallel between collections of writings of two contemporary women writers: George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, especially concerning the way they tackle the issue of maternity in their fiction. In their novels, they seem to show a common interest in depicting and sometimes analysing a multiplicity of maternal experiences through the characterisation of their female protagonists. Motherhood is thus envisioned both as a social identity that defines women’s status and roles, and as a personal experience which can be emotional, somatic or even sublimated. The purpose of this research is to identify how their representations of maternal figures both echo contemporary discourses on the subject – social, medical or scientific ones – and regenerate this field of investigation and its normative understanding during the Victorian period. The arguments which will be defended are informed by French Theory and Gender Studies, especially as far as the conception of the body as a discursive construction is concerned. This theoretical background will shed light on a corpus of nineteenth-century scientific and medical treatises and on the way the topical comprehension of the maternal body and its ideological implications are reverberated in the novels under study. The impact of these definitions of the female body on the elaboration of gendered identities and, by extension, of social roles will also be considered in order to better pinpoint the ways in which Eliot and Gaskell depart from this traditional Victorian apprehension of maternity. Through the analysis of how maternal bodies are inscribed in these two writers’ texts and of the way they summon models of ideal mothers such as the Madonna in their fiction, the objective will be to observe how Eliot and Gaskell appropriate the maternal question and use it as a literary trope to be rejuvenated.
Ana Laura González Hernández, Universidad de La Laguna, Canary Islands, Spain, anaglez84@gmail.com
Heterotopic suburbia in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels: A study of gender, violence and desire
Although for many years the suburbs have been represented as homogeneous dormitories for the white middle class, recent work in the interdisciplinary field of suburban studies has focussed on the growing heterogeneity of suburbia as a rather complex and dynamic terrain, resulting in new creative responses to this phenomenon from a wide range of disciplines. However, the representation of suburbia in fiction and film still tends to be dominated by a two-dimensional notion based on either utopian aspiration or dystopian alarm. In light of this, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia serves as a useful tool for the analysis of suburban texts, considering that it provides an alternative framework to allow for the contestation and renegotiation of space.
In my PhD dissertation I analyse the suburban setting as a hybrid construction of intermingled social, cultural and emotional processes in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels (1989), both brought to the big screen by Sofia Coppola (1999) and Scott Smith (2003) respectively. Taking the concept of heterotopia as a main standpoint, I focus on the problematic relationship between characters and setting, as both novels portray individuals who find themselves in a state of crisis in direct connection to their suburban surroundings. More specifically, I explore the construction of female and male gender roles, the exercise of ethical violence implicit in the demand for a coherent self and communal identity, and the mechanisms of desire that keep the characters physically and emotionally bound to the suburban landscape. By combining spatial, gender and affect theories, this thesis aims at shedding light on the growing field of suburban studies, proving that the representation and study of suburbia is essential to developing a capacity for critical thought and providing a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis to be used in future research.
PHD LIT B Monday 1.9.2014 14.30–16.30 Room S2
IDENTITIES 2: RACE, CLASS, CULTURE
Juan José Martín González, University of Málaga, Spain, jmargon7@gmail.com
Dark neo-Victorianism: Race and the Empire in neo-Victorian Fiction
Within the currently-expanding phenomenon of neo-Victorianism, race and the empire hold a privileged stance among the manifold ramifications of neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on different but complementary methodological approaches, my PhD dissertation looks into a selection of neo-Victorian novels dealing with race, ethnicity and the British Empire, namely Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006), Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003), Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008) and Robert Edric’s The Book of the Heathen (2001). Postcolonial studies have exerted a considerable influence on neo-Victorian criticism.
Accordingly, in my dissertation I deal with issues of orientalism and Victorian imperialism, setting off compellingly from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) but also taking into account subsequent critiques and reconsiderations on Said’s work, specifically works by Gayatri C. Spivak, Homi Bhabha or John M. MacKenzie. Another methodological avenue within my dissertation is that outlined by Afro-European studies. Within this recent critical field, I pay special attention to the efforts which are being made by current historians in unearthing the (invisible) presence of racial minorities in nineteenth-century Europe to bring them back to the historical record. This line of research features prominently in The Journal of Dora Damage and Hottentot Venus.
That said, my dissertation ultimately intends to ascertain the extent to which neo-Victorian fiction can account for the experiences of ‘dark’ subjects in Victorian England and Europe, and how this ‘dark’ neo-Victorianism complements both current explorations into colonial history and 19th c. slave narratives and the European travels depicted in them.
Daný van Dam, University of Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, VanDamHD@cardiff.ac.uk
Ethnic and sexual stereotyping in neo-Victorian fiction
My research looks at ethnic and sexual stereotyping in neo-Victorian fiction. Neo-Victorianism is a newly developing field concerned with contemporary texts – novels, films, artworks – which, in different ways, critically return to the Victorian period. At present, this period is still remembered – not necessarily correctly – as a time of prudishness about sexuality, of strong industrial developments and related class problems, and also as a time when the British Empire was at its strongest. Neo-Victorian literature depicts the crossing of social, sexual or racial boundaries to question these memories of the Victorian age. As of yet no research has been done on how the empire’s stereotypes of colonial sexuality permeate, or fail to permeate, neo-Victorian novels. I address this lack by exploring, through close readings, the portrayal of ethnic and sexual stereotyping in neo-Victorian writing and their interconnectedness.
In this doctoral session, I would like to discuss my experiences working in a small and developing (sub-)discipline like neo-Victorianism. Although my work draws heavily on research performed in other fields, such as postcolonialism, gender theory and Victorian literature, neo-Victorianism – first named in 1997 – develops as an independent genre. As it is such a recent field, debates about terminology are still very much a part of existing criticism. These concern both the term neo-Victorianism and the formation of the genre and its canon: what texts belong to the genre, what texts should be considered canonical and why.
My preliminary results on Victorian stereotypes in neo-Victorian fiction show that they are still used in contemporary texts. However, while some novels merely ignore or even continue nineteenth-century stereotypes of colonial sexuality, others encourage the reader to think about the colonial past and the traces it has left in the present. Doing research in a new discipline like neo-Victorianism means that any work requires an extra justification, not just explaining the relevance of the sources to the research question, but also in relation to the developing (neo-Victorian) field.
Sercan Hamza Bağlama, University of Durham, England, United Kingdom, sercanhamza@gmail.com
Re-conceptualization of class, alienation and victimization in contemporary British literature
This dissertation will cover six contemporary British novels, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960), Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), Patrick Mccabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and James Kelman’s How Late It was, How Late (1994). These novels will be analyzed and compared within the scope of Marxist and post-Marxist literary theories. In this respect, some concepts such as alienation, mechanization, escapism, monotony, false consciousness, bourgeois morality and corruption that cause the victimization of the working-class will be examined within the dichotomy of appearance and substance. Besides, special attention will be given to what extent class boundaries, metaphors of rebellion and identity concepts changed from the 1950s to the 1990s. How these transformations are implicitly reflected and expressed in social and domestic relations of the characters, especially in the novels of Welsh, McCabe and Kelman, will also be elucidated. In this context, the objectives of this dissertation can be listed as follows:
Looking at the possibilities of literature deriving its force from ideology in the revelation of social, cultural and political allusions of contemporary Britain,
Focusing on changing class boundaries, new divisions and disintegrations in the working-class characters of modern and postmodern periods which are successively the dominant cultural forms indicative of capitalism and neo-capitalism,
Clarifying some concepts like industrialism/capitalism/neo-capitalism, alienation, bourgeois morality, materialism, reification, monotony and disintegration which cause working-class characters to have a feeling of being trapped and victimized in the mechanisms of a class-ridden society,
Mirroring the fact that working-class people, though they belong to different ethnic groups, are victims of similar problems like alienation, nihilism, poverty, corruption and so on,
and shedding light on the invalidity of neoliberalism’s postmodern identity politics for working-class people.
Andrea Fernández-García, University of Oviedo, Spain, andreafg87@hotmail.com
Geographies of identity in coming-of-age stories by US Latina writers
This PhD thesis analyzes the configuration of diasporic identities in several coming-of-age stories by US Latina writers, focusing on the spaces as experienced by the children and teenage characters portrayed in the texts. The literary corpus of this thesis includes the following novels: Esmeralda Santiago’s Almost a Woman (1999), Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Call Me María (2004), Julia Álvarez’s Return to Sender (2009) and Reyna Grande’s The Distance between Us (2012). This study seeks to confirm three main hypotheses. Firstly, the characters’ identities and lives are made and remade through everyday spaces, the most important being the home, the school and the street. Secondly, global processes affect the characters’ identities and experiences in different localities. Finally, spatial discourses convey ideas about childhood, adolescence and gender that shape individual lived experiences. In this sense, feminist geographies and the geographies of children and youth provide a powerful epistemological grounding from which to explore these hypotheses. On the one hand, feminist geographies provide the tools to examine how the characters, all of them Latina immigrant girls, experience spaces according to their gender and ethnicity and how their relations and attitudes (re)produce or, inversely, change dominant spatial configurations. On the other hand, geographies of children and youth allow us to consider the age variable in this thesis, thus bringing to the fore an analytical category that continues to be overlooked in geography. The results obtained so far lead to stressing the fact that the characters under consideration do not respond passively to dominant discourses, but instead exercise their agency in their own identity development, which arises from direct experience in different locales that enable not only oppression, but also cultural resistance.
PHD LIT C Monday 1.9.2014 17.00–18.30 Room S2
IDENTITIES 3: SELF AND TEXT
Ira Hansen, University of Turku, Finland, immhan@utu.fi
The other me: Embodied self-alienation in the works of Paul Auster
In my doctoral dissertation I study the embodied experience of the self through Otherness. I do not consider Otherness as something standing opposed to or outside the individual, but as something emerging from within the self. Neither am I discussing identities as such, but rather the alienation of the self into a different mode of subjectivity altogether – a subjectivity in which the boundaries, experiences and memories of the previous self can nearly be abolished.
Otherness, then, is a form of repression. It is first and foremost alienating and functions as a survival mechanism against traumatic experiences. However, repression also signifies that subjectivity, or parts of it, cannot ultimately be erased. The (sub)conscious experiences are the building blocks of the same self. Therefore, Otherness of the self is precisely Otherness not autonomous selfhood, even if the individual experiences it as such.
My main theoretical framework is phenomenological, and I am particularly interested in how the Otherness of the self manifests in embodied, psychophysical experiences. I examine how physiological experiences influence the constructions of the mind and vice versa and how they structure the self, create and shape reality and enable the Otherness of the self. At the center lie the notions of Patočka and Ricoeur, who suggest that one cannot know oneself/one’s self before (first) knowing the o/Other. At its best, then, Otherness of the self can lead to a deepened self-understanding. However, in the American context, which is the focus of my dissertation, this phenomenon is ultimately destructive, taking the individual further away from the self. Furthermore, Auster’s characters experience themselves particularly through/by embodying space, place and language, and these three levels create the framework within which I examine the Otherness of the self.
Péter Kristóf Makai, University of Szeged, Hungary, epigunya@gmail.com
Mind the gap: Narrating cognitive difference in autism fiction
My doctoral dissertation investigates the representation of fictional mental functioning of autistic protagonists in four early 21st century disability novels, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark, Claire Morrall’s The Language of Others and Jodi Picoult’s House Rules. In my work, I try to weave together disability studies (Stuart Murray, Mark Osteen, Ralph James Savarese), cognitive narratology and literary studies (Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine) and results from experimental psychology and neuroscience to explore autism and its contested relationship to empathy. Focusing on the concept of “theory of mind”, I survey how this scientific construct has travelled across disciplines, how it has been used to disable autists, and how its appearance in novels has produced a shift towards seeing novel-reading as mind-reading. I extend current research on cognitive literary theory into the domain of disability literature by looking at the way certain narratological strategies (descriptive granularity, idiosyncratic dialogue, the use of focalisation or the disruption of narrativity) are utilised to convey neurological difference, which also fits into the research programme of so-called “unnatural narratology”. In order to refrain from cognitive reductionism, I consider literary disability studies as a counter-discourse that re-humanises autism by drawing attention to the social norms of cognition, and I analyse the novels to see how the portrayal of autists change in different genres. The overarching thesis is that in the last forty years, cultural and scientific changes in Euro-Atlantic societies have thrust autism into the literary limelight as a paradigm case of a millennial crisis in sociality, and that a highly interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand the popularity and compelling narratological power of the autism novel.
Veronika Végh, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, vera@szo.hu
The Fragment as a Form in British and Hungarian Romanticism
Romanticism did not see the Whole as the only possible manifestation of the artistic expression, there was a remarkable interest in fragmented structures. The Romantic fragment is the result of a deliberate and conscious concept; it questions “wholeness” and redefines labels such as “unfinished”, “incomplete” and “fractured”. The phenomenon existed in the whole of European literature (and art) and the fact that it emerges internationally, very often without a direct influence, makes it even more interesting.
The subject of my dissertation is the comparative study of British and Hungarian Romantic fragment poems. The hypothesis is that a comparative study may help to understand the machinery of the Romantic fragment, offering ways to see certain patterns of a form (?) that seems to elude classification and definition. Some of the authors considered are Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Charlotte Smith, Mihály Vörösmarty, János Arany, Sándor Petőfi, Lőrinc Tóth, Ferenc Kölcsey. The method in use is probably the most straightforward, the texts in question are let to communicate with each other, while I record the unfolding patterns indicative of a shared origin, intent, or message. The structure of my dissertation follows these findings closely. The opening chapter discusses ruin poetry and the aesthetics of the ruin, a subject essential to understand the fragment. The following chapters are going to be about the connections with memory, trauma, beginning and end of life and the transcendental. The study cannot be without the close inspection of the German Romantic fragment theory, the Romantic irony and the sublime.
I use recent results by researchers such as P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J. Nancy, T. Mcfarland, M. Levinson, A. Regier, C. Elias, M. Sandy, D. Duff, S. Thomas, M. Szegedy-Maszák, G. Eisemann and M. Szilágyi.
Anne-Sophie Letessier, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III, France, anne-sophie.letessier@univ-montp3.fr
Text/image relations in Jane Urquhart’s landscape writing
Canadian author Jane Urquhart has never ceased to reflect upon the cultural prisms that mediate our perception of landscape and its representation. Her novels call for a thorough examination of the prevalence of the visual in our experience of space.
Cultural geographers have underlined how the aesthetic value attached to the word landscape, which historically first referred to a pictorial representation, suggests that our apprehension of space as landscape conjoins what is seen with a way of seeing it. Urquhart repeatedly draws attention to the eye responding to latent aesthetic and cultural models, both literary and pictorial.
In novels which are fraught with pictorial references and which repeatedly feature artist figures – novelists, poets, painters, sculptors, and photographers – landscape writing is underpinned by an interplay between word and image. Drawing upon the seminal work of French scholar Liliane Louvel, I have established a typology of the text/image relations in Urquhart’s novels based on the various degrees of pictorial saturation. This has led me to consider that the interplay that informs her writing of landscape bespeaks an uncertainty about the spell of the image, the fascination and power it exerts on the beholder. Furthermore, as studies in intersemiotics have shown, text/image relations do not partake of isomorphism. I would argue that the impassable gap between text and image is the locus in which Urquhart’s writing invests to probe the specificity of the word.
My research has led me to define four main axes:
the concept of ut pictoria poesis and the analogies between word and image in the light of the notion of figurability;
the concept of “imprint” developed by French philosopher Didi-Huberman and how it operates both on the level of perception and representation;
the distinction between seeing and looking in relation to post-colonialism;
Urquhart’s attempts to circumvent the figuring force of the image.
PHD LIT D Monday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S2
SPACES:GEOGRAPHIES, TOPOI, HETEROTOPIA
Martin Štefl, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, steflmart@gmail.com
Physical and Psychical Spaces in Modern English Literature 1890–1930
The thesis discusses affinities between physical and psychical spaces in selected works of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats in connection with the main philosophical and aesthetic problems posed by the changes in modernist representation of character with respect to space and place. In doing so, the argument assesses the “in-human humanism” of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf which manifests itself in the interrelation between states of mind and material universe, the way in which the consciousness accommodates various material “admixtures” and how subjectivity “escapes” from subject to its own outside.
Using the conservative thought of Wyndham Lewis as a vital source of comparison, the thesis examines how the interaction of these newly constructed modernist subjectivities with space changes and challenges traditional ideas of unity of self, personal identity and autonomous agency. Drawing on a number of themes from visual arts, the discussion connects these psychical factors with the notions of solidity and fluidity/stability and instability of material reality and individual objects, moving bodies or things in space.
As a part of this, the thesis incorporates a detailed discussion of Italian Futurism, especially F. T. Marinetti’s and Umberto Boccioni’s theories of physical transcendentalism, force-lines, ambiente and technological sensitivity. The idea of modernist subjectivity “entering into a very intimate relationship with material reality” is further pursued in T. S. Eliot’s poetry as well as in Yeats’ “cosmological psychology” of his A Vision.
In its method, the thesis relies first of all on philosophies and aesthetics of the period (Bergson, Moore, James, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Worringer) as well as on theoretical and philosophical texts of the discussed authors. Relevant questions from visual arts and modern philosophies of space and place are also considered.
Representations of space and the politics of gender in the dramatic work of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy
Anikó Bach, University of Pécs, Hungary, anikobach@yahoo.com
The oeuvres of Friel and Murphy show remarkably similar plays in thematic concern, yet presenting divergent views of Ireland. Both playwrights are highly critical of their age. Murphy’s plays are rough and rather violent as opposed to Friel’s more poetic and playful dramatic style. My thesis attempts to answer the question of the extent to which the representations of space and gender in the works of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy are combined and respond to the social, political and economic changes of the second half of the twentieth century in Ireland. The notions of space, place and gender are culturally constructed and shaped. In the Irish context, where place―due to Ireland’s colonial past, The Troubles, or the globalization―always matters and gender is established and sustained by a highly patriarchal culture and politics, one has to think about these as inextricably linked. The idea is that the plays chosen―spanning almost half a decade―reflect this dynamism in the portrayal of space and gender.
My aim is to uncover some of these connections and discuss the idea that space is not only constituted by, but it is also constitutive of gender. My approach is text-based and is relying on the one-dimensional space in the written text represented and evoked via mimesis and diegesis. For theoretical background I am drawing on theories like that of Issacharoff, Foucault, Ubersfeld―to name only a few.
The corpus under consideration (still under revision):
Philadelphia, Here I Come! (Friel, 1964), A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant (Murphy, 1969), Lovers: Winners, Losers (Friel, 1967) On the Outside (Murphy, 1959) On the Inside (Murphy, 1974), Faith Healer (Friel, 1979), The Gigli Concert (1983), Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel, 1990) Bailegangaire (Murphy, 1985), The Home Place (Friel, 2005) The House (Murphy, 2000)
Kata Gyuris, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, gyuriskata@gmail.com
Questions of identity in Anglophone and Francophone African literatures
Postcolonial literatures have been in the forefront of literary studies for a while but it seems that neither the local nor the Western consciousness has managed to process the fundamental instabilities of identity that originate from the transitions between the colonial and the postcolonial states of existence. The focal point of my dissertation is Anglophone and Francophone African literatures written after 1950, and the primary aim of my research is to prove – in line with Spivak’s strategic essentialism – that the processes of (post)colonialism and their effect on identity can be best described and understood through common and recurring motifs in these works.
The thesis relies heavily on theory: it seeks to establish a balance between early French theoretical texts mainly by Senghor and Glissant, who are perpetually dissatisfied with too monolithic concepts such as “négritude” and the more essentialist writings of Bhabha, Spivak and Robert Young. The main method of literary analysis is close reading, with a corpus including but not being limited to novels by Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee on the English side, and novels by J. M. G. Le Clézio, Henri Lopès and Ahmadou Kourouma on the French side.
Among the motifs which seem to be common in all these works and which seem to describe the insecurities originating from the (post)colonial transition, we find a symbolic metamorphosis, relying not only on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming” but also on the Western origins of the term. Another connected motif is animality and the subsequent juxtaposition of intellect (soul) and body. After a brief theoretical introduction, the presentation will focus on the appearance of these themes in the works of the above-mentioned authors in order to show that an essentialist approach can indeed offer an interpretation of the processes of (post)colonialism.
Lukáš Merz, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, lukas.merz@gmail.com
The topology of Peter Ackroyd’s novels
Location plays a central role in the novels by Peter Ackroyd. The intimate connection with London and its locales is one of the most prominent features of his writing. Sensitive characters feel drawn to certain places, are able to relate to them and be affected by them. In a sense, the location plays its own role and affects the characters. The central question to my research is how this relation actually works? How is the effect achieved? Why is the sense of place so powerful? My argument is that beneath the postmodern façade of the text, the play with genres, viewpoints, and temporal distortion, lies a firm pattern of archetypal locations invested with mythical qualities.
These special locations are not seen as mere settings, but as literary topoi. Inspired by the works of James Frazer, Northrop Fry and the Czech authors Daniela Hodrová and Michal Peprník, literary topology examines these recurring stylised locations and their functions in the plot structure. They include the topos of “house”, “room”, “spire/tower”, “gate/entrance”, and “labyrinth”. Topos, as a clearly defined locale, means a specific mode of perception and interpretation of place. The thesis discusses the topoi and presents them not as static, but as a constantly changing concept of place, always having specific characteristics and roles in the story, while resting on the deepest psychological patterns. By analysing the features of a concrete topos in Ackroyd’s works, several analogies emerge and a shared semantic isotopy appears that defines the archetypal use of location. An analysis of their semantic fields shows how they exercise their qualities and form centres of gravity, or anchors, in the space of the novels between (or in) which the characters move and act, (un)aware of the meanings the topos conveys.
Zsuzsanna Tóth, University of Szeged, Hungary, dzsini24@freemail.hu
Mapping axis mundi(s): The logic of mythic and literary geographies in the mythopoeia of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy
My doctoral dissertation will focus on one peculiarity of the English literature of the fantastic since J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973). It is mythopoeia, the conscious integration of traditional mythological themes and archetypes into a fictive mythological system, with the aim of formulating religious messages. My corpus consists of Philip Pullman’s (1946– ) book trilogy, His Dark Materials (1995–2000), whose mythopoeia functions according to the Western religious motives of completeness. The topic of this presentation is the logic of this trilogy’s mythic and literary geographies. My aim is to prove that in spite of Pullman’s reliance on passages through parallel universes during the narration of his story, in the end he adamantly insists on a given person’s attachment to or oneness with his/her birthplace. In this way, His Dark Materials trilogy propagates the needlessness of escapism, the celebration of material reality, even local patriotism. In my analysis, I differentiate two types of cosmic centres (axis mundi) on the basis of Deirdre F. Baker’s geographic typology of fantasy fictions. The cosmic centre of Pullman’s literal map is Oxford as the setting of the beginning and the end in His Dark Materials trilogy; a cultic town of English intellectual history, and of twentieth-twenty-first-century English children’s literature; and Pullman’s hometown. The cosmic centre of Pullman’s metaphysical map is the Republic of Heaven as the terminus of the quest for wholeness, identity and maturity; also a saving attitude in children’s and adolescents’ literature. As a result, I find that although the idea of an individual’s oneness with his/her birthplace witnesses English national identity, it is compatible with Pullman’s notions of anti-imperialism, and tolerance toward other races, ethnicities and belief-systems.
Cult/Area Studies
PHD CULT A Saturday 30.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S2
Convenors:
John Corbett, University of Macao, China, jcorbett@umac.mo
María José Coperías Aguilar, University of Valencia, Spain, Maria.J.Coperias@uv.es
Eszter Szép, ELTE, Budapest, Hungary, eszterszep@gmail.com
Drawing Trauma and Torture in the Digital Age: Joe Sacco’s comics about Iraq
As the title of my dissertation, Representing War, Violence and Trauma in 21st Century Graphic Narratives, suggests, my research focuses on the representation of traumatic events in autobiographical comics, such as the works of Art Spiegelman, Miriam Katin, and Zeida Abirached; and comics journalism, especially the works of Ted Rall and Joe Sacco: Safe Area Goražde, Palestine, Journalism.
The starting point of my research is the nature of the medium of comics: its formal and structural characteristics, its possibilities and limits, as explored by Groensteen and Hatfield. I am interested in comics that border between fact and fiction: especially the works of comics journalists claim to be hand-drawn and handwritten reports and points of reference in our most virtualized age.
My paper focuses on Joe Sacco’s pieces of comics journalism centering on Iraq: “Complacency Kills,” “Down! Up!” and “Trauma on Loan”, all published in his 2012 volume, provocatively entitled Journalism. In the first part of my presentation I investigate the dialogue between these comics and the digitally mastered or military-sponsored photographs of war. I argue that the drawn medium of comics can carry a truthfulness which is lost in photographs created digitally, about which we are increasingly sceptical.
Equally importantly, I connect the discourse on digital media (Manovich, Ritchin) to the representation of trauma and torture in comics. My paper is concerned with questions raised by the representation and perception of traumatic events, as addressed by Hirsch, LaCapra, Butler, Sontag, and Mitchell: can trauma be addressed by the medium of comics? What can we learn by such an address? Comics’ above mentioned truthfulness and the deeply personal nature of the drawing creates a sensitive environment for capturing trauma and interpreting retelling.
Virginia Fusco, Carlo 3 University, Madrid, Spain, vir_fus@hotmail.com
Reading American Neo-Gothic from a Feminist Perspective
“Those events call forth feelings of excitement, satisfaction, contentment, self-confidence, pride, power, it matters less what events are used (…). In the end, what counts most is the reader’s sense that for a short time she has become other and been elsewhere.” With these words Radway summarises the key elements that we associate to the very process of reading.
Starting from these reflections on female readership of romance novels, I am analysing some American neo-gothic novels that became popular at the beginning of the 90s and still represent a point of reference for those that love reading paranormal, gothic or even terror novels dominated by strong female characters. Reading the vast collection of Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter books and tracing a complex genealogy back to the origin of some literary myths such as the vampire or the zombie, I am trying to account for the transformations that we can observe in these literary figures as much as the transformations in the contraction of the main female characters considering them a result of the emergence of a new feminist and feminine sensibility and different gender politics that have had a great impact on the American socio-political and philosophical scenes in the past two decades.
Working on the books using feminism, philosophy and critical theory I intend to account for such transformations and suggest a possible ‘genesis’ of contemporary female identity through the study of the symbolic significance of a powerful heroine such as Anita in the Hamilton’s novels.
In order to carry out my PhD research I am looking closely at feminist theory and bibliographical references on literary criticism. At the same time, I am contrasting some of the ideas that have emerged from the textual analysis with those of a monthly seminar group of 13 women (qualitative research as a form of ethnography) that I organise in a council-run centre for women in Madrid –Hermanas Mirabal.
Martyna Bryla, Universidad de Málaga, martynabryla@uma.es
Post-war Eastern Europe as a Liminal Landscape in American Literary Imaginary
In his seminal publication, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), Larry Wolff convincingly demonstrates that the idea of Eastern Europe is much older than the Cold War. Wolff traces it back to the eighteenth century intellectuals who discovered, described and taught Eastern Europe to the Enlightenment’s audience through their writings.
Following Wolff’s proposition that post-war Eastern Europe is not only a geopolitical construct but also a conceptual category, I set out to examine its representation in the works of celebrated and less-known American authors who visited the region between 1960s and 2000s. Among them are Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur Philips, and John Beckman.
The dissertation falls within the tradition of imagology, which analyses the processes of representing foreign nations through literature and other media. To examine the way in which Eastern Europe is imagined in American literature, I employ the concept of liminality. My proposition is that Eastern Europe functions as an in-between realm embodying contradictions and paradox, where the ordinary rules and norms are held in abeyance. As a rule, images of alterity tend to tell us more about those who produce them than about the spected itself. Accordingly, Eastern Europe’s liminal “structurelessness” is where these complex tensions between self and other are enacted.
Although the thesis has been inspired by such seminal works about the “invention of tradition” as Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe, Said’s Orientalism (1978), or Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997), its objectives are more modest. The author does not attempt to prove that the representation of Eastern Europe in terms of a liminal landscape forms part of a larger political project. Nor does she aim to describe Eastern Europe as it “really” was. Instead, she hopes to demonstrate that there is something of a persistent mental image of Eastern Europe in the analyzed works, and that it goes beyond 1989—the year in which Eastern European as a geopolitical construct formally ceased to exist.
References
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.
Ela İpek Gündüz,Gaziantep University, elaipekgunduz@hotmail.com
Victorian Contexts in Contemporary British Fiction
Within the postmodern contextualisation of history and historiography, the function of the new historical novel is to re-evaluate history. Neo-Victorian fiction, a significant iteration of this new historical novel, reinterprets the Victorian period through the form of the contemporary novel, the historical novel, and historiographical metafiction. Some writers, however, go beyond these categorisations, blending or ignoring them to create unique and new visions of Neo-Victorianism. The title of my dissertation is Victorian Contexts in Contemporary British Fiction and my aim is to question the continuous return to Victorian times in the contemporary novel.
Neo-Victorian fiction is rarely understood in relation to Victorian forms of historical novel. Rather, it is usually aligned with postmodern fiction’s engagement with history. Because of the fact that neo-Victorian novels address the conventions of the classic historical novel as defined by Lukács, it could also, however, be argued that the neo-Victorian novel addresses the past through a somewhat ‘authentic’ realism. This aspect of the neo-Victorian novel will be explored in my thesis, arguing for the proximity of the neo-Victorian project to the (apparently opposed) strictures of post-modernism.
In this paper, neo-Victorian novels will be evaluated as historical fictions, as well as historical fictions as ‘memory texts’, which hope to account for the depths of the past by positioning the objective account of past events within the always-unfinished processes of remembering. Thus the genre foregrounds the historical novel as an act of recollection that is firmly grounded in the techniques by which we remember in the present, performing a kind of objectively historiographical – but subjectively psychological – remembering. I will attempt to prove, then, that Neo-Victorian novels employ the structures of recollection in order to remember the Victorian period as part of the cultural memory, thereby reinforcing both continuity with and difference from the present day, producing a characteristic blend of recognition and estrangement in the reader.
PHD CULT B Sunday 31.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S2
Convenors:
Martin Montgomery, Universidade de Macau, China, mmontgomery@umac.mo
Michel Prum, Université Paris Diderot, France, prum.michel@wanadoo.fr
Petra Filipová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice, pet.filipova@gmail.com
Gender in Contemporary U.S. Culture
This presentation deals with asexuality as a sexual orientation, especially with the way it is depicted in contemporary American television and literature, with focus mostly on the Young Adult category. Asexuality has been gaining attention in recent years and has brought heated debate as to whether it can be viewed as a sexual orientation comparable to hetero-, homo- and bisexuality, or if asexuality is connected to a hypoactive sexual desire disorder and should be treated as such. This thesis adopts the former viewpoint, asserting that asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a lack of sexual attraction towards other people. Due to the low visibility of asexuality in textual production general, there is a shortage of characters who specifically state they are asexual. Thus, for research purposes the thesis also studies characters who consistently exhibit asexual behaviour, even without an explicit positioning identity-wise. Taking into account both characters who are ‘out‘ as asexual, and those who at least give evidence of consistent asexual behaviour, it is possible to point out a certain sense of stereotypical ‘Otherness’ with regard to non-asexuals and to examine the reasons for viewing asexuals as dehumanized, incapable of making basic human connections, or even dangerous. These points are explored in contemporary American TV series (e.g. The Big Bang Theory, Huge) as well as in 21st-century U.S. literature (e.g. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, or Elizabeth Bear’s Dust).
Reni Radkova, Sofia University, Bulgaria, renird@uni-sofia.bg
The Concept of Intercultural Competence and the Fulbright Program English Teacher Assistant as a Practical Model of Realization of Intercultural Communication
The focus in the suggested research is on the role of intercultural communication in English language education and the program of English teacher assistants (ETA), which is part of the international Fulbright educational exchange in Bulgaria, for the enhancement of intercultural competence. It will present not only the context of English language acquisition in Bulgaria, but also the development of multicultural awareness and tolerance in the language classroom. The new concepts of teaching intercultural communication and competence promote the idea that they are not free from language learning and language-in-culture. The main goal of the ETA program is to improve the quality of English language teaching and learning in Bulgaria by assigning native speakers with adequate academic credentials to (English) language high schools all over the country and especially in underdeveloped regions. This model has real importance as it represents training by native speaker who functions as an intercultural moderator.
The main goals of the research are:
• To promote the Fulbright program
• To strengthen educational advising.
• To promote cultural sensitivity among Americans and Bulgarians.
English language skills and intercultural communication should better be taught by native speakers. It is not only because they are a priceless tool and a natural way for learning English, but meanwhile they teach intercultural communication and intercultural competence. Also they use interactive and productive methods of teaching and presenting American and British culture and conversational English.
As a part of the Fulbright program ETA gives the students, mentor teachers, teaching staff, and the local community the possibility to stay in touch with English and American language and culture, thus imperceptibly enhancing intercultural competence.
Andrea Bila, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, andreabila@gmail.com
The Voice of Islam: Muslim organisations and State-Islam Relations in Great Britain and France
Successive British and French governments have encouraged the formation of an official body representing Muslims since the early 1990’s. However, less than two decades after the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was assigned the role of the British government’s closest Muslim ally and the communities’ spokesperson in 1997, the question of Muslim representation is pending yet again. In France, the trajectory of the government-backed the Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM) created in 2003 is similar: weakened by the members’ infighting, it finally failed to achieve organisational unity and effectively represent Muslims.
In my dissertation, I examine the similarities between the two cases and consider the objective reasons which led to the decline of national representative bodies. Using government reports, official statements, press articles and personal accounts of the individuals involved in the inception of these bodies, I argue that they played a significant role in the early stages of Muslim mobilisation. However, once the religion-based bodies’ legitimacy and ability to cater for Muslim communities in the new post-9/11 context came under question, the national councils gave way to new types of Muslim political mobilisation.
As a result, a multitude of “progressive” Muslim organisations focusing on social cohesion, interfaith outreach, civic participation and social welfare emerged. They seem to be less prone to unifying Muslims politically and rather represent them in their diversity. Moreover, by shifting their objectives from accommodating the needs of the Muslim communities to the prosperity of the whole society, these new local actors not only help build new Muslim identities but also strive to transform the image of Muslims from an inward-looking community to outward-looking dynamic citizens.
Elodie Gallet, Université de Poitiers, elodie.gallet@etu.univ-poitiers.fr
The Untold Story of the Conflict In Northern Ireland: Television and Influence
Thanks to the emotions it can generate, no other media has as immediate an impact on the population as television does. Because of this potential, every state, as democratic as it might be, can hope and expect that the broadcasters would share their own editorial judgements, especially when they deal with public matters. Tensions between the State and the media can therefore arise from the public right to know, and the State’s desire to manage information. This paradox is exacerbated in times of war or conflict, and even more so when this conflict takes place within national borders. Thus, we can wonder if broadcasting is a weapon the government can use, whatever it does, or can it be a watchdog exercising the right that people have to get informed and the right the media have to provide information and comment on the news?
This presentation will aim at exploring the dual role of television. This media is both under the State’s influence, and a source of influence on public opinion. The conflict in Northern Ireland provides a clear illustration of this reality, insofar as many TV programmes have contributed to counteract the dominant view of the conflict, by offering an alternative interpretation of the events. In spite of the government’s pressures, many programmes have questioned the way the authorities have tackled some aspects of the conflict, and even managed to unveil some miscarriages of justice.
SEMINARS
Literature
SLITE1 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A4
THE CHANGING REPRESENTATION OF THE JEWISH FAMILY IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
Convenors:
Stanislav Kolář, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, stanislav.kolar@osu.cz
Zuzana Buráková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, zuzana.burakova@upjs.sk
Due to the profound sociocultural changes that have affected the lives of American Jews, the traditional Jewish family has undergone a rapid transition which has resulted in the need for a more contemporary conceptualization of the Jewish family and consequently of Jewish identity within the context of American literature. We encourage proposals that address our topic from the perspective of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, memory, trauma and Holocaust studies.
Participants
Luisa Juárez Hervás, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, luisa.juarez@uah.es
Transnational politics of memory. Eva Hoffman’s portrayal of family and self in second-generation Holocaust writing
Far from traditional autobiographical texts that emphasized linearity and progression towards the formation of a stable, definable self, second generation Holocaust life writing exemplified in the works of Anne Karpf, Lisa Appignanesi or Eva Hoffman, follows the trend established by post-colonial, feminist and working class autobiographies of the eighties to produce experimental narratives of the self. As daughters of Holocaust survivors, these writers set out to explore the aesthetic and political implications of post-memory by producing narratives that plait on the one hand, personal, intimate details of a fragmented, scarred self and a peculiar family life, and on the other, socio-historical facts in a seemingly Rushdiean fashion. Although mostly studied as examples of second generation Holocaust memoir, because of their emphasis on trauma and memory, these texts can also be seen as an expression of transnational and diasporic literature of nomadic subjects. This paper will explore autobiographical writing by Eva Hoffman, with a comparison to the other two authors, focusing in the peculiar representations of family life and of individual identity as one of the most relevant manifestations of postmemory and post-Holocaust identity.
Alistair Heys, Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, alistair_heys@hotmail.com
The Nameless Crime: Bloom, Judaism, and the Bronx
My proposal begins with Norma Rosen’s hypothesis that although American Jews were safe from the Holocaust, ‘since then, in imagination, we are seldom anywhere else’. This assertion is easily demonstrable with recourse to Harold Bloom’s thoughts upon Ezekiel: ‘The shadow of the Holocaust still and always falls upon Judaism. How could it not?’ While talking of his father and mother, Bloom relates that his extended family were murdered in the Holocaust, ‘He had been born in Odessa; she, in Ashtetol, long since wiped out by the Nazis, near Brest-Litovsk.’ Therefore, my purpose is to link Bloom’s criticisms of what he refers to as normative Judaism to his childhood upbringing in the Bronx during the 1930s and 1940s. It was precisely this period when his cloth-worker father experienced periods of unemployment and Bloom first began to quarrel with his rabbinical teachers.
Eniko Maior, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, enikomaior@yahoo.com
The Representation of Jewish Family in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
In my paper I want to deal with Gary Shteyngart’s third novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010) and the representation of the Jewish family. On the Old continent the Jews used to live in closely knit communities led by the rabbi. As Jews were no longer living in closely knit communities, the question of individualism appeared. Jewish families and communities were no longer the most important things in the life of the individual. The individual came to the foreground and left no place for other things. The Jews experienced total freedom in speech, in life and most importantly in thoughts. The bounds of their past life were forgotten and a new set of values had to be elaborated in order to fulfill the needs of this assimilated, acculturated and Americanized individual.
The protagonist of the novel under discussion tries to find his identity, which is in continuous change. He tries to figure out in a world filled with cultural, racial and urban conflicts his own identity from the perspective of a former immigrant and as a member of a minority group. The task of my paper is to show whether he succeeds or not.
Joshua Parker, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria, parkerjm71@gmail.com
Exploring Postmemory Abroad
It has been over 35 years since Michael Krasney announced the death of “the American-Jewish novel.” Not surprisingly, its resurgence in recent years often focuses on protagonists’ exploration of the past, and more specifically on their families’ pasts. Nathan Englander’s work, for example, often focuses on multi-generational continuity and conflict. But as important as examining familial pasts is their examination from the outside -from a certain distance – and that distance, this paper argues, is often afforded by narratives taking protagonists away from the space of America to examine their families’ histories and postmemories abroad.
Contemporary Berlin, as portrayed in the recent work of Jewish-American authors like J.S. Marcus, Chloe Aridjis and Peter Wortsman, is a space where conflicts between personal and cultural narratives run deep. This paper draws on recent studies suggesting that for traumatic memories to be “reconsolidated,” they must be consciously recalled and “edited” by association with the ambience of a new environment, then “re-stored.” It examines to what degree authors explore tie narratives set in Berlin to already-established cultural and familial narratives of the city, and to what extent they allow themselves the freedom to create new narratives models – models allowing them to locate themselves in relation to family histories of families whose own connections to the Holocaust are increasingly distanced.
Michaela Weiss, Slezská Univerzita v Opavě, Czech Republic, michaela.nahlikova@gmail.com
Surviving without the Man: Incomplete Families in Irena Klepfisz’s Poetry
The paper focuses on the image of incomplete and ghost families in the poetry of a contemporary American Jewish poet Irena Klepfisz. Born in Poland during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Klepfisz lost her father and, surviving in a Catholic nursery, emigrated with her mother to the United States. In her autobiographical poems she uses the Holocaust as a point of separation and fragmentation of Jewish identity and at the same time, of family and its values. She tries to overcome the loss by recovering and rewriting her memories of her father who is perceived as continually present between the mother and daughter. In her later poems Klepfisz contemplates the structure of American Jewish families from a feminist perspective and centralizes the female experience, giving voice to women who either did not marry or lost their husbands. She challenges their outcast position within the traditional extended Jewish families and survivor communities, where they have been either silenced or merely suffered, as marriage and reproduction are seen as a social duty and the only hope and promise of a new life after the Holocaust.
Zuzana Buráková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia, zuzana.burakova@upjs.sk
(Un)usual Families in Short Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The traditional view on the decline and the destruction of the traditional Jewish family is usually perceived as a consequence of the external historical changes brought by the destruction of the Old World through the twentieth century. Our paper argues against this view as we explore the selected short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer in which the extended family history is a dominant theme. We contend that the transition of the traditional Jewish family does not necessarily stem from the external forces and the emergence of modernity but comes from the family inside, as demonstrated in Singer’s Yiddish short fiction set in the enclosed shtetl world. The themes considered as means of a gradual disintegration of Jewish family values such as adultery, divorce, childlessness, homosexuality, transvestitism, atheism and sexuality are in Singer’s stories portrayed not as an impact of societal and historical transition but that of an individual. The aim of the paper is to contemplate the transitory nature of what is considered a ‘traditional (Jewish) family’.
Stanislav Kolář, University of Ostrava, Czech republic, Stanislav.Kolar@osu.cz
The Holocaust and Fractured Families
This paper compares the representation of the Jewish family in traditional realistic narratives about the Holocaust with postmemorial narratives of the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Both narrative modes mirror the disruptive effects of the Holocaust on the family and its structure; however, as the paper suggests, the disintegration of the Jewish family in the works of the Second Generation is conveyed in an alternative way, radically different from more traditional Holocaust fiction. Second Generation writers use innovative narrative forms, for example elements of magic realism, Yiddish folk-tales etc. Imaginative investment, to use Marianne Hirsch’s term, enables these writers to avoid the ethically unacceptable appropriation of the original trauma of Holocaust survivors in their reconstruction of their family history. While a traditional portrait of a family fractured by the Holocaust will be examined in Susan Fromberg Shaeffer’s fictional memoirs Anya, alternative approaches to this topic will be represented by several authors of the Post-Holocaust Generation. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the Post-Holocaust Generation’s search for adequate responses to the historical trauma, with the emphasis on the depiction of family life, manifested in the highly complicated relationship between Holocaust survivors and their children.
SLITE2 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room A4, (B)17.15–18.45 Room A4
REVISITING THE NATION IN POST-WAR MODERNIST LITERATURE
Convenors:
Armela Panajoti, University of Vlora “Ismail Qemali”, Albania, armelap@assenglish.org
Adrian Radu, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, adrian.radu@ubbcluj.ro
The aim of this seminar is to explore the concept of nation, subsequent and adjacent constructions of identity and, more generally, whatever is related from this perspective to the modernist literature of the post-war period. Therefore, the seminar sets out to look into national identity as a form of collective identity and give an answer to the question about what we make of the group, of the whole, of the collective, of the nation in a period when the individual less than the group is more and more placed in the centre of attention.
Participants
Katharina Walter, University of Innsbruck, Austria, katharina.walter@uibk.ac.at
‘Alte Gummy Granny mit Zuckerhuthut’: The Nation in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Its German Translations
This paper examines representations and transgressions of the boundaries of national identity in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the German translations of the novel by Georg Goyert (1927) and Hans Wollschläger (1975). Such a reading of Ulysses alongside its translations sheds new light on Joyce’s portrayal of, and often sardonic comments on, Irish society and its national emblems. Challenging conceptions of literary translations as inferior renderings or extensions of an original work, this paper especially draws attention to the ways in which Goyert’s and Wollschläger’s German versions of Ulysses inform an understanding of the Joycean text. Rather than evaluating the German renderings in terms of their degrees of accuracy, originality or transparency in representing Joyce’s modernist novel, this paper focuses on the dialogic intersections produced by Joyce’s, Goyert’s and Wollschläger’s respective constructions of national identities and symbols in Ulysses. Taking account of socio-historical developments in conceptions of the nation in 20th-century Europe, the analysis shows that translation is an important factor in negotiating as well as overcoming the confines associated with national affiliation.
Benjamin Keatinge, South East European University, Macedonia, benkeatinge@gmail.com, b.keatinge@seeu.edu.mk
Mentoring Irish Modernism: T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber and Irish Poetry after the Revival
T.S. Eliot’s connection to Irish Modernist writing is most associated with his 1923 defence of James Joyce in ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ together with his 1940 memorial lecture on W.B. Yeats. However, Eliot’s influence on the course of pre- and post-war Irish literature is more extensive than this. Not only was Eliot a personal friend of Irish modernist poet Thomas MacGreevy (whose nationalist leanings were criticized by Samuel Beckett), Eliot was directly responsible for the publication of major post-Revival poets in his role as editor at Faber and Faber. Louis MacNeice came to prominence thanks to Eliot; Richard Murphy’s collection Sailing to an Island (1963) was accepted by Eliot. Other Irish writers received support and review commissions from TSE and Eliot’s influence on Irish modernist poets like MacGreevy, Brian Coffey and early Beckett has been widely remarked.
This paper will reconsider how T.S. Eliot was a sometimes unseen sponsor of Irish poets seeking to develop a post-Yeatsian aesthetic. Eliot represents one of the few common contact points between widely separated authors. As Irish post-war poetry develops, Eliot (as person and poet) helped individual writers escape the constraints of monolithic cultural nationalism at home by way of contact with international modernism.
Armela Panajoti, University of Vlora, Albania, armelap@assenglish.org
“Consider this and in our time”: A nation from above
Written in the inter-war period, Auden’s poem “Consider” airs a snapshot of England from above featuring a post-war wasteland. In order to obtain a more comprehensive view of the nation, Auden rises above the physical and psychological boundaries contained on land and urges for a panoptic or aerial vision in the opening lines of the poem and invites the reader to reflect upon it.
This paper aims at analyzing the poem in order to demonstrate how it reveals post-war symptoms of a nation. The use of defining articles, although intended to accommodate the reader within a familiar setting, creates a rather ambiguous effect when coupled with medical language, military references, and psychological terms which do not simply hint at post-war effects, but, above all, leads the reader to a choice of future identity questioned more precisely in the last lines of the poem.
Ozan Selcik, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University, Turkey, ozan.selcik@erdogan.edu.tr
Beats on the stage: ‚Beat Generation in Post-War Literary Context‘
Post-war era significantly changed the concept of the US nation and identity. The Great Depression in the 1930s had seriously affected the American economy; however, the Second World War resuscitated the US economy. The USA became the world power; and in the postwar era, Americans enjoyed unprecedented personal prosperity and individual freedom. The widespread theories of Freudian psychology highlighted the individual’s origin of mind and the seriousness of the importance of the individual, which was also the social impact of World War Two.
Secondly, gender issues were a significant social matter for American Society in post-war America. Russell defined the era by saying that “America had irrevocably changed.” Contributing much to a changing concept of identity, the Beat Generation is one of the most significant results of the history of literature and literary movements during the post-war era.
Thirdly, against the traditional methods of composition, together with the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957, this period “signaled the emergence of a new movement in American Literature” (Hopkins, 279). The members of Beat Generation Literary Movement made an all-out effort to open up new possibilities of modern composition. The phrase “to be on your own“ is at the heart of our understanding of the aspect of the language that the Beat Generation Literary Movement had formed.
Strinyuk Svetlana, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia, strinuk@mail.ru, sstrinyuk@hse.ru
Modernist Tradition in Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane
Addressing nationality is one of the central topics in contemporary Irish literature. It gave a remarkable corpus of serious literary writing on creating national identity, various methods and approaches being implemented to create the identity concept. Seamus Deane in his elegiac novel Reading in the Dark collects memories to build the reality of Ireland as a nation. The enormity of the civil unrest and suffering of victims undermines faith; nevertheless, the narrator of the novel in question tries to cope with the difficulties of being Irish, collecting mosaics of his past into a complicated picture of existence in the present.
The aim of this paper is to place the topic of creating national identity via modernism means in Reading in the Dark on the agenda of scholarly inquiry. Contemporary Irish literature inherited much from Joyce, building a close relation with the ‘literature of fact’. Seamus Deane rethinks poetically historical wrongs, in a Joycean manner turning ‘one day’ into ‘every day’. At the same time, self-meditation on writing and interpretation is an integral part of this novel. Meticulous attention to detail, impressionistic narration and specific linguistic means of building national and confessional identity make the novel a fine example of modernist writing in contemporary Irish literature.
Valeria Polopoli, University of Catania, Italy, polopoli@unict.it
Narrating (Trans)Nationhood: the Challenge to Essentialist National Identities in Diana Evans’s 26a
My paper aims at illustrating how the Anglo-Nigerian author Diana Evans contributes, with her 26a (2005), to deconstructing racially exclusivist configurations of Britishness and, in more general terms, of modern European national identities. Perfectly in line with contemporary Black British writing and its thinking about both British identity and the identity of Britain in a distinctly post-racial and post-national way, Evans’s novel revisits and reconceptualises the idea of the British nation as a plural site of multicultural convergence and offers new inclusive configurations of British national identity, thus changing the nature of national boundaries themselves. The fortunes of a mixed-race family, the Hunters, and in particular of the two protagonists, the twin sisters Georgia and Bessie, serve to contest notions of ethnic homogeneity traditionally associated with Britishness. In the novel, the author’s emphasis on transnational connections and her delineating new transcultural models of subjectivity invite us to conceive of the British nation (and the contemporary nation as well) as a space of linkages and synchronicities that far surpasses narrow national exclusivity and transcends, in Gilroy’s terms, “both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (Gilroy 1993: 19).
Sule Okuroglu Ozun, Suleyman Demirel University, Isparta, Turkey, suleokuroglu@gmail.com
Diasporic Consciousness and the Idea of Nationhood in Anita Desai’s Bye Bye Blackbird
The concept of diaspora in recorded history emerged with the scattering of the Jews after the destruction of the first Temple of Solomon. Today the concept is also changing with recent global shifts, deterritorialization and reterritorialization which allow a move beyond restricted notions of space by offering alternative narratives to idealist accounts of identity and nationality. Thus, the “nation – dream and reality of the nineteenth century – seems to have reached both its apogee and its limits … [when] the Second World War, though fought in the name of national values … economic homogeneity, historical tradition and linguistic unity … brought to an end the nation as a reality: it was turned into a mere illusion” (Kristeva 1991: 188). Since diaspora experience includes never-ending border crossings, all essentializing distinctions between the colonizer and the colonized, the self and the other, citizen and noncitizen, based on the assumption about spaces being a fixed source for a coherent identity, are deconstructed in diasporic space. The aim of this paper is to discuss the complexities of border crossing prevalent in the life of the early diasporians and how diasporians performatively re-form their nationality through an act of imagination in Anita Desai’s Bye Bye Blackbird.
Aylin Atilla, Ege University, Turkey, atillaaylin@yahoo.co.uk , aylin.atilla@ege.edu.tr
Reflective Nostalgia and Englishness in Julian Barnes’s England, England
Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), states that reflective nostalgia is “more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude”, where reflection suggests “new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis” (49). As she differentiates, where “restorative nostalgia evokes national past and future; reflective nostalgia is more about individual and cultural memory” (49). In Julian Barnes’s novel England, England (1998), the Isle of Wight represents England, and it locates a theme park based on a collection of all things that are traditionally associated with the idea of Englishness. It presents a backward nation which gradually regresses into its own past, finally becoming a rural country dominated by Celtic and pagan ceremonies. Nevertheless, it is inevitable for a country experiencing the end of empire having a radical change in social structure to look back on more successful periods and to create national myths to compensate for their loss. As Boym suggests, “national memory tends to make a single teleological plot out of shared everyday recollections. The gaps and discontinuities are mended through a coherent and inspiring tale of recovered identity” (53).
This paper proposes that although England, England seems to be a parodic account of nostalgia, and a caricature of the illusions that constitute most people’s notions of “Englishness”, a closer reading will reflect on the nature of collective identity. The cultural, economic and fantasy space created as a theme park is also a representative of a paradigm of the mixed economy of post-war England which has finally been replaced by capitalism. It will also be discussed that Barnes’s novel draws parallel ideas with those recent theories of nationalism in which the constructed nature of national feeling is emphasized. Moreover, the novel undermines issues of national identity and the myth of Englishness in a very ironic way. In Boym’s words: “if restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous” (49).
Pavlina Flajsarova, Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, flajsarova@centrum.cz
Come Back to Me Blue Mountains and Harvey River: Romantic Sensibility and the Treatment of Jamaican Landscape in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison
„I am definitely a poet of place. Even when I am not writing about Jamaica, it is always on my heart,“ says Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison. Her poetry shares with English Romantic poets (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley) many features such as Romantic sensibility, the use of the sublime, and landscape sources of inspiration. Therefore, the paper will compare and contrast the treatment of landscape and the use of established poetic forms by the British Romantics and by Lorna Goodison. Furthermore, the paper will explore how the formal aspects of Goodisonˈs poetry support the poetic effect of her verse. In order to evaluate the mediation of the uniqueness of Jamaican landscape, the use of Standard English as opposed to Creole will be dealt with. Goodison treats the Jamaican landscape as a matrix against which the colonial and slavery history are judged. In her best poems, Goodison transforms the Caribbean history of social injustice into the personal histories of women attached to particular Jamaican landscapes, such as the Harvey River or the Blue Mountains. The Jamaican landscape thus serves as a focal point for the explorations of the feminine self and identity of the Caribbean diaspora. Therefore the paper will ultimately focus on the way Goodison transforms the Jamaican landscape and history into a quest for individual and national identity that has been shaped and reshaped by slavery, colonial and especially postcolonial and postmodern social development.
SLITE3 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A3, (B)17.15–18.45 Room A3
INTERMEDIAL BODY POLITICS: TOWARDS A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF IMAGE/TEXT DYNAMICS
Convenors:
Anna Kérchy, University of Szeged, Hungary, akerchy@gmail.com
Catriona McAra, University of Edinburgh, UK, cmcara@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
The seminar aims to explore intermedial interactions between literary and visual representations of the female body relying on the assumption that the conceptual shift implied in the dialectical, dialogic trope of word and image (i.e. the mixed-media image/text dynamics) entails a challenge to binary oppositions’ hegemonic logic, and hence provides an adequate means for the self-reflective expression of heterogeneously embodied, polyphonically voiced, kaleidoscopically envisioned feminine subjectivities-in-progress. We perform an interdisciplinary wedding of semiotics to corporeal feminism, of literary theory to readings in visual arts, and of iconography to revisionary interpretations of literature; unveil how the semioticization of female bodies affects the somatization of texts and images; and aim to offer a gender-sensitive analysis of topics like the textual value of illustrations, pictures collaged inside literary texts, the figurativeness of lyrical language and the materiality of signifiers.
Participants
Dóra Csikós, ELTE, Budapest, Hungary, dora@prospero.hu
„And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle“: Eighteenth-century female subjectivity-in-progress and its price
As the proliferation of medical textbooks on women shows, throughout the eighteenth century (and into the nineteenth), there was an obsession to define and measure – and thus to contain and gauge – the female body. Typically, medical and moral issues were discussed in the same breath: the nature of women entailed a somatized body and, correspondingly, a deviant mind. Through three visual examples (the dissected female heart, the female thermometer and the female skeleton), I would like to show how medical discourse was laden with cultural values. In (or, rather, against) this context, William Blake wrote The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, a poem on the rape of a woman and its aftermath. Visual and textual are combined to subvert the idiom of the age and show the feminine subjectivity-in-progress: the traumatized, bound, tortured and naked female body is clothed and rises; from silent victim, Oothoon becomes an eloquent orator of the rights of all the ’daughters of Albion’. Based on Wollstonecraft’s Vindication and the myth of Prometheus as its hypertexts, Blake’s Visions is also a remarkable example of female bonding: the solitary female fleeing from her oppressor in the Title page is replaced by females huddling together in defiance in the final plate.
Anna Kérchy, University of Szeged, Hungary, akerchy@gmail.com
Iconotextual Sites of Alice’s Feminist Resistance in Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel’s Victorian Fairy-Tale Fantasy Picture
Books
As a result of the unique collaboration between author Lewis Carroll and illustrator John Tenniel, the Victorian fairy tale fantasy picture books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are distinguished by curious (con)fusions between verbal and visual regimes of representation: the figurative ‘picturesque’ metaphoricity of language-games and ‘telling’ images functioning as plot vehicles are complemented by vanguardist graphic design and typographical tricks inspiring even today’s technologically advanced adaptations from pop-up books to iPad apps. While verbal and visual nonsense mingle to challenge the boundaries of the Imaginable and the Speakable (Jabberwock/y is a memorable specimen of imagetextual monstrosity) physicality is foregrounded as yet another significant medium, both through the insistence on the materiality of the book object and the corporeality of its interpreter. Relying on the threefold methodological apparatus of feminist corporeal narratology (Grosz, Punday), picture book studies (Nodelman, Nikolajeva-Scott) and the iconotextual poetics of text/image relations (Louvel, Mitchell), my paper aims to explore how the intermedial and metamedial interactions between Lewis Carroll’s narrative fiction about Alice’s adventures and John Tenniel’s accompanying illustrations create an intermediary image-textual space that can be read/regarded as a proto-feminist site of heterogeneous semiosis. The interactively generated imagetextual frictions and fissures challenge the hegemonic logic of binary oppositions, open up freeways and bypasses of meaning(de)formations, and enable a subversive, counterspectacular semioticization of somatized identities for female protagonist and reader alike – both becoming empowered as embodied implied authors.
Erzsébet Barát, University of Szeged, Hungary, b_zsazsa@freemail.hu
How to revisit the image/text dialectic in „post-feminist“ advertisements
In my talk I wish to explore the methodological conditions of the assumption that the conceptual shift implied in the word/image dynamics should hold out a challenge to the prevailing categorization practices in binary oppositions. I shall argue that such a conceptual shift may emerge if we are prepared to move from the hegemonic concerns in feminist scholarship about the image/representation of women to woman as image as suggested by Sue Thornham (2007), i.e. to the conceptualization of visuality as a constitutive, integral dimension of „womanhood“. I shall expand Thornham’s position and argue that the corollary of such a move is to revisit the conceptualization of power and differentiate between arbitrariness and contingency, subversive and transformative body politics. To substantiate my claims I shall reflect on recent so-called post-feminist attempts at representing „real female bodies“ and expose their limits of „authenticity“ and individualization.
Anja Koletnik, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, anja.dreamer@gmail.com
Bodies Breaking Boundaries: Non-Conforming to Cisgender Normative Embodiment … Portrayed by Androgynous Models
Embodiment is regarded one of the most palpable spheres where gender norms can and – within hegemonic society’s compulsory cisnormativity – must be portrayed. All humans have bodies; there is no escape from the reality of our bodies, therefore how bodies are agents of (public) presentations are forms of manifestations of gender non/conformity. Feminist scholarship has produced an array of arguments portraying the interconnection of gender, sex and their constitutions. With the intention of intertwining notions of feminist argumentation with the research topic’s aim of locating possible contestation of cisnormative social regulations upon individuals and their bodies, I will engage with various argumentations, which will offer a theoretical structure for this research project.
This paper will present notions of tangible expressions of non-conforming gender expressions, portrayed through androgynous fashion modeling. Suggesting that individuals who manifest non-conformism in relation to cisnormativity challenge cisgender norms, I will portray androgynous modeling within Westocentric cultures as an illustration of my claim. In order to coherently explore notions that will allow me to attempt to answer my research question, I will first conceptualize notions of sex, gender and gender identities. Within elaborations of expressions of gender, I will introduce the concept of androgyny: a contestation of cisgender normativity. I will connect these topics of gender and gender expressions to bodies and gendering of bodies. Then I will outline the concept of androgynous models; models that use their bodies as tools upon which breaking of the binary gender system is taking place. I intend to introduce androgynous models with regard to academic discourses, and also to their presence within fashion and media.
Catriona McAra, University of Edinburgh, cmcara@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
Lactation Narratives: The Embodied Fairy Tales of Samantha Sweeting
This illustrated paper explores the notion of embodied storytelling in the work of the London-based interdisciplinary artist Samanatha Sweeting (b. 1982). Her work first came to international prominence at the Tate Liverpool ‚Alice in Wonderland‘ exhibition (2011) which subsequently toured to Germany and Italy. Sweeting's work is characterised by reference to well-known nursery rhymes and fairy tales such as Charles Perrault's ‚Peau d'Âne‘. My paper considers a selection of artworks by Sweeting which use photography, video and performance to focus on the practice of breastfeeding. Between 2007 and 2011 Sweeting produced a controversial body of work during which she allowed various animals to suckle directly from her breasts. On select occasions nursing apparatus was deployed to augment the performative experience. Ultimately this led to an induced form of lactation, be it natural or artificially supplemented. Such practice enables a requestioning of the binaries that exist between categories of maternal and non-maternal, eroticism and reproduction. Developing concerns of the 1960s and 1970s Body Art practices with a more intimate edge and with reference to the legacies of French feminist theory, I argue that Sweeting's practice corporealises the fairy tale in a way that opens it up to contemporary debates around the female body as political site.
Agnes Strickland-Pajtok, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary, agnespajtok@yahoo.co.uk
Women and Clothing– Female Self-Fashioning in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
The aim of this talk is to analyse clothing as the extension of the female body and as markers of various female identities in Doris Lessing’s seminal work, The Golden Notebook.
In the first part of my talk I will examine the ways appearance can contribute to the formation of the novel’s main characters, and whether dresses are able to highlight features which would remain hidden in the lack of them. We shall discover that on one level the depiction of dresses – virtually ekphrases– enhance the aesthetic richness of the text. Yet, on another, anagogic level they become elements of an elaborate poetic imagery, which – going beyond the articulate meaning of verbal message – offer space for individual and intuitive interpretation.
In the latter half, conclusions from the close-reading analysis will be employed and utilised to reveal a more abstract significance regarding the connection between a woman’s self-constructed image and its external perception. Hopefully, interrogating this conceit will unveil the complex function of clothes as tools to connect the female body to a chosen personality and also to culture and history.
Larisa Kocic-Zámbó, University of Szeged, Hungary, larisa.kocic@gmail.com
The Body of Modesty: Mediated Anxiety over a female James Bond
Modesty Blaise, the comic book heroine of spy fiction penned by Peter O’Donnell, was a hugely successful series of daily newspaper comic strips, adapted to movies (Modesty Blaise, 1966; My Name is Modesty, 2003), and to a series of novels and short stories written by O’Donnell himself. Although dismissed by critics as an ’ersatz female Bond’, the ’mistress of high kicks and high jinks’ – as others call her – still merits more than just passing comments related to her male counterpart. In my present study I wish to trace the anxiety inherent in the multimedia presentation of the feminine body as a lethal combat tool besting male opponents, focusing particularly on two, distinct comic versions – one drawn by Jim Holdaway, the erstwhile creative partner of O’Donnell and Modesty’s visual creator, and the other drawn by Enric Badia Romero, the longest running drawer of Modesty – and the dynamics between these and the novelized accounts of her adventures. In a mixture of genres and media, Modesty is a self-termed ‘hermaphrodite polecat’ with conflicting representation, and the insistence on her femininity is a continuous occasion for commentary by the authors, thus providing a fascinating subject of intermedial body politics.
Eszter Katalin Szép , ELTE, Budapest, Hungary, eszterszep@gmail.com
Who Owns the Body in Contemporary British Graphic Narratives? – An Approach to Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes and Karrie Fransman’s The House that Groaned
The paper analyzes the representation of female bodies and their relation to the space they occupy in two contemporary British comics, Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (2012) and Karrie Fransman’s The House that Groaned (2012). In both narratives institutionalized – schools, hospitals, and an asylum – and private spaces limit and metaphorically represent what claims can be made for the ownership of the bodies of the female protagonists. The starting point of analysis is the medium and the toolkit of comics. The relationship of word and image is one of the “tensions” by which graphic narratives operate (Hatfield) – the paper explores how the issues of self-expression, identity, and self-representation are addressed in these two comics. Dotter is a mixture of feminist scholar Mary Talbot’s autobiography and Lucia Joyce’s biography, in which dancing is a metaphor for Lucia‘s fight for control over her body. Parallel to this, relating to her body is a central question to young Mary, who chooses to become a mother. The House offers female bodies virtualized by photoshop, or made habitable by plastic surgery. I analyze the representation of invisible and overweight female bodies, and argue that the protagonists’ unsuccessful attempts to escape their bodies are epitomized by the final collapse of the anthropomorphized house.
SLITE4 Monday 1.9.2014 (B)11.00–13.00 Room S4, (A)14.30–16.30 Room S4
THE FICTION OF VICTORIAN MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES
Convenors:
Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, Marino@lettere.uniroma2.it
Adrian Radu, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, adrian.radu@ubbcluj.ro
Victorian culture is essentially a patriarchal one in an age of male dominance. But it also contains the expression of female emancipation and assertion of equal rights with men and equity in legal, educational, professional, and personal aspects of life. This seminar aims at exploring Victorian literature from the perspective of gender, gender roles and representation and to provide an opportunity to discuss the literary output of Victorian male and female writers, the specific depiction of genders, the way writers, works, individual characters include conventional representations of both sexes, but also reflect the changes in attitude that this age contained.
Participants
Burak Irmak, Istanbul Aydin University, Turkey, burak.irmak@outlook.com
Acting Out Gender: Performativity and Becoming Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
The paper will examine performativity in the nineteenth century Victorian novel, especially resistance to dictated male performativity and the results of it illustrated by male authors in their novels, specifically Oscar Wilde, in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the character named Lord Henry Wotton who arguably shows characteristics of Wilde himself.
Trapped by the male roles dictated to him by the society, such as marriage, Lord Henry finds relief in talking to other people about his desires, the things he wants to do and the things he cannot do. In a platonic teacher-student relationship, he leads Dorian into his desires and finds escape from his never-ending cycle of stereotypical gender through him.
However, such a behavior causes him sorrow, due to his wife falling in love and running away with another man, and Dorian becomes a killer, something which Lord Henry does not expect. Arguably this Wilde-ish Frankenstein’s monster is not just a punishment for Lord Henry Wotton but a warning to Wilde himself, who is in a similar situation, since the same rules for upper class people also apply to Wilde.
Feryal Cubukcu, Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey, cubukcu.feryal@gmail.com
Is Masculinity in Sherlock Holmes in Peril?
The Victorian period in England was one of the most influential and important epochs in history. Among the rules of Victorian society were stringent codes pertaining to what was acceptable for men and women. Men were expected to hold decent jobs, marry respectable women, and create the next generation of proper British citizens. There were certain behavioral norms for men and women that were standard practice for asserting one’s proper gender codes. In his 1995 book Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman identifies, within Victorian men’s writing, a method of constructing masculinity that opposes the dominant English model of manliness based on bourgeois domestic matrimony. This paper aims at tackling some Sherlock Holmes stories in terms of the Victorian masculinity of which features are delineated by Sussman, and tries to justify the idea that the masculine tests endured by Sherlock Holmes usually involve the rejection of the female or mother, often figured by the casting off of female clothing, and bonding with the father or more often surrogate father, which is, in this case, Dr. Watson, an act sealed by chaste bodily contact within carefully controlled rituals of male-male physicality.
Carla Fusco, University of Macerata, fuscocarla@libero.it
Ruth: an Unusual Prostitute. Elizabeth Gaskell’s speculative gaze vs Victorian Masculine Vision of Woman.
Prostitution was a much-debated topic in the mid-nineteenth century, when it was defined as the great social evil. Industrialisation had convinced the population to engage in a massive abandonment of the countryside to work in suburban factories. Many were the consequences of this dramatic change, not least the poor conditions of workers bound to live in slums. Prostitution often occurred as a means to fight poverty, but public opinion preferred to condemn those women as sinners and labelled them “fallen women”. In a society based on prudery and repression of female sexuality, a prostitute reinforced the masculine dichotomised image of woman: Madonna/harlot.
Intellectuals paid much attention to this subject, and prostitution became the shocking but attractive subplot of some sensational novels – but also a way to harshly criticise social ills.
Nevertheless, prostitutes were liminal characters of subplots, until Gaskell’s Ruth. The unlucky destiny of an unwed mother, compelled to work as a dressmaker in slavery condition, was supposed to be disturbing enough to shake Victorian hypocrisy.
The aim of my paper is to analyse the novel as a contrasting counterpart of Victorian social beliefs and show the hermeneutic complexity of the text and context.
Gonul Bakay, Bahçeşehir University, Turkey, gonulbakay@gmail.com
Images of Masculinity in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales
Images of masculinity in Byron’s Turkish Tales illustrates that masculinity is not a fixed/universal category but rather it is a contested field comprising of time, place and culture-specific interpretations. The concept of masculinity as problematized in Byron’s Turkish Tales would be better understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming. Perceptions/definitions of masculinity are historically and socio-culturally situated. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been important in helping to illuminate the complexities of identity as a “desiring production”. As they suggest, “desire is not simply a discursively anchored need or lack, but a requirement to be in the social world to become an individual or male or female” (Deleuze and Guattari qtd. in Stephan Whitehead 2002). For the purposes of this paper, I am particularly interested in their articulation of desire as the main dynamic informing the production of subjectivity. Drawing on insights by Deleuze and Guattari, this paper examines performatively constituted masculinities in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales with particular emphasis on the portrayal of male identity as fluid, metamorphic and capable of multiple possibilities.
Eliana Ionoaia, University of Bucharest, Romania, elianaionoaia@yahoo.com
The New Woman – The Victorian Gendered Identity at the Fin de Siècle
The Victorian construction of gendered identity falls into clear-cut if damnable categories. The separation of the spheres of activity into public and domestic is equally straightforward, up to the late Victorian period. The invention of the telegraph and the typing machine allowed the most daring of middle-class women to join the public sphere and the work market. Thus, the New Woman was born. If early Victorian descriptions of the throngs of men heading to work were commonplace in Dickens's works, the fin de siècle saw them joined by women. Thus, this paper will investigate the treatment of New Women in the writings of female and male authors of the fin de siècle. Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883) and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1896) are two of the works considered for this analysis of the way the identity of the New Woman is constructed by a female and a male author who were, however, both supportive of this new female typology.
Irina Presnakova, Daugavpils University, Latvia, i.presnjakova@inbox.lv
English Ghost Stories: the Literary Output of Victorian Male and Female Writers
One of the striking findings from studying the English ghost story of the latter half of 19th century is the fact that until very recently the histories of English literature provided no single reference to this literary phenomenon (supernatural, frequently referred to as marginal, mediocre, but so popular in Victorian society). In this way the ghost story was excluded from the literary context of the time. The assumption that “Victorian culture is essentially a patriarchal one in an age of male dominance” can be put into question if we refer to the English ghost story, which provides evidence of very successful women writers of the Victorian era such as Mary Braddon, Margareth Oliphant, Elizabeth Gaskell etc, popular with all classes of the reading public, who published individually in collections or sprinkled throughout various rare books and magazines, often competing with such hallmarks of the genre as Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy or Meredith. So in my report I will discuss the issue of the literary output of Victorian male and female writers, foregrounding the argument as to whether there is or there is no reason to claim ghost stories as woman’s property.
Marlena Marciniak, Opole University, Poland, marciniakm@uni.opole.pl
Blue-blooded or white-collar? Gradual Democratization of the concept of gentlemanliness in selected examples of Victorian fiction
Gentlemanliness may be regarded as a significant hallmark of Victorian culture and a key term in contemporary definitions of masculinities. J. R. Vernon wrote in 1869 that “[a] gentleman is a MAN . . . he is always manly” (qtd in Plamer 1908:339), encapsulating the direct relation between conforming to the ideals of gentlemanliness and developing a masculine identity in the Victorian frame of mind. According to Robert Colls, “[t]he Victorians took gentlemanliness and turned it into ‘manliness’” (2002:77). One of the reasons why manliness came to be so closely associated with gentlemanliness is the substantial reconceptualization of the latter notion in the nineteenth century: from a hermetic social rank designating, by and large, noble birth to a universal moral quality attainable by men regardless of their family origin or material status. The gradual evolution of Victorian views on gentlemanliness can be traced in Victorian fiction, which actively participated in public debates on the meaning of the concept. Novels such as Nicholas Nickleby, John Halifax, Gentleman, The Woman in White or Evan Harrington seem to champion men who despite their low-class background or limited financial means assert their worthiness by virtuous conduct, in contrast to their rich and aristocratic antagonists.
István Szabadi, University of Debrecen, Hungary, istvanszabadi89@gmail.com
Faith and Hysteria: The diagnosis of George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart
Adela Cathcart, an 1864 novel by George MacDonald, Scottish Victorian author and Christian minister, narrates the healing process of a very ill young woman carried out by a group of friends by the unexpected means of storytelling. The individual narrated stories of the characters amount to a criticism of the medical discourses and practices, the social and gender roles, and the spiritual life of the era, and the cure for the ailing protagonist suffering, presumably, from what was to become known as hysteria, consists in addressing and alleviating the malady in all of the above fields. In my presentation I will compare and contrast diagnoses and cures of female maladies prevalent in late Victorian medicine with those implicit in the narratives of the “healers” of the novel, demonstrating the extent to which MacDonald differed from his contemporaries and was, in fact, ahead of his time. Discussing the incorporated stories, I will link the unique and modern aspect of healing, as presented in the novel, to the overall context of faith.
SLITE5 Sunday 31.8.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room A3, (B)16.00–17.30 Room A3
INVESTING IN TIME: LITERATURE, CULTURE AND PERIODIZATION
Convenors:
Mihaela Irimia, University of Bucharest, Romania, irimia.mihaela@clicknet.ro
Jukka Tiusanen, University of Vaasa, Finland, jukka.tiusanen@uwasa.fi
We propose for this seminar a discussion of how centuries, still fairly coherent units of time, have experienced their ups and downs, their cuttings short like the twentieth century and expansions like the long eighteenth century, their re-readings and reevaluations, been invested with value and new life or like currencies being shorted or sold long. We encourage discussions of the commercial value of culture and literature, and the changes that have resulted from re-evaluations of the currency of time and period. Contributors are encouraged to discuss how our sense of period affects the present debate on the discourses of modernity.
Participants
Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University/Academy of Finland, jason.finch@abo.fi
The Long(est) Victorian Age
What does it mean to propose a hangover from one century into the next? Can we justify seeing one century as merely the aftermath of its predecessor?
Modern British literary history has tended to be understood using aesthetic criteria in terms of a violent and radical break with the past that is most often thought to have happened in the 1910s. But using historical-geographic criteria instead, the whole twentieth century could be understood as post-Victorian. For most of it, Britons tended to live in Victorian houses in smoky towns, to travel by train and harbour Victorian ideas about Britain’s place in the world. This is not even to begin talking about the various Victorian revivals that happened in twentieth-century Britain, from Oxford aesthetes such as Harold Acton and Robert Byron in the 1920s through to the politically conservative revisioning of the Victorian associated with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
But instead of focusing on instances of twentieth-century Victoriana, my paper assesses how much sense it makes to consider the whole period from 1815 to 1960 or thereabouts as a long Victorian age. University literary pedagogy could benefit from a reconsideration of the existing boundaries between periods within which the ‘Victorian’ is opposed to the ‘modernist’. The reality is that there were changes but also continuities. Some of the most radical aspects of modernism can be detected in writers thought of as classically Victorian, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. At the same time, a post-Dickensian strand can be found in many British writers of the mid-twentieth century, from Patrick Hamilton to Alexander Baron. Examples are drawn from these writers and from my current Academy of Finland postdoctoral project on the construction in discourse of the idea of the ‘London slum’. The methodology is Deep Locational Criticism, as proposed in my book of the same name, which will come out with John Benjamins in 2014.
Thomas Kullmann, Onasbrueck University, Germany, thomas.kullmann@uni-osnabrueck.de
The Victorian Age and its Twentieth-Century Connotations
In popular imagination, few periods of British history have been connected with as distinct a set of characteristics as the Victorian Age: According to the Oxford English Dictionary the adjective “Victorian” can denote (sense 2) “attitudes supposedly characteristic of the Victorian era; prudish, strict; old-fashioned, out-dated”. A 1979 edition of the Collins English Dictionary even provides the definition “exhibiting characteristics […] like “prudery, bigotry, or hypocrisy”. Some scholars (German scholars in particular) refer to the Victorian Age as “Victorianism”, implicitly suggesting it is not a mere period of time but a political ideology which, like other ‘-isms’ (e. g. fascism, communism, capitalism) evokes unpleasant associations.
This characterization is all the more remarkable as many of Queen Victoria’s contemporaries experienced their own culture as being in a stage of flux or transition, or a confusing muddle of heterogeneous tendencies. I should like to explore the cultural conditions which – in the years following World War I – gave rise to the twentieth-century image of the Victorian Age, as well as to its use as the embodiment of a fascinating ‘other’ in the post-World-War II decades, as in Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), and Byatt, Possession (1990).
Martin Potter, University of Bucharest, Romaina, martingpv@hotmail.com
Epochal Ends and Beginnings in the Writings of David Jones
David Jones, the twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh poet, essayist and artist, was convinced, like many modernist writers, that a phenomenon known as ‘the Break’ had cut modern life off from traditional life, such that an unprecedented cultural rupture had taken place. He was also deeply interested in the late antique and early medieval periods, particularly in British history, and believed that English and Welsh popular culture differed in their perspective on cultural memory, due to the characterisation of English, but not Welsh, culture by a number of historical interruptions in cultural continuity. This paper will explore Jones’ attitudes to these cultural ruptures, and the periods in between them, and the way he brings them into his poetry, as well as discussing how he sees all historical periods as contained within, and made sense of by, a framework of sacred time.
Madalina Potter, Bucharest, Romania, madallina47@yahoo.fr
Overlapping Centuries: Time and Value in Geoffrey Hill's Clavics
My paper will explore the way in which Geoffrey Hill juxtaposes events from various centuries in Clavics, and analyse how poetical value – as Hill understands it – stems from this type of approach to history. I shall concentrate mainly on the way in which the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries overlap throughout the volume, and argue that by re-connecting independent strands of history through poetry he is attempting to achieve a very strong sense of the historical embeddedness of poetry.
By referring to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, I shall argue that time in Clavics is kairotic, and that by subduing chronology, Hill manages to break free from the ‘empty time’ that Benjamin believes is characteristic of modernity. I shall further argue that Hill’s use of double temporality in Clavics is a means of achieving real poetical value and escaping commodification, to which contemporary poetry is arguably very prone.
Miroslawa Modrzewska, Gdansk University, Poland, miroslawa.modrzewska@gmail.com
Periodization and the notion of the baroque and neo-baroque in British literature and culture
The categories of the Baroque, as a historical period of literature and culture, and (neo)baroque, as a transhistorical paradigm of discourse recurring in the history of literature and culture and also relevant in post-modern art, have not been universally accepted as models of thinking about British literary history. Important publications offer a periodization of British literature which dissolves the Baroque into several chapters/periods of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution and Restoration (Sanders 2004), or various episodes of English Baroque are recognized as Jacobean, Caroline, and Commonwealth, that is: the Elizabethan Age (1558–1603), the Jacobean Age (1603–1625), the Caroline Age (1625–1649) and the Commonwealth (1649–1658). International authors, on the other hand, define relevant periods of cultural history as Early Baroque (c.1590– c.1625), High Baroque (c.1625– c.1660), or Late Baroque (c.1660– c.1725), sometimes identified as Rococo. The notion of the Baroque and (neo)baroque becomes relevant again (Davison 2007, Lambert 2008, Zamora and Kaupt 2010) in the situation of currently registered cultural changes which exhibit the crisis of representation typical of the Baroque epoch. The idea of ‘international baroque’ may help to avoid the translatio imperii of British periodization of literature with its preference for the Renaissance or the Augustan.
Vassil Anastassov, Fatih University, Turkey, vanastassov@yahoo.com
Are There Strict Boundaries Between Literary Periods? A Postmodern Reading of Coleridge's Theory of Language
The paper offers a Poststructural/Postmodernist reading of Coleridge’s views on language. It is argued that his analysis of the type of relationships between words and what they refer to in a reality “created” by the human mind’s sensory perceptions goes beyond the boundaries of Romanticism and can be read from the perspective of Saussurean Structuralism and Derridean Deconstruction. Hence: strict periodization of trends in the history of linguistic-literary theory can be plausible, considering the “universality” of the Platonic-Kantian basis of contemporary science.
Thomas Kullmann, Onasbrueck University, Germany, thomas.kullmann@uni-osnabrueck.de
The Victorian Age and its Twentieth-Century Connotations
In popular imagination, few periods of British history have been connected with as distinct a set of characteristics as the Victorian Age: According to the Oxford English Dictionary the adjective “Victorian” can denote (sense 2) “attitudes supposedly characteristic of the Victorian era; prudish, strict; old-fashioned, out-dated”. A 1979 edition of the Collins English Dictionary even provides the definition “exhibiting characteristics […] like “prudery, bigotry, or hypocrisy”. Some scholars (German scholars in particular) refer to the Victorian Age as “Victorianism”, implicitly suggesting it is not a mere period of time but a political ideology which, like other ‘-isms’ (e. g. fascism, communism, capitalism) evokes unpleasant associations.
This characterization is all the more remarkable as many of Queen Victoria’s contemporaries experienced their own culture as being in a stage of flux or transition, or a confusing muddle of heterogeneous tendencies. I should like to explore the cultural conditions which – in the years following World War I – gave rise to the twentieth-century image of the Victorian Age, as well as to its use as the embodiment of a fascinating “other” in the post-World-War II decades, as in Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), and Byatt, Possession (1990).
Elena Butoescu, University of Craiova, Romania, elenabutoescu@yahoo.co.uk
The Construction of the Author in Britain, 1700–1800
It appears that Johnson's designation of the eighteenth century as The Age of Authours referred not only to the huge number of writers that invaded Britain, but also to the quality of their writings. Immediately after the author became an autonomous individual and rejected patronage, controversial issues clustered around the status of the author and literary property. This article explores the controversial status of the author and the evolution of authorship between Ned Ward’s late seventeenth-century description of the Grub Street author as “strumpet” (1698) and Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779), where originality and creativity became necessary qualities for an author who became the owner of the work he produced. In this period, authorial identity underwent major changes and the portrait of the author evolved from “strumpet” to craftsman, from hack writer to tradesman, and from mercenary to original genius. The present study will illustrate how the figure of the modern author was moulded by such circumstances as the system of literary patronage, the world of print as profitable trade, the transformation of the literary marketplace, and the emergence of booksellers.
Eszter Tory, Janina Vesztergom, Hungary, gilisztus@gmail.com
Make the Silent Audible: Communicative and Cultural Memory in Jeanette Winterson’s Weight and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad
The primary intent of this presentation is to examine how communicative and cultural memory manifest themselves in Jeanette Winterson’s Weight and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. With the aid of the theoretical concepts of communicative and cultural memory formulated by Jan Assmann, we present how myths can be related to cultural memory and to postmodern literature. We attempt to illustrate the ways in which the codification of myths shows similarities to the process whereby objects of communicative memory get transformed into those of cultural memory. Moreover, we analyse the epic genre from the temporal and structural points of view by relying on Bakhtin’s theory in his The Dialogic Imagination. We examine the ways in which the novels engage with and subvert Bakhtin’s arguments concerning not only the genre of the epic but also the concepts of chronotope and heteroglossia. By presenting the different aspects of genre transgression, the heterogeneity of voices and orality in the two novels, we demonstrate how the works can be interpreted within the framework of both cultural and communicative memory. The collaborative nature of our presentation symbolizes our critical approach characterized by its focus on dualities presented in the novels.
Wojciech Drąg, Wrocław University, Poland, moontauk@gmail.com
The Man Booker Prize and the emerging canon of contemporary British fiction
In Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and the Fiction in Britain Today (1996), Richard Todd argued that the Booker Prize had “evolved in powerful and unpredictable ways,” becoming an immense boost for the sales of the awarded and short-listed novels as well as a tremendous influence on the formation of a canon of contemporary British fiction. In my paper, I wish to examine the relevance of Todd’s observations to British literary fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I want to analyse the critical (and commercial) impact of the Man Booker Prize on the emerging canon of the contemporary novel in Britain on the eve of the prize’s much maligned opening up to entries from the United States. I shall conclude with an attempt to predict the influence of this decision on the condition of the British novel and assess the validity of the fears voiced by the literary establishment (A. S. Byatt, Howard Jacobson, Philip Hensher) that the Man Booker’s move will reinforce the domination of the American novel and aggravate the crisis of literary fiction in the UK, as evidenced by British writers’ poor performance on the recently announced shortlists for the Bailey’s women’s prize and the Folio Prize (eventually won by the American George Saunders).
Anthony Johnson and Ilkka Juuso (†Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen)
James Robertson’s The Fanatic (2000): An Investigation into the Temporal Representation of a Late Twentieth Century Historical Novel
This paper is part of a project finessing the study of temporal representation in Scottish historical novels through criticism aided by digital prosthetics. As an example we examine the interdiegetic world of James Robertson’s ground-breaking novel The Fanatic (2000) and the ways in which its constructed Scottish ‘present’ (1997) and revised 17th-century past mesh with the conceptual, cultural and linguistic traces surviving from the ‘real worlds’ represented. Following the Polish critic Jan Białostocki, we envision these (often) thin ‘slices’ of time as ‘iconospheres’, noting that the events of 9/11 have already created a gulf between that of the book’s production and the default readerly responses available at the present time. The prosthetic testing our intuitions is the ‘Time Machine’ – a tool which automatically codes the novel through a temporally sensitive electronic resource, the Thesaurus of Oxford English Dictionary – opening up new insights into early modern and post-modern representations of time, and nuancing more precisely the ways in which we may discuss the temporalities, periodizations and the zeitgeists routinely thrown up in criticism.
SLITE6 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room S3,(B) 14.30–16.30 Room S3, ( C )17.00–18.30 Room S3 / Tuesday 2.9.2014 (D)11.00–13.00 Room S3
FIGURES AND SITES OF MEMORY IN 19TH- AND 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Convenors:
Irena Grubica, University of Rijeka, Croatia, igrubica@gmail.com
Tamás Bényei, University of Debrecen, Hungary, tamasbenyei@yahoo.com
By focusing on formative aspects of figures and sites of memory in 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture this seminar will investigate how individual, family, generational, collective, cultural and national memories and strategies of recollection and forgetting inscribe themselves onto the spaces we inhabit, and how spaces become contentious zones for the politics of memory and forgetting. Possible topics may include: monuments, ruins, gardens, landscapes, haunted houses, etc. as sites of memory; urban culture, memory, forgetting and “the practice of everyday life“, history and memory, hysteria, amnesia, museums, archives, cultural memory and identity formation; gender and sites of memory, etc.
Participants
Zdeněk Beran, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, Zdenek.Beran@ff.cuni.cz
Praga Magica: Prague as a Place of Memory and Vision in George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and George Sand
In Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) a convalescent hero is invited by his father to take a trip to Prague, and in the prospect of the journey he experiences a miraculous vision of the city. Both in his hallucinatory and consequent real experience the pivotal point is formed by a Charles Bridge statue of St. John Nepomucene. Trollope’s Nina Balatka (1867) also culminates under the shadow of the patron saint in the middle of Prague’s Bridge. The paper argues that the statue plays a symbolical role by its reference to a crucial historical moment, the martyrdom of John, the memory of which constitutes not only the gist of Czech national identity but also the ideas of equality, loyalty and love. This symbolism was probably inspired by George Sand’s novel Consuelo, in one of whose episodes the heroine is confronted with a scene near the same statue of St. John, with intense political overtones. An ardent reader of Sand, Eliot might have based her conception of Prague on the conflation of her own experience and her reading of Consuelo, a conception readily taken over by Trollope. Thus the statue becomes a topos of historical memory and defines the locus as a magic, transcendental scene.
Tomasz Niedokos, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), Poland, niedokos@kul.lublin.pl
Sanctification of London Space in Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill and the Ealing Studios Comedy Passport to Pimlico
The paper discusses two works, a comic novel by G. K. Chesterton and a film comedy, which playfully explore the motif of one of the London districts of Notting Hill and Pimlico respectively, declaring itself an independent state with all the required paraphernalia of statehood: the King’s charter, mediaeval heraldry, armed forces in colourful uniforms, distinct law of the land, etc. In both, the assertion of independence and bold displays of local pride lead to war with other London districts and the British government, which eventually ends in reunification. What binds the two works is the underlying idea that the new unexpected situation allows the inhabitants of both districts to see familiar figures and sites in a new perspective; thanks to the new “state” symbolism, the familiar London space is invested with new meanings and becomes enchanted. This re-enchantment, or sanctification, of place can be attributed to the lingering fascination with the art and pageantry of the Middle Ages, evident in the Gothic Revival movement, on the one hand, and, especially in the case of Chesterton, a yearning for pre-Reformation Catholic London, with its symbols, artefacts, rituals, omnipresent in urban space, being analogies of or pointing to transcendent reality, on the other.
Brigitta Hudácskó, University of Debrecen, Hungary, brigitta.hudacsko@gmail.com
Surveillance: An Urban Culture of Memory Formation
My paper examines the ever improving methods of surveillance of public urban spaces and the memory archives storing the data thus acquired: I would like to look at the involuntary recorded memories that users of urban spaces leave behind by their mere occupation and usage of space, including recordings made by law-enforcement tools, and technology available to the general public as well. I also want to ponder the reflections given to these technological practices: besides the archives of involuntary memories, there are also reactions to these practices, which reactions reflect upon the experience of being made into a memory; such as intentional alteration of public spaces.
I would like to examine instances and techniques of urban memory formation in surveillance with the help of a genre that is quick both in reflecting urban phenomena and in applying the latest technological advances: the procedural crime drama on television. As the genesis of crime fiction itself is tightly linked to the emergence of urban sciences, and the crime genre is, concerned with − the making of and unravelling of − memory, procedural crime drama offers itself as an appropriate ground for the examination of the culture of urban memory formation.
Irena Grubica, University of Rijeka, Croatia, igrubica@gmail.com
James Joyce and Cultural Geography: The City as a Site of Counter-Memory
One could argue that the spatial readings of Ulysses entered the canon of Joyce criticism in the late 1970s with M. Seidel's Epic Geography and C. Hart's A Topographical Guide, which provided detailed maps based on the novel and, therefore, paved the way towards further exploration of the link between geography, topography and the city-text of Joyce's novel, i.e. the textualization of real space. The postcolonial and historicist readings that emerged only a decade later tend to link the novel's textual strategies to colonial resistance. My paper will combine these critical insights with the burgeoning field of cultural memory studies. Instead of Seidel’s “epic geography”, focused mainly on Homeric parallels, I propose to read Joyce's urban space through the lens of cultural geography, departing from the assumption that the space in Joyce is produced (Lefebvre, Soja) and that memory plays a significant role in its production. Joyce's city-text will be explored as a site of both personal and collective memory, and of counter-memory. Memory will be explored in its close relation to the everyday practice of walking (de Certeau). The paper will provide a micro-reading focused on two episodes: “Lestrygonians”, which Joyce himself linked to the art of “architecture”, and "Wandering Rocks”, which is focused on walking.
Tamás Bényei, University of Debrecen, Hungary, tamasbenyei@yahoo.com
Sherlock Holmes and collective memory
The paper intends to link the symbolic-ideological role of the detective genre with reigning ideas (or ideologies) of memory, using Conan Doyle’s volume The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, especially the story ’The Musgrave Ritual’. The detective plot, predicated on and concerned with the reconstruction of something that went fatally wrong in the past, has an inherent connection with memory and, since the late 19th century, has fulfilled an important symbolic role in the memory work of British society. ’The Musgrave Ritual’ is unique among Holmes tales in that it creates an explicit link between Holmes’s work and public, even national mnemic issues (the pile of rusty metal retrieved in the course of the story turns out to be the crown of Charles I). The tale offers an allegory of detective work as ’restoration’ in more than one sense. Creating numerous links between frame and narrated story as well as staging Holmes’s detection as the repetition of a butler’s transgressive usurpation of his masters’ place, the tale contrasts various strategies of dealing with the past, from passive repetition to active reconstruction.
Jane Mattisson, Kristianstad University, Sweden, jane.mattisson@hkr.se
Modern detective fiction as a site of mourning and remembrance and the importance of acknowledgement. The case of Inspector Ian Rutledge
Acknowledgement, as defined by Jay Winter, is active knowledge, expressed in public as the recognition, re-thinking and re-stating aloud of claims that other human beings have on us. Among those claimants are victims of war and violence. Charles Todd’s immensely successful Ian Rutledge series answers our culture’s appetite for imagined violence and extreme emotions; it also reveals the power of agonising memories when combined with the horror of an ever-present inner voice that refuses to allow the Inspector to forget what he did at the Battle of the Somme. The Ian Rutledge series invites the reader to share the horrors of the War, bear the burden of guilt and recognise the sacrifices not only of those who died but also of those who survived and must live with their memories. As with all detective stories, the reader becomes part of the plot, disentangling the clues and sharing the responsibility to understand and to resolve. The detective story as a site of memory is thus in part the reader’s own creation.
CANCELLED Renáta Zsámba, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary, zsambarenata@yahoo.com
A Matter of Life and Death: Mr Darcy and Memory in P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley
P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley (2012) is a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice transformed into a detective story, no doubt due to James’s enthusiasm for Austen’s intimate world, a perfect setting for criminal acts. James brings back the myth and memories of the essence of English life, especially in the image of the country house, Pemberley Hall, the static, immobilized Eden as W.H. Auden called it and which, as Martin Priestman says, is “the bastion of cultural or welfarist power”. Mr Darcy, the carrier of this cultural memory, faces a disruption in his unconscious existence after the murder of Captain Denny in Pemberley woods. Though it solves the puzzle, the investigation reveals several crimes as Mr Darcy delves into his own memory. In its deep structure, the novel also portrays the struggle between individual and collective memory. The search for the dead body in the forest, finding and burying it become the metaphor of exploring and eliminating Mr Darcy’s own memory, “as if it had never happened”. The paper explores individual and collective traumas brought about by crime as well as the need for the restoration of Mr Darcy’s collective identity as the embodiment of essential Englishness.
Eva Antal, Eszterhazy Karoly College, Eger, Hungary, antaleva@ektf.hu
Lucidity and Obscurity in Bellamy’s, Morris’s and Wells’s Utopian Future-Dreams
Utopian fiction displays the intriguing interdependence of past, present and future. The “hermeneutics of hope” of “the utopian function” (cf. Ernst Bloch) foreshadows some “real” possibility expressed in the fantasy-images of the future potentialities, while utopias are traditionally rooted in the criticism of the present, not without nostalgic longing for the past. My selected fin-de-siècle novels – Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888) and Equality (1897), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Herbert George Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) – are labelled as the so-called “dream-narratives”, where the time traveller, having been awakened from his sleep, faces the translucent and opaque vision of the “Not-Yet-Become” realised in the “empty-possibility” of time.
In my presentation, I will present how the narrator’s blurred memories are “built in” the description of the “bright future”: in Bellamy’s works, one of the emblematic buildings is actually built on the 19th-century man’s dungeon, the Wellsian narrative gives the scenery of the Sleeper’s nightmares, and the Morrisian utopia highlights the recollection of the pastoral world. I also try to show that some of the buildings, spaces and gardens of the imagined worlds, as recurrent monuments, “haunt” later anti-utopias, sci-fi novels and films.
Judit Friedrich, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), friedrich.judit@gmail.com
“One of my suitable pasts”: Fluidity and Memory in Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector
The narrator of Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector (1997), while ceramicking along its narrative, is also a reader of the past of other characters, especially that of its main interpreter, Rosa. While keeping a catalogue of its collectors, it also reads and tells their stories. For this ancient vase, everything is still within the realm of Jan Assmann’s communicative memory, while in itself it is the carrier of many forms of cultural memory. Narrator and narrative change shape, the identity of characters move from any fixed points presupposed at their introduction. Rather than lamenting the lack of an overall cohesive narrative structure in The Collector Collector (like the one conveniently presented converging in a historical moment in Under the Frog), this paper will attempt to discuss (or, to apply the term used in the novel for this activity, “tickle”) Fischer’s work by assuming that fluidity and constant change are its guiding principles, with recurrence serving as a structuring force that triggers memory and helps constructing and maintaining identity, whether personal, historical or cultural. However, these constructions will also only work within limits: authenticity, even that of a genuine work of art passed down through history, is also fluid.
Eva Gyöngy MÁTÉ, University of Debrecen, m.gyongy@gmail.com
Landscape gatherings: Landscape as the medium of memory and forgetting in Andy Goldsworthy’s art
British environmental sculptor Andy Goldsworthy uses nothing but materials – such as stones, wood, wool, leaves, icicles, snow or driftwood – found in a particular environment to design living monuments that can make the interaction tangible between diverse forces that shape the land and make it intelligible for perception. By studying the artistic process in which his unconventional pieces are being crafted and dissolve unpredictably, I wish to examine the potential landscape has as a medium of remembering (and forgetting) on an individual as well as on a collective level. Also, I am interested in what Goldsworthy’s pieces can tell about the nature of memory in the context of landscape craft, its logic at work when described in terms of highly metaphorical images that of the river, seed or wall, for instance. In my presentation I propose a phenomenological reading of his works from three aspects: their relation to time, figurativity and mediality.
Natalya Novikova, Lomonosov University, Moscow, Russia, netalie@yandex.ru
Decay Still Impregnate with Divinity: Les Lieux de Mémoire in Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”
I would argue that Byron’s poem allows to develop the rich potential of Nora’s broad treatment of lieux de mémoire from rhetorical topoi/loci to commemorative practices, institutions, texts and properly ‘places’. In Byron we have a commemorative ritual (the pilgrimage), geographically exact ‘devotional places’, significant poetical topoi (ubi sunt, sta viator, tempus fugit etc). The complex subjectivity of the poetic persona helps to illuminate Nora’s fundamental distinction between the traditional memory that relies on a primordial identification of act and meaning and the modern memory – its affective nature, unconscious of the deformations caused by remembering and forgetting, is haunted by critical historicism. Byron’s journey amalgamates very different commemorative patterns: a religious pilgrimage, an enlightened Grand Tour, a Romantic Grand Tour extended to the exotic ‘cultural periphery’, while the traveller himself owes both to the heritage of Voltaire and Gibbon and to the Romantic empathy towards the Other. It can be said that lieux de mémoire participate in the ‘re-enchantment’ of the secularized bourgeois world, and thus, the Spenserian poetics provide Byron with a medium to challenge the religious and rhetorical attitudes/practices that regulated a formerly normative domain of cultural memory with his subjective imagination of the past.
Martina Domines Veliki, University of Zagreb, mdomines@ffzg.hr
Spatiality of Memory: Rousseau’s “Reveries of a Solitary Walker” and Wordsworth’s “The Excursion”
In the paper we will depart from the idea that we usually experience ourselves in relation to place. The notion of human identity as being bound up to the notion of place is not a specifically Romantic phenomenon. However, in Romanticism the place acquires a new role to play: it joins the events experienced with the self by means of memory. Thus the Romantic self is constituted not only through memory as a temporal category but also a spatial one. Such reading of the chosen Romantic texts is contrary to the well-established readings which prioritize the mind of the writer over the material world. However paradoxical it may seem to regard Rousseau and Wordsworth as “bodily writers”, acutely aware of the significance of place, “Reveries of a Solitary Walker” and “The Excursion” reveal writers aware of the man as a physical being and his capacity to remember through the body. Therefore, in the phenomenological readings of the afore-mentioned texts (Bachelard, Casey, Malpas) we will explore the relationship between the mind and the place through such concepts as “‘body memory”, localization of memory and intersubjective memory.
Martin Stefl, Charles University in Prague, steflmart@gmail.com
D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: A Hypomnesic Topo-analytics
Poetically proposing that “in the theatre of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains its characters in their dominant roles”, Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis famously treats memory, intimacy and personal identity as essentially inscribed into space. Expressing a similar preference for “spatialized” memory, D. H. Lawrence gives in his fiction an account of human existence based on a “mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth”. This paper attempts to depict this “mighty struggle” as fundamentally based on a process of overcoming this “ontological insecurity” (D. J. Kleinbard’s term) by constructing one’s existence mnemo-technically, i.e. by localising one’s memories and ego-identity into place. In contrast to the dangers posed by the vast spaces of the surrounding cosmos, such individualised places represent lived hypomnemata, ideal-machines for storing and re-actualising idealised memories through which the Self continually re-enforces its autonomy and identity. Relying on a detailed reading of Lawrence’s short stories such as “The Man Who Loved Islands” or “England! My England!” and considering Lawrence’s philosophy of the “ideal”, the paper examines the emergence of a place as a memory-battery or an ideal “Non-I protecting the I”.
John A. Stotesbury, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, john.stotesbury@uef.fi
Configuring Identity through Memory of Siege: The Rock and the Barbary Macaque in 21st-Century Gibraltarian Fiction in English
Gibraltar, controlled by the British since 1704, played a major role in British naval strategies in the 19th and 20th centuries, and its colonial status continues to be contested on a regular basis. Its original British colonial status was formalized by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and since then Gibraltar has endured some 15 longer and shorter military sieges that have repeatedly closed its frontier with Spain. Gibraltar’s populations, both human and simian, have fluctuated considerably in numbers and ethnicities, with a human population of some 30,000 stemming from not only Andalusia, Minorca and the UK but also the Mediterranean region, especially Portugal, Catalonia, the Balearics, Malta, Genoa, Morocco, and several Jewish exclave communities. In contrast, its population of Barbary Macaque monkeys, primarily of Moroccan and Algerian descent and resident in the higher reaches of the Rock, remains fairly constant at roughly 300.
The purpose of this paper will be to trace the role played by constructions of communal memory of mythical, historical and contemporary siege in fiction published by indigenous Gibraltarian Anglophone writers since the turn of the present century. Particular attention will be paid to writing by M. G. Sanchez, and by Sam Benady and Mary Chiappe.
Ozan Selcik, Recep Tayyin Erdogan University, Turkey, ozan.selcik@erdogan.edu.tr
Saratoga Springs as a Site of Memory
Saratoga Springs is one of the important memory sites in antebellum American History, and also of great national interest of the United States. It is a landmark where you speak of human freedom and justice. What makes this place important is Solomon Northup, who was an important figure in early nineteenth century; freeborn, but kidnapped and sold into slavery for twelve years.
Made into film in late 2013 and awarded an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave plays a key role in documenting his account, with vivid details to have direct effect on his own identity as a slave, which is also another key element of such an autobiographical novel to support the author’s intention of achieving autobiographical veracity. His own insight and perfect depiction of the place where he lives contribute much to the specialization of Saratoga Springs and the places where he was taken. Northup’s account is ironic in many ways that he loses his primary right in the nation’s Capitol. The capitol fails to save his freedom, which is the symbol of democracy, but at the same time leads to his corruption.
Éva Pataki, University of Miskolc/University of Debrecen, Hungary, vicapataki@yahoo.com
“Memories relived and battened down”: The Diasporic Home as a Lieu de Mémoire in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me
In diaspora experience there is a powerful link between space, identity formation and collective memory. The performed traditions and cultural practices of a diasporic group activate a cultural memory, which serves as a unifying force and as a signifier of social differentiation, and thus fosters group/collective identity. Focusing on how memory influences the construction of diasporic identity, and how it inscribes itself on space and place, I read Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (2004) and investigate the processes through which the physical locations of remembrances turn into what Pierre Nora (1994) refers to as lieux de mémoire. For Nora these sites of memory do not inhabit living traditions but denote only remnants of the past; i.e. they are in fact places of forgetting or misremembering due to the diversity and liability of individual memories. Since for the Kumars’ extended family in Syal’s novel the place where they strive to keep their traditions alive is the home, I argue that this diasporic space is a site of both memory and forgetting, the birthplace of a re-created collective cultural memory, as well as a transitory zone, denoting the displacement of not only people but memories as well.
Zuzana Klímová, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 145169@mail.muni.cz
Memory of the Landscape: Resurrection of Past and Community in Works of Wilson Harris.
Understanding history or alleged ‘historylessness’ of postcolonial communities is the topic Wilson Harris tries to explore. His approach is diametrically different from the dominant chronological understanding of time and stability/fixity of space. Harris embraces the paradoxical nature of universe and casts doubts at the hegemonic perception of ‘reality’. Individual and collective memories are tools for creating identity and placing oneself within the universe. Harris embraces the imaginative power of art which can incorporate various forms of memory and which possesses the creative potential leading to positive change in our perception of the universe – especially understanding of the ‘Other’. Harris’s fictional communities unconsciously contain within themselves seemingly lost parts of history. Harris talks about ‘absent presences’, ‘phantom limbs’ of communities. From the ‘womb of space’ Harris resurrects the almost forgotten communities that become once again living presence in the universe. Landscape is an ever-changing living organism with its own memory reflecting changes of history within its structures. It contains both signs of the lost nations and presence of the heterogeneous population created by colonial past. In the reality where individual and collective memory can fail, landscape preserves the memory which can be retrieved through the process of creative imagination.
SLITE7 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room S3/ Sunday 31.8.2014 (B) 11.00–13.00 Room S3
FEMALE RITUALS: COOKING AND EATING IN/AND WOMEN’S FICTION
Convenors:
Nóra Séllei, University of Debrecen, Hungary, sellei.nora@arts.unideb.hu
Katarina Labudova, Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia, labudova@ff.ku.sk
Cooking and eating food allow for multiple associations to be swallowed: from the sexual to the spiritual, from the culturally specific to the general, from the domestic to the social and beyond. Food in fiction is also tied up with creativity, serving as a master trope. Consequently, the consumption and rejection of both food and fiction often resonate with metaphors of morality, power and indulgence, and they become essential in the construction of one’s body and identity: you are what you read/eat. We invite papers exploring the pleasures as well as discomforts associated with rituals of cooking/(non-)eating and reading/writing.
Participants
CANCELLED Agata Buda, University of Technology and Humanities in Radom, Poland, a.buda@pr.radom.pl
Food as the Representation of Gender Roles in the Victorian Female Novel
The aim of the paper is to analyse the idea of cooking/eating in two Victorian novels: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Both works present the idea of food as one of the major points of reference in human relationships. One of the aspects worth analysing is family eating. The meetings are preceded by careful preparation of meals (e.g. preserves by Mrs. Tulliver or Nelly’s dishes). The food often becomes the major topic during these meetings, showing in this way the gender roles in the nineteenth-century England: females are irreplaceable in preparing food but men very often ignore the final product of cooking. This idyllic space of collective eating (according to M. Bakhtin) can be frequently destroyed by refusing; men refuse to eat either because of sadness (Mr. Earnshaw) or being fussy (Linton); women do not eat due to the fact they are busy taking care of men (Cathy) or are more interested in reading (Maggie). Both sexes are aware of the demands society poses to them. Neither Cathy and Maggie are allowed to read books, but expected to be mindful about meals.
Eva Hrkalova, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, evahrkalova@gmail.com
Wives and Daughters: Dinner as a Symbol of Superiority
Elizabeth Gaskell’s characters are sometimes obsessed with discussing and describing meals, as in Wives and Daughters, particularly with its early dinners, late dinners and the ever-present dinner parties. These parties, especially the food served at them, represent a certain type of a “divider” between not only the social classes, but also the family roles in one household. When focusing on the dinners at the Gibsons’ and at the Hamleys’, one can observe that wealthier families are more specific about the courses, or about the choice of wine. At the Gibsons’, the dinners do not very often serve a social purpose – the characters usually eat at different times and different meals. This is changed by Mr. Gibson’s second wife, who tries to overcome her social inferiority by throwing dinner parties, and persuading her husband to eat more regularly and expensively. Her complete opposite is Mr. Gibson’s daughter, who manages to have a rather free choice in her meals. As these two female characters are opposites in the food they eat, they also are opposites in the books they read and the way they read them. Their choices indicate the different positions they occupy in their family and in the whole community.
Pirjo Koivuvaara, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, pirjo.polkki@uef.fi
Cooking by the (French) Book: Food and Identity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters
Different practices of food consumption serve as a manifestation of different identities, or ideal characters. In nineteenth-century Britain, the consumption of cookbooks helped to create and maintain the socially ideal character by suggesting that a way to achieve this goal was through food consumption. The act of buying a cookbook in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866) has implications that go beyond the mere wish to eat well. It is an indication of the buyer’s, Mrs Gibson’s, aspirations to social esteem, among which the wish to produce food and meals that distinguish her from her middle-class peers ranks high. Consumption, especially the consumption of food, serves as a sign of social emulation and social relationships in Wives and Daughters where food offers Mrs Gibson a way to bolster her social identity. She engages in a performance of her social identity, or rather the identity she desires to have, through the choices she makes when it comes to food; the cookbook she buys enforces the performance of her desired social identity and serves as a symbol of the genteel and fashionable lifestyle she wants to adopt.
Gabriela Boldizsarova, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia, gabriela.boldizsarova@ku.sk
In Sycorax’s Kitchen: Cooking Identity in Marina Warner’s Indigo
Marina Warner has been interested in women's issues for a long time, both as a writer and a scholar. Her rich sensual writing reflects her view of food and its preparation as having a vital role in woman's life, shifting it from the real to the metaphorical level. One of the examples is her novel Indigo, in which cooking becomes an issue of identity.
In the character of Sycorax, Warner draws a parallel between the real preparation of food and the “cooking” of indigo as a creative activity, which becomes a signifier of Sycorax's identity, reflected also in her body. Her seclusion, her position within the local society, her knowledge of and her attitude to the environment, are all linked to her approach to cooking. The paper will discuss the mythical, historical, social, and feminist perspectives of the circumstances of “cooking indigo” which permeate in the novel, and create a rich mixture for the reader to taste.
Maria Parrino, University of Bristol, U.K, Maria.Parrino@bristol.ac.uk
Eating and reading in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
When in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the Creature meets his creator, he forces him to listen to his story. A remarkable part of the Creature’s narrative is devoted to food, cooking and eating habits: from raw to cooked food, the Creature defines his relation with fire and taste. As Carol Adams (1990) has convincingly underlined, what emerges is the Creature’s vegetarian stance (one resonating with Mary and Percy Shelley’s interest in animal rights), a trait which distinguishes him from his carnivore creator. Another part of the Creature’s narrative pauses on his acquisition of a language, a skill he develops by listening to the De Lacey family while hidden in a hut. Among the first words he learns are words referring to food. Parallel to the Creature’s ingestion of the vegetarian food and the spoken language of the De Laceys is his consumption of books. Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Werter and Plutarch’s Lives not only help the Creature develop his reading skills but also contribute to the shaping of his identity, one that questions the issue of monstrosity, gender and narrative (Peter Brooks).
Katarina Labudova, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia, labudova@ku.sk
Man-eating and Blood-drinking Zenia: Cannibalistic Images in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
In The Robber Bride, Atwood presents a voracious seductress, Zenia, who has wild appetites. Her victims are associated with nurturing and nourishing foods such as practical tuna casseroles (Tony), healthy vegan diet (Charis), sweet toasts with honey and jam (Roz): they eat together to support and comfort each other. Zenia, however, is associated with drinking blood and eating raw meat. Described as an immortal goddess and/or vampire, Zenia gets whatever she wants/steals: alcohol, men, raw steaks, money, sex and power.
I concentrate on Zenia’s ambiguity: her sinful desires can be read as projections of her three women victims who secretly want to be like her. Zenia thus represents a liberating power, affirms the right to difference and otherness. Zenia’s stories actually liberate the three women and force them to acknowledge the darker dimension of their repressed otherness.
The image of Zenia as the “dark twin” of Tony, Charis and Roz suggests complementarity: Zenia’s dark appetites are their appetites for revenge, victory and power. Zenia’s hunting and predatory appetite complicates the (seemingly) supportive female sisterhood and solidarity.
Irene González Sampedro, University of Oviedo, Spain, iregonsam86@hotmail.com
My Body, My Rules: Corporal Transgression in Janice Galloway’s The Trick is To Keep Breathing (1989)
According to Naomi Wolf (1991), eating is a mechanism that organises society in a hierarchical manner. In this sense, the practices derived from the act of consuming food determine people’s socialization in a capitalist world. The aim of this paper is to question the social normative discourses inscribed on bodies through Janice Galloway’s novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989). For this purpose, I will examine the protagonist’s anorexia and alcoholism as a transgressive display of the corporal regularisation exercised over women. Hence, I will make use of Susie Orbach’s (2009) perspectives on the importance of physicality and how it limits people’s daily practices and relationships. Similarly, I will use Michael Foucault (1976; 1977) and Alexandra Howson’s (2013) theories of the social discipline imposed on bodies. I will also concentrate on analysing the main character’s eating disorder as a subversive practice, so I will employ Naomi Wolf (1991) and Susan Bordo’s (1997) conception of bodies as malleable spaces influenced by the nutritionist and aesthetic markets. Besides, I will focus on Mary MacGlynn’s (2008) viewpoint of the novel as a bulimic narrative mechanism adopted by Galloway in order to develop an independent identitarian construction from the rituals of writing.
Astrid Schwegler Castañer, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, astrid.schwegler@gmail.com
Food and Transnational Matrilineage: Negotiation of Second-Generation Chinese American Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
Food is often used as tool to negotiate one’s identity, as it both expresses the complexities of the self in relation to others – you are what and how you eat – and at the same time it vividly illustrates the abstractness of the internal negotiation through its concrete sensual presence. This capacity of food imagery to tangibly articulate complexities expresses how identity, ethnicity and matrilineage are closely connected in Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club. Tan uses food imagery to, at the same time, express and bridge the distance and sense of disconnectedness – exacerbated by the experience of migration – that daughters feel towards their mothers and their mothers’ cultures in order to ultimately negotiate one’s sense of self, including Amy Tan’s own identity. The observation of the mother-daughter relationship through the prism of Nan Bauer Maglin’s themes of matrilineage literature focused on textual fragments related to food and foodways reveals how food articulates the negotiation of the figure of the mother and her culture into the daughters’ identities.
Yasmina Djafri, University of Abdelhamid Ibn Badis, Mostaganem, Algeria, y_djafri@yahoo.fr
The Power of Food in Crescent by Diana Abu Djaber: A Latent Reminder
In her novel Crescent (2003), Diana Abu Djaber depicts the atypical life path of the female protagonist Sirine; a chef cook in a Lebanese café in Los Angeles, who smells, feels, and tastes an Orient she has come to know from the different aromas her Iraqi uncle had sensitised her to. Interestingly enough, Sirine manages to project the world of her homeland through her food and becomes a live memory for millions of Arab Americans who yearn to join the café to feel a sense of comfort and nostalgia in the midst of a global, multicultural and chaotic U.S. Food is then portrayed as a latent reminder of ignored feelings, lost emotions and unknown truths. Hence, the present paper aims at exploring the miraculous power of cooking and eating oriental for an Arab exile. Particular attention will be directed, first, on how food might function as a complex language able to communicate memory as well as love in the narrative. Second, a tentative understanding of how food might awaken the protagonist question her identity and sense of belongingness will be discussed.
Eszter Ureczky, University of Debrecen, Hungary, ureczky.eszter@arts.unideb.hu
Food and Eating as the (Un)making of Social Class and Female Passion in I am Love
I Am Love is a 2009 melodrama set in contemporary Milan, following an haute bourgeoisie family’s life and disruption. Emma Reechi (Tilda Swinton), the Russian-born protagonist, can perfectly pastiche the mannerisms of the Italian overclass, but her uncannily alabaster outlook and bursts of Russian betray that she is an outsider. The polished surface of their family life explodes when, having been aroused by a prawn dish she relishes in his restaurant, Emma begins an affair with the young chef (her son’s friend), Antonio. The emphasis in the depiction of food is not on the stereotypical Mediterranean affirmation of sensuality, rather it is more about ritual: family meals function as a secular high mass, while Emma’s shared eating with her lover signifies her gradual liberation. Her dammed-up capacity for passion finds its transgressive expression for the first time in middle age, and by denying her matriarchal responsibilities, a self-possessed woman goes through an awakening process. The presentation will read the food symbolism of I am Love in terms of class markers, cultural otherness and Emma’s self-discovery, focusing on the film’s lush visual style, which could be called postclassical Hollywood baroque, recycling images from Vertigo and Italian genre cinema of the '70s.
Nóra Séllei, University of Debrecen, Hungary, sellei.nora@arts.unideb.hu
Food as a Protean Metaphor in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop
Carter’s The Magic Toyshop abounds in instances of cultural self-reflexivity that invite the reader to decode the semiotics of various cultural representations. Whereas in critical readings of the text great emphasis has been placed on the rewriting of master narratives like the Bible and Greek mythology, food imagery is a relatively underexplored aspect, although the text uses, among others, food as a metaphor to explore various cultural assumptions related to genders, power, and hierarchy. The use of food ranges from the fear of femininity, maternity and the body (see Melanie’s attitude to the food prepared by Mrs Rundle) through the Sunday meal – and its corollary: sexuality – controlled by Uncle Philip to the transgressive feast of the incestuous siblings, breaking down Uncle Philip’s regime. Considering this teleology, one can claim that the text goes in the direction of a liberatory narrative, which, however, is undercut by Carter’s allusions, as if indicating that it is impossible to go beyond the discourse of representation. In my reading, food is a part of this complex system: it functions as a metaphor, but also reflects upon its own metaphoricity, and as such, food can be understood as a major tool in reading and writing culture
SLITE8 Sunday 31.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A4, (B) 16.00–17.30 Room A4
NEW VISIBILITIES: THE RHETORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF VICTIMHOOD AND OTHER FORMS OF VULNERABILITY IN 21ST CENTURY BRITISH FICTION
Convenors:
Jean-Michel Ganteau, University of Montpellier 3, France, jean-michel.ganteau@univ-montp3.fr
Susana Onega, University of Zaragoza, Spain, sonega@unizar.es
Deconstructivist and trauma critics have popularised the view that trauma is unrepresentable. However, the proliferation of narratives representing traumatised or vulnerable individuals and groups shows that this is possible, even though through forms of rhetorical indirection such as symbolic language and narrative genres and modes of excess capable of providing an unfixed meaning to trauma. The seminar seeks contributions envisaging the role of 21st-century British novelists in the development of this new type of narrative to avoid the establishment of victimhood as an essentialist category of identity politics, and to provide strategies of resilience and foster the fruition of affects.
Participants
Jean-Michel Ganteau, University of Montpellier 3, France, jean-michel.ganteau@univ-montp3.fr
Shifting visibilities: The politics of trauma and vulnerability in Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane
Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane (2007) documents life in London’s eponymous street, the secular locale of the furriers’ trade. The year is 1967, when the Sexual Offences Act was passed, decriminalising homosexual acts between adults in private. Against this realistic background, the novel chooses to circuitously draw up its own ethical agenda by re-visiting the Beauty and the Beast legend and re-scripting it as a bitter elegy. Skin Lane is essentially a trauma narrative in which the main protagonist’s individual trauma harks back and forward to that of the community of people deprived of their rights. Far from considering victimhood as essence, it takes pains to reveal its constructedness at the hands of what has recently been identified as dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou). Even while addressing the issue of vulnerability as an inherently human quality – something that makes us responsible for one another – it strives to demonstrate its cultural constructedness. Instead of envisaging vulnerability as force (Brown, Le Blanc), it provides a narrative line which falls short of empowerment, thus gainsaying contemporary narratives of emancipation. In so doing, it contributes to the expression of a politics of literature (Rancière).
Laurent Mellet, University Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail, France, laurent.mellet@univ-tlse2.fr
The humanism behind Jonathan Coe’s narrative “patchwork[s] of . . . coincidences”: acting and writing around vulnerability
In Jonathan Coe’s most recent fiction (The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club, The Closed Circle, The Rain before it Falls, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Expo 58), characters are often first defined and apprehended through their fallibility and “effective vulnerability”. Coe’s narrative patterns and “patchwork[s] of . . . coincidences” (The Rain before it Falls) are to be construed as his main humanist answer for those characters to find meaning in chaos and resist trauma, leading them to self-assertion and “politics of cooperation” (Richard Sennett). I will argue that Coe’s role in the development of the new visibilities of literary victimhood is first linked to such humanist writing, which aims at putting the individual subject back at the centre of action, decision-making and existentialist praxis. Yet his narrative strategies also posit that the representation of vulnerability has to do with moving, acting and writing aside—his political logics of deviation will be unravelled so as to show that literary forms of vulnerability are here to be equated with original aesthetics and ethics of the accidental, the comic, the alternative, and eventually self-delusion.
Maria Grazia Nicolosi, University of Catania, Dept. of Humanities, mg.nicolosi@unict.it
“hideous trajectories, skilfully navigated” Hidden in Plain Sight: The Vulnerable Shapes of Lisa Appignanesi’s Holocaust Narratives
The impressive literary output by children of Holocaust survivors that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has grown into a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon. Due to longstanding intimacy with racialised terror and forced existential precariousness, the post-Holocaust legacy arguably casts its shadow more darkly over Jewish writers than over any others in Britain (Kenyon 1991: 53). Second- and third-generation British Jewish writing appears to respond to the metaphysically and psychologically traumatic dimensions of the Holocaust experience. Inflected by a postmemorial sensibility born out of a profound identity crisis, this writing inhabits an “imagined world” of “impending destruction” (Patraka 1999: 56). However, it eschews the sacrificial aesthetics prevailing in the universalising vocabulary of canonical Holocaust literature, interrupting its victimisation patterns. Lisa Appignanesi’s memoir Losing the Dead (1999) and her novel The Memory Man (2004) enact this dual movement through self-conscious rhetorical modes of Holocaust representation (Grimwood 2007: 1). The paper intends to examine those textual features that highlight Appignanesi’s second-generational reclamation of this muted discourse within Holocaust memory as well as her contribution to contemporary British-Jewish writing.
Susana Onega, University of Zaragoza, Spain, sonega@unizar.es
The Politics of Peter Ackroyd’s Rhetoric of Excess and Indirection in The Lambs of London
The common critical view that the postmodernist rewritings of history respond to a bent for playfulness that adds nothing to our understanding of the past has been a constant in the appreciation of Peter Ackroyd’s works. However, our interpretation of past events are determined by the memories we keep of them, so that even the most fragmentary and ludicrous recreations of the past trigger off a process of “sideshadowing” (Morson 1994, 7) that necessarily casts new light on the recreated events. Furthermore, in the case of traumatic memories, meaning is often conveyed through the gaps left in the narration by the sheer struggle for representation. Starting from this premise, the paper proposes a reading of The Lambs of London (2004) as an exemplary Ackroydian fiction combining postmodernist playfulness and fragmentariness with a rhetoric of indirection and excess and a generic and modal hybridity that, as argued elsewhere (Onega and Ganteau 1–14), is characteristic of contemporary trauma fictions. It contends that the use of these devices allows for the emergence of a counter-narrative that provides a serious critique of Victorian family relations in general and the social strictures of middle-class women in particular, thus destabilising received notions of nineteenth-century identity politics.
Merve Sarıkaya, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey, mervem82@yahoo.com
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder: An Anti-Hero of the Twenty-First Century Who Cannot Go on But Must Go on
This paper is aimed at analysing and discussing how, in Remainder (2005), Tom McCarthy’s anti-hero, traumatized by an accident which involves something falling from the sky, shows resilience in his attempts to keep feeling alive. Avoiding the essentialist category of victimhood after trauma, McCarthy’s traumatized anti-hero re-enacts and obsessively re-builds his unclear memories in what may be described as a Beckettian loop, which gradually becomes impossible to control and transforms him into a murderer. As Peter Boxall argues, the extraordinary advances in technology, especially in the twenty-first century, have transformed and extended the spatial, temporal, and physical limits of our being. These intellectual and physical extensions seem coterminous with the excessiveness of trauma, which is associated with a surplus of affects. In keeping with this, the representation of trauma in literature requires a new narrative form which is not confined to unrepresentability and ungraspability but is thematically and/or symbolically excessive. In my analysis, I will try to demonstrate that McCarthy’s anti-hero refashions his own spatial and temporal limits through his excessive re-enactments of the past which foster his resilience but at the same convert him into an anti-hero of our time.
Eileen Williams-Wanquet, University of La Réunion, France, eileen.williams-wanquet@univ-reunion.fr
Reviving Ghosts: The Reversibility of Victims and Vindicators in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger
I would like to pursue the conclusion Susana Onega comes to, in her answer to George Letissier, concerning the identity of the “little stranger” in Sarah Waters’s fifth novel (2009), showing how Waters associates the use of the Gothic and of psychological realism to “plumb the psyche” (Robert Heilmann) and express the unspeakable trauma of the mixed feelings involved in British class relations. Although the novel is set in the context of the class crisis of the postwar period, the trauma transcends time and space. The transtextuality with Jane Eyre shall be developed, in order to suggest that the “phantom” unconsciously carried by the narrator-focaliser, Faraday, is also that of Bertha Mason and of Jane Eyre herself, revived with a vengeance in The Little Stranger. Haunted by the ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a past text that itself keeps spectrally and anti-lineally returning, Waters’ novel, typical of postmodern romances that “create doubt” (Elam) and blur temporality, rethinks the relation between victims and vindicators, offering a reflexion on the ubiquitous and elusive nature of evil, and on its origins: if a victim cannot exist without a tormentor and if a traumatised victim returns to take revenge, where do vulnerability and responsibility ultimately lie and how can the endless repetition of the same, the repetitive spiral of violence, be broken?
Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhus University, Denmark, litsel@dac.au.dk
Post-colonial and migrant memories
Christos Tsiolkas’ best-selling, award winning and TV-adapted novel The Slap (2008) focuses on migrant middle-class life in post-White-Australian multicultural Melbourne. Eight main characters are chosen as points of view in the same number of chapters around a core event: a boy is slapped during a family party. On the surface, the novel explores the dissonance of values among friends and family within a constrained middle-class environment. But more importantly, what keeps them together and apart is the difficult and different role memory and forgetting play for each of the main characters, and others as well, in an intricate cultural web, constituting a grey zone between individuality and collectivity, consciousness and sub-consciousness. The paper will analyse the novel in the light of recent conceptualizations of memory and thus will open it to the perspective of the transnational globalised cultures of today.
SLITE9 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A) 17.15–18.45 Room S2 /Sunday 31.8.2014 (B) 16.00–17.30 Room S2
SEMINAR ON ENGLISH MANUSCRIPT STUDIES
Convenors:
Carlo Bajetta, Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italy, carlo.bajetta@univda.it
Guillaume Coatalen, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France, guillaumecoatalen@hotmail.com
The focus is on editing manuscripts from all periods, whether they be strictly literary or not. The seminar is particularly interested in unpublished material in manuscript. Research topics include, and are not restricted to, finding manuscripts and archival work, manuscript collections, scribal work, paleography, manuscripts as books, the coexistence of manuscripts and printed books, what manuscripts tell us on reading habits, editing manuscripts, electronic versus printed editions, manuscript studies and digital humanities. Manuscript studies have been on the cutting edge of literary theory and papers on authorship, the constitution of the text or hermeneutics are welcome.
Participants
Efterpi Mitsi, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, emitsi@enl.uoa.gr
An Angell in Oxford: A Greek scholar’s voyage, manuscript and plea in early seventeenth-century England
This paper examines an obscure manuscript at the Gennadius library in Athens (MS 121.1) which contains the English translation of a short autobiographical essay written by the Greek scholar Christophoros Angelos. The text, published in 1617 in Oxford as Christopher Angell, a Grecian who tasted of many stripes and torments inflicted by the Turkes for the faith which he had in Christ Jesus, narrates Angell’s misfortunes in Ottoman-held Greece and his escape to England, followed by the praise of the country and its inhabitants. This original manuscript, acquired by bibliophile John Gennadius in the sale of Sir John Arthur Brooke at Sotheby’s on 25 May 1921, reveals not only the publishing history of Angell’s pamphlet, the first publication by a Greek in England, but also an engaging story of intercultural exchange, translation and quest for patronage.
The manuscript’s colophon in Greek, in the author’s own hand, signing the manuscript as “Χριστόφορος Άγγελος έλλην πελοποννήσιος” [Christophoros Angelos, a Greek from Peloponnese] follows the English text in bookhand; his uneven handwriting contrasts with the script of the two different scribes, the first having a bolder hand while the second a rounder and straighter one. Moreover, the two attached ink drawings, which provide the models for the woodcuts in the printed editions, symbolize the book itself. The first, depicting Angell’s torture in Athens, looks as if the author, who has no ability in drawing, wants to show an illustrator how to represent his suffering; the second drawing, which is more artistic, presents an allegorical figure of England with Angell as a small suppliant on its side, displaying in a personal and dramatic way Anglo-Greek relations in the early seventeenth century.
D. C. Andersson, Wolfson College, Oxford, Great Britain, Daniel.andersson@gmail.com
Editing Philosophical Manuscripts: A case study from seventeenth-century Oxford
Problems of dictation and problems of mishearing/misremembering complicated philosophical terms are not merely intellectual problems. They are problems of physical inscription. The current paper will examine the manuscripts of Richard Crakanthorpe, an Oxford scholastic philosopher from the early seventeenth century, whose introduction to natural philosophy (existing in two separate redactions) I have edited for publication. In addition to some comments on the identity of one of the scribes, I will In particular look at whether we can construct a ‚grammar‘ of deletions, errors and omissions, and see what this may say about the classrooms of learning in early modern Oxford.
Andrew James, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, jamesandrew205@gmail.com
The Personal Side of Writing: a Study of Graham Swift’s Correspondence
This paper focuses on the letters of Graham Swift in the British Library’s archives in a discussion of the novelist’s own distinction between the personal and the autobiographical. Although the archival correspondence is limited to “professional” exchanges with scholars, editors, translators, and general readers, we are fortunate to have both sides of the conversation. Because Swift retained copies of his own letters, we are able to see the cat-and-mouse game that unfolds between readers wanting to know more about the man behind the novels and a novelist determined to keep the curious at bay. In response to inquiries into the biographical background of his fiction, Swift maintains that his novels are the product of imagination. Usually he does so through a measured treatise on the difference between life and literature; but occasionally, perhaps when he is short on time or patience, he becomes glib. For example, in a 5 September 1986 letter to an inquisitive fan of Waterland, Swift declared: “Works of fiction are just ‘dreamed up’. If you can tell me where your dreams come from, I’ll tell you how I write.” However, twenty years later he offered a more helpful response to a German scholar who had asked about the origins of the novel Tomorrow:
It’s clearly a novel about very personal things. I think I’ve always wanted to write very personal novels and this may be my most personal one so far, though not in the sense that very much in it, if anything, is directly, autobiographically personal to me. I think this is the business of fiction, to be personal and perhaps resonate very intimately with the reader’s life, without being personal in any literal sense. (27 December 2006)
By drawing on numerous exchanges in the British Library’s archives, this paper will explore the validity of Swift’s distinction between the autobiographical and the personal in trying to understand his reluctance to admit life experience as the basis for fiction.
Conny Loder, independent scholar, connyloder@yahoo.de
Shakespeare’s Playhouses and Early Modern Documents
Every year I conduct a Shakespeare excursion to London in which students not only watch plays and engage in acting workshops, but also locate relevant original manuscripts that pertain to Early Modern playhouses.
The relevance of these documents is high. In a conversation that I had with Julian Bowsher, head archaeologist from the Museum of London, we discussed how information is brought together from various manuscripts to pin down locations on which to excavate with the hope of tracing Early Modern playhouses. This information – for the Theatre, Blackfriars, the Globe, the Rose, the Swan – is found in marginal documents, spread out over numerous documents, often in law suits, or are mentioned in leases, and that, rather indifferently. So far, not many of these pieces have been gathered, and we are still in need of a comprehensive picture of the playhouse situation in Early Modern London.
In this paper I would like to present which documents are of relevance, how we can use these documents today to locate not only the physical sites of these playhouses (and yes, there is still a debate as to where one should start digging) but also what these documents reveal about the conditions of acting, about being an entrepreneur in an acting company and, not to be forgotten, about how theatre was received by Londoners – Puritans and theatre enthusiasts alike.
Roberta Grandi, Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy, roberta.grandi@unicatt.it
From manuscript to manuscript – Two King Lear burlesques
The study of Victorian burlesques is often hindered by the scarcity of documental material. This is partly due to the innate perishableness of these productions, whose nature relied mainly on topicality: their often limited success, the minor theatres where they took place, the little renown of their authors, all frequently contribute to obscure the concrete history and contexts of many interesting specimens of this fascinating genre.
This paper will investigate a symptomatic case for the transmission history of such texts, that of the manuscripts of John Chalmer’s King Leer and His Darters (1848) and of Frederick Marchant’s, Kynge Lear and his Faythefulle Foole (1860). The first burlesque was staged at the Bower Saloon in Lambeth; very little is known about both the performance and its author. The second was staged at the Britannia Theatre; its author, this time, was a playwright and actor who enjoyed a discreetly long career.
Marchant’s burlesque is, in fact, extremely similar to Chalmer’s, particularly in the first part of the play. Through a detailed comparison of the surviving evidence, this paper will endeavour to work out the relationship between these manuscripts and their authors, thus casting some new light on the history of these interesting, and unjustly neglected, texts.
Anunciación Carrera de la Red, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain, acarrera@fyl.uva.es
The Stannington Diploma and the Problem of Misappropriated Authorship
This paper is concerned with an anonymous transcript at the Society of Antiquaries of London, reproducing the text on the outer face of the lost tablet of the Stannington Diploma, the Roman inscription found in 1761 Yorkshire.
The script had been sent on to the Society soon after the discovery by John Watson, who failed to provide the identity of its original copyist. A first authorial attribution of sorts was made by John Hunter: apart from attesting the copy was ‘plainly in the handwriting of Mr [John] Wilson [of Broomhead]’ (1819: 18n), he proved that it had been the latter who had sent up both news and copy to Watson. This fact being little conclusive with regard to authorship, the ‘definitive’ edition of the text merely notes that ‘apparently the transcript was prepared by John Watson’ (Frere et al., 1990: 2401.6). My research at various British archives yielded positive results: the identity of the real copyist of the Stannington diploma and the series of fraudulent appropriations which Wilson’s and Watson’s communications, along with those of others, proved to be. The case aptly illustrates the issue of misappropriated authorship within the field of manuscript studies and is presented here to call for the attention of English specialists towards its significance.
Marcella Henderson-Peal, Université Paris Est Créteil, Paris12, marcella.henderson@u-pec.fr
Carrying out research work on the literary and philosophical reception of British author John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) led
to the discovery of several unpublished, and indeed hitherto unknown, correspondences within the context of current renewed interest in Powys’s works in France. One of these correspondences includes 24 letters from Powys to philosopher of existence (rather than existentialist) Jean Wahl over 27 years. The other one concerns the role of the collaboration and co-authorship between John Cowper Powys with his translator, Marie Canavaggia, who translated into French two of his major novels and more importantly his Autobiography. She was also Louis Ferdinand Céline’s assistant (2 volumes of 508 letters from Celine’s correspondence to her have been published). Céline called her my “dear double”. I should like to press the importance of these letters in Celinian studies and therefore the importance of the Powys/Canavaggia letters for Powys scholars.
SLITE10 CANCELLED
THE FORMS OF THE LANDSCAPE: SOUND/SENSE AND TOPOGRAPHY
Convenors:
Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang.Goertschacher@sbg.ac.at
David Malcolm, University of Gdańsk, Poland, david.malcolm@anglistyka.edu.pl
Landscape has formed a traditional subject of English-language poetry since the Renaissance. It has certainly been prominent in poetry from the last fifty years. A variety of poets have written powerfully of landscapes of the most varied kinds. These include: Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Charles Tomlinson, Jon Silkin, Anne Stevenson, David Constantine, Michael Hofmann, Kathleen Jamie, Paula Meehan, and John Burnside. Landscape poetry is defined by its subject. However, in keeping with our two previous seminars at ESSE conferences (Turin 2010, Istanbul 2012), we are interested in how the subject of landscape relates to the technical or formal aspects of the poems that address the topic. How do rhythm and meter, phonological organisation, strophe, enjambment, and genre embody, question, undermine, or augment the landscape poem’s manifest content? We invite proposals that discuss the technical aspects of landscape poems and their meaning in English-language verse (for example, from North America, Britain, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, or India, although that of other national English-language traditions is also welcome) since 1960.
SLITE11 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A6, (B) 17.15–18.45 Room A6
CONFORMISM AND ANTI-CONFORMISM RECONSIDERED: FROM POSTMODERNISM TO CONTEMPORARY SENSIBILITY IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ARTS
Convenors:
Jaroslav Kušnír, The University of Prešov, Slovakia, jkusnir@fhpv.unipo.sk
Dan Popescu, Partium Christian University, Romania, dhpopescu@yahoo.com
The most recent tendencies in British and American fiction show a certain wish to recuperate realistic meaning as well as to ironically point out the “exhaustion” of the poetics of the “former non-conformist” postmodern authors whose status has changed because of the “institutionalization” of their works. The position of the post-metafictional generation of authors – people such as David Foster Wallace, Villiam Vollmann, Mark Haddon, and others – manifests itself in an interest in reviving the position of the subject, in a certain distance from the earlier generation of postmodern authors and with it, in a new literary “non-conformism”. This session welcomes papers dealing with all aspects of those innovative kinds of poetics which are aimed at reconsidering or “creatively” extending postmodernist art. Comparative and interdisciplinary studies are encouraged.
Participants
Sigolène Vivier, Sorbonne University, France,sigolene.vivier@gmail.com
Ironic Sincerities: Re-reading the Post-modernism of David Foster Wallace’s Short Stories
Although Wallace’s literary acrobatics in his short stories are seemingly reminiscent of “po-mo”, his prose should not be read as a mere perpetuation nor as a discarding parody of it, but rather as an attempt to transcend post-modernist irony via irony itself in order to access the essence of meaning and a sincerity, even an ingenuousness, that fiction should be striving for in order to regain its rights on muthos (as ‘storytelling’). By exploiting the very dangers of solipsism and reflexivity both textually and thematically, Wallace brings the literary focus back on the emotionality of the human subject while providing an effective comment on modern popular culture – but I will argue that his subtle subversion of post-modernist conformism also resides a) in the way he redefines the role of the reader by eschewing his/her distanciation as a mere Implied Reader whose task is to solve the textual riddle, and by appealing to him as both object and subject of his meta-fictions and b) in the way he stylistically experiments with mimesis (see the verbosity of his bombastic endnotes and jargonizing descriptions) as a bold endeavour to revivify realism as well as the process of identification, but also paradoxically as a challenge to tackle what art should but cannot always articulate – i.e. in his own words “what it means to be a fucking human being” (“An Interview with David Foster Wallace”, interview by Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (summer 1993): 138.
Kušnír, Jaroslav, University of Prešov, Slovakia, jkusnir@fhpv.unipo.sk
After Postmodernism: “Senzicerity”: Between Avant- Pop and New Sincerity? William Vollman’s The Visible Spectrum (1989) and Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV (1998)
Since the late 1990’s, many critics have been discussing a possible end of postmodernism (I. Hassan, A. Kirby, R. Eshelman) and suggested an emergence of new senzibility referred to as, for example, digimodernism (A. Kirby, 2009). Some of them suggested the origination of a new kind of fiction which emphasizes the value of human experience through the narratives different from postmodern narratives which understand this experience and human subject as linguistic constructs (David Foster Wallace’s fiction understood as fiction of New Sincerity by Adam Kelly). Other authors and critics have, however, contributed to a growing confusion about postmodern literature and literature of new sensibility by including the authors traditionally understood as postmodern (see, for example, P. Geyh’s Anthology of Postmodern Fiction, 1989, including William Vollman’s and Curtis White’s fiction) in their Avant-Pop Anthology and Avant-Pop Manifesto (see http://www.altx.com/…nifesto.html) claiming to have included the authors different from postmodern authors. Analyzing a possible emergence of new senzibility manifesting itself in the poetics of new sincerity (like in David Foster Wallace’s fiction as understood by Adam Kelly), and in the Avant-Pop senzibility, my paper will deal with these narrative techniques and the vision of the world which creates a new senzibility as manifesting itself in William Vollman’s The Visible Spectrum (1989) and Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV (1998). I will use the compound term “senzicerity” as a combination of (new) senzibility and (new) sincerity to analyze these authors’ both connection with postmodernism and postmodern vision of the world as well as the way their depiction of pop culture and new senzibility implies these authors’ difference from dominant postmodern vision of the world, thus representing a non-conformist relation to postmodernist fiction.
Diana Benea, University of Bucharest, Romania, dbenea@gmail.com
Post-Postmodernist Sensibility in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
Starting with Vineland (1990), Thomas Pynchon’s more recent body of work has registered a subtle shift from the high postmodernism of his first three novels, dominated by the paranoia of all-encompassing regimes of control, towards a toned-down vision marked by a reconceptualization of the status of the subject and its enhanced ethico-political agency. Interestingly, this shift of vision might be easily obscured by the fact that Pynchon still employs his signature tropes (paranoia, the quest, etc.), as well as his prevalent aesthetic strategies (genre pastiche, parody, metafiction), albeit with a new degree of irony and self-consciousness. Bleeding Edge (2013) illustrates the tension between what has become a predominantly stylistic, “exhausted” postmodernism, on the one hand, and the contemporary urgency and heartfelt humanity of a novel about 9/11 and terrorism, about the dotcom bubble and the traps of virtual reality, and, not least, about family, communal bonds, and questions of trust. By removing the layers of Pynchon’s self-pastichizing style, the paper aims to excavate the quasi-“realistic” treatment of the aforementioned thematic concerns and the implicit attempts at recuperating a sense of “realistic” meaning. The novel thus becomes the latest and most direct expression of the post-postmodernist/ late postmodernist sensibility of Pynchon’s recent fiction, gesturing beyond the textual provocations of his earlier novels towards what the writer described, in the Introduction to Slow Learner, as his preference for works “grounded in human reality”, able to probe into “the deeper, more shared levels of life that we all really live”.
Dan H Popescu, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, dhpopescu@yahoo.com
Vineland or Thomas Pynchon against his younger self
The paper intends to analyze how the author of Vineland practically reconsiders the darker paradigm set in his first three novels, and emphasizes the lighter, truly postmodernist approach that marks the works he has written since. In this respect, Vineland exposes the author as fighting against the limits of his own poetics while employing the same “non-conformist” attitude.
Pokrivčák, Anton, Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra, Slovakia, apokrivcak@ukf.sk
Conformism, Anti-conformism and the Sense of Literary Studies in the Post-Postmodern Age
Literary theory of the last decades of the twentieth century was dominated by the issue of fragmentation, representation, political and ideological struggles, and so on. The concept of postmodernism gave rise to a wide variety of critical approaches, many of which take one far beyond the realm of literary study – to philosophical, political, or sociological contexts. One of its consequences was also the emphasis on non-conformism, anti-conformism, anti-essentialism, etc. However, if literary theory is not to become just a seeker and justifier of various manifestations of otherness, it has to start pointing to what we already know, to what is close to us, to humanity in its essential or universal aspirations. The problem is analyzed through the discussion of several texts, both primary artworks as well as critical conceptions.
Tibor Tóth, Eszterházy Károly College Eger, Hungary, totib@ektf.hu
The Strange Case of…
No, the title of my lecture is not The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, although some sort of analogy between “The Strange Case of Philip Roth and the Wikipedia Administrator” and Stevenson’s novel seems a valid supposition…
Philip Roth has been on the literary stage for 61 years now and his career is an excellent example of the way in which many great writers of the last century encountered, embraced, perfected and abandoned (or attempted to abandon) postmodern narrative and its assets. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century Roth willingly assumed the status of a magus, constantly formulated and re-formulated past, present and future, and produced an incredible plurality of identities; his games with the themes of authority and freedom have attracted constant attention.
In my paper I intend to discuss some aspects of Philip Roth’s 21st century ‘reformulated’ attitude towards the inherent and relevant dichotomy between freedom and authority. The starting point was occasioned by his “An Open Letter to Wikipedia,” dated September 7, 2012.
The discussion of the theme will touch upon certain aspects of some famous Roth novels, including The Anatomy Lesson, The Ghost Writer, The Facts, The Counterlife, Deception, The Human Stain and Exit Ghost.
My aim is not to draw some final conclusions on the attitude of the post postmodern towards its predecessor, as at the moment this is impossible. Instead, I hope to reveal some of the basic dilemmas of the 21st century post. One of the major questions seems to be whether the artist’s confrontation with the ‘manipulative identity plurality factory’ founded and perfected by late postmodernism is possible or the Wikipedia Administrator was definitely right when he questioned Roth’s authority over his own art and serenely declared that the novelist was a not a credible source and “we require secondary sources”.
Péter Dolmányos, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary, dpeter@ektf.hu
Non-confomist History or Non-historic Conformism? Roddy Doyle’s The Last Roundup Trilogy
Up until the publication of A Star called Henry in 1999, Roddy Doyle was considered principally as a chronicler of the present. Doyle’s concern was the working class world of Dublin, carefully and consciously overlooked and neglected by revivalist agendas before him, and his vivid portrayal of the subculture of the South Dublin housing estates safely established him as an important voice in contemporary Irish fiction. The novels of the Barrytown trilogy are usually referred to as conversational novels, as Doyle limits narration to a bare minimum and allows his characters to do most of the speaking, thus challenging a number of traditional as well as postmodernist narrative techniques. In 1999, however, Doyle ventured into new territory by launching the first volume of a new trilogy. The Last Roundup was heralded as the writer’s new departure into a new world, that of the historical novel. With the trilogy now complete, the project can be readily assessed, since Doyle playfully reconsiders and subverts notions of the historical novel, and its postmodern version, historiographic metafiction, and reverts to more subjective yet at once more traditional ways of storytelling. The result is an exciting world which the paper intends to explore principally from the points of view of history and narration.
Judit Nagy, Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church, Budapest, Hungary.
Conformism versus non-conformism as a quest for the genuine in art in George Bowering’s ”The Hayfield”
The issue of conformism versus non-conformism in art can be approached from the point of what constitutes genuine artwork, a question which has been preoccupying artist and critic alike. Gordon Featherall, the art historian protagonist of Canadian writer George Bowering’s short story ”The Hayfield”, aspires to become a genuine painter through his knowledge of art. Contemplating literary and pictorial aesthetics of the 20th century and having studied the oeuvre of famous literary figures and painters, he makes an attempt at painting his subject, the hayfield. Will he succeed in his endeavors to achieve something genuine? Building on a detailed analysis of the protagonist’s painting- and literature-related remarks, the paper aims at exploring the connection between conformism/ non-conformism in art and genuine artwork.
SLITE12 Saturday 30.8.2014 17.15–18.45 Room S1
THE RECEPTION OF VICTORIAN FICTION IN EUROPE
Convenors:
Ebbe Klitgård, Roskilde University, Denmark, ebbek@ruc.dk
Alberto Lázaro, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, alberto.lazaro@uah.es
The publication of the volume The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe this year has contributed to our understanding of the relationships between Victorian literature and the intellectual history of mainland Europe. However, much could be learned from looking at other significant writers of the same period. Papers are invited which investigate the ways in which British Victorian authors, such as George Eliot, William Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, Lewis Carroll, the Brontë sisters, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell and many more have been translated, published, read and reviewed in Continental Europe over the last centuries.
Participants
María José Coperías Aguilar, University of Valencia, Spain , maria.j.coperias@uv.es
The Reception of Elizabeth Gaskell in Spain
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) was a prolific and well-known Victorian writer who enjoyed great popularity during her lifetime and sold a comparatively high number of copies of her books. However, after her death, her work seems to have fallen into oblivion in the minds of most readers and critics, except for her novel Cranford and her biography of Charlotte Brontë. Although an incomplete collection of her works was published in the early 20th century and some occasional critical studies were also published in the first half of that century, it was not until the 1950s, with Marxist criticism, and in the 1970s and 1980s, from a feminist approach, that she was rediscovered. In this paper we will try to analyse how her work has been received in Spain, especially in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Despite the few translations we have managed to find for the first half of the 20th century, in recent decades there appears to have been a great increase in popular interest in reading her work. However, this great interest in Elizabeth Gaskell does not seem to exist in the academic world.
María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, University of Corunna, Spain, maria.lorenzo.modia@udc.es
George Eliot and Spain: An Irregular Reception
The publication in 2015 of the volume The Reception of George Eliot in Europe will no doubt show the wide knowledge that many countries in Europe had regarding this Victorian writer. However, as the chapter on the reception of George Eliot in Spain will hopefully show, that reception has been irregular in Spain regarding both the works translated and the periods in which they were issued. Although it is known that one of her novels was published in Spanish – in an abridged edition – immediately after having been published in England, the Spanish reading public had to wait until the twentieth, or even until the twenty-first century, to enjoy the literary work of this English author, and some of her texts have not yet been translated into the language of Cervantes. Other issues interesting for analysis are those of gender, religion, and censorship. Regarding the first topic, although she always kept her male pseudonym, her authorship had been revealed in the English-speaking countries rather early in her literary career, whereas in Spain her male nom-de-plume was kept without other indications and very often she was referred to as male. I will also argue gender issues are intermingled with those of faith in the reception of George Eliot's texts in Spain under Francoism, mediated by the official censorship system.
Ebbe Klitgård, University of Roskilde, Denmark, ebbek@ruc.dk
The Reception and Translation of Thomas Hardy's Novels in Denmark, Including a Comparison with George Eliot
It is well known that Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) gave up writing novels near the end of the 19th century, following the public scandal aroused by his novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). There was a somewhat similar literary scandal about sexual morality in Denmark around the same time, and in this context Tess was translated in 1893, whereas Jude did not appear in Danish until 1926. To this day Tess remains the most popular of all Hardy's novels in Denmark, as in most European countries, with new translations in 1905 and 1926, the latter of these translations republished in 1981. However, several other prose texts by Hardy were translated, both short stories and the novels Far From the Madding Crowd (1874, transl. 1943) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886, transl. 1931). In this paper I will mainly discuss the translations of the four novels mentioned so far by the same translator, Aslaug Mikkelsen, who was one of the first female academics within the field of English Studies in Denmark. I will include a comparison with Mikkelsen's translation of George Eliot's Silas Marner and an article she wrote about Eliot. Furthermore, I will investigate the question of why George Eliot became even more frequently translated than Hardy, and why and how both writers were edited in the process of translation.
Alberto Lázaro, University of Alcalá, Spain, alberto.lazaro@uah.es
The Reception of Thomas Hardy in Franco’s Spain: The Case of Jude the Obscure
Some of Thomas Hardy’s novels are well known for the controversial reception they received from British publishers and readers. When first published in serial form, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) were both heavily bowdlerised, and when they were finally published as an unexpurgated whole some critics harshly attacked them for being in conflict with Victorian morality. Surprisingly enough, when a translation of Tess was reprinted in Spain during General Franco’s regime (1939–1975), despite its strict moral and religious censorship, Spanish censors did not find fault with Hardy’s sympathetic portrayal of a “fallen woman”. However, the case of Jude was special. The novel was banned in Spain on moral and religious grounds during most of the regime. It was only in 1972 that censors did not disapprove of the book’s critique of the institution of marriage and allowed a Spanish printing of 15,000 copies of Jude’s story. It is interesting to note that laws regarding marriage were very strict under Franco’s regime, and divorce was not legalised until 1981. This paper will look at the reception of Hardy’s last novel in Spain, which shows the contradictions and the changing social and moral climate during the latter years of Franco’s regime.
SLITE13 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A10, (B) 14.30–16.30 Room A10
MAPPING THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE IN THE NOVELS OF FEMALE DEVELOPMENT
Convenors:
Soňa Šnircová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, sona.snircova@upjs.sk
Milena Kostić, University of Niš, Serbia, mkostic76@gmail.com
As some feminist theorists of the Bildungsroman claim, public and private spaces play crucially different roles in the male and female versions of the genre. While the classic works of the male Bildungsroman show that the hero’s development requires a move from the private space of home into the public sphere (formal education, independent life in the city), the heroines in the traditional novels of female development (such as Jane Eyre, Emma, The Mill on the Floss) are not allowed to make any significant move beyond the limits of domestic life. The seminar will explore whether the social and cultural changes brought by the second wave of feminism and the growing importance of the public sphere in the life of modern women have led to any significant changes in the representations of the public and the private in contemporary narratives of female Bildung.
Participants
Cédric Courtois, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, Cedric.Courtois@univ-paris1.fr
Third-Generation Nigerian Female Writers and the Bildungsroman: Breaking Free from the Shackles of Patriarchy
“Even the broadest definitions of the Bildungsroman presuppose a range of social options available only to men.” Since Goethe’s Wilhem Meister, Abel, Hirsch, and Langland have stated that “the definition of [the Bildungsroman] has gradually been expanded to accommodate other historical and cultural variables”. I aim to delve into the unstable limits between the public and the private in two novels of female development: the debut novels of two third-generation Nigerian female writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 Purple Hibiscus and Sefi Atta’s 2005 Everything Good will Come. Both novels tackle the issue of gender, and are sometimes considered feminist novels by critics. I will show that the protagonists of these novels attempt to break the shackles of a deeply-anchored Nigerian patriarchal society by negotiating the traditional borders between the private and the public, “from introspection to activity” (getting into motion sometimes takes time), “from the enclosed realm of the familial home into the social world” (moving outward), from muteness to effusiveness, without necessarily ending with the typical closure of the novel of male development. The two novels under scrutiny incorporate autobiographical elements thanks to which both novelists explore, question, and negotiate generic boundaries. The events that both protagonists live, from childhood to adulthood, become allegories of what women but also Nigeria go through.
Andrea Fernández-García, University of Oviedo, Spain, andreafg87@hotmail.com
Challenging the Public/Private Divide in Nuyorican Novels of Female Development
This paper explores how Nuyorican writers Esmeralda Santiago and Judith Ortiz Cofer challenge gendered views of the public and the private in Almost a Woman (1999) and Call Me María (2004) respectively by presenting physical mobility as a structural paradigm for the maturation of their heroines, thus reversing the patterns of female development depicted in traditional female bildungsroman. It will be claimed that, even though the home is an important space of socialization for their characters, it is not portrayed as the primary site of female identity. Indeed, the heroines’ experiences in public spaces are of great significance for their identity development. As will be shown, entertainment and especially education provide the heroines with the opportunity to gain a gradual access to the public sphere. It will be further argued that their incursions outside the private realm challenge the gendered normativity of the streets and that their dangerous walk to school ultimately empowers the characters to escape social exclusion through education. Besides, it will be discussed that Santiago and Ortiz’s feminist commitment informs the alternative representation of the private and the public in their bildungsroman. This subversive portrayal will be examined following a feminist approach to space and gender.
Lilijana Burcar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, lilijana.burcar@guest.arnes.si
Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street: Antibildungsroman in the House of Poverty and Deprivation
Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street is written in the form of vignettes and told from the point of view of a first-generation Mexican-American girl. Each compressed poetic narrative focuses on the protagonist’s life in Chicago barrio, with vignettes coalescing into a protest novel and a form of anti-bildungsroman. The girl narrator, sometimes naïve, but ever wiser, recounts the trajectory of her growth from early childhood to adolescence and beyond by placing it “within the socio-political frame of poverty, racial discrimination and gender subjugation” (Olivares N. pg.). Rather than being inwardly oriented, this antibildungsroman views the individual as part of a broader socio-economic reality, insisting on the girl’s “growth from a limiting personal to liberating communal consciousness” (Giles 71). This in turn requires an exit from a seemingly isolated personal space and entry into a public one. As a result, Cisneros’s antibildungsroman attempts not to end on a reconciliatory note but calls instead for the kind of rebellious subjectivity arising out of anger at one’s systemic dispossession and deprivation, including gendered subjugation. Yet, Cisneros’s attempt at such an anti-traditional bildungsroman encounters its own difficulties and ideological traps.
Yıldırım Özsevgeç, Erdogan University, Turkey, yildirim.ozsevgec@erdogan.edu.tr
The Birth of a “New Woman” In Nights at the Circus
The term “female bildungsroman” concentrates on the psychological and moral growth of the heroine, the protagonist of the novel, from youth to adulthood. It is a kind of a “coming-of-age story” wherein the character development is very important. Besides, the “female bildungsroman” depicts the “suppression and defeat of female autonomy, creativity, and maturity by patriarchal gender norms”.
Angela Carter uses examples of this genre. She drives forward the oppressed woman profile in her detailed narration and tries to make a deconstruction of grand narratives, such as tales and myths, by using this profile.
In her novel Nights at the Circus (1984), Fevvers, the protagonists of the novel, starts a journey between love and happiness and at the same time fights against the patriarchal discourses. Fevvers’ and some other characters in the novel achieve their goal of being a “mature woman” gradually but with difficulty. Carter uses fairy tales and intertextuality to support her characters’ development. For example, Fevvers has wings to liberate her and the other women in the novel, Mignon and Lizzie. So, this paper not only elaborates on how Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus reorders or reorganizes certain traditional assumptions of the oppressed female subject that have become a model for women’s role in the society but also explains the birth of ‘the new woman’.
Ángel Chaparro Sainz, UPV-EHU-University of the Basque Country, Spain, angel.chaparro@ehu.es
(Out and In-) Doors: Identity and Space in Phyllis Barber’s Autobiographies
Phyllis Barber was raised in a Mormon household but she gave up being an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon Church, for a long time. Her autobiographies can be read as a literary and candid attempt to understand her own identity as a woman, a Mormon and a mother and wife. In that identity shaping, space and landscape play key roles. In this presentation, I aim at researching her two autobiographies, How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir and Raw Edges: A Memoir, from a point of view that analyzes her rendition of setting as an exploration of a very specific set of connections that reveals how the place she dwells in influences her own concept of self, specifically, how interior and exterior spaces are strategically used to imply complex readings of these memoirs. In fact, these two memoirs, published within a gap of fifteen years, cover different and specific periods in her life, but they both combine to offer a complex overview of her upbringing and her maturity in connection to place.
Attila Dósa, University of Miskolc, Hungary, aitdosa@uni-miskolc.hu
Questioning Authority in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: A Hermeneutic Approach
Established criticism of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) includes readings of Muriel Spark’s emblematic work as a novel of education (a boarding school story) and as a religious novel (a Catholic allegory). Plots in both of these novelistic sub-genres are generally concerned with authority – the former usually questioning it and the latter usually affirming it. In the present case, as a novel of education, Miss Jean Brodie seemingly questions secular authority on a very basic level (the authority of adults). As a religious novel, it seemingly questions religious authority on the topmost level (the authority of the church). Problems of representing, identifying with, interrogating, misleading and rejecting authority are central to both readings: the plot and the story equally revolve around the key problem of the identity and the motivation of the pupil (Sandy Stranger) who subverts Miss Jean Brodie*’s authority by “betraying” her. I will try and extricate the novel from the specific contexts of these genre-based readings by paying close attention to the methods of questioning and to the nature of the questions asked and the answers provided to a) question the established notion that the novel deals with authority; and b) provide an answer from the text to the question that has been often asked: Why was Miss Brodie betrayed? Finally, though Scots critics (Rankin, Massie, Crawford) have made repeated attempts to appropriate the Edinburgh-born Spark for the canon of Scottish fiction, her place in the canon is not convincing – and not just because *The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s only “Scottish novel”. Therefore, my talk will also explore c) the subtle and roundabout ways in which Spark rejects her Scottish identity through questioning two cornerstones of Scottishness: education and religion.
Milena Kostic, University of Nis, Serbia, mkostic76@gmail.com
Education as Manipulation in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The paper explores the difference between the public and private aspects of Miss Jean Brodie’s teaching techniques: whereas according to the general public opinion she seems to be a free thinker and a radical rebel against the dominant patriarchal norms, in her private classes the readers recognize the repetition of the identical pattern of destructive patriarchal authorities, ultimately resulting in the manipulation of her pupils. The theoretical framework of the paper relies on the critical discussion of the concepts of Louis Althusser’s “interpellation” (1971), Alice Miller’s “poisonous pedagogy” (1990) and Judith Butler’s “appropriation of the male identity by women” (1990).
Vitana Kostadinova, Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, vitana.kostadinova@gmail.com
Female Lifestyles from Pride and Prejudice to Lizzie Bennett’s Diaries
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a traditional novel of female development, in which the heroine’s transition into adulthood ends with marriage. Deresiewicz points out that Elizabeth Bennett does not think it necessary to give others a fair hearing because she thinks she knows everything there is to know; thus, growing up becomes related to making mistakes and feeling the consequences. Lizzie Bennett’s Diaries is a twenty-first century adaptation of the novel, which involves cultural translation of female lifestyles for the sake of a contemporary audience who would not choose to plunge into the past. The very genre of the series implies the public sphere: it is a video blog, in which the protagonist addresses the anonymous multitude of internet viewers. Here Elizabeth is a student of mass communications. She turns down Mr. Collins as expected, but the original proposal of marriage has been substituted by a proposal of a business partnership, and it is her friend Charlotte who accepts to delve into a different dimension of the public. In other words, “[m]arriage, as the mark of narrative closure which exemplifies the merging of individual and social interests, is now explicitly revealed not as the endpoint of female Bildung, but as its very antithesis” (Felski 138). This point is reinforced once again when Elizabeth’s sister Jane declares her career more important to her than the man she is in love with – but she graciously allows him to move to New York if he wants to be close to her.
Soňa Šnircová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, sona.snircova@upjs.sk
Girlhood in Susan Fletcher’s Eve Green and Tiffany Murray’s Happy Accidents: Contemporary Transformations of the Female Bildungsroman.
Published in 2004 as debut novels by contemporary writers, Eve Green and Happy Accidents share some important similarities. Fatherless and abandoned (for different reasons) by their rebellious mothers, the young heroines have to move from cities to the rural setting of Welsh farms to be brought up by their maternal grandmothers. Both authors place the coming-of-age stories into the context of the female Bildungsroman tradition, using allusions to Jane Eyre as important structural elements of their narratives. My paper will claim that these two texts represent a new stage in the development of the female Bildungsroman since their appropriation of the tradition can be defined as postfeminist: Susan Fletcher, who makes the romantic motif of Jane Eyre central to her novel, appears to support the new cult of (almost idyllic) domesticity, while Tiffany Murray, whose images of domesticity are, on the contrary, interwoven with grotesque elements, uses the mad Bertha motif in the way that challenges victim feminism.
SLITE14 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 14.30–16.30 Room A6, (B) 17.00–18.30 Room A6
THE CHANGING FACETS OF PARATEXTS
Convenors:
Dorothee Birke, University of Freiburg, Germany, dorothee.birke@frias.uni-freiburg.de
Maxime Leroy, University of Haute-Alsace, France, maxime.leroy@uha.fr
This seminar welcomes papers on paratexts, particularly from the point of view of the developments in the relationships between authors–of all genres and periods–and their readers. Pertinent paratexts include titles, intertitles, prefaces, dedications, articles, interviews, illustrations, websites, blog posts, e-book author platforms, etc. Although papers may look at paratext in the context of one work or author, we strongly encourage those that will compare different text types, and/or paratexts from different periods or national traditions, in order to reveal continuities and discontinuities in topoi, modes of address, readers’ reception, and relations between text and paratext.
Participants
Sarah Herbe, University of Salzburg, sarah.herbe@sbg.ac.at
The Biographical Paratext of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Poetry Collections
In 1806, the writer of the preface to The Poetical Works of the Late Mary Robinson, found that “no publication can be presented to the world, unembellished by a ‘Life of the Author,’ […].” More than two hundred years earlier, the first “life” of an English author had been prefixed to Speght’s edition of Chaucer’s Works (1598), but it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that introductory lives became a regular feature of the collected works of English poets. This paper proposes to trace the changing forms, functions and conventions of the allographic biographical paratext of English single-author poetry collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a focus on the following questions: How does the introductory life relate to other paratextual genres such as epistles to the reader and commendatory verse? What appeals are made to the readers of the biographical paratext concerning the reception of the author’s work in view of his or her life? And how is the necessity of an introductory life explained by the writers of the biographical paratext?
Magdalena Ożarska, Jan Kochanowski University, Poland, mozarska@gmail.com
Diaristic Paratexts: Mary Shelley’s Journal Intertitles
The journal genre is subject to a strictly mechanical order, expressed through dating, and its inseparable quality is the option to begin and to end at any point. “Diaries do have distinct shapes, [which] derive from their existence in time passing. Some are shaped by external events in the diarist's life, which, even from the writer's point of view, have a beginning, middle and end. Courtship diaries ending with a marriage and travel diaries ending with the arrival at a destination are examples of such texts” (Culley 19). The beginning of a journal is usually rather explicit, but journal endings usually pose problems both for the diarist and, consequently, for the researcher (Lejeune 187). The diarist’s choice to enter paratext, particularly in the form of intertitles, into his/her self-writing, seems to suggest a need for tighter structural control over the text. This might explain why diary intertitles and other forms of diary paratext are not very common, particularly in nineteenth-century women’s self writing. If they can at all be found in a diary, what function do they serve? What form do they assume? What effects do they produce? I will look at these issues in Mary Shelley’s 1814–1844 Journal Books.
Mustafa Kirca, Çankaya University, Turkey, mkirca@gmail.com
Double-Voiced Peritext in Parodic Discourse
The paratext, as Genette explains, designates the signals on the threshold of a text which guide the reader to the “right” reception and also indicate the genre that the text belongs to, hence offering a generic context to interpret it. Such paratextual signals, particularly those described as “peritexts” by Genette, which include titles, chapter titles, prefaces, dedications, etc., assume a highly communicative function in the double-voiced discourse of parody and pastiche, serving to negotiate the parodied and the parodying voices. Specifically, paratextual elements which can serve as taxonomy markers of a parodic text undertake the double function of signaling the parodied genre and the parodying voice. The aim of this presentation is to analyze the double function of the peritext in parodic discourse in order to observe the refraction of the authorial voice through studying the paratextual constituents of Cervantes’s paradigmatic novel Don Quixote and the unique role they assume in the text. The study also suggests that some twentieth century parodic texts, like Julian Barnes’ novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, signal the presence of the parody through incorporating the authorial voice in the paratext to secure the “right” generic context for the reader.
Ruth Menzies, Aix-Marseille University, France, Ruth.Menzies@univ-amu.fr
Paratext and Context in 20th-Century Gulliveriana
The highly complex paratext to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) plunges the reader into an unsettling game in which the author toys with his audience’s expectations, introducing an ambiguous discourse on truth and reliability that both underpins and deliberately undermines the rest of the work. This paper examines how the authorial opportunities afforded by paratextual constructs are exploited by the writers of two twentieth-century examples of Gulliveriana, Matthew Hodgart in his 1969 sequel, A New Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms [… ], and Alison Fell in The Mistress of Lilliput (1999). In hypertextual writings such as these, the horizon of expectation is necessarily informed by the heredity of the modern texts. This paper sets out to determine the role played by these paratexts in defining author-reader relations, studying the ways in which each paratext interacts not only with the text it frames but also with the literary and historical context framing it. We will seek to establish how intertextual or hypertextual links with a canonic work such as Swift’s affect the function and performance of modern paratexts and how the latter relate to their Swiftian precursor.
Pierre Lurbe, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier, France, pierre.lurbe@univ-montp3
‘When paratext morphs into text’: John Toland's Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover (1705, 1706, 1714)
In 1701 and 1702, the Irish polygraph John Toland visited Prussia and Hanover in an official capacity, as a member of the diplomatic mission led by Lord Macclesfield to present the Electress Sophia with the Act of Settlement. The subsequent Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover was first published in 1705, complete with dedication (to the Duke of Somerset), preface, and appendix. A second, then a third edition of the Account were successively published in 1706 and 1714. In each case, the substance of the account as such was left intact, but the title-page was significantly altered, while the Appendix was twice substantially enlarged. The extent of the additions to the Appendix was such that it ended up no longer quite functioning as the paratext it claimed to be, but very much as a text in its own right, altering the balance of the entire book in the process. The aim of this paper is to look at the shifts in meaning entailed by the changing nature of the Account's paratext, and by the progressive blurring of the line between text and paratext.
Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, University of Wrocław, Poland, freeway.bohemia@gmail.com
Changing Paratextual Practices in Selected Editions of Contemporary Drama
While most of the published collections of modern drama are framed by a diversity of peritexts, some editions include epitextual material in the form of interviews. The opening paratexts often provide information in the capacity of what Genette defines as “the basic role of the preface”, modestly called “introduction”, though their content and function reveal a hybridity discussable in terms of either Genette's threshold or Foucault's heterotopos. The present paper argues, on the basis of sample material, that the more recent introductions, as opposed to the earlier ones, tend to become more personal and provide a paratextual surround which in liminal cases takes on the form of memoir. These paratexts do impart some information about the plays and their historical context but, more importantly, they engage in a dialogue with the main text by attaching the author to the text from which they traditionally erase themselves. Colette Gaudin uses the metaphor of umbilical cord between life (paratext) and work (1985, 36). It is this subtle dependence that the paper will try to explore, asking about the extent of the author’s endeavour to determine the reader's experience by promoting both the fictionality and the authenticity of the framed experience.
Jennifer K. Dick, University of Haute-Alsace, France, fragment78@gmail.com
Anne Carson: Paratext as first barrier—the whole landscape looks inside out
Anne Carson begins her books with paratexts that may stop readers, leaving them perplexed and uncertain, doubting whether they wish to go inside. This paper will introduce the underlying methodology to Carson’s seeming madness as she uses paratext in her title/subtitle combinations such as Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (announcing three mutually exclusive genres of writing—autobiography, poetry and fiction) to intercept and prevent entry, but also to maintain elements of traditional paratext use. Titles, faux interviews, prefaces and other paratexts complexify the central texts of her works. The dialogue between reader and author becomes a kind of dance where the dancers are drawn close and then pushed away, constantly seeking connection. This paper will also touch on the ways in which examining how Carson uses paratext is related to engagement in the reading process as well as to the notions that are a fundamental part of her works, including Keats’s “Negative Capability”, or philosophical inquiry such as Heidegger’s question of what it means to be or not to be “continuous” with the world. It will close with suggestions about how Carson’s paratext use announces a reader-involved process of creating the text itself.
Côme Martin, Paris-Sorbonne University, France, come.martin@gmail.com
Where Does Paratext Begin? The Cases of S., House of Leaves and Building Stories
Gérard Genette has famously defined a paratext as a threshold, “that by which a text becomes a book and offers itself as such to its readers (Seuils, 1987, p. 7). This definition, though simplistic, offers a good rule of thumb to determine what is part of a given diegesis and what is not. The question becomes more complicated with books that are explicitly looking to blur the limit between what is real and what is fictional, as is the case with Doug Dorst’s S. (2013) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). The paratext of those two books is very complicated to define, as the fictional diegesis arguably begins from their very covers, hence almost abolishing the notion of paratext. Hence, I would try to use them as a case study for a reflection on the status of paratext in post-modern literature, and on what constitutes a threshold in such experimental works. To expand my scope, I will also look at Chris Ware’s latest comic book, Building Stories (2012), in which the reader navigates from one part of the story to the next without a clear perception of the story’s boundaries.
SLITE15 Saturday 30.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A8
MODERN SCOTTISH DRAMA AND HISTORICAL MEMORY
Convenors:
Ian Brown, University of Kingston, UK, ijmbrown@hotmail.com
Daniele Berton-Charrière, Université Blaise Pascal, France, Daniele.BERTON@univ-bpclermont.fr
As Scotland’s September 2014 independence referendum approaches, an issue is “what constitutes Scotland?”, often called “an understated nation”. Plays, including McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off (1987) and Greig’s Dunsinane (2010), have addressed the constitution and mediation of Scottish historical memory and national/personal identities. This seminar addresses representation of historical memory in modern Scottish drama, whether as general theme, in individual playwrights’ oeuvre or in individual plays. Cross-generic papers contrasting issues of historical memory in the Scottish novel, poetry and/or song are also welcome.
Participants
Danièle Berton-Charrière, CERHAC Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France, Daniele.BERTON@univ-bpclermont.fr
Direct figuration and anamorphic representation in the dramatic and theatrical construction of Scottish memory and identity
The interest of Scottish playwrights in the historical figures and events land-marking the building of their nation seems to be idiosyncratic and widespread. Paradoxically deeply rooted in their past, and yet open to modernity and novelty, their works keep embedding such features or choosing them as key topics, allowing constant dialogical links between text and context, and creating intertwining trans-textual networks. Their dramatic pieces and stagings pay memorial tribute to the past, but they jointly represent the current construction of national and personal identity, through confrontation and tension, through nostalgia and no turning back. Scottish drama and theatre is complex, technical, referential and meta-discursive.
Based on a few examples, the study will try to show how these forms of direct figuration share the textual space with antagonistic anamorphic views and approaches. Both actors and spectators of their own lives and grounds, authors and characters give vent to subjective feelings and objective criticism, to affection and condemnation, through humour, satire and self-derision, the clash and fight between the Self and the Other turning into some observable free of bias introspective analysis.
Dilek Inan, Balikesir University, Turkey, dilekinan@hotmail.com
Representations of Scotland in David Greig’s Plays: Cultural Identity vs National Identity
In plays like Europe, The Architect, and The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, David Greig focuses on contemporary displacement and homelessness and a sense of detachment from the Scottish context. Despite the fact that many of his plays are set in Scottish settings, as in The Architect, The Cosmonaut, Victoria, Outlying Islands, etc., he belongs to a new generation of dramatists who suggest that they do not belong in Scotland in the way the nationalist myth puts forth. Greig admits that even if it is against their will, they are representing Scotland, even inventing it. Scotland is based on a geography of the imagination in his plays. He argues that playwrights introduce a ‘shape, order and insight’ into the world they live in when they inventively recreate this world. In order to present Scotland, which is in Greig’s words a damp, crabbit, northern country on the fringes of the continent, he holds a responsibility to expand the ways in which the country is conceptualized and understood. In each new play he expands the ‘living space’ of the nation by materializing another place. There is almost always a strong sense of ambiguity in Greig’s representations of the Scottish identity. Although many of his plays are set in the Scottish highlands, and he chooses to portray Scottish characters, Greig mainly urges that a more multicultural identity is necessary and crucial rather than a Scottishness that is fixed within a heroic past in which Scots were victimized by the English reign. Instead of dwelling on a nationalist identity he looks towards a multicultural continental Europe. Being critical of the territorial identifications, Greig emphasizes Scotland’s need to interact with a multicultural Europe. He disapproves of the manners of idealism and romanticism as an important part of the Scottish national identity. Instead of a national identity defined by borders, he is motivated by definitions of cultural identity in a rapidly changing globalized world and constructs a European Scottish culture and identity in his plays.
Gül Kurtuluş, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, kurtulus@bilkent.edu.tr
Patriotism, Morality and The Spirit of Macbeth’s Ambition in Dunsinane
David Greig’s Dunsinane is a play of irresolvable conflict, in which all parties aspire for the whole of the pie that is Scotland. Filled to the brim with war, deceit, and passion Dunsinane includes the topic of patriotism. Characters believe they are doing whatever it is they do for the sake of their country, whether it is England or Scotland. Siward, the English commander, sets his course in Dunsinane out of nothing but self-righteous patriotism, which soon leaves its place for power-driven ambition. Not for Siward per se, but for most of the characters, ambition is the driving force. They make use of their patriotic zeal as an excuse to wage and resume war. Thus, a colonial war against guerrilla movements forms the basis of the plot. English troops are in Scotland to install a new king who will re-establish order, and the soldiers loyal to the Scottish Queen Gruach, defending their land, are situated deep in woods, which presents them as similar to guerrilla ‘freedom fighters’. Patriotism is a very strong theme in Dunsinane that is accompanied with modern warfare, and the justification of it. The play is a modern sequel to Macbeth, and many of the characters have the spirit of Macbeth’s ambition breathed into them, so this paper attempts to compare the two plays in their take on the fine line between patriotism and ambition.
Ali Altun, Recep Tayyip Erdogan University, Rize, Turkey, alialtun07@gmail.com
In Search of National Identity: the Case of Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off
As one of the most prolific and distinguished figures in British literature, the Scottish writer Liz Lochhead has been dealing with issues concerning national identity, feminism and Scottishness in her plays and poems. Although she has produced many works on national identity and has been appreciated both by critics and audiences alike, she has not yet drawn enough attention of the world, due to the fact that Scottish literature has been overshadowed by mainstream English literature. This paper aims to show how she approaches the history of Scotland and national identity in her acclaimed play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, which takes the audiences back to sixteenth-century Britain. The play provides information about historical ties between Scotland and England through the characters of Mary and Elizabeth I. The playwright invites the audience to identify themselves with the Scottish characters and thus helps contribute to constitution and awareness of national identity. Moreover, the story of Mary in the play evokes not only personal issues, but also the issues of national identity. Given that there are plenty of discussions and much debate going on about the independence and national identity of Scotland these days, historical subjects treated in the play also seem to reverberate with relevant contemporary issues of national identity.
SLITE16 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 14.30–16.30 Room A3, (B) 17.00–18.30 Room A3
“THERE ARE BUT A HANDFUL OF STORIES IN THE WORLD”: J.M. COETZEE AND THE NON-ENGLISH LITERARY TRADITIONS
Convenors:
María J. López, University of Córdoba, Spain, ff2losam@uco.es
Kei Wiegandt, Freie Universität, Germany, kai.wiegandt@fu-berlin.de
This quote from J.M. Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel Lecture conveys the writer’s need to borrow stories from others; the fact that “if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old, then they must sit forever in silence”. Whereas research on Coetzee has concentrated on Coetzee’s English intertexts, we welcome papers that focus on the dialogue that Coetzee’s fictional and non-fictional works establish with literary traditions other than those of the English language. Accepted papers will be considered for publication after the conference.
Participants
Angelika Reichmann, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary, reichmanna@gmail.com
Possessed by the “Exhilarating Monster” of English Modernism J. M. Coetzee’s Reading of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg
In Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900–1930 Peter Kaye points out that with the publication of Constance Garnett’s translations in the 1910s “Dostoevsky was introduced as an exhilarating monster […] on the English horizon” (6). In the present paper I aim to explore the extent to which J. M. Coetzee’s reading of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg, a consistent rewriting of Devils (The Possessed in Garnett’s version), repeats this fundamental feature of Dostoevsky reception in English modernism. I argue that by recreating Dostoevsky as a paradoxical amalgam of his diametrically opposed fictional characters, by echoing some critical statements of such English modernists as D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, and by finally representing the veiled, though definitely monstrous figure (of Stavrogin) as emerging from Dostoevky’s mirror image, Coetzee re-examines Dostoevsky’s English modernist reception in a post-modernist context. Ironically, though, (demonic) possession, Coetzee’s Dostoevskian master-trope of reading and writing seems to be the most appropriate figure for his own relation to Dostoevsky’s works, too: central Dostoevskian themes, and especially allusions to Devils, feature in several of his novels.
Kata Gyuris, ELTE, Budapest, Doctoral School of Literature, gyuriskata@gmail.com
An Understanding with the Beast – Kafkaesque metamorphoses and the Colonial Other in J. M. Coetzee’s novels
Coetzee frequently enters into dialogue with European writers, including Kafka, whose grotesque atmosphere and moral he often retains in his stories. The presentation focuses on three of Kafka’s short stories (“The Metamorphosis”, “The Burrow”, “In the Penal Colony”), which have all made a lasting impact on at least two of Coetzee’s novels (Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace).
In Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari position Kafka as a representative of minor literature for his complicated heritage as a German-speaking Jew in Prague. The authors name three identifying features of minor literatures: firstly, the deterritorialization of language; secondly, their political concern; and thirdly, a need for collective representation. They further develop the idea that all “becomings”, including “becoming-animal” are actually “becoming-minoritarian”.
This “becoming-animal” is a fundamental part of Coetzee’s oeuvre, as it seems to pertain to the very depth and basic mechanisms of the (post)colonial situation. The presentation will seek to prove that Coetzee’s literary interest in stories of grotesque metamorphosis into animals and his turn towards the promotion of animal rights are indicative of an acute sense of otherness, and further show us that the Colonial Other resides precisely in Coetzee’s animals.
Donald Powers, Independent Researcher, Cape Town, donaldpowers1@gmail.com
Discontinuity in Autobiography: Benjamin, Barthes, Coetzee
If there are discontinuities between the work of Benjamin, Barthes, and Coetzee, there are strong continuities too, which this paper sets out to explore. In Inner Workings Coetzee describes how Benjamin’s autobiographical writings are “built out of discontinuous, intense moments” (50) and a “montage of fragments” (51) rather than continuous chronological narrative. Similarly, Roland Barthes’s autobiographical writings are marked by a relentless fragmentation and subversion of any settled self-image and -position. It is no surprise that both writers admired Brecht’s theatre for its episodic, disharmonious quality. In this paper, I want to draw connections between Benjamin, Barthes, and Coetzee for similarities in their techniques and ideas about life-writing. But I also want to emphasise how and why in Coetzee’s work the impulse towards interruption and discontinuity is held in tension with a strong pull towards coherence of the authorial figure and his life. In the course of my paper I will be focusing on various texts by Benjamin from Selected Writings, Barthes’s Roland Barthes, Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, Summertime, and Here and Now, and Kannemeyer’s 2012 biography of Coetzee.
Ottilia, Veres, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, veresottilia@gmail.com
The Story of Sinbad and the Old Man of the Sea in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, Foe and Life and Times of Michael K
In The Arabian Nights Sinbad’s story of the Old Man of the Sea gives account of the sailor’s fifth voyage when he encounters the monstrous Old Man who fastens on his back and would not let go and clings to him so that he cannot shake him off, riding him day and night until Sinbad would welcome death. I consider Sinbad’s story of crucial interest in Coetzee’s novels in that it introduces a fundamental motif and trope of his novels: the motif of carrying another on one’s back. The motif has an emphatic significance in the colonial context because it clearly evokes the ambiguous colonial scene of the ‘white man’s burden.’ The scene of carrying another on one’s back actually takes place in Dusklands, in Jacobus’ narrative, and is also invoked by Susan in Foe as a ‘simile’ referring to and representing her relationship with Friday, and then again the story appears in Michael K, portraying the burdensome mother-son relationship. The presence of Sinbad’s story in these novels raises the problem of the ethical interest of Coetzee’s novels and is significant because it wants us to consider what happens when the reliable dialectic of master and slave begins to fail.
Fernando Galván, University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain, fernando.galvan@uah.es
Fictionalising the Writer: Coetzee versus Borges
One of the most usual metafictional devices employed by J.M. Coetzee in his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, is the figure or persona of the author. Readers and critics have felt somewhat confused when trying to interpret who speaks in some novels or in some of the (conventionally labelled) autobiographical writings, such as Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year, Boyhood, Youth, or Summertime, and even in some of his essays and interviews (in Stranger Shores or Doubling the Point, among others). The use of the third person, the present tense, the terms “autrebiography” and “confession”, or references to “John”, “John Coetzee”, or “Señor C.”, have provoked a variety of readings (Attridge, Attwell, Boehmer or Kossew, just to mention a few). The aim of this paper is to discuss the process of fictionalisation of the writer in these works in the light of what Borges said and wrote about himself through the persona of “Borges” or “the blind poet”. My basic contention is that Coetzee is echoing Borges’s self-projections in these books, and wondering about himself, as he put it in Stranger Shores, “which Borges is real, which is the other in the mirror”.
Gillian Dooley, Flinders University, South Australia, gillian.dooley@flinders.edu.au
’Hades this place, and I a fugitive shade’: Classical cultures and languages in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron
Elizabeth Curren, in Coetzee’s Age of Iron, is a retired Classics lecturer. Greek and Roman mythology, and Latin and Ancient Greek, are part of her consciousness. Several critics have discussed Mrs Curren’s humanistic, enlightenment sensibility, shaped by a liberal education which has come to be seen by many as irrelevant in the South Africa of the novel, and which therefore functions as a symbol of the marginalisation of western liberal culture in Africa. Other critics have pointed out the importance of Christian and biblical discourse in the novel. Latin, in the form of phrases taken from the Vulgate and the Catholic liturgy as well as from classical texts, is woven through the texture of Mrs Curren’s consciousness: her mode of thought and expression tends to the etymological and the allusive. In this presentation I will consider the part these two discourses, classical and biblical, seemingly incompatible in some ways and overlapping in others, play in shaping the character of Mrs Curren. I will consider how the Latin language in her internal monologue and speech mediates her interactions with other characters and her reactions to particular events in the novel.
Valeria Mosca,
Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy, valeriamosca@alice.it
Ideas and Embodied Souls: J. M. Coetzee’s Platonic and Christian Intertexts
Both J. M. Coetzee’s latest book, The Childhood of Jesus, and his collections of ‘fictionalized’ lectures or essays such as Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year have been described as ‘novels of ideas’, philosophical debates staged in fiction. Along with various references to different novelistic traditions, these works do in fact display more or less explicit Platonic intertexts that criticism does not often take into account. Platonic dialogism intertwines blatantly with Christian references from the Gospels in The Childhood of Jesus; a closer look at Elizabeth Costello reveals similar features. My analysis aims at exploring this intertextual intersection between novelistic traditions, Christian references and Platonic format according to recent, ‘Bakhtinian’ developments in Plato studies: if the Dialogues are not mere ‘display cases’ for ideas and doctrines, but rather artistic forms in their own right, can any truth at all be found in the dramatic polyphony they stage? Such a question may contribute to the theoretical discourse stemming from Coetzee’s philosophical fiction: is intertextuality a matter of ‘mere’ stories, or does it also involve the format that is chosen to tell them? Is one to derive any authorial or authoritative voice from them? Do ideas end when stories begin?
SLITE17 Saturday 30.8.2014 17.15–18.45 Room A8
WALTER SCOTT AND THE SHAPING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOVEL
Convenors:
Ian Brown, Kingston University, London, UK, ijmbrown@hotmail.com
David Clark, Universidade da Coruña, Spain, dclark@udc.es
2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Walter Scott's Waverley, a sensation on its appearance. Scott's subsequent career as a novelist shaped the nature of the novel and his influence, often now deeply embedded and equally often neglected, has been fundamental to the establishment of the modern novel as a genre, not only in Europe but also in the rest of the world. This seminar invites papers not only on Scott's novels but on the development of the nineteenth-century novel in English, particularly with regard to the influence of – or reaction against – Scott's pioneering example.
Participants
Alev Karaduman, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, karaduman@hacettepe.edu.tr
Medievalism in the Victorian Novel: Sir Walter Scott’s Interest in Medieval Ideals
Medievalism is a term that refers to a social phenomenon in which there is a great interest in the history of medieval times and especially in the period’s value system. Victorian medievalism is the reproduction and reinvention of medieval literature, themes and ideals in the nineteenth century. One of the basic reasons for this interest in medieval themes and ideas was Queen Victoria. Her ascension to the throne in 1837 encouraged the development of the ideal of chivalry; Queen Victoria and Prince Albert consciously invoked chivalric structures to frame Victoria's power. The political impact of Victorian medievalism is unquestionable; the expansion of the British Empire caused feelings of disorientation and alienation for many British citizens. By reverting to their medieval roots, the Victorians created a much more coherent sense of national history, identity and destiny. Similarly, England's increasing industrialization, accompanied by increasing pollution and poverty, engendered a deep longing for a return to a pastoral, pre-industrial ideal, and, for many Victorians, the Middle Ages seemed a perfect source of cherished ideals and values and, hence, for such an ideal. In order to preserve their medieval heritage, Victorian writers also rewrote and revived their past through their novels. They engaged with many aspects of the Middle Ages, including chivalry, the Crusades, the Vikings, the Robin Hood ballads and the legends of King Arthur. One of these writers was Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), who used medieval chivalric elements in his historical novels, especially in Ivanhoe (1812), which is prominent with its medieval concepts and issues. Thus, the major aim of this paper is to analyse the use of medievalism in the Victorian novel with reference to Sir Walter Scott’s novels.
Jean Berton, Université de Toulouse II, le Mirail, France, jam.berton@wanadoo.fr
Emulating Scott: or how a French imitator published a novel, Aymé Verd, (1842) in imitation of Quentin Durward (1823)
The author Auguste Callet — who had already published a pastiche of Woodstock in 1840, Allan Caméron — enjoyed the raging Scott mania of the 1820s (and beyond) because he was making shameless profit from Scott’s novels. This paper will engage in a brief comparative study of Aymé Verd (1842) and Quentin Durward. It follow this by exploring the outcome of the Scott craze which was then developing in France and questions the concepts of imitation, forgery, pastiche, parody and envy.
Ian Brown, Kingston University, London, ijmbrown@hotmail.com
The impact of adaptation of Scott’s novels for the stage
Very soon after the appearance of the first of Walter Scott’s novels, they were adapted for the stage. Throughout the nineteenth century such adaptations constituted the core of the ‘National Drama’, a mainstay of Scottish theatre of that century. In parallel, as his novels took continental Europe by storm, so composers were attracted to his novels as the sources of plots and characters for operas, including Lucia di Lammermoor and The Fair Maid of Perth. This paper considers the history of such stage adaptation and what it reveals about the interaction of his novels and the nineteenth century theatre. In particular, it argues that the ways in which Scott used dialogue and the dramatic in his novel writing influenced later novelists in the nineteenth century.
SLITE18 Sunday 31.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A8
EDWIN MORGAN AND THE PROSPECT OF SCOTLAND
Convenors:
Alan Riach, University of Glasgow, UK, Alan.Riach@glasgow.ac.uk
Silke Stroh, University of Muenster, Germany, Silke.Stroh@uni-muenster.de
In Sonnets from Scotland (1984), Edwin Morgan envisioned a national history and potential which has increasingly urgent political application as the referendum on independence approaches in 2014. His poem on the Scottish parliament (2004) stressed connections between literary, cultural and political vitality. This seminar considers the place of poetry in national self-imagining, national self-realisation and continuing critical awareness. We welcome papers examining Morgan's work in the national context, his relation with his poetic precedent Hugh MacDiarmid, his legacy to contemporary writers, and international connections through his translations from European literatures and through North and South American concrete and postmodern influences.
Participants
David Kinloch, University of Strathclyde, Great Britain, d.p.kinloch@strath.ac.uk
Edwin Morgan’s Orientations
This paper will present a personal view of Morgan by a contemporary Scottish poet who was his student at Glasgow University and who has subsequently engaged with his work both poetically and academically. It will argue that his ‘prospect of Scotland’ becomes clearer if viewed from the perspective of the orient, understood as place, ideological construct and – ultimately – not as a noun but as a galvanising verb. The paper will range widely over his work in an attempt to gauge the nature of the ‘orientations’ that enabled him to forge a distinctively Scottish poetics.
Pilar Somacarrera, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, pilar.somacarrera@uam.es
“Dear merry man, what is your country now?” Cosmopolitan concerns and nationalism in Edwin Morgan’s poetry
As the 2014 referendum about Scottish independence approaches, a discussion of whether Scottish culture can be considered postcolonial or studied in the framework of postcolonial theory becomes more relevant than ever. Morgan’s commitment to nationalism does not limit itself to his bequest of almost 1,000,000 pounds to the SNP, but permeates his entire poetic career, especially his collections From Glasgow to Saturn (1973) and Sonnets from Scotland (1984). Morgan not only hopes for an independent Scotland, but, as Roderick Watson explains, also for a cosmopolitan one. The “third planet” in “The First Men on Mercury” echoes Bhabha’s “third space,” the place where newness enters the world. The Mercurians and the Earth Men speak a pidgin, a hybrid language for communication between speakers who do not share a common language. Therefore, following Cairns Craig, Scotland is a hybrid space characterized, in Alan Riach’s words, by affinity across difference. I will demonstrate how in Morgan’s poetry (especially Sonnets from Scotland) Scotland projects its national identity “outward bound” through cosmopolitanism because cultural proximities shape the notion of the self, which – following Lévinas’s argument – must integrate the Other.
John Corbett, University of Macau, JCorbett@umac.mo
Words and Games: Edwin Morgan and the Brazilians
In the early 1960s, Edwin Morgan discovered the concrete poetry of the ‚Noigrandes‘ movement, and began corresponding with two Brazilian poets, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos. He also began translating their poetry for publication in anthologies of concrete poetry in English, and in smaller journals. From the 1960s, through the 1990s, Morgan continued to write to the brothers, and he sent them inscribed copies of his selected and collected translations, and pamphlets and collections of his own poetry, mainly in the concrete mode. This paper considers how his direct engagement with the work of the Brazilian concretistas shaped Morgan's own experimental poetry. Always interested in experimental forms, Morgan found in his translations of the Brazilian source texts principles of reading and writing visual and aural poetry that he would later apply to his own work. The paper shows in detail how these principles and techniques can be transferred from Morgan's translations to his original poetry, and, in consequence, how Morgan's enthusiastic adoption of concrete poetry placed him in a social network of avant garde writers that extended beyond national boundaries, and brought him into conflict with writers of the previous generation.
Aniela Korzeniowska, University of Warsaw, Poland, a.korzeniowska@uw.edu.pl
Edwin Morgan’s Pre- and Post-Devolution Presence in Poland
Of concern here is the confrontation between Edwin Morgan’s unquestionable position as Scotland’s official first Poet Laureate after Devolution, his own widespread interest in and extensive knowledge of matters not only Scottish, his translations pointing to his involvement in world literature, and his curious position on the Polish literary and academic scene before and after 1999.
When looking more closely at Morgan’s presence in Poland, it is interesting to discover that as a poet he first appeared here in translation in 1982. Then throughout the 1990s very limited selections of his poetry would occasionally see the light of day, mainly promoted by Polish translator Andrzej Szuba and the journal Literatura na świecie. His poetry, among others, was discussed for the first time by Jerzy Jarniewicz in the same journal in 1992.
However, since entering the new millennium, there appears to have been an interesting shift from Morgan as a poet in translation to Morgan’s oeuvre being presented in conference papers and the occasional doctoral dissertation. Hence the intriguing question why one of Scotland’s greats is still only known to a very small readership both within and outwith the Polish academic world.
Alan Riach, University of Glasgow, Alan.Riach@glasgow.ac.uk
Edwin Morgan: Change Rules
Morgan's principled commitment to multiple identities and the various voices of personae, clever experimentation of all kinds, and translations from a wide range of languages, was the rule of his poetry from its earliest examples through to Sonnets from Scotland (1984), and at the beginning of the 21st century, in Love and a Life (2003), the ‚autobiographical, candid‘ Morgan presented himself in full strength and vulnerability. Three other works of this millennial transition are crucial: Demon (1999), A.D. A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Jesus Christ (2000) and The Play of Gilgamesh (2005). In considering these works in an overview of the trajectory of Morgan's achievement, what is central becomes increasingly clear: the matter of Scotland, the virtues of the independent nation state Morgan so emphatically endorsed, both in directly financial terms and in his poetry. This paper explores these changing rules of Morgan's work, as it demonstrates not only that ‚change‘ is what rules us all, nor that ‚rules‘ are things that must be changed, but also that rules and change are reciprocal principles, always in balance of some kind, for better or worse, and in Scotland, for Morgan, in need of redress.
SLITE19 CANCELLED
LIZ LOCHHEAD AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JOURNEY
Convenors:
M. Jean Berton, Universite de Toulouse II, France, jam.berton@wanadoo.fr
Anne Varty, University of London, UK, a.varty@rhul.ac.uk
In 2012 Liz Lochhead published “My Favourite Place” in which she describes her journey from Glasgow to Loch Uig. Conveying an enriched sense of place, the poem is also a journey into memory, into love, into mourning, and it stretches the idea of home. In a period when Scotland reconfigures its political and cultural identity, this seminar opens consideration of the figure of the journey in Lochhead’s work, both her theatre and her poetry. It invites papers on this theme in its broadest sense, to include geographical travel, identity and the sense of place, transgression, trespass, memory, linguistic difference, political union and fragmentation, perspectives of distance or proximity.
SLITE20 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 14.30–16.30 Room A2, (B) 17.00–18.30 Room A2
THE UNEXPECTED IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S FICTION
Convenors:
Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France, paccaud.josiane@orange.fr
Claude Maisonnat, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France, Claude.maisonnat@univ-lyon2.fr
Wieslaw Krajka, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland,
wieslaw.krajka@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl
“It is always the unexpected that happens,“ Marlow muses in Lord Jim. In Conrad’s texts, the unexpected is at least disruptive, often traumatic. A trivial object, an insignificant event or character crops up, and the course of reality is undone. The symbolic order is shaken at its roots, the truth is glimpsed. One occurrence of the unexpected won’t make the protagonist wiser, however, there is no ready-made answer. How does Conrad’s fiction deal with the contingent, the traumatic? If we follow Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the contemporary writer always takes us by surprise, how does Conrad remain our contemporary in this respect?
Participants
Joanna Skolik, The University of Opole, Poland, jskolik@uni.opole.pl
“It shouldn't have been like that.....” between the reasons and results: unexpected consequences of protagonists' conscious choices.
In my paper I would like to have a look at the consequences of conscious choices made by Conrad's protagonists. It occurs that they never bring what was previously expected, the result of such a conscious choice is always unexpected; as if the writer wanted to prove that the saying “if you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans…” is absolutely true. Conrad's characters who plan their future in detail and foresee their own success – fail. Conrad shows that a man who has only his own good in mind cannot really succeed, only those who realise their moral obligations, who think about others, are “the winners”. They find the meaning of their life as well as their place on the earth. Sometimes a deed which seems to be meaningless turns out to be essential for the whole life of the hero. Conrad proves that following Rousseau’s vision of a natural man does not guarantee a success, only following the Pindarian formula “became who you are” gives a chance for a success. However, in Conrad’s works even success is perceived differently, namely Conradian successes can look as if they were failures; they prove to be what they really are in the course of events.
I would like to discuss “the unexpected” in A Personal Record, Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and Youth.
Wiesław Krajka, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin Poland, wieslaw.krajka@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl
The Unexpected as Magic in Karain: A Memory
The plot of Conrad’s short story “Karain: A Memory” is made of a series of unexpected events: Pata Matara’s sister’s elopement with a Dutchman, Karain’s shot at Matara (instead of at the Dutchman), Karain becoming the absolute ruler of his foothold of land, his acts of unrest amidst such absolute power, the constant company of the Malay sword-bearer, Karain’s deep crisis after his death, the action of his white friends resulting in restoration of Karain’s peace of mind, his return to his ‘kingdom” and restoration of his former power; indeed in this short story Conrad constantly takes the reader by surprise. All these unexpected events are disruptive and deeply traumatic for the protagonist; they shake his symbolic order. Through presenting such sequence of events the truth about Karain’s psyche is glimpsed. And finally there comes in this story a trivial object, a coin, a gilt Jubilee sixpence, and it is presented to Karain through an act of magic-making in his seemingly insignificant meeting with his white friends on their schooner. Through this object and this event the course of Karain’s reality is not undone but done. Perhaps this occurrence of the unexpected does make the protagonist wiser? Perhaps it provides a ready-made answer to his crisis and anguish?
Armella Panajoti University of Vlora “Ismail Qemali”, Albania, armelap@assenglish.org
Heads or Tails: The Absurdist Fate of Kayerts and Carlier in “An Outpost of Progress”
In “An Outpost of Progress” the trivial sugar episode, although described as an unexpected burst of anger, results in the fatalistic death of the pair. Featured in a wasteland-like setting, Kayerts and Calier follow a fate which almost reaches the level of the absurd. The pair anticipates in many ways other famous duos in literature and cinema, from Laurel and Hardy to the famous absurdist duos of Vladimir and Estragon, Ben and Gus or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. One can recognize in them aspects of each of these pairs – the clownish descriptions applying to them, their incompetence, dependence upon each other, idleness, the pervasive irony and also their tragic and trivial end.
In this paper I want to argue that the story obeys absurdist logic, most notable in its presentation of characters, the deterministic context and the somewhat unusual minimalism of details. As such, the dice is cast from the very beginning for Kayerts and Carlier, and the unexpected simply boosts its happening towards its previsioned end in the same way that Vladimir and Estragon, despite their long waiting, never meet Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern resign to their foreseen death, and Ben ends up pointing his gun at his friend Gus.
Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, Université Lyon 2, France, josiane.paccaud-huguet@univ-lyon2.fr
The Unexpected in Lord Jim: Catastrophe, Catharsis, Catalysis
Among Conrad’s novels, Lord Jim is one that presents a high degree of unexpectedness: from the barque of pitch pine that alters the course of the Patna which, contrary to all expectations, doesn’t sink, through Jim’s unpredictable responses to the demands of the heroic ideal, to the disruption produced by a trivial remark like “Look at that wretched cur!” or by Gentleman Brown’s arrival in Patusan.
Marlow himself notes that he is subject to the kind of chance which causes him “to run up against men with soft spots” like Jim, who take him as the target for their “infernal confidences”. The unexpected, then, is the source of catastrophe – for the self, for the ideal, for the group: a manifestation of the Real of jouissance that tears through the symbolic fabric. But it is also the catalyst for an unforeseen event: the intimate “talking cure” that goes on between Marlow and Jim in parallel with the public trial. Marlow’s part here, however, is not that of a confessor, a silent presence allowing the cathartic purification of passions and the reassertion of the symbolic. He is, as has often been noted, a partner, someone who takes part in a process of revelation that will take him from surprise to surprise – including about himself.
Unlike sublimation, catalysis is a chemical reaction in which the catalysing element – the unexpected – is not consumed by the reaction: the “toxic” agent somehow remains, slightly transformed in the “final” product. If we transpose this to Conrad’s fiction, we shall see how the unexpected revelation about the infernal jouissance that has caused Jim’s undoing, produces a powerful element in the new novelistic alchemy; this agent is no other than the unspeakable which ultimately becomes the reader’s partner in the Conradian universe.
Nathalie Martinière, Université de Limoges, France, nmartinière@gmail.com
Exploring the Unexpected with Marlow in Conrad’s Fiction
“It is always the unexpected that happens,” says Marlow ironically in Lord Jim about Jim’s naive narration of what happened to him on the Patna. Yet, Conrad’s novels are not exactly traditional action-packed adventure novels in which the reader turns the pages in search of constant new developments. In the stories narrated by Marlow, the unexpected, what is unanticipated, is systematically presented by Marlow as the thing to be most feared as it destroys the characters’ fragile balance and threatens the meaningful construction of their lives.
The “unexpected” does not, however, have the same meaning and value for character, narrator and reader: the collision and what follows is unexpected for Jim only, as the reader has been prepared for something decisive through the form of the narration and quantities of signs retrospectively deciphered and pointed out by Marlow. Besides, what is really unexpected (traumatic) and unacceptable for Jim is his shameful reaction. The blank in his speech (“I had jumped … it seemed”) reveals that “unexpected” in this case is synonymous with “unsayable/unspeakable.” “Unspeakable” is also the definition of the “unexpected” in Heart of Darkness as Marlow is the witness of a series of horrors whose nature and extent he had not anticipated. If Jim and Kurtz are defeated and eventually reduced to silence by their confrontation with the unexpected, it is not the case for Marlow, who manages to keep its destructive influence at bay by putting words onto it, thus giving shape to what is beyond representation for the characters and turning it into a story which may be “inconclusive” but which nevertheless appears as an act of resistance – “I am the voice that cannot be silenced,” Marlow says.
I would like to study how, contrary to what his declaration to Jim would have us think, Marlow takes the “unexpected” as a serious question that largely defines his attitude, role and ethics as narrator. Migrating from story to story, he seems to be on a quest, constantly looking for the decisive moments when man is confronted with his fate, which is also the moment when Marlow finds his voice and his motivation: while characters like Jim and Kurtz cannot process the “unexpected,” he, as narrator, is the main figure of resistance to its overpowering influence. For that reason, Conrad’s choice of Marlow makes it possible for him to represent the traumatic effects of the “unexpected” (through fragmentation of the narrative voice, disruption of chronology, repetition, etc.) while preserving their impact for the reader.
Claude Maisonnat , Université Lyon 2, France, claude.maisonnat@univ-lyon2.fr
Shame, the Contingent and the Traumatic in “Falk”
In this short story Conrad weaves an intricate plot in which Falk’s cannibalistic act is at the origin of the trauma that triggers off the whole, almost incredible, sequence of events, based on the conventional pattern of “delayed decoding” that is the hallmark of Conrad’s narrative strategies. The readers’ suspension of disbelief is stretched to the utmost as the revelation of the truth about the initial trauma is postponed, so that Falk’s personal, social and commercial behaviour remains enigmatic. One of the keys to the story is the repressed feeling of shame which Falk reverses into arrogance. Shame arises from the critical gaze of the other, so that Falk perceives himself as a blot on the landscape, which explains his desire for inclusion manifested by his several attempts at finding a wife. However, in the story the gaze is mostly mediated through language, as Hermann’s squeamishness, Falk’s distrust of words, and Schomberg’s gossip amply testify. Conrad makes the most of his characters’ complex relationship to language to dramatize his own doubts about his mastery of the English language thereby introducing through his unidentified narrator a distant metafictional dimension to the story.
Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska, Cardinal Wyszynski University, Warsaw, a.szczepanwojnarska@uksw.edu.pl
Mrs. Shomberg’s effect
Schomberg’s wife, being the most insignificant character in the Conrad’s novel “Victory”, plays the crucial role in the turn of events. Her action, however it might be perceived as accidental, reveals undoubtedly that Mrs. Schomberg took her chance only to express her own personality and to take care of her own interest. The same pattern is followed later on by Lena. The reader’s encounter with the unexpected in this regard proves Conrad’s mastery of the writing craft. Reflection on “Victory” leads me to the hypothesis that female protagonists are embodied unexpectedness that serve as the tools of destiny. The heroines excluded from logocentric order set by the ruling men’s power are expected to act according to the paradigm created for them. Their behaviour, words and actions are not understood at all if they differ from the stereotypes. Men only possess the right to differ; a woman who differs breaks the rule, and that is unexpected. The relation of ‘being expected to’ is built on the presumption of being subordinated, and therefore any glimpse of independence surprises. In Conrad’s fiction one may find many examples of feminine unexpectedness that is not assessed, nor condemned, but rather humbly admitted by the author to be a significant factor of reality.
Brigyda Pudelko, The University of Opole, Poland, bpudelko@uni-opole.pl
The Ultimate Measure of a Man in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Conrad’s “The Warrior’s Soul”
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy, and nobody can really tell what a person’s character is until you observe them in a challenging situation.
Most of the space in “The Warrior’s Soul”, which is devoted to moving descriptions of the wretched and bloody retreat of the remnants of the French army in the crossing of the Beresina, with the Cossacks at their heels “cutting down galvanized corpses that didn’t care”, is analogous to Tolstoy’s presentation of the French army moving away in War and Peace.
In War and Peace Tolstoy, sometimes sympathetically and often sarcastically, illustrates how men, inwardly trembling, outwardly strut their courage on the battlefield to win medals and fame. While debunking romantic heroism, however, he strove to replace it with “true” courage. In defining courage Tolstoy drew much on Plato, whose dialogues he read in French translations of Victor Cousin. Following Plato’s notion that for the brave man, duty – what one should do – overrides what is really fearful, Tolstoy observed that courage required a mixture of true knowledge and steadfastness. Defined as steadfastness, courage for Tolstoy is the natural resistance of the spirited human individual to fearful things, the most formidable of which is death. Anger and shame, feelings aroused when a soldier is physically threatened or humiliated, ignite the spark of heroism. On one hand, then, true courage requires knowledge, both of what is fearful, and also of when we should stand and fight. On the other hand, the real test of courage on the battlefield begins only when a man recognizes that he may be killed at any moment, and despite this endures.
So, who is truly courageous in Tolstoy’s novel and Conrad’s story? For Tolstoy, it is, for example, Lavruska Denisov, who knows the true enemy, cowardice, and challenges death in full knowledge of its arbitrary power. He believes that he cannot control his fate on the battlefield, and this fatalism liberates him to behave bravely. In Conrad’s story the Christian concept of a benevolent universe and the chivalric conception of honour are shown to be rendered futile. The grotesque irony is that Tomassov must be a Cain figure killing his “brother”. The “man of honour” who had once sworn De Castel to command his life, paid his “debt a hundredfold” with “one liberating shot”i releasing him “from a fate worse than death – the loss of all faith and courage.”.
What is interesting, is that for both Tolstoy in War and Peace and Conrad in “The Warrior’s Soul” honour, that essentially human virtue, as well as courage which is the “pure courage” – candid, humble, modest, serene, spontaneous, full of decency; and not that brilliant courage – bravoure de gentilhomme, of which vanity is the only motive – are virtues that both great writers exert themselves to find and show to the reader.
Monika Majewska, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland, m.majewska@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl
Following the Wolf in “Prince Roman”: Conrad and Tolstoy
But for Stephen Brodsky, who in his article “Saint Roman: Memory, Myth and History in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Prince Roman’” put a spotlight on the wolf appearing in Conrad’s tale, I would not have probably embarked on close reading of the story, not to mention writing about it, for I thought it offered no revelation. Following the wolf, as it transpired, meant facing the unexpected.
The focus on the wolf made me pose the question as to the (possibly) Dostoevskian layers of Conrad’s tale, but it also provided a stimulus to consider it in the context of Tolstoy’s oeuvre – though in the latter case, I have to admit, the wolf and I were moving in a somewhat zigzag fashion.
The most obvious counterpart of “Prince Roman”(1911) as far as Tolstoy’s fiction is concerned is What For? (1906; Za shto?), for both texts are set in the times of the Polish November Rising of 1830–1831 against Russia. Unique when viewed in the context of Conrad’s fictional writings because of its open dealing with Poland and Poles, “Prince Roman” presents the reader with the eponymous hero serving as “a religio-patriotic icon symbolic of Poland’s suffering,” as Brodsky has it. Tolstoy’s text, in turn, stands out in Russian literature due to its scathing indictment of the oppressive measures implemented by Nicholas I against Poles, whom the writer views sympathetically, as the victims of Russian politics.
I hope the adoption of “What For?” as the main contextualization for “Prince Roman” will yield interesting results, pointing to new areas of research into Conrad’s relation with Russian writers and his notion of Polishness.
SLITE 21 Sunday 31.8.2014 16.00–17.30 Room A2
CANADIAN LITERATURE IN A MULTI-CENTRIC WORLD
Convenors:
Michelle Gadpaille, University of Maribor, Slovenia, michelle.gadpaille@uni-mb.si,
Vesna Lopicic, University of Nis, Serbia, lovevuk@gmail.com
Theorist Slavoj Žižek has claimed that we inhabit a “multicentric world.” What does this mean for contemporary English Canadian literature? The panel invites papers on Canadian literary multiculturalism in the context of the de-centering of cultural production and the eclipse of conventional gatekeepers of cultural prestige. Potential topics are as follows:
Literary prizes and power redistribution
Multiculturalism and the dissolution of literary Canadian-ness
Electronics and de-centered literary production
Becoming Canadians: The educational and cultural profile of the new second generation of immigrants
Participants
Monica Bottez, University of Bucharest, Hungary, monibott@yahoo.com
(Canadian) Multiculturalism in the 21st Century
The paper sets out to discuss the European retreat from multiculturalism presented in Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (eds)’s volume Toward Assimilation and Citizenship (2003) against the contrary opinion put forth in Will Kymlicka’s Multiculturalism: Success, Failure and the Future (2012), also taking into account the threats that terrorism poses to this policy, as they are exposed in Stewart Bell’s book The Martyr's Oath: The Apprenticeship of a Homegrown Terrorist (2005) and his article “The spillover effect: Canadian diasporas and terrorism” (2009).
Natalia Kaloh Vid, University of Maribor, Slovenia, natalia.vid@siol.net
Canadian literature across the ocean: translations in the Soviet Union and in Russia
The process of literary selection is always a creative act: the selections collectively build an image of a culture that reflects the selector's own ideas of how that culture should represent itself. There are two main criteria for translating Canadian literature in modern Russia: the English language of the original and prestigious literary awards. Thus, the literature of English-speaking Canada has almost completely eclipsed Quebec literature, represented nowadays mainly by Nadine Bismuth. Among other Canadian authors translated into Russian between 2000 and 2008 are Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Douglas Copeland, Leonard Cohen, Nancy Huston, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, Rebecca Godfrey and Charles de Lint.
In my presentation I will explore how the Russians, like the Canadians, have been seeking a literature to give shape to national consciousness and to create a sense of national self. To this end, I will compare the choice of Canadian authors in the Soviet Union and in modern Russia.
Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, marie-anne.hansen@uni.lu
“Liliane Welch: A Canadian-European poet – Poetry as a vector of identity construction”
Liliane Welch’s life (1937–2010) and work are truly ‘multi-centric’, not in the political sense that Žižek had in mind, but revealing a number of strong cultural and linguistic centres that evolved in the course of her life. Her writing reflects mobility and participation in several communities, thus raising questions, mostly in relation to creative processes, identity construction and the reception of a poet’s work.
This paper aims to show that her relations to each of these centres revolve around particular spaces, include remarkable people she has met and encompass literary texts to which she responds in her own writings. It appears that poetry becomes for Welch a dynamic means of cultural identity construction. I will argue that from the mid-seventies onwards Canada remained the core of her life and writing, against which she could gauge views and values, but that this Canadian centre has become particularly enriched by a complex and multifaceted additional Italian centre that has significantly marked her poetic creation. The examples should show that, very much like the memoirs and auto-fiction of immigrants, poetry can provide significant insights into the creative energies of immigrant / migrant writers who feel close to several cultures and languages.
Judit Molnár, University of Debrecen, Hungary, judit.molnar@arts.unideb.hu
Space and Memory Construction in Robert Majzels’ A City of Forgetting
Montreal, with its literatures written in French, English and many other languages, is one of Canada’s multi-centric literary worlds. Robert Majzel’s City of Forgetting (1997) is a representative example of the city novel, a genre that is part of the Anglo literary revival that Montreal has been enjoying since the 1990s. The novel under discussion focuses on the metropolis’s “dystopic urban landscape” (Domenic Beneventi). My intention is to show the unique ways the varied homeless characters, who belong to different times and places, and who have radically different cultural backgrounds as well, relate themselves to the multifarious cityscape. Majzels’s text reconfigures the urban vision of Montreal while demonstrating how the different historical-fictional characters, such as Le Corbusier, Che Guevara, Karl Marx etc. situate themselves in the city. The multi-layered text is full of spatial references; the reader walks the city together with the flâneurs and the flâneuses listening to the cacophony of the international city that Montreal has grown into. I shall illustrate how the image of the ideal city and the dark side of cosmopolitanism reflect upon each other.
SLITE 22 Sunday 31.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A6
INTERDISCIPLINARY DICKENS
Convenors:
Dominic Rainsford, University of Aarhus, Denmark, dominic.rainsford@hum.au.dk
Soňa Šnircová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, sona.snircova@upjs.sk
Thanks to the recent growth in attention to Dickens’s non-fictional writings, as well as to increasingly sophisticated readings of his fiction, we are beginning to appreciate that he was keenly aware of many of the intellectual currents of his time. This seminar will explore this inter-connectedness further. We invite papers that show Dickens’s interest in philosophy, economics, psychology, historiography, ethnography, the natural sciences, technology, medicine or any other field of empirical or theoretical research.
Participants
Aleksandra Kędzierska, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland, corioola@gmail.com
Recycled Lives: The tales of the shops in Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz.
In his introduction to Sketches by Boz (1835–7), Dennis Walder emphasizes Dickens’s awareness of “the instability of people’s lives”, linking this possibility of imminent crisis with the symbolic image of the door of the pawnbroker’s shop. Standing “always doubtfully, a little way open, half inviting, half repelling” (SB 144), it tempts potential customers to confront the unknown and perhaps even outsmart the spirit of mischance. Based on five essays from the collection: Shops and their Tenants, Brokers' and Marine-store Shops, The Pawnbrokers' Shop, as well as Seven Dials and Meditations in Monmouth Street, this paper, examining a motif of recycling, intends to address Dickens’s preoccupation with commerce. A depressing, somewhat ironic reflection of prosperity of London at the outset of Victorian era, the shops in the Sketches offer their tale of woe: a tale about the triumph of objects which, unlike people, have been given another – second or even third – life to live and which, becoming extensions and/or substitutes of persons, illustrate the worst aspects of dehumanization. Additionally, the paper will demonstrate how Boz’ ‘recycling poetics’, evident in his use of such devices as hyperbolae, enumeration, prosopopoeia and repetition, enhance the narrator’s marketing strategies, at the same time helping him to handle the trauma of poverty by preserving memory of those reduced to garbage.
Loredana Salis, Univesity of Sassari, Italy, lsalis@uniss.it
Hopeless cases? Dickens, mendacity and medical earnestness
It is a peculiarity of Dickens's oeuvre that it offers readers long, detailed and fairly entertaining, if not thought-provoking, descriptions. Illnesses and accidents are central to numerous and meticulous accounts; their accuracy certainly displaying this writer's intelligence and interest for medical matters. In a pioneering essay on the topic, which appeared in The British Medical Journal in 1924, Charles Stracham investigated ‚the medical knowledge of Charles Dickens‘, and there he concluded that the author of Great Expectations possessed ‚powers of medical observation far in advance of the clinicians of his day‘. Stracham's view can hardly be refuted; indeed Dickens had first-hand experience of clinical cases, and he certainly was a careful observer of people's ailments. But to limit the interpretation of accounts of incidents and illnesses to the writer's personal interests and curiosity is to miss (and dismiss) their significance. Focussing on ‚Mr. Nightingale's Diary‘, a one-act farce written and produced in 1851, this essay suggests that Dickens's familiarity with medicine enables and discloses his understanding of and scepticism for medicine and medical practitioners. The play revolves around a hypochondriac, Mr. Nightingale, and his diary, in which he incessantly annotates symptoms and cures, and which he trusts blindly and religiously. Behind the irony of this behaviour lies a serious reflection and a critique, on Dickens's part, of dogmatic knowledge and the unquestioned authority of science. The play stages the encounter of two world views, thereby exposing how medical earnestness is often mendacity in disguise.
Edyta Świerczyńska, University of Warsaw, Poland, edytaang@o2.pl
Geometry of incarceration: Dickens’s enslaved minds in A Tale of two Cities
Though it is now a commonplace truth that Dickens’s primary interest in psychology lay in the workings of the mind “on the dark side” (his own included), little has been said about the symbolic link between space and the most intricate mechanisms of reasoning, conscious and unconscious motivation, or degeneration of his vivid characters, most of whom are not entirely “dark”. With the exception of Little Dorrit, in which there exists a direct link between the prison and the condition of the characters’ psyche, such a connection is left implicit, and the psychological importance of spatial surroundings is still either read superficially or completely rejected. My aim is to redeem the meaning hidden deeply in Dickens’s spatial constructions, showing that he did not leave anything to chance and every minute detail served a higher cause, hence building the symbolism of this most realist writer. In order to show his perfect, albeit intuitive, understanding of the human nature (NOT in the Pickwickian sense), I chose a novel that would never be first categorized as “psychological”: A Tale of Two Cities. Here Dickens’s parallel constructions of the mind and space can be interpreted as pre-Freudian, which proves not only the universalism of psychological mechanisms, but also Dickens’s quick and active mind reading minds.
Jeremy Tambling, University of Manchester, UK, retired, jtambling@outlook.com
Dickens, Judaism and Cosmopolitanism
It is often argued, from Lauriat Lane and Harry Stone onwards, that Dickens moved from a relatively anti-semitic presentation of the Jew, outstandingly in Fagin (but Steven Marcus’ question ‘Who is Fagin?’ has never been fully answered) to a more benign one with Mr Riah in Our Mutual Friend. This biographical approach to the question of the status of Jewishness in the nineteenth century (before the word ‘anti-semitic’ was coined, in 1879) is useful but it may be extended and rethought by reference to Jewish studies in relation to the nineteenth century, which see less of a tradition of growing awareness and sympathy, and look at emancipation in the light of arguments about race and culture which draw on such names as Lessing and Marx, Heine and George Eliot, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, and the status of being ‘cosmopolitan’, a word implying both sophistication, and rootlessness, indeed, as the defining term for the Jew.
Linguistics
SLANG1 Sunday 31.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A9, (B) 16.00–17.30 Room A9
PRODUCTIVITY IN WORD-FORMATION
Convenors:
Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook University in New York, U.S.A., mark.aronoff@stonybrook.edu
Pavol Stekauer, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, pavel.stekauer@upjs.sk
Extensive research on morphological productivity in the last decades has not only led to new ideas and theories but also indicated a range of problems. The seminar will concentrate on the following topics:
Methods of computing productivity
Form-based vs. cognitively founded approaches to productivity
Productivity as competition between word-formation processes/rules
Discrete vs. scalar notions of productivity
Constraints on productivity
Actual, potential, possible, and probable words
Sociolinguistic factors influencing the productivity of word-formation
Participants
Laurie Bauer, Victoria University of Wellington, laurie.bauer@vuw.ac.nz
The Importance of Marginal Productivity
There have been various attempts to measure morphological productivity, and, in general, high productivity has been of more interest than low productivity. I wish to consider cases of marginal productivity. While it is true that there can be problems in distinguishing between marginal productivity and lack of productivity, there are places where marginal productivity can be very revealing.
I shall discuss cases where there may be difficulty in deciding whether something is or is not productive (available), and then consider some instances of very low productivity (profitability) in English. I shall suggest that these throw light on how analogies work in morphology, in instances where it is not necessarily clear which analogy is likely to be followed, and that instances of marginal productivity often indicate weak spots in the morphological system where change is incipient or on-going.
In particular I shall focus on the productivity of verbal ablaut in English, but I shall also consider some instances of marginal derivational productivity.
Paola-Maria Caleffi, University of Verona, Italy, paolamaria.caleffi@univr.it
The hashtag: A new word or a new rule?
According to the tweeting typographic convention, a hashtag typically consists in one or more words strung together with no spaces behind a pound sign, word boundaries sometimes marked by a capital letter, as in #WhatUniversityHasTaughtMe (Sagolla 2009; Cunha et al. 2011). Born as a topic-marker to make tweets easily searchable, the hashtag has developed into a “community-building linguistic activity” (Zappavigna 2011: 2). Today, the pound symbol seems to be gaining popularity not only on other social network sites (like Google+ and Facebook), but also outside the Net, hashtag phrases starting to appear in the linguistic landscape (i.e. news texts, advertising, political writing).
This paper analyzes the hashtag as a (new) process of word-formation that is becoming increasingly productive in English and in Italian, both online and offline. The analysis is based on a corpus comprising tweets, as well as advertisements and headlines from printed magazines and newspapers, and data from (transcribed) political speeches. The study investigates the morpho-syntactic implications of this (new) formation pattern and the pragmatic/semantic exploitation of the hashtag as a means to create catchy expressions. Preliminary results show a gradual steady spread of the hashtag convention in English and in Italian, in a variety of communicative contexts, at different levels and in different degrees.
References
Cunha, E; Magno, G; Comarela, G; Almeida, V.; Gonçalves, M.A.; Benevenuto, F. (2011). “Analyzing the Dynamic Evolution of Hashtags on Twitter: a Language-Based Approach”. Proceedings of the Workshop on Language in Social Media (LSM 2011), Portland, Oregon, 23 June 2011, pp. 58–65.
Sagolla, D. (2009). 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form. Hoboken: John Wiley & Son.
Zappavigna, M. (2011). “Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter”. New Media &Society, 13/5: 788–806.
http://nms.sagepub.com/…ll.pdf.+html
Bożena Duda, University of Rzeszow, bozenaduda@yahoo.co.uk
The productivity of word-formation among Late Modern English synonyms of prostitute in an onomasiological method of research
The part and parcel of sociolinguistic reality we live in is a multitude of language restrictions which have been imposed on human kind since time immemorial. The reason for this is that – regardless of the time period or the geographical location – people have always been warned against a certain taboo. The forbidden spheres in the lives of social communities, such as religion, death, illnesses, sex, body parts and bodily functions – to mention but a few – have obviously left their mark on the linguistic system of a given community. As Chamizo Dominguez and Sánchez Benedito (2005:12) argue, in our society, the last remaining taboo seems to be sex. Hence, we may risk forwarding the assumption that the linguistic restrictions imposed on people communicating within the sphere of sex should have triggered the formation of a large number of lexical items to veil the shamefulness, embarrassment or, even, contamination associated with more direct appellations.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the productivity level of word-formation as a formative mechanism employed in the formation of the synonyms of prostitute dating from Late Modern English. The body of the analytical data includes such terms as night-walker, town-woman, town-miss, market dame, kennel-nymph, tomrig, molly, trully and hack among others. The analysis conducted also takes into account the word-formation heritage among the synonyms of prostitute which had entered the English lexico-semantic system before the advent of the Late Modern English period. The analytical framework is based on the onomasiological theory of word-formation proposed by Štekauer (1998).
References
Chamizo Dominguez, P.J., F. Sánchez Benedito (2005) Conceptual Networks of English Bawdy Euphemisms and Dysphemisms. Unpublished Manuscript.
Štekauer, P. (1998) An Onomasiological Theory of English Word-Formation. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Pavol Štekauer, P.J. Šafárik University, Košice, pavel.stekauer@upjs.sk
Productivity as a battlefield between semantic transparency and economy of expression
One of the fundamental postulates of cognitive linguistics is that of a scalar nature of linguistic categories and phenomena. In an onomasiological approach to word-formation this principle can be manifested, inter alia, by the scalar nature of word-formation strategies when assessed in terms of two competing tendencies, i.e., the tendency towards the semantic transparency of new complex words and the tendency towards economy of expression. Within this framework, it is demonstrated that word-formation productivity also depends on the sociolinguistically determined preferences of coiners of each novel complex word in terms of the above-mentioned word-formation strategies. The paper relates the notion of semantic transparency to the onomasiological theory of word-formation, in particular, to its part dealing with onomasiological types. These result from the interaction of two levels of the act of naming, the onomasiological structure and the onomatological structure, interrelated by the Morpheme-to-Seme-Assignment Principle. This theoretical framework establishes the conditions necessary for the implementation of an experiment described in Part 2 of the paper. The experiment includes three sets of tasks and covers four languages, each represented by forty informants.
Michael Bilynsky, Ivan Franko National University, Lviv, Ukraine, bislo@ukrpost.ua
The productivity of derivational types and suffixal models within shared-root deverbal paradigms as reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary
Presented in the paper is an electronic framework for the study of deverbal productivity in English. Over seventeen thousand verbs together with sixteen categorical and, where applicable, all suffixal manifestations of their shared-root derivation are examined. The majority of the almost eighty thousand thus assembled textual prototypes were taken from separate OED entries; some were found inside the entries of the shared-root counterparts. The verbs and their derivatives belong to the presently used, but also in part now archaic, lexemes. The first stage of the analysis is a look at all the diachronic peaks and troughs of deverbal categories evinced in their respective single or rival suffixes with reference to native and borrowed verbs. Then we focus on the possibilities of studying the diachronic stringing of shared-root relatedness distinguishing a temporary existence of a single element or combination of elements and the respective complementation(s) over time. The said modeling yields a number of distribution curves. They are modifiable by the data intervals as regards the ranges of the age difference between the attestation of the shared-root base and derived element(s) or just derived elements. The framework also envisages resettable assessment boundaries of the age difference between two or more textual prototypes. The age-homogeneous elements are those attested literally in the same year or in close chronological proximity beneath the threshold setting their chronological heterogeneity. In this way we distinguish between the documented basically spontaneous productivity and the productivity concluding a lapse of the so-called transposition time with the attestation of a derivative. Hence, the temporal stretch between the appearance of the base, i.e. a potential for derivation, and the realized derivation is characteristic of the speed of the onomasiological expansion in the derived lexicon. It rests on single or multiple cognitive or/and form-based productivity. The paper will be accompanied with ample on-sight queries to the developed framework. The downloaded exhaustive exemplification will aim at showing the strengths and weaknesses of electronic modeling in the study of historical word-formation.
Jean Albrespit, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, jean.albrespit@univ-pau.fr
“Collective” nouns, a remarkable case of lexical productivity
The aim of this paper is to study “collective nouns” in English (i.e. of the type: A gaggle of geese) as a model of lexical creation. There is a remarkable inventiveness in the proliferation of such periphrases. We will first address the issue of the distinction between “partitives” and “quantifiers” and the distinction between a “strict” quantifier (a pound of) and an “approximative” quantifier (a drove of pigs) constructed on a metaphor. The diachronic dimension will be taken into account, as well as dialectal variation (for example, a swag of suggestions in Australian English).
A brief comparison will be made with a romance language, French, where productivity does exist (une avalanche de critiques) but is not so developed and where very often such expressions are used as emphasizers.
Our claim is that an existing model (in this case “A X of Y”) facilitates lexical innovation and that syntactic and semantic analyses are not sufficient: parameters such as social, historical and anthropological phenomena must be taken into account in order to provide an explanation for the choices made and the constraints on productivity.
Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook University, New York, mark.aronoff@stonybrook.edu
Competition and Morphology: Applying Gause's law of competitive exclusion to language
The Russian ecological theorist and experimentalist Georgy Gause demonstrated in the 1930's that two species competing for the exact same resources cannot coexist. I will apply this principle to a number of well-known distinct phenomena in linguistics morphology: blocking, productivity, and morphological classes. Gause's law predicts that equilibrium can be found in the short term. A number of such cases that have been brought to light in morphology in recent years as problematic for conventional theories. I will discuss several in detail and show that they conform to Gause's law.
Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, University of Valencia-IULMA, jesusferdom@gmail.com
The role of non-recurrent words in productivity counts
Despite the notional complexities of morphological productivity, not few proposals have been made towards its quantification, with statistical models standing as a reference in this domain. In several productivity models, a central role is played by units with a low frequency, in particular hapax legomena, i.e. corpus elements with frequency 1. Based on the assumption that a low rate of occurrence of derivatives may be indicative of the productive status of a word-formation process, certain proposals have placed hapaxes at the core of their computations (Baayen 2009).
In this paper we inspect low frequency in general and hapax legomena in particular with the aim of shedding light on how such units affect productivity measurement (Evert & Lüdeling 2001). A corpus sample is used to test a number of productivity models and examine their behavior when the concept hapax is modulated in different ways. This allows assessing the relevance given to these items and noting the implications that they carry for the phenomenon of productivity.
References
Baayen, R. H. 2009. Corpus linguistics in morphology: Morphological productivity. In Lüdeling, A. & Kyto, M. (eds.) Corpus linguistics. An international handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 900–919.
Evert, S. & A. Lüdeling. 2001. Measuring morphological productivity: Is automatic preprocessing sufficient? Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2001, 167–175.
Dóra Pődör, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, podor.dora@kre.hu
Productivity in Verbal Noun Formation in Modern Irish: A Case Study of the suffix –áil
Bloch, in her book on verbal nouns in Modern Irish, states that “Despite efforts made by various linguists Irish morphology (especially word-formation) remains in many respects an uncharted area” (Bloch-Trojnar, Maria (2005): Polyfunctionality in Morphology. A Study of Verbal Nouns in Modern Irish. Wydawnictwo KUL, Lublin, p 227). This paper attempts to present a case study of the verbal noun forming suffix –áil, which used to be just one of the suffixes with which verbal nouns were formed in earlier stages of the Irish language; however, today it is basically the only productive verbal noun forming suffix attached to verbs borrowed from English. The research focuses on the diachronic changes in the productivity of –áil.
References
Bloch-Trojnar, Maria (2005): Polyfunctionality in Morphology. A Study of Verbal Nouns in Modern Irish. Wydawnictwo KUL, Lublin.
Tanja Säily, Helsinki University, Finland, tanja.saily@helsinki.fi
types2: A tool for analyzing variation in morphological productivity
Corpus‐linguistic studies of variation and change in productivity need to Compare type and hapax frequencies across subcorpora. The problem with comparing these frequencies is that they depend on the size of the (sub)corpus in a non-linear manner (Baayen 1992:113, Säily 2011:127), which means that standard techniques such as normalization are not applicable. Säily and Suomela (2009) propose a solution based on accumulation curves and permutation testing. Unlike models based on extrapolation, this method does not make simplifying assumptions like “words occur randomly in texts”. Furthermore, it is highly visual and provides a built-in measure of statistical significance. Through a diachronic study of the suffix -ity, the present paper demonstrates an improved version of the software used to produce the accumulation curves. Called types2, this version (Suomela 2012) provides p-values in addition to confidence intervals and thus a way to control the false discovery rate in multiple hypothesis testing. To facilitate exploration, the curves are implemented as interactive SVG images embedded on web pages with links to the other images and to the underlying data. Other features include an SQL database for the data sets and results, and possibly a measure of effect size in a future release (see Gries 2006).
References
Baayen, R. H. 1992. Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. Yearbook of Morphology 1991, ed. by Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle, 109–149. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Gries, Stefan Th. 2006. Some proposals towards a more rigorous corpus linguistics. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54(2): 191–202.
Säily, Tanja. 2011. Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7(1): 119–141.
Säily, Tanja & Jukka Suomela. 2009. Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and –‐ity in early English letters. Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments, ed. by Antoinette Renouf & Andrew Kehoe, 87–109. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Suomela, Jukka. 2012. types2: Type and hapax accumulation curves. Computer program. http://users.ics.aalto.fi/suomela/types2/
SLANG2 Monday 1.9.2014 (A)14.30–16.30 Room A4, (B)17.00–18.30 Room A4
SEMANTICS OF EVALUATIVE MORPHOLOGY
Convenors:
Alexandra Bagasheva, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria, abagasheva@gmail.com
Lívia Körtvélyessy, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, livia.kortvelyessy@upjs.sk
During the last 30 years the concept of evaluative morphology (EM) has been discussed from various perspectives and in various languages. While most of these discussions were focused on formal aspects of EM the aim of the seminar is:
to discuss the possibilities of a universal semantic model of EM, including various approaches to the semantics of EM, the range of cognitive categories covered by EM as well as their possible realizations;
to discuss the semantics of EM in individual languages that might support but also contradict any of the suggested universal models.
Participants
Lívia Körtvélyessy, P. J. Šafárik University, Slovakia, livia.kortvelyessy@upjs.sk
Approaches to the semantics of evaluative morphology
The paper discusses one of the central issues of research into evaluative morphology, in particular, its semantics. The paper starts with a brief outline of various models of the semantics of evaluative morphology. They include Jurafsky’s diachronic radial model of diminutives (1996) which gave a strong impulse to research into this area of evaluative morphology, Prieto’s model (to appear) which also covers augmentatives, and Mutz’s model (to appear) which also takes a diachronic point of view. The core of the paper is a proposal of a new cognitive model projected onto a new radial model of evaluative morphology both of them based on an onomasiological approach to word-formation. The models are founded on the idea of evaluative morphology as a continuum in which prototypical cases express the meaning of quantity under or above the default value. The relation between augmentatives and diminutives is viewed as that of a scale. The evaluation process is implemented within four basic cognitive categories (SUBSTANCE, ACTION, QUALITY and CIRCUMSTANCE). This establishes four basic categories of evaluative morphology, in particular, the Quantity of Substance, the Quantity of Action, the Quantity of Quality, and the Quantity of Circumstance. The theoretical considerations are illustrated with examples obtained within my cross-linguistic research.
Klaus P. Schneider, University of Bonn, k.schneider@uni-bonn.de
The meaning of diminutives: a first-order perspective
Despite a host of publications on evaluative morphology, no agreement has been achieved on the semantics of diminutives. Several issues are still controversial. It must, however, be remembered that all descriptions of diminutive meaning in the research literature are second-order conceptualisations, i.e. abstract scientific constructs developed by experts in morphology and semantics. The present paper, by contrast, is aimed at exploring first-order conceptualisations, i.e. how language users who are lay persons understand the meaning of diminutive forms. The paper reports on a series of experiments which include translation tasks (with and without individual or collaborative thinking aloud and keylogging), recall experiments, and retrospective interviews. The informants were native speakers of English, native speakers of German and German learners of English. The overarching question is what the experimental evidence can teach us about first-order conceptualisations, and how these conceptualisations may advance our understanding of the semantics of diminutives.
Antonio Fortin, University of Manchester, antonio.fortin@manchester.ac.uk
The semantics of evaluative affixes
We present a unitary account of the range of attested meanings of evaluative affixes (EAs), which have long been considered too varied and heterogeneous to permit such an analysis (cf. Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994; Jurafsky 1996).
Refining the multidimensional semantics of Potts (2005; 2007), we show that the descriptive (at-issue) meanings of Spanish EAs are relative gradable adjectives in the sense of Kennedy (1997). Since the adjectival meaning of the diminutive is only available if the referent of the root to which they attach is spatiotemporally bounded, we frame this as a presuppositional requirement of the descriptive dimension. If the referent is unbounded, presupposition failure is induced, and only an expressive meaning is possible.
The e expressive semantics of Spanish EAs arise as they manipulate the middle coordinate of expressive indices, the interval I ⊑ [ –1; 1], whose midpoint and width model the type and intensity of the affect expressed by a diminutive, respectively (Potts 2007). We further propose that expressive indices are inherently specified on all lexical items, with I canonically set to “neutral”, and introduce a new mechanism, AFF, which is an algebraic operation for manipulating I.
By assuming that the target of an EA is determined contextually rather than syntactically, we can straightforwardly model and predict the well-known and prima facie “contradictory” range of meanings that Spanish EAs can convey, as well as their distributions. Whereas prior work assumes that EAs are unusually polysemous (Jurafsky 1996) or primarily pragmatic (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994), this semantic approach derives their many attested meanings and functions (e.g., “small,” “young,” “bad,” appreciation, deprecation, hypocorism, intensification/exactness, attenuation/approximation, and illocutionary mitigation) compositionally, from the interactions of their multidimensionality with the properties of the elements with which they combine.
References
Dressler, Wolfgang U., and Lavinia M. Merlini Barbaresi. 1994. Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and Intensifiers in Italian, German and Other Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Jurafsky, Daniel. 1996. Universal Tendencies in the Semantics of the Diminutive. Language 72(3): 533–578.
Kennedy, Christopher. 1997. Projecting the Adjective: The Syntax and Semantics of Gradability and Comparison. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Potts, Christopher. 2005. Logic of Conventional Implicatures, vol. 7 of Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2): 165–197.
Alexandra Bagasheva, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, a.bagasheva@uni-sofia.bg
The semantics of evaluative prefixes in Bulgarian
Evaluative morphology in Bulgarian has been traditionally associated with diminutive suffixes. Admittedly, suffixation is the most productive and ubiquitous means to express evaluative semantics in the language. However, suffixation is characteristic exclusively of nominal and adjectival diminution, while prefixation seems to be preserved for encoding morphologically marked evaluative semantics in verbs. By exploiting the concept of diagrammatic iconicity and studying the types of evaluative meaning encoded by evaluative nominal and adjectival suffixes and verbal prefixes a model of the matrix of affixal evaluative semantics in Bulgarian is proposed. On the basis of the analysis of the different sets of meanings associated with the prefixal slot and the suffixal one and the nature of the lexical classes to which these attach, it is claimed that the positional preference is not a chance development, but is motivated by the onomosiological nature of the lexical classes. What is more, this dependency is further reflected in the different polysemy patterns and/or lexicalization tendencies for prefixes and suffixes. It is maintained that the Langackerian distinction between entity vs. processual profiling based on prototypical schematization of conceptual content tallies naturally with the three phenomena discussed (pre-or suffixation, polysemy patterns and lexicalization tendencies). It is hypothesized that evaluative semantics is also susceptible to profiling and that QUANTITY of SUBSTANCE and QUANTITY of ACTION display different multidimensional matrixes of meaning composition.
Daniela Katunar, Matea Srebačić, Krešimir Šojat, University of Zagreb
dkatunar@ffzg.hr, matea.srebacic@gmail.com, ksojat@ffzg.hr
Diminutives at the front and rear: Croatian diminutive verbal prefixes po- and pri- and suffix -n(u)
Croatian's rich diminutive verb semantics comes from the interaction of verbal stems with a) 18 diminutive suffixes, e.g. –k-, -uck-, -uš-, b) prefixes po- and pri- and c) the suffix –n(u). This rich affix inventory is in many ways challenging for a unified account of diminutive verb semantics. In revision of Jurafsky’s (1996) radial category model of diminutive semantics, Katunar (2013) proposes three types of diminutive (suffixed) verbs in Croatian based on a) the intensity scale (bockati “to poke lightly‟, b) path/attention dispersion (trčkarati "to run around / čituckati "to read inattentively‟) and c) quality (piskarati “to write badly‟). In line with Tovena (2011), she also discusses pluractionality as a phenomenon related to diminutive verbs, especially in terms of event segmentation and segment size (žmiriti “keep eyes closed‟ – žmirkati “to blink‟; gristi “to bite‟ – grickati “to nibble‟). However, diminutive prefixes and the suffix -n(u) were not taken into account in the model presented in Katunar (2013). Whereas diminutive suffixes are often regarded as specialized forms for derivation of diminutive verbs (Barić et al. 2005), prefixes po- and pri- are less straightforward with regard to their diminutive meanings. This is due to the polysemous structure of the prefixes themselves, which apart from diminutive meanings encode other semantic and grammatical properties such as adlocativity (prilaziti “to approach‟), distributivity (pobrojiti “to count down (everything)‟), causativity (poboljšati “to make better‟) or inchoativity (poteći “to start flowing‟) (see Belaj (2009) and Dickey (2003)). Therefore the goal of our research is to provide a description of the Croatian prefixes po- and pri-, as well as the suffix -n(u)-, and to examine the way in which their diminutive meanings are formed and related to other features of their morphosemantic structure. Based on the data obtained from the CroDeriV, Croatian Derivational Database (Šojat et al. (2013)), we examine 797 po-, 364 pri- and 820 -n(u) verb lemmas in relation to diminutive formation. We regard the notion of approximation as related to adlocativity for the prefix pri- (pritvoriti “to close halfway‟) and (temporal) segment as related to size and intensity diminution detected for both prefixes and suffix -n(u). We demonstrate that these diminutive properties can be distributed to both prefixes at the front and suffix -n(u) at the rear of the stem (potrubiti /trubnuti “to honk the horn (shortly and lightly)‟).
Manana Topadze Gäumann, University of Bern, manana.topadze@isw.unibe.ch
On the semantic aspect of evaluatives in Georgian
Although Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages display a rich inventory of evaluatives, no thorough investigations have been conducted in this field. Studies of evaluative affixes are traditionally included in derivational morphology and are usually limited to markers which express diminution and endearment.
In this paper, I will firstly give an account of evaluative strategies in Georgian (and of their counterparts in Megrelian and Svan) analyzing their basic semantic properties, some of which have not been discussed in literature and deserve close consideration.
Secondly, I will discuss the functional status and distribution of evaluatives and show that whilst the occurrence of evaluative markers is restricted in Standard Georgian, it is very widespread in some dialects, where evaluative morphology shows a high token frequency.
Furthermore, I will address the issue of translation of evaluatives from and into Georgian, considering data from parallel (translated) texts. In particular, I will focus on the semantic and pragmatic differences between items in source and target texts.
Renáta Gregová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Slovakia, renata.gregova@upjs.sk
Semantics of Slovak Diminutives
Diminutiveness represents one of the most important modificational onomasiological categories in the Slovak language. The modificational attribute of diminutiveness can be of a quantitative or qualitative nature: quantitative diminutives express the smallness of the object or the quality named; qualitative diminutive suffixes convey incorporated emotional meaning that can be either meliorative or pejorative. However, most Slovak diminutives have both semantic values, quantitative (descriptive) and qualitative. The boundary between the quantitative and qualitative character of a diminutive is usually very ambiguous and can be fully uncovered only in a context. Moreover, in Slovak there are the so-called primary diminutives (a diminutive marker is added to a neutral base word) and secondary diminutives (a diminutive suffix is joined to an already existing diminutive). In addition, Slovak diminutive morphemes show the property of consecutive application. The process of diminutivization as a quantitative and/or qualitative change of meaning is referred to as an arithmetic operation that is theoretically unlimited. This means that there is a theoretically unrestricted possibility to modify – quantitatively and/or qualitatively – the meaning of a given base word. The paper will concentrate on all these Quantitative and Qualitative nuances of primary and secondary morphological diminutives in the basic cognitive categories SUBSTANCE, QUALITY, ACTION and CIRCUMSTANCE.
Angeliki Efthymiou, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, aefthym@eled.duth.gr
Modern Greek diminutive and intensifying adjectives (in a cross-linguistic perspective)
Although diminutive and augmentative (i.e. intensifying) adjectives are a common and frequent phenomenon in Modern Greek, there is no detailed treatment of these morphological evaluative means, with the exception of some in-depth analyses of several specific sub-themes (cf. among others Delveroudi & Vassilaki 1999, Efthymiou 2003, Melissaropoulou & Ralli 2008). This study aims to describe the diminutive and intensifying adjectives in Modern Greek (e.g. nostim–utsik(os) ‘tasty DIM’, kont-ul(is) ‘short DIM’, penta-nostim(os) ‘tasty AUGM’, kat-aspr(os) ‘white AUGM’) and to discuss the asymmetry in the distribution of prefixes and suffixes in the expression of the four evaluative semantic values SMALL, BIG, GOOD, BAD (i.e. diminution is expressed both by prefixes and by suffixes, intensity is expressed by prefixes or prefixoids; cf. also Grandi 2005). Furthermore, the study will focus on affixization processes (i.e. numerals, adjectives and nouns used as ‘prefixoids’) in the domain of diminutive and intensifying adjectives (e.g. θeo-trel(os) ‘crazy AUGM’, tetra-pax(os) ‘fat AUGM’). Finally, the study aims at discussing the assumption that augmentatives are less widespread than diminutives (cf. among others Grandi 2005, Stekauer, Valera, Kortvelyessy 2012).
References
DelveroudI, R., and S. Vassilaki. 1999. Préfixes d’intensiteé en Grec Moderne: para-, kata-, poly- et olo-. In Les Opérations de Détermination: Quantification/Qualification, edited by A. DESCHAMPS & J. GUILLEMIN-FLESCHER, 149–167. Paris: Ophrys.
Efthymiou, A. 2003. Prefixes or first elements denoting intensification in Modern Greek. Studies in Greek Linguistics 2002: 519–528 [in Greek].
Grandi, Nicola. 2005. Sardinian evaluative morphology in typological perspective. In PUTZU, Ignatio (ed.), Sardinian in Typological Perspective. Bochum. Dr. Brockmeyer University Press, 188–209.
Melissaropoulou, D., and A. RALLI. 2008. Headedness in Diminutive Formation: Evidence from Modern Greek and its Dialectal Variation. 2008. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55: 183–204.
Štekauer, Pavol, Valera, Salvador, Körtvélyessy, Lívia. 2012. Word-Formation in the World’s Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marios Andreou, University of Patras, Greece, andreoum@upatras.gr
On the headship status of Greek diminutive suffixes: a view from Lexical Semantics
Whether diminutive suffixes are inflectional or derivational and whether they are heads of their formations have been hotly debated and no consensus has been reached. Scalise (1998) argues that diminutives are situated between derivational and inflectional suffixes and that they are not heads since they have no categorial properties. Melissaropoulou and Ralli (2008), however, argue that although Greek diminutives have no categorial properties, they are nevertheless heads since they are derivational and not inflectional. They also argue that the absence of categorial specification is manifested by other (true) derivational suffixes which attach to nouns and derive nouns.
In this presentation, I examine the lexical semantic properties of Greek diminution in the framework of Lieber (2004). First, I argue that the derivation vs inflection distinction should not be identified with the head-nonhead asymmetry. Second, I compare Greek diminutives to suffixes which Melissaropoulou and Ralli (2008) claim to be category-neutral. Consider the following:
a. ornit-eddha ‘little hen’
[-scalar ([+material ([ ])])]
- eddha ornit(a) ‘hen’
b. anthrop-ia ‘humanity’
[-material ([i ], [+material ([i ])])]
- ia anthrop(os) ‘human’
This comparison reveals that the diminutive -eddha from the dialect of Griko in (1a) differs from the suffix -ia (1b) in the following: (a) the structure of its skeleton, (b) the semantic features relevant to diminution, and © the mechanism by which it combines with the base. In particular, -ia is not category-neutral since it has a categorial specification (i.e. [-material]) and it bears an argument position (the ‘R’ argument), whereas, the diminutive -eddha is deprived of arguments and only bears the feature [-scalar], which is not a categorial feature.
The proposed analysis shows that diminutives are not heads and that not all suffixes should be accounted for by the same mechanism; -ia belongs to subordination of functions with co-indexation of arguments, whereas, the absence of arguments from the skeleton of -eddha means that diminutives are instances of subordination without co-indexation.
References
Lieber, Rochelle. (2004). Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Melissaropoulou, Demetra and Angela Ralli. (2008). Headedness in diminutive formation: Evidence from Modern Greek and its dialectal variation. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55, 183–204.
Scalise, Sergio. (1988). The notion of ‘head’ in morphology. In Geert Booij and Jap van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1988, pp. 229–246. Dordrecht: Foris.
Olga Steriopolo, olgasteriopolo@hotmail.com
Evaluative size suffixes in German and Spanish
Steriopolo (2009) argued that there are two classes of evaluative suffixes in Russian: attitude and size suffixes. Attitude suffixes consistently express an attitude (affectionate vs. pejorative) towards a referent, while size suffixes consistently refer to the size of a referent (diminutive vs. augmentative), at the same time they can express an attitude. The two classes of suffixes syntactically differ in their manner and place of attachment in a syntactic tree. Attitude suffixes are syntactic heads that can attach either to √roots or to nouns, while size suffixes are syntactic modifiers that can only attach to nouns. With this respect, the question arises whether this is also true cross-linguistically. Is it the case that attitude and size suffixes share the same manner and place of attachment across languages?
I investigate size suffixes in two genetically unrelated languages, German and Spanish. I argue that size suffixes have different manner and place of syntactic attachment across languages.
The German size suffixes –chen, –lein as well as the colloquial Austrian suffix –erl attach as syntactic heads (compare with Russian size suffixes that attach as syntactic modifiers), thus showing syntactic variation in terms of manner of attachment (table 1).
The Spanish size suffix –©it shares the same manner of attachment with Russian size suffixes; however, it attaches to various syntactic categories and not just to nouns, as in Russian. This shows syntactic variation in terms of place of attachment (table 1).
Table 1: Cross-linguistic variation in syntactic attachment of size suffixes
| Size suffixes | Syntactic modifiers | Attaching only to nouns |
| Russian | ||
| German | * | |
| Spanish | * |
These findings contribute to a discussion of form-function correspondence between syntactic categories (Wiltschko, forthcoming). They show that although evaluative size suffixes cross-linguistically have the same meaning (or function), they significantly differ in their syntactic structures (or form). Thus, there is no 1:1 correlation between form and function of evaluative size suffixes across languages.
References
Steriopolo, O. (2009). Form and function of expressive morphology: A case study of Russian. Russian Language Journal, 59, 149–194. Available from http://www.steriopolo.com/category/thesis.
Wiltschko, M. (Forthcoming). The universal structure of categories. Oxford University Press.
Nicola Lampitelli, LLL / Université de Tours & CNRS, nicolalampitelli@gmail.com
Morphosyntactic form and semantic function of Somali evaluative system
Somali displays rich derivational and inflectional morphology in verbs, adjectives and nouns. As far as evaluation is concerned, verbs and adjectives (they belong to the same category, see Andrzejewski 1969) undergo reduplication to express approximation, reduction and/or attenuation, i.e. qualitative evaluation. In contrast, nouns lack typical synthetic evaluative constructions. Quantitative evaluation is performed by analytic constructions of the type N + SMALL/BIG. On the basis of the classification proposed by Grandi & Körtvélyessy (To appear), Somali does not satisfy entirely the prototypical evaluative pattern. On the one side, the synthetic constructions express qualitative evaluation and this process is limited to verbs and adjectives; on the other, the juxtaposition of the adjectives SMALL/BIG entails quantitative evaluation but only in nouns. In other words, the morphosyntactic form of the evaluative construction entails its semantic function. Within a Distributed Morphology approach (Embick 2010), I will show that the analytic constructions N + SMALL/BIG are built in syntax in the same manner as the synthetic constructions involving reduplication. As a consequence, both processes can be considered to be morphological constructions. Despite the appearances, Somali evaluative system is consistent with the classification proposed by Grandi & Körvélyessy (To appear).
SLANG3 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S5
WORD-FORMATION AND TRANSPARENCY IN MEDICAL ENGLISH
Convenors:
Pius ten Hacken, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria pius.ten-hacken@uibk.ac.at
Renáta Panocová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, renata.panocova@upjs.sk
As a side effect of the rapid progress in medical research and of the emergence of new medical conditions, medicine is a domain where new concepts have to be named more frequently than in many other domains. Because of the prominent position of English in medical research, most of these concepts are first named in English. This seminar will consider naming strategies used for these concepts from the perspectives of how transparent the resulting names are for practitioners and the general public and how they create problems for translation into other languages.
Participants
Mariusz Górnicz, University of Warsaw, mgornicz@uw.edu.pl
Compression as a factor behind the borrowing of English medical terminology into Polish
Term compression, a source of non-transparent terms, is playing an important role in the importation of English terms into Polish medical language. This presentation, based on an extension of V. Leitchik’s (1981) classification of types of compression in terminology, discusses the importance of compression in this respect. The following is highlighted:
- a preference for metonymic/metaphorical terms (including terms incorporating colloquial lexis) can be observed in English, while Polish medical terminology displays a preference for analytical (transparent) terms. This divergence frequently leads to the borrowing of non-analytical terms into Polish. Calques of such terms are often accompanied by markers of their “alien” nature, such as quotation marks;
- liaison compression, a process that produces terms with incongruous lexical meaning, has similar consequences for the rendition of terms in other languages;
- typological discrepancies between word formation patterns make certain forms of syntactic compression (e.g. compound pre-modifiers) feasible in English but not in Polish. Strategies to overcome this incompatibility include the use of English abbreviations in Polish terminology.
Examples used here are illustrative of general tendencies rather than the terminology of a particular medical speciality or specific text genres.
Szymon Machowski, Adam Mickiewicz University, szymonm@amu.edu.pl
Compounding properties and translation methods of the English names of infectious diseases
My paper is primarily devoted to outlining the word formation trends in coining various English-language compounds to name diseases, their sources and newly developed medications applicable to clinical treatment. The second goal is to suggest ways of translating such compounds into Polish. The research is based on the latest medical data provided by the World Health Organization and the issues of the Journal of Infectious Diseases from 2010 to 2013. Firstly, the compounds are divided into: (1) new forms of infectious micro-organisms, (2) names of diseases, (3) clinical diagnostics, (4) newly elaborated pharmacological treatment. Secondly, the compounds from each onomasiological category are classified into: open, hyphenated, neoclassical (described by ten Hacken, 1994, 2012) and solid compounds. Next, a set of possible methods is introduced for translating these compounds into such Polish medical terms as excerpted from the articles on bacteriology and virology from the issues of Nowiny Lekarskie, Przegląd Epidemiologiczny and Medycyna Praktyczna – Szczepienia from 2010 to 2013. In conclusion, certain correlations between the grammatical and onomasiological properties of the English compounds and the structure of their Polish equivalents are presented.
Sevda Pekcoşkun, Kırklareli University, cevirmencik@gmail.com
Word formation strategies in translated popular medical texts in Turkey
Popular medical texts are written to inform the general public about health issues, trending topics and new approaches in medicine. Therefore, these texts are expected to be understandable and applicable for lay people to be beneficial in daily life. As full comprehension of a passage is closely related to the understanding of the terms in the text, analysing word formation strategies of terms in popular medical texts contributes to answering the question to what extent popular medical texts truly address their target readers. Since this study concentrates on translated texts in Turkey, another question asked is to what extent the term formation strategies used in Turkish translations of popular medical texts contribute to the functionality and target-orientedness of translated texts. Therefore, a corpus-based study that covers translated popular medical texts published within a certain period in Turkey is used and frequencies of applied word formation strategies in the texts are determined. The statistics reveal which word formation strategies are most frequent in translated texts in Turkey and the data also shed light on the understanding of translation strategies adopted. Analysing the word formation strategies used in translated texts also contributes to determining their success of reaching the target readership.
Renáta Panocová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice,renata.panocova@upjs.sk
Transparency and use of neoclassical word formation in medical English
Neoclassical word formation has been used extensively in medical terminology. In this paper I will explore the transparency of this naming device in comparison to alternative naming strategies, such as eponyms, paraphrases and abbreviations. An example of a concept with alternative names is gallstones and cholelithiasis. The English name is a compound, but the noun gall is obsolete in the relevant sense. The neoclassical formation consists of the stems chole (‘bile’) and litho (‘stone’), and the suffix asis. In a case like this, the investment in acquiring the knowledge of the individual neoclassical formatives is paid off by a more precise, transparently interpretable name. The difference is even stronger when we compare neoclassical formations with eponyms. The meaning of the eponym Fallopian tube is not straightforward. Although the meaning interpretability of the corresponding term oviduct depends on the knowledge of the meaning the neoclassical stems ovi (‘egg’) and duct (‘tubular bodily canal or passage’), the degree of transparency seems greater. Descriptive paraphrases may be easier to understand, but they are very long. When they are abbreviated, the transparency largely disappears. Neoclassical word formation is a relatively efficient naming device as long as the names are mainly used by specialists.
Pius ten Hacken, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, pius.ten-hacken@uibk.ac.at
Naming Devices in Middle-Ear Surgery: A Morphological Analysis
In this paper, I will present an analysis of the terminology of a highly specialized medical area in terms of the naming devices used. The basis for the research is Gersdorff & Gérard’s (2011) Atlas of Middle Ear Surgery. This book is intended for otologists specializing in middle ear surgery. It describes the anatomy, surgical instruments, and surgical operations using a large number of pictures. The analysis of the text, supported by the extensive index, resulted in a collection of 657 terms.
There are only few derivations, all of them neoclassical, e.g. myringitis. Phrasal descriptions are also quite rare. They are mostly A+N combinations, e.g. general anasthesia. The large majority of the terms are compounds with a nominal head. The non-head can be a noun, e.g. cartilage perforation, a relational adjective, e.g. eustachian tube, or a multi-word expression, e.g. soft tissue deficiency.
The interpretation of these compounds depends on an understanding of the component parts and the relationship between them. With a moderate degree of field knowledge, the relation can generally be determined on the basis of the semantics of the components. The least transparent terms are those involving proper names, e.g. Hüttenbrink cartilage punch.
SLANG4 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A2, (B) 17.15–18.45 Room A2
WORD-FORMATION IN CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
Convenors:
Vladimir Ž. Jovanović, University of Niš, Serbia, vladimir.jovanovic@filfak.ni.ac.rs
Jovanka Lazarevska-Stančevska, University Ss Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Macedonia,
jovanka@ukim.edu.mk
The seminar will present a framework for discussions about various issues of interest to the linguistic domain of word-formation in view of the contrastive linguistic method and its main tenets. The focus of the seminar is to gather contributions by professionals that have been studying the processes conducive to the formation of lexis by comparing and contrasting at least two different languages, English necessarily being one of them. The objective is to juxtapose not only the products of the processes such as affixation, compounding and any of the secondary mechanisms, but also to address the similarities and differences underlying the productive patterns, the ways English formative models may affect the processes of other languages, to the end of reaching generalizations about English word-formation, as well as that of other languages.
Participants
Monica Karlsson, Halmstad University, Sweden, mica.karlsson@glocalnet.net
Quantitative and qualitative aspects of advanced students` L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) mastery of suffixation
Developing the skill to form derivatives is a slow incremental process even for native speakers of English, starting in elementary school and continuing through high school. In fact, it appears to be a universally challenging area of the lexicon. Nevertheless, studies have shown that it is one of the most important skills to possess for a learner aiming to enlarge his/her L2 vocabulary and that it therefore may be worth the while for learners spending time on gaining mastery of affixation rules.
In the present investigation, 15 Swedish first-term university students were asked to take two gap-filling context-based tests on suffixation, one in their L1 (Swedish) and one in their L2 (English), both of which were frequency-based (both stem and suffix considered). The students were also asked to evaluate their L1 and L2 knowledge of suffixation. The present study thus addresses the following research questions: Considering 1) the frequencies of the stems and suffixes and 2) the meanings of the suffixes and what word classes they form, what 1) quantitative and 2) qualitative knowledge of suffixation do Swedish university students have in English as their L2 as compared to in their L1?
Jacek Rachfał, Poland, jacekrachfal@gmail.com
The language of architecture: In English and in Polish
Unless they are simplex forms, English terms are products of derivation, less frequently of conversion, and very often, of compounding. The compounds are all nominal, so their heads are always nouns but their non-heads can be nouns, adjectives or verbs. The N+N pattern is the most common among the English compounds. By contrast, Polish compounds do not include the V+N type; if the N+N type occurs, it is based on the genitive-case link, whereas the prevalent type is the RA+N pattern, more frequently with inverted word order. This RA+N (or N+RA) pattern is classified by Polish morphologists as juxtaposition, whose morphological status is controversial. Polish also abounds in derivatives, some of which have a phrasal origin.
When a diachronic perspective is chosen, both English and Polish terms reveal effects of classical processes of semantic change, or, alternatively, of the operation of metaphor and metonymy. However, the study of individual histories of architectural terms points at different sources of borrowing: in the Middle Ages, English borrowed from Old Norse, and then, on a massive scale, from Old French and from Anglo-Norman. Roughly at the same time, Polish absorbed Czech words, and later, huge numbers of Middle High German lexemes. The Renaissance and the following centuries witnessed an influx of Modern French and Italian words, both into English and Polish. The sources of borrowing are then different for English and Polish but historically, the patterns of the processes are again, in a sense, symmetrical.
Irina Petrovska, University St. Kliment Ohridski, Macedonia, irina.petrovska@yahoo.com
Jovanka Lazarevska-Stančevska, University Ss Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Macedonia, jovanka@ukim.edu.mk
Taste semantic cuisine – Macedonian English parallels in gastronomy
The paper explores the linguistic processes of composing culinary terms in the English and Macedonian language. A morpho-semantic contrastive analysis covers the lexical categories of cooking verbs, nouns denoting names of particular dishes expressed by a single, derivational and compound lexemes, and names described by word phrases. The contrastive analyses of both semantic fields show striking similarities. This emphases the fact that the culinary terms express certain universal characteristics common for most languages in the world.
Culinary terminology is specific in the way of naming dishes that express certain aspects of the cultures of English and Macedonian language. This can be noted in the lists of traditional dishes in both cuisines.
Through history, foreign influences on both languages had their contribution in enlarging the lexicon with borrowings. The influence of the European cuisine is particularly dominant in the choice of restaurant food. The analyses cover list of dishes in English, a corpus sample presenting restaurant offer in the leading tourist region in the Republic of Macedonia. The results show that there is a need for closer professional cooperation of experts from the field of linguists and those from the field of catering. Further lexical and cultural misunderstandings have to be avoided when the lists of dishes are translated into English.
Miloš D. Đurić, University of Belgrade, Serbia, djuric@etf.rs
Canonical and non-canonical compounds in English engineering discourse
English Electrical engineering discourse manifests a wealth of linguistic items that are defined as compounds. The aim of this paper is to explore further the status of canonical and non-canonical compounds in written and spoken electrical engineering discourse in contemporary English. In the first part, the author discusses some previous and current accounts of English compounds in the linguistic literature and tries to provide delimitation of canonical and non-canonical compounds. In the second part, the author offers the concrete findings of the corpus-based analysis.
Different semantic, syntactic and pragmatic criteria have been invoked, described and implemented in an attempt to analyse the concrete examples from the author's corpus. In the third part, the author tries to reconcile certain formal criteria for compoundhood by introducing the gradience in order to describe the behaviour of these items in English electrical engineering discourse.
Bledar Toska, University of Vlora, Albania, bledartoska@yahoo.co.uk
On noun pluralization in Albanian and English
The purpose of this short talk is to highlight some of the most important aspects of pluralizing nouns in Albanian and English. Based on a contrastive approach, the main focus of the discussion will be to show both similarities/differences and systematic productive patterns in noun pluralization processes in both languages. The first part of the talk deals mainly with some theoretical background related to pluralization of nouns. The second part makes a short contrastive analysis and is especially concentrated on suffixation, alteration (as a frequent non-concatenative operation in Albanian), base vowel fronting and conversion, all illustrated with numerous examples.
Eva Sicherl, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Eva.Sicherl@ff.uni-lj.si
On diminutive forms in English and Slovene: A contrastive analysis
The paper aims to present different ways in which diminutiveness can be expressed in Slovene and English respectively; the focus is on word-formational and syntactic properties of diminutive structures in both languages analyzed. The starting point of the discussion is the fact that diminutiveness counts as a basic element of semantic extension, which can, however, be realized predominantly morphologically, as is the case in Slovene, or predominantly syntactically, as is the case in English. A further point of discussion is the categorical distribution of diminutive forms in the two languages: while diminutive nouns seem to be present in most languages of the world, non-nominal diminutives can only be found in some languages.
The patterns for expressing diminutiveness in Slovene and in English are presented and subdivided into word-formational ones and analytical ones. The situation in Slovene is paralleled to that in English, where word-formational patterns are expected to be somewhat less common and analytical diminutiveness to prevail on language-typological grounds. The analysis aims to explore this assumption within different word-classes, and draws parallels between English and Slovene. In order to substantiate our claim that Slovene seems to form and use diminutives with somewhat greater ease than English, a statistical analysis of diminutive forms from Roald Dahl's Matilda and its Slovene translation is provided. The analysis is to include not only nouns, but also verbs, adjectives, adverbs and interjections.
Vincent Renner, University of Lyon, France, vincent.renner@gmail.com
French and English lexical blends in contrast
Studies in contrastive word-formation have largely neglected the area of extragrammatical morphology, and the subarea of lexical blending in particular. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained contrastive account of blending in French and English. It is based on the comparison of units culled from the COED and the Petit Robert. The most notable results are as follows. French and English blends are quantitatively comparable in terms of internal semantics and segmental overlap, and remarkably dissimilar in terms of the dominant formal pattern (French favors the right clipping of the left input lexeme, English the right clipping of the left input lexeme and the left clipping of the right input lexeme) and of the linear ordering of fractolexemes in subordinate blends (about half of the French blends are semantically right-headed whereas only a small minority of English blends are left-headed). This latter difference is not easily accounted for; possible influential factors for French include an analogy with neoclassical compounds, which are right-headed, and a constraint to preserve the gender-marking suffix/ending of the head input lexeme in the blend.
Alexandra Bagasheva, „St. Kliment Ohridski“ University, Sofia, Bulgaria, abagasheva@gmail.com Contrastive analysis of deverbal nominal compounds and compound verbs in English and Bulgarian
The focus in the proposed presentation is focused on a contrastive word-formation analysis of agent and instrument/appliance synthetic compounds (e.g. Bulgarian: водоотвод [vodootvod, ‘water-remover’, drainage], ръкохватка [rakohvatka, ‘hand-holder’, handle], парочистачка [parochistachka, ‘steam-cleaner’, steam-cleaner]; English: cash dispenser, pencil-sharpener, bell-push) and compound verbs in Bulgarian and English (e.g. Bulgarian: прахосмуча [prahosmucha, ‘dust-suck’, vacuum-clean] главозамайвам (се) [glavozamyvam (se), ‘head-daze (self)’, get a swell head], главоблъскам се [glavoblaskam (se), ‘head-jostle self’, worry exceedingly]; English: earmark, ring-fence, cherry-pick). The analysis is cast in the cognitive linguistic paradigm and makes use of the concept of construction schema as the chosen “tertium comparationis” and of frame and lexical concept as analytical tools, which best reveal the significant word-formation niches in the two languages. On the basis of frame-informed analyses it is shown that while the nature of synthetic compound nouns in both languages is comparable, compound verbs show greater contrasts in terms of types, restrictions and preferences for intra-compound relations and semantic diversity. An explanation is sought in terms of the influence of word-relevant morpho-syntactic properties on word-formation phenomena in the two languages (noun incorporation and part-of-speech marking). Iconicity in word-formation (as defined in Natural Morphology) is further exploited to analyse the language-specific alignment of lexical concepts and construction schemas. The role of parasynthesis for the productivity of compounding in the two languages is also taken into account.
Vladimir Ž. Jovanović, University of Niš, Serbia, vladimir.jovanovic@filfak.ni.ac.rs
Formative semantic models of adjective compounding in English and Serbian
The paper is a comparative-contrastive analysis of the models or patterns of adjective compound formation in English and Serbian, two typologically different languages. As any sustainable attempt on establishing the similarities and differences in the two languages would not be possible upon the surface formal features of their compounds, the comparison has been performed on the basis of formative-semantic models of adjective compounds based on the internal relations of their underlying structure. The contrasting procedure has been based on 42 different models established in English and half that many in Serbian. The entire idea is founded upon the assumption that compound lexical constructs are interpretable in terms of reduced clauses (in this particular instance adjectival clauses), an approach that could be traced back in the works of Lees (1969), Chomsky (1972), Ljung (1979), Lieber (1992) and others.
Ada Bohmerová, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia, bohmerovaada@yahoo.com
Current trends in English word-formation processes and their impact upon Slovak
The paper presents a research of the word-formation processes of neologisms in English ranging from the turn of the millennium to most recent coinages, focusing mainly on the currently “trendy” processes. The data have been collected from dictionaries of neologisms and from open databases contributed to by the general public. Hence, in addition to the already codified lexical units they also include ad-hoc formations, idiolect items, or even products of “leximania”. However peripheral they might seem from the systemic point of view, in many ways they indicate the trends within word-formation processes for the new communicative needs.
With regard to the international impact of English and lexical borrowing as a dimension of intercultural communication, our contrastive analysis indicates that not only English lexical units but even some recently prominent English word formation processes have made their way into Slovak, extending its onomatological possibilities. This testifies to a highly intensive and systemically unprecedented deep cross-linguistic impact of English on the Slovak lexical system. Included in the research are also some observations concerning analogous word-formation dynamism in several other Central European languages.
SLANG5 Sunday 31.8.2014 (A) 16.00–17.30 Room A1 /Monday 1.9.2014 (B) 11.00–13.00 Room A1
COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF ENGLISH IDIOMS
Convenors:
Lilli Tissen, Albrechts Universität, Germany, l.tissen@mail.de
Tatiana Fedulenkova, Vladimir State University, Russia, fedulenkova@list.ru
Natalia Potselueva, Pavlodar State University, Russia, nata_potz@inbox.ru
The topic of common and specific features in idioms of different languages as compared to English idioms will be discussed, including:
common and specific features in the structure of idioms compared: in the lexical and functional character of their components, in the grammatical composition of the idioms (e.g. Verb + Adj + Noun), in the dependence of components within idioms,
common and specific features in the meanings of the idioms compared, in mechanisms of semantic transformation of their prototype: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole,
common and specific features in the origin of idioms compared, in their functional and pragmatic values.
Participants
Zoia Adamia, Manana Shelia, Maia Marghania, Teaching University Rvali, Georgia, Rustavi
a.zoia777@gmail.com; manan-7@mail.ru; maiko_margania@mail.ru
**A Comparative Study of Biblical Phraseological Units with White and Blue Colours in English, Russian and Georgian
Language is very rich in phraseological units, proverbs and sayings which we constantly come across in literature, in movies, in mass media and in our everyday communication. The correct use of them gives speech a unique originality and special expressiveness.
The aim of the present research is to study the perception of white and blue colour terms through the cultural aspect touching upon biblical symbolism of colours, set phrases being a great treasure of folk wisdom. The lexicon of colour is interesting when studying it historically or in a special context. In all languages there are numerous expressions in which colour plays an important role expressing moods and feelings. Symbolism of colour meanings is based on analogies and the associations connected with vision of colour, and possesses the ability to carry cultural and significant information.
Special attention is paid to usage of the white and blue colours in proverbs and the Bible. Having analyzed the colour components ‚white‘ and ‚blue‘, being considered as Christian colours, the authors describe some peculiar features of translation of biblical phraseological units in the English, Russian and Georgian languages. A complex study of proverbs and sayings as the object of linguistic research is an actual problem from the point of view of cognitive linguistics and linguoculturology. In the language consciousness of a native speaker proverbs and sayings play a significant role, cumulating national-cultural features of the language picture of the world of the nation. A comprehensive study of expressions will give the chance to understand of specifics of the Russian, English and Georgian mentalities and cultures. The authors have carried out a comparative analysis of biblical phraseological units with the above mentioned colour components and also touched upon the problem of translation equivalents, as many of them are multiple-valued phrases that are difficult for interpretation and comparison. The European countries and peoples, accepting Christianity, relied on the knowledge in the field of classical philology, folklore, myths elements of which in large volume have been met in biblical texts and many times have been specified throughout centuries. For centuries both translators’ skills and consumers’ tastes of translations have changed, and signs of church translations to the corresponding originals remained in language without changes getting a thin coating of archaism. Such a comparative analysis is the necessary precondition of a profound study of different languages. The usage of figurative expressions gets into the sense of popular wisdom more deeply.
Natalia Potseluyeva, Pavlodar State University, Pavlodar, Republic of Kazakhstan, nata_potz@inbox.ru
Contrastive analysis of zoomorphic phraseology in English, Russian and Kazakh
The paper is targeted at contrastive analysis of English, Russian and Kazakh phraseological units (PUs) based on metaphor, which is considered to be one of the most frequent types of semantic transformation of the genetic prototype of idioms and other phraseological units. The paper is based on Alexander V. Kunin's method of phraseological identification, V. D. Arakin's method of typological comparison, and the phraseological conception of cross-cultural communication initiated by E. F. Tarasov. The research investigates culturally marked associations that characterize the concepts WAR and PEACE represented by means of animalistic terms, or zoomorphisms, as constituent parts of English, Russian and Kazakh PUs. Our attention is focused on positive and negative evaluations of the concepts WAR and PEACE in the language picture of the world in different cultures.
In the English, Russian and Kazakh languages, with all their dissimilarity of lexical and grammatical systems, there are universal metaphors. Similarity of images arises because “different languages, independently from each other, resort to identical metaphorical transferences” (V. Gak, 1988). Such similarity of thinking reveals the conventional nature of metaphorical images in different linguistic cultures and it explains the existence of basic metaphorical models in languages which is a universal way to represent the concepts, e.g.: Eng. аs brave as a lion – Rus. храбрый как лев – Kaz. арыстан жүректі. As a result we see that conceptual sphere FAUNA is used equally widely in English, Russian and Kazakh pictures of the world, i.e. metaphor borrowed from the world of wildlife is traditionally an important part of the conceptual picture of the world in the language consciousness of the person. The metaphorical models under study reveal evident cultural bias and reflection of features of national mentality and political traditions.
Roman Voronin, Northern (Arctic) Federal University, Severodvinsk, Russia, doctor.voronin2010@yandex.ru
Quantitative and structural characteristics of English and German proverbs with the components good/ gut and bad/ schlecht
It is impossible to perceive the semantics of phraseological units without the knowledge of its structure, as A.V. Kunin put it. The paper deals with the quantitative and structural analysis of about 2000 proverbs having isomorphic components in the two Germanic languages. The novelty of the study is in its comparative trend and quantitative approach to it.
Close attention is paid to proverbs in modern linguistics, because they are to be found in all the existing languages and thus represent one of the linguistic universals. One more significant feature of proverbs consists in their ability to accumulate a particular nation’s life experience and consequently reflect the fundamentals of this nation’s world view. In this respect of special importance are proverbs directly referring to good and bad aspects of the objective reality and evaluating them.
The most frequent components within the sampling of English proverbs are good and its degrees of comparison. On the whole, the components with positive connotation prevail over those with negative connotation. A similar relationship is observed in German, where the component gut and its degrees of comparison can be found much oftener that the component schlecht and its degrees of comparison. This enables us to conclude that both the English and German proverbial world views tend to reflect objective reality by referring to its positive aspects and describing better scenarios, while worse ones are expressed implicitly.
As far as the structural organization analysis is concerned, inference should be drawn that the proverb samplings in question are quite isomorphic according to this parameter. In both the languages the correlation of structural types of sentences (simple, compound, complex) is approximately the same in the two languages. It is obvious that proverbs tend to be as simple and comprehensible as possible in their structure. In terms of communicative types of sentences the overwhelming majority of proverbs have the form of declarative sentences. Interrogative and imperative sentences are of far less importance. Judging by the correlation of communicative types of sentences, we can draw a conclusion that proverbs are inclined to admonish the recipient in a kind indirect way with the help of describing some situation of the extralinguistic reality.
The quantitative and structural analysis of proverbs sheds light on some of their fundamental properties and gives us an opportunity of penetrating into the essentials of the proverbial world view of a particular nation.
Lilia Linnik, Kyiv National Linguistic University, Kyiv, Ukraine, lilinnik@gmail.com
Structural, semantic, and functional features of English and Ukrainian phraseological units denoting movement
Typological and comparative linguistic studies are currently the focus of special attention due to a number of factors, both linguistic and extralinguistic, the nature of which is reduced to the desire of a national language speaker to find self-identification in the sociocultural space through comparison of the native language with other languages.
This presentation is devoted to the study of English and Ukrainian idiomatic means of verbalization of the MOVEMENT/ ПЕРЕМІЩЕННЯ concept, which is fundamental in terms of its role in the conceptualization and categorization of extralinguistic reality.
Explication of productive models of idiomatic meaning generation and analysis of metaphorization mechanisms provide an in-depth investigation of phraseological unit semantics both in the synchronic and diachronic aspects. Application of the procedure of phraseological analysis allows the finding of the most significant features of the expression and content aspects of phraseological units. Since phraseological units are complex and multifaceted formations with variable dependence of components, to implement the cognitive approach to the analysis of idioms, to reveal peculiarities of idiomatic mapping of movement in physical space and productive metaphorization models as a basis of idiom formation, we have undertaken a phraseological analysis of structural and semantic features of the mentioned group of phraseological units, namely: the degree of idiomaticity (semantic stability); correlation with parts of speech; structure types; motivation basis; and mechanisms of idiom formation. The results of this analysis are outlined in the paper.
Elizaveta Ilina, Vladimir State University, Vladimir, Russia, elizaveta-ilina-1995@mail.ru
Substantive and adjectival variability of comparative phraseological units in English, German and Norwegian
Lexical variability of phraseological units (PUs) is treated in the paper as an ability of the components of PUs to interchange. Lexical variability is mainly found in the following types of PU component change:
- The change of substantive components: Eng. as common as dirt / as common as muck, as clear as day / daylight, as cold as ice / as cold as an iceberg c.f.: (a) The central heating had been switched off and the room was as cold as ice; (b) You won’t melt Sally’s heart, it’s as cold as an iceberg (Cowie, ODOEI, p. 18). Substantive components in the PUs under study may have more than three variants which have no synonymic relationship, e.g.: as neat as a bandbox/ a new pin/ ninepence/ wax, as thin as a lath/ a rail/ a rake/ a thread-paper/ a whipping-post. The interchange of substantive components is also found in German and Norwegian.
- The change of adjectival components: Eng. as big/ as round as saucers, as bold/ as brave as a lion, as proud/ vain as a peacock, as large/ big as life, as clever/ as smart as paint: (a) Mary, as clever as paint and much admired in academic circles, was clearly destined for a brilliant career; (b) He’s as smart as paint, that boy, and the best apprentice I ever had I never had to show or tell him anything more than once (Cowie, ODOEI, p.18).
In German variants with the interchange of adjectival components are also frequent: groß/ stark/ kräftig wie ein Baum (too powerful, strong), voll/ blau wie eine Haubitze (extremely drunk), verschwiegen/ stumm/ still wie ein Grab (very silent, secretive), gesund / stark wie ein Bär (sound as a bull), kalt/ kühl/ gleichgültig wie eine Hundeschnauze (very indifferent, unemotional). In Norwegian the interchange of adjectival components is not as frequent: pakket [stappet] som sild i en tønne (extremely stuffed).
The analysis testifies to the fact that componential variability in the phraseological units under study is an index of their identity.
Guldarkhan Smagulova, Kazakh National University named by Al-Farabi, Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstansmagulova.g@mail.ru
Idioms as expressive means of the lingual personality in the Kazakh language as compared to English
The phraseological fund of the Kazakh language, which has embodied various idioms and other phraseological units (PUs) over the ages, is ‚the mirror, which in lingua-cultural society identifies its own national consciousness‘, according to Veronika N. Telia’s apt words (Telia 1996: 9).
The lingual personality converts or transforms the basic fund of Kazakh idioms and other phraseological units and creates thereby a purely personal view about a particular idiom. This can be seen by referring to the discourse of the oratorical verse by Biys and Akyns-Zhyrau.
The artistic world of the Kazakhs has striking dissimilarities with the European world view. Nomadic life in the lap of magnificent nature, full of steppe romance, allows the lingual personality to form a particular artistic world view, which is infinite in time and space. Kazakh phraseological units accumulate and translate lingual personality knowledge and vision about the world around, thus reflecting a specific attitude of the national mentality, e.g.: kabagynan kar jauyp, kirpiginen muz tamgan – the idiom, giving appraisal of a Kazakh Batyr’s actions in an imagery form, often used in the oratorical speech of Biys and Akyns within the meaning of ‚an anger man‘. The idioms kozine topyrak shashu (lit. whelm eyes with dust), muzga otygyzyp ketu (lit. leave to sit at ice) have the same expressiveness and distinctive symbolism, which are used in the meaning of ‚aldap ketu / cheating‘.
The Kazakh lingual personality uses idioms with the view of self-representation of its own, which determines one's virtuosity. It is the artistic verse of steppe Zhyrau, which is based on idioms or other phraseological units, and became the epitome of the Turkic mentality, martial prowess and ancient Nomadic traditions.
Idioms and other phraseological units in the Zhyrau verse serve to inspire individual features in the lingual personality, to determine the specificity of its verbal behavior, to reveal its character and intentions, its life values and moral standards.
The perspective of the studies consists in the search of English equivalents of the Kazakh idioms and other phraseological units under study.
Tatiana Fedulenkova, Vladimir State University, Vladimir, Russia, fedulenkova@list.ru
Typological Relevance of Phraseology: New Approach to the Study of Phraseological Units
One of the most urgent problems in modern linguistics is the problem of typological relevance of phraseology, which has been considered as ‚a typological outsider‘ for a long time. The perspective of enrichment of the typological model of the language is found in the study of isomorphic and allomorphic features of phraseological units and implications and universals in the sphere of phraseology.
Phraseology is a comparatively young field of linguistics which was founded and formed as a self-contained linguistic discipline during the mid-1960s due to the expansive research of Soviet/ Russian school of linguists. About fifteen years later, in the late seventies and the early eighties, it was recognized in Western Europe and began making its way to America.
As one of the most outstanding modern lexicographers, the author of the famous and most reliable Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English Anthony P. Cowie, pointing out to the indisputable progress of the soviet school of phraseological analysis and its influence on the world linguistics, underlines: „Recognition of phraseology as an academic discipline within linguistics – the term itself, like the adjective ‚phraseological‘, reflects Eastern European usage – is evident not only from vigorous and widespread research activity, but also from the publication of several specialized dictionaries reflecting one theoretical perspective or another… ‚Classical‘ Russian theory, with its later extensions and modifications, is probably the most pervasive influence at work in current phraseological studies and is unrivalled in its application to the design and compilation of dictionaries.“ (Cowie 1998: 2).
The analysis methodology is chosen with a view to finding out isomorphic and allomorphic features as well as universals and implications between peculiarities of organization of different elements of the language structure, which is sure to enable us to add phraseological features to the typological model of the language. The paper is targeted at demonstrating some basic universal implications in the field of phraseology of English, German and Swedish and illustrating the way they work for typological linguistics.
SLANG6 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A)17.15–18.45 Room A1 /Sunday 31.8.2014 (B) 11.00–13.00 Room A1
PHRASEOLOGY AND BUSINESS TERMINOLOGY: THE POINTS OF CROSSING
Convenors:
Tatiana Fedulenkova, Vladimir State University, Russia, fedulenkova@list.ru
Yakiv Bystrov, Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, ybystrov@ukr.net
We often come across such phraseological units (PUs) as “Occam's razor”, “nest egg”, “sleeping beauty”, “small dragons” which appear to function as units of business terminology. Papers on business terminology of idiomatic character are welcome to the Seminar. Items for discussion:
structural, semantic and contextual approaches to business PU-terms;
types, classifications, and LSP applications of terms of idiomatic character;
metaphor and metonomy as basic mechanisms of meaning transformation of the PU prototypical word combination;
characteristics of dictionary entries and definitions of PU-terms and their pragmatic value;
traditions and innovations in teaching business phraseology at universities.
Participants
Victoria Ivashchenko, The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, The Institute of the Ukrainian Language, Kyiv, Ukraine, vicivashchenko@ukr.net
Tetyana Stasyuk, Dnipropetrovs’k State University of Agriculture and Economics, Dnipropetrovs’k, Ukraine, stasyuktv@gmail.com
Phraseology and Business Terminology in Cognitive and Socio Perspectives
In our report we will demonstrate the analysis of two types of verbalization of cognitive structures, represented in the open-choice principle (terminological tendency) and the idiom principle (phraseological tendency).
Using the theory of categorization and conceptualization we prove that both traditional terms and terminological phraseological units (TPU) can be outlined as products, results of human mental and lingual activity. Conceptualization is an abstract and simplified perspective of the knowledge we have about the universe. This representation of our knowledge can be fixed both in terms and in TPUs by the similar stages of rethinking of entering information and embedding it with the tokens. The difference is only in the level of the lexeme or phraseme’s capability to pack conceptual features, to seize the volume of knowledge and to embed various sub-modalities.
On the other hand, there are differences in word’s capabilities to represent special concepts. For instance, business terms such as stockholder are highly domain-specific, and of little phraseological interest, although the texts in which such word occurs do tend to contain interesting clusters of domain-specific terminology. But it is impossible to know the meaning of common words such as the noun time without knowing the phraseological context in which the word is used. It demands clarifying semantics in context or communicative situation. For instance, it could be prime time, high time, rush time or crunch time. And those are business TPUs. The last one means “a short period when there's high pressure to achieve a result”, e.g.: It's crunch time for stem cell researchers in Korea. New government regulations may soon make their work illegal.
The basic cognitive mechanism of raising the TPU is metaphor, which is one of four types of conceptualization by R. W. Langacker – scheme, image, metaphor, metonymy (Langacker, 1991). In Steen`s conceptual level of metaphor description, metaphor is viewed as a proposition, which involves “idea units or thoughts” (Steen, 1999). It is conceptual metaphor that associates the mental image and the knowledge to the meaning of language unit (Lakoff, 1987). Metaphor builds TPUs embedding conceptual information that activates the comprehension and interpretation of the business / professional world. Metaphorical transfer reveals possible connection between the mental image and the figurative meaning of the TPU.
Yulia Prodan, Kamianets-Podilsky Ivan Ohienko National University, Kamianets-Podilsky, Ukraine, yulia_prodan25@mail.ru
Interaction of Terminological and Phraseological Spaces in the Language of Musicians
The issue of the interaction of the term and the phraseme as well as the problem of defining that phenomenon with a corresponding linguistic term has been the focus of contemporary linguistics. The interaction of these two units results in combining phraseological and terminological meanings in one lexical unit.
To define such a unit, linguistics makes use of such terms as a term-phraseme (O. I. Pavlova), a term-phraseologism (Y. V. Razvodovska, K. V. Zhutnikova, a terminological phraseologism (O. O. Nikulina), a phrase-term (O. A. Shylenko). The analyzed lexical units take intermediate position between phraseology and terminology.
Taking into account the previous experience of the scientific research, we will make an attempt to systematize and generalize the definitions of such a syncretic linguistic unit. In our further research we will use the notion “term-phraseme”, of which main differentiating features are the stability of the component composition and structure, semantic integrity, reproducibility, basic primary meaning and altered figurative (secondary) meaning, belonging to the corresponding terminological system, idiomaticity. The term-phraseme is a syncretic linguistic unit as it combines in itself characteristics of both the term (systemacy, available definition, a tendency towards monosemanticity within its terminological field, stylistic neutrality, distinct semantics) and the phraseologism (semantic integrity, reproducibility, relative constancy of the component composition and structure, emotional and expressive character) which contradict each other. On the one hand syncretism is connected with neutralization, and on the other it is connected with the processes of inter-transitivity of language units.
Semantic interpretation of the term-phrasemes shows that most widespread method of creation of such syncretic linguistic units is metaphorization of common words, and also terminological units that are included in these combinations of words. Getting figurative metaphorical sense, common word and / or term becomes part of the term-phraseme and on occasion as a result of reinterpretation of common words – professionalism-phrasemes and jargon-phrasemes. For example, in the field of music, term-phrasemes include (молочний кадр – an image, which is focused on the breasts of person); professionalism-phrasemes (водити бика – to accompany the registering one’s marriage in the registry office, ганяти собаку – to play the avant-garde music; and jargon-phrasemes (іти на жмурика – to gather for musical maintenance of the burial, ходити до жмурика в гості – to play on the burial).
Yana Ignatovich, North (Arctic) Federal University, Arkhangelsk, Russia, ignatovichjana@rambler.ru
Phrasal Verbs in Teaching Business English
The aim of the paper is the study of collocations and phraseological units (PUs) having the verb to give as one of their components for the purpose of their usage in BE teaching.
Stage 1, at which phrasal verbs are studied.
The issue of primary importance in the study of phrasal verbs is polysemy. It is the context that helps to present the semantic structure of the polysemantic phrase give away, for example ‚to give someone a present or a prize of something‘; give something free of charge, e.g.: We have invited a famous former student to give away the school prizes
Stage 2, at which the study of PUs with a partial shift of meaning takes place.
For example, give somebody notice – ‚give formal notification that employment is to end‘, e.g.: If he wants to get rid of you, he'll have to give you a fortnight's notice.
Stage 3, at which the study of motivated PUs with a full shift of meaning takes place.For example, give somebody the green light – ‚let somebody know that it is safe to go ahead with his plans, that he is allowed to do as he wants in some particular case, e.g.: The Ministry of Agriculture, like the Department of Trade and Industry, refuses to say which companies have been given the green light (to increase their prices) or to discuss the basis of their decision.
Stage 4, at which the study of unmotivated phraseological units with a full shift of meaning and a high level of abstraction takes place.
For example, give somebody the raspberry – 'treat somebody with rudeness and contempt‘, e.g.: Snooper Riley and Tugs Campbell gave him the raspberry on the Green today (The Observer).
BE teaching competence implies the component of differentiation between all the types of phraseological units having a frequent verb as their constituent. The university experience leads us to the conclusion that the more attention is paid to the study of such phrases, the greater is the progress in mastering business English.
Liudmyla P. Naumenko, Instutute of Philology, Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University, Kyiv, Ukraine
v-naumenko@voliacable.com
The Linguistic Nature of English Business Jargon
The aim of the paper is to study the linguistic characteristics of the language phenomenon ‚business jargon‘ in English discourse. The relevant tasks are to consider the correlation of business jargon with similar notions ‚argot‘, ‚slang‘, ‚cant‘ in the language system; aims and means of primary and secondary nomination; language units of business jargon; sources of acquiring business metaphors by business discourse.
With intensive proliferation of modern business discourse in its different forms – professional, corporate and public relations – business jargon has occupied a stable niche in non-standard everyday talk on professional topics among business people.
The differentiation between jargon, argot, slang and cant is performed on the basis of their main functions: for argot (in English its counterpart is cant) it is esoteric / criptologic, for jargon – representative, for slang – expressive emotive and recreational which also corresponds to the criterion of openness of these sublanguages.
As a means of nominalization business jargonisms are subdivided into neonyms (primary nomination) used to name newly-born notions or their characteristics, e.g.: cash, junk, brainstorming, and as words to rename already existing notions (secondary nomination) in order to re-think too complex notions and ideas and to facilitate their interiorization, e.g.: outsider, bonanza, air pocket.
The source of business jargonisms is metaphoric transference of words and terms from different spheres of life which creates anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, social, medical, sporting, military, aviation and shipping metaphors.
Anahit Bagdasaryan, Humanitarian Institute, Vladimirsky State University, Vladimir, Russia, anna-bag@mail.ru
Structural Analysis of Phraseological Units in Business English
The value of research in the field of the structure of phraseological units is evident because without the structure it is next to impossible to perceive their meaning, as Alexander V. Kunin puts it [Kunin 1996: 105]. The paper is based on the paternal theory of Business English phraseology [Fedulenkova 2002: 247] and is aimed at the analysis of grammatical structure of business phraseological units and finding out their most typical structural patterns.
Structural pattern 1: Adj + N. It is characteristic of two-component phraseological units with constant dependence of components and embraces 37% PUs under study: Blue Book, clean opinion, green card, green shoots, empty nesters.
Structural pattern 2: N + N. It is characteristic of two-component phraseological units with constant dependence of components and embraces 14% PUs under study: sister company, mirror site, nest egg, carpet bomb.
Structural pattern 3: V + N. It is characteristic of two-component phraseological units with constant-variant and constant dependence of components and embraces 14% PUs under study:
- constant-variant dependence of components can be illustrated by the only sample cost a (small) fortune/ the earth/ bomb/ packet.
- constant dependence of components can be illustrated by: abandon ship, close the books, hold office.
Structural pattern 4: Part I + N. It is characteristic of two-component phraseological units with constant dependence of components and embraces 7.9% PUs under study: carrying cost, holding cost, running cost, сlearing house, listening figures, clearing bank, paying bank.
Structural pattern 5: V + Prep + (d) + N. It is characteristic of three-component phraseological units with constant and constant-variant dependence of components and embraces 3% PUs under study: run into difficulties/ problems/ debt, run into hundreds/ thousands, run of book/ paper/ network/ site.
The analysis shows that the most frequent structural pattern is Adj + N (37%), which testifies to the fact that constant dependence of components is predominant within the frame of the given stock of phraseological units.
Darya Silina, Ekaterina Marycheva, Humanitarian University, VlGU, Vladimir, Russia, silina.dasha@yandex.ru, epmarycheva@maill.ru
Phraseological Units in Business English: Relations with the Prototype
Idioms and other Phraseological units (PUs) are not only a characteristic feature of emphatic speech. Many idioms and other PUs are made use of in Business English, where they are mostly far from emphasis and usually serve as specific business terms, e.g.: blue chips meaning ‚a share in a reliable company with very little risk of losing its value‘ (Tuck, Oxford Dictionary of Business English, 2000: 59), long tail meaning ‚the situation in which wide range of items sell in modest quantities individually but make up a considerable volume of sales collectively‘ (ODOBAM 2009: 341), tax haven – a country, where taxation is very low and therefore attracts investment from foreigners who wish to escape paying tax (Oxford 2000: 420), etc.
It has been observed that business phraseocon is constantly enriched by means of common English stock of idioms and other PUs. The relations between new business idioms and their common English genetic prototypes are different. Some of them retain their meaning in a new sphere of business as in: make a go of (business) – ‚to make progress in‘ (Seidl 1978: 204), etc. Others develop new meanings peculiar only to business sphere, e.g.: catch a cold – ‚to lose money in a business deal‘ (Tuck 2000: 80).
In analyzing phraseological units borrowed from common English into Business English, we come to the conclusion that in this process stable word combinations either retain their first meaning or lose it. Thus, an expression to make a go of something has the same meaning as in common English as when it is used in the sphere of business, that is: ‚to succeed in something‘ (Spears, AID 2007: 328).
For semantic analyses the most interesting are the PUs which in the process of secondary nomination acquired a new meaning. Those expressions are very difficult to recognize as terms. Thus, a word combination to catch a cold is used by a person who doesn't deal with business operations in the meaning of ‚to fall ill‘. At the same time for a business dealer this expression means ‘to lose money in a business deal’ (Oxford 2000: 80).
The paper also deals with other mechanisms of PU meaning transference: metaphor, hyperbole, etc.
Elizaveta Ilina, Tatiana Fedulenkova, Humanitarian Institute, Vladimirsky State University, Vladimir, Russia,elizaveta-ilina-1995@mail.ru, fedulenkova@list.ru
Business English Phraseological Units as Specialised Terms in Specific Domains
Idioms and other phraseological units are frequent not only in colloquial style but in the sphere of business and some adjoining fields as well. With a view to singling out and defining those domains we undertook a semantic analysis of the most recent dictionaries on business and finance. In the process of this study the phraseological theory developed by A.V. Kunin was referred to. It has been observed, as a result, that many English phraseological units serve as specialised terms in the following specific domains, namely:
advertising: e.g. prime time – ‚the time of day when the greatest number of people listen to the radio or watch television and when advertising rates are highest‘ (Tuck 2000: 321)accounting: e.g. sales ledger – ‚a book or a computer file in which the money owed or paid to a company for the goods it sells is recorded‘ (Tuck 2000: 371)banking: e.g. the rate of interest – ‚the amount of money charged by the bank, or paid by the bank for the loan or use of money‘ (Seidl 1983: 203)
business: e.g. a sleeping partner – ‚a person who provides a percentage of the capital of a business but who does not have a part in the management of a business‘ (Seidl 1983: 204)
buying and selling: e.g. to run up an account (with a shop) – ‚to buy a number of things on credit‘ (Seidl 1983: 204)commerce: e.g. price ring – ‚a group of sellers in the same industry who have agreed to fix a minimum price for a product‘ (Tuck 2000: 320)
economics: e.g. free market – ‚a market where prices are allowed to rise and fall according to supply and demand, without prices being fixed by governments‘ (Tuck 2000: 178)finance: e.g. easy money –‚money that is earned without difficulties‘ (Tuck 2000: 145);
stock exchange: e.g. government bonds – ‚securities issued by a government in the form of debenture stocks with a fixed interest that is paid at regular intervals‘ (Tuck 2000: 186)
The majority of phraseological units under study are intensively used in business, economics and management. Their phraseological character is proved by the semantic coherence of their components.
Ekaterina Vishenkova, Ekaterina Volkova, Pavlodar State University, Pavlodar, Republic of Kazakhstan, osya1987@mail.ru, poporina@mail.ru
Business Phraseological Terminology: Teaching for Professional and Cross-Cultural Understanding
No doubt to study idiomatic business terminology is very important in order to avoid communicative failures and to ensure success in business. This is particularly important in domain-specific language teaching to students of business and finance. The problem is that phraseology is ambiguous in its nature, i.e. it is characterised by different degrees of divergence of form and meaning. The meaning of an idiom is not the sum of its parts. For instance, the combination of such common everyday words as a drug on the market does not serve to denote the fact that marihuana, or hashish, morphine, cocaine, heroin or any other kind of opiate is available, but it serves as an economics term used in trade to name goods on the market for which there is no demand (Seidl 1983: 63), some goods that find no customers (Gulland 1994: 139), etc. (Fedulenkova 2003: 247).
Learners who are faced with a well-defined domain in the foreign language need to be taught that vagueness and ambiguity are likely to decrease in the case of international idioms, i.e. those having equivalents identical in form and meaning in other languages of the world, such as money laundering, ‚the process by which the illegal source of proceeds is concealed by means of financial transactions or any other means to make it appear legitimate‘ (Grafova 1998: 648), for which the Russian equivalent is: отмывание денег. But in business and finance, such ambiguity may lead to misunderstandings, which may sometimes have very serious consequences. That is why awareness of the important differences between one's own culture and other cultures has become a growing issue in fields such as Business English.
Business English, like other registers in given domains, involves a certain amount of specific terminology. What puzzles beginners is being unable to decipher the meaning of a financial, economic or business term because it is of idiomatic origin, such as sleeping partner, meaning ‚a person who has capital in a partnership but takes no part in its commercial activities‘.
The ultimate practical aim of teaching a foreign language is to help students to acquire complete mastery of the form and content of the language, so that they can fully and freely communicate using vocabulary items, idiomatic phraseology, grammatical constructions and finance and banking terminology, especially of idiomatic character, correctly and appropriately.
SLANG7 CANCELLED
SEMANTIC PROSODY ACROSS BORDERS
Convenors:
Lachlan Mackenzie, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, lachlan_mackenzie@hotmail.com
Hortensia Pârlog, University of the West, Timişoara, Romania, abaparlog@gmail.com
Semantic prosody, highlighted by John M. Sinclair and others, refers to certain words’ preference for collocates with either positive or negative associations. The apparently neutral verb cause, for example, has been shown to “prefer” negatively loaded objects (problems, death, damage, etc.). Semantic prosody is hardly ever recorded in dictionaries and therefore remains opaque to translators and learners. We invite papers that compare semantic prosody in English and at least one other language. We also welcome papers which discuss the theoretical status of semantic prosody and/or address the challenges faced by work in this area.
SLANG8 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 14.30–16.30 Room A1, (B) 17.00–18.30 Room A1/Tuesday 2.9.2014 ( C )11.00–13.00 Room A1
CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PHRASEOLOGY
Convenors:
Tatiana Fedulenkova, Vladimirsky State University, fedulenkova@list.ru
Victoria Ivashchenko, Institute of the Ukranian Language, Kiev, Ukraine, vicivashchenko@ukr.net
The seminar will focus on new theoretical perspectives and the latest developments in phraseology, including stylistic investigations, the issues of tradition vs creativity in the use of phraseological units in discourse, and cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research. The pedagogical implications of teaching the stylistic use of phraseologisms also present great interest, both to native and L2 students. Participants are encouraged to present their observations and theoretical conclusions on the basis of systematic studies of empirical material. Discussions of paradigmatic relations of English phraseologisms (synonymical, antonymical, hypero-hyponymical, etc.) in the system of the language, as well as a cross-linguistic approach, are welcome.
Participants
Leyla Apazheva, Kabardino-Balkarian State University, Nalchik, Russia, aleila2006@rambler.ru
Neophraseological Neologisms in Virtual Communication (based on material from the social networks facebook.com, vk.com, tuenti.com)
We can observe how the environment of virtual space is becoming a more common place for communication, and social networks are a phenomenon which allows us to retrace the origin and spread of the phraseological neologisms that arise from the Internet discourse. Research shows that the process of the creation of new idioms is growing. The results of a survey by Talka University among young people aged 14 to 35 indicate that:
about 75% of respondents know the majority of phraseological neologisms;
nearly 60% of respondents use them in daily speech.
The most frequent idioms of the social network facebook.com are:
- forever along. It is used for designation of personal social status;
- epic fail. It designates unexpected global failure which as a rule causes sneers;
- poker face. It comes from poker, where it is necessary to keep an unemotional aspect in order not to display existence or lack of advantageous cards.
Some Russian neophraseological units which are popular in the social network vk.com originate from a virtual language. It is named „Albanian“ and presents a metaphorical allegorical language of expression the thoughts in an unreadable form. The main concept is an alternative spelling. These are some examples:
- afftor peshi ischo (rus. author, keep writing). It's an expression of approval and support which demonstrates the wish to get to know the further work of the author;
- atstskiy sotona (rus. infernal Satan). This idiom also transfers admiration and shows that the author's ideas impressed the other participants of internet communication;
From a cursory examination of neophraseological units of a virtual discourse, it seems that social networks are spaces where there is no observance of any grammatical and syntactic norms. Nevertheless, we should note the creativity and innovation of users of social networks at creation of new idioms. Psychologists believe that communicants model their own language of communication not only for fuller and exact expression of the thoughts but also to abstract themselves from other social groups. Similar closeness and obsession within the virtual world can become a serious obstacle for introduction and fixing of neophraseological units in language. Such secrecy and obsession in the virtual world can be a serious obstacle to the introduction of neophraseological units into the system of the language.
Svetlana Bashieva, Kabardino-Balkariаn State University, Nalchik, Russia, sbas2012@yandex.ru
Phraseology as a Mechanism of Ethnic Outlook Reflection: Kabardino-Balkariаn VS English
One of the key aspects in the sphere of investigation of linguists is the aspect of representation of knowledge resulting from human cognitive activity in phraseology. It will help to trace and to describe the peculiarities of various fragments of the ethnic picture of the world. Phraseological units are „the result of complex cognitive procedures, during which, on the basis of the common knowledge about the world new knowledge about the objects of reality is represented in the form of verbal image“ (Alikaev R.S., Bashieva S.K., Phraseological units as a source of special ethno-specific information transmission // Bulletin of Pyatigorsk State Linguislic University-Pyatigorsk, 2010, № 4, p. 106–109).
The aim of the report is to analyze phraseology as the mechanism that encodes ethnocultural information in one of the minority languages of the North Caucasus – the Karachay-Balkar language – as compared to English.
Analysis of the empirical data shows that the representation of diversity of the ethnic picture of the world of Karachays and Balkars in phraseology reflects their particular worldview and a set of values that embodies important ethnic and cultural meanings. We have examined phraseological units with special ethnic components, such as itge chabir etgenley “work in vain” (literally: as though a chabir was sewn for a dog), chabir ashagan kiychykcha “like a guilty party” (literally: as a puppy that has eaten a chabir), ayagima chabir bau kyisip bashlaganly “since early childhood” (literally: since I have learnt to lace chabir), tulugun kagarga “to beat somebody unmercifully” (literally.: to beat somebody’s tuluk), kyozlery tuluk kibik bolurga “to cry a lot” (literally.: the eye became to look like tuluk), otoy iyige kirmegen Aimush “virgin” (about a man; literally.: like Aimush that has never been in the room for newly-weds). Because of lexemes chabir “man shoes made of oxhide with straw insole”, tuluk “leather bag”, Aimush “pagan god of the Karachay and Balkar people, the patron of domestic animals that understood the language of sheep” that are used in the modern karachay-balkar language only in fixed word-combinations, they have acquired the status of microtexts of a cultural value.Our further research, it is targeted at finding out proper English equivalents of the PUs under study with the view of adequate translation of contexts containing them.
Rosemarie Gläser, Dresden, Germany, schreibbuero.boernig@web.de
Interface between Phraseology and Paremiology in Political Discourse: Margaret Thatcher’s Autobiography The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995)
The culture of political discourse is largely determined by the behaviour and rhetoric of individual politicians as they appear in medial representation. A considerable amount of corpus-based research in phraseology and paremiology as conducted in recent years by Prof. Wolfgang Mieder at the University of Vermont in Burlington (USA) has been focused on the “proverbial rhetoric” employed by British and American statesmen and public authorities, such as Winston Churchill (1995), Harry S. Truman (1997), Abraham Lincoln (2000), Frederick Douglass (2001), Barack Obama (2009), and Martin Luther King (2010). The phraseological material under contextual analysis includes proverbs, proverbial sayings, quotations and slogans. The text sources cover speeches, interviews, newspaper articles, books, and often memoirs.
Against this background, the present study is aimed at the rhetoric of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013). The phraseological material has been drawn from the two volumes of her extensive autobiography bearing the titles The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995). These texts include fragments of speeches, critical comments, reports on state visits, personal reflections, and lively descriptive and narrative prose.
They provide plenty of proverbial sayings, proverbs, maxims, slogans, quotations, and memorable phrases of her own like The Lady is not for turning and We have ceased to be a nation in retreat.
Anahit Hovhannisyan, Gyumri State Pedagogical University, Gyumri, Armenia, a_hovhannisyan@mail.ru
Idioms and Metaphor
Recent linguistic and psycholinguistic research in the field of idiomaticity has convincingly shown that there is a link between the meaning of an idiom and appropriate discourse situation. The traditional “dead metaphor” approach to the study of should be reconsidered and the study of idioms should be reconsidered and the existing model of idiomaticity be regarded from a new perspective. I suppose that in a particular context phraseological units undergo metaphoric changes as a result of the original and figurative meanings of the components are brought back to life to make a new metaphor. In other words, “dead metaphors” in a very prosperous contextual situation “awakened from their long eternal sleep” to give birth to a new metaphorical meaning and metaphorization of the second order takes place – metametaphorization. It is for this reason that term “sleeping metaphor”, introduced by Müller is perhaps a better name for a certain type of idioms with more or less transparent inner form than “dead metaphor”. The process of idiomatic metaphorization can be defined as a typological trait for all languages, whereas languages differ in the way these processes are performed.
Piotr Cymbalista, University of Rzeszow, Poland, cymbalis@univ.rzeszow.pl
Motivation of semantic modifications: similarity or asymmetry? A comparison of Polish and English expressions in the lexico-phraseological fields of WORK and PROFESSION/OCCUPATION
The lexico-phraseological fields of WORK and PROFESSION/OCCUPATION may both serve as a rich repository of useful vocabulary, in general, as well as idiomatic expressions and phraseological units, in particular. Furthermore, this observation may be considered applicable to practically any language.
In the light of the tenets of cognitive semantics, it is possible to explain the observation above by pointing out to the influence of the relevant conceptual domains. The onomasiological potential for the emergence of an ample amount of the vocabulary and numerous idiomatic expressions in the lexico-phraseological fields enumerated above is substantial because of one characteristic quality of the conceptual domains of WORK and PROFESSION/OCCUPATION. This characteristic quality may be identified as the proximity between the conceptualizers and the extralinguistic context of the professional, occupational, etc., activities that they perform daily, and which constitute a substantial part of either the extralinguistic experience or the extralinguistic knowledge of any language community. Thus, the ubiquitous everyday experience of work is transformed into a profuse source of readily available conceptualizations that are easily legible to other language users involved in or sharing the same language-external reality.
The onomasiological strategies resulting in the development of the vocabulary in question and the establishment of the phraseology related thereto may often result in semantic change. This may be supported with the observation that their senses are based in particular on the mechanisms of metaphorical mapping, as well as metonymic and synecdochic association. The metaphorical mappings to be found in the relevant vocabulary often occur between concrete and abstract conceptual domains or domain networks (e.g. be the architect of one’s own fortune), whereas the metonymic associations are frequently established between, for example, the worker and the location of work (e.g. walk the streets), the worker and the result/product of work (e.g. effects man), the worker and the characteristics tools (e.g. a hired pen), the worker and his/her uniform (e.g. white collar), or even the worker and his/her pay (e.g. penny-a-liner). As regards the synecdochic associations, they are usually of the pars-pro-toto type (e.g. all hands on deck).
Last, but not least, the characteristic types and directionalities of the above-mentioned onomasiological mechanisms may be approached not only within the lexico-phraseological system of a given language, but cross-linguistically (for example, in Polish and English, as in the case of the research on which this paper has been based), for the purpose of identifying the possible similarities and dissimilarities in the paths of conceptualization applicable to the counterpart lexico-phraseological fields influenced by the extralinguistic context relevant to the ubiquitous conceptual domains of WORK and PROFESSION/OCCUPATION.
Elena Ryzhkina, Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia, phraseologinya@mail.ru
On Phraseological Neology: Regularity vs. Creativity (based on modern English phraseology)
The presentation tackles the problem of phraseological innovations in terms of human creativity involved in the use of codified idioms in discourse. In particular, it provides an insight into the dynamics of modern English phraseology which reflects its most common mechanisms and regulations.
The basic assumption the study proceeds from is that neological processes in phraseology should be treated as a system phenomenon which is stipulated by the general tendencies the language displays in its development and which depends on the fund of the nominative means accumulated throughout the language history.
Among the language tendencies underlying the evolution of the phraseological system two deserve special attention: the tendencies towards economy and regularity. These now account for the growing productivity of secondary nomination in the lexical system and tertiary nomination in phraseology. Here also belong non-conventional modifications of idioms, for they do not fall out of the system but, indeed, rest on the language norm.
A massive study of empirical material shows that various nonce-phrases created on the basis of codified English idioms fit into certain patterns existing in English. This concerns not only the devices of structural or/ and semantic transformation of codified units, but also regular patterns of producing phraseological neologisms and nonce-phrases by analogy. If we disregard the cases of truly unique individual coinages, they will represent this or that nominative pattern which can be actualized whenever is necessary in discourse to meet concrete communicative needs of the language speaker.
Such patterns are largely language-specific. This is substantiated by a cross-language analysis of phraseological neologisms or products of nonce-use of codified idioms. Thus, the dynamism of English and Russian idioms originating from the same source (like biblecisms) displays different patterns and language mechanisms employed – peculiar to the respective language.
So, the study demonstrates that creativity key to the nonce-use of phraseological units which serves to adjust the available means of expression to the needs of the language users is finely balanced against the language tendency towards stability and regularity.
Nadezhda Rakhmatullaeva, Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia, rakhm@mail.ru
On Structural-Semantic Analogy in English Phraseology (the metonymic pattern)
The paper is concerned with the issue of man’s creativity in the use of English phraseological units (PUs) in discourse, namely with the formation of new idiomatic expressions on the bases of the existing ones by means of structural-semantic analogy. The study is concentrated on metonymy-based English phraseological units and neologisms created by analogy.
Although phraseological units are usually seen as unique, non-patterned linguistic units, there can be observed similarities between many of them suggesting the existence of certain productive models/ patterns. Indeed, many scholars agree that there are structural, semantic and structural-semantic descriptive models of PUs. Yet, the existence of productive models is still a debatable issue. The influx of new PUs based on structural-semantic analogy, however, gives sufficient evidence that the mechanism provides not only a descriptive, but also a productive model for creating new PUs. In fact the mechanism is capable of producing any number of new units (or, rather, their occasional modifications) on the basis of existing ones to meet the ever growing demands of human communication.
One of the major mechanisms of producing PUs by analogy is metonymy. For instance, among the English idioms based on analogy the one that is best represented is the model of substitution of ‚the attribute for the social function‘. In fact, a professional, social activity is strongly associated with the attributes (like uniform) of the people involved in it. The clergy are associated with black coats, doctors with white coats, etc. Besides, the model is regularly used to designate servicemen in the armed forces in the UK and the USA, e.g. names with the components: ‘coat’ (blue coat, red coat), ‘beret’ (green beret, red beret), ‘jacket’ and so on.
An instance of the model of substituting the attribute for the function in social discourse is the metonymic pattern describing voters in the UK (e.g. Essex man, Mondeo man etc).
The studied ‚attribute-for-the-function‘ model proves that the mechanism of analogy provides descriptive as well as productive models of creating new phraseological units.
Ekaterina Volkova, Vladimir State University, Severodvinsk, Russia, poporina@mail.ru
Hyperonymic and Hyponymic Relations in the Field of English Comparative Phraseological Units
Hyper-hyponymic relations demand element-interaction relations. There are not many research works devoted to the question of that kind of relations in the field of English comparative phraseological units. In his work, Professor Alexander V. Kunin says that hyper-hyponymic relations are encountered more seldom than antonymic or synonymic ones. This statement sounds true for comparative phraseological units as well. The original hyper-hyponymic relations are impossible because of the structure of comparative units (as…as). But the second components of the comparativisms are usually connected with hyper-hyponymic relations. The analysis of the second components of the CPU is a question of interest because characteristics of the second component are defined by the reason of comparison.
We can divide comparative phraseological units into a number of groups according to the type of representation of the second component (food, animals, birds, plants, natural phenomena etc). The names of the groups are hyperonyms and the second components in every group are hyponyms. It is a very rare case when a CPU has the second component which is hyperonym in itself, e.g.: as free as a bird.
CPUs with the hyperonyms as the second component have wider meaning than with the hyponyms as the second component. For example, in the CPU (as) free as a bird the word ‚free‘ is connected with the characteristic common for all birds: ability to fly and, consequently, freedom. Then search phraseological units with different species of birds as the second components: (as) high as kite – ‚high‘ is connected with particular characteristics of this bird which is used to fly very high, (as) graceful as a swan –the swan is supposed to be a very graceful bird and differs from, for example, the goose (as silly as goose).
This feature is common for nearly all topical groups of CPU. We can say (as) wild as a beast and (as) greedy as a wolf, (as) blind as a bat, (as) tricky as a monkey etc. About plants we can say: (as) pleasant as flowers and (as) fresh as daisy, etc.
The results of our analysis of the comparative phraseological units show that CPUs have hyper-hyponymic relations which influence their semantic meaning and sphere of use.
Maria Konnova, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad, Russia, MKONNOVA@kantiana.ru
Biblical Idioms in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Corpus-Based Approach
The cognitive approach, aiming at investigating the triple unity of language, mind and culture, provides a deeper insight into the essence of mental schemes underlying the process of lexicalisation of biblical micro-texts both as fixed phrases (quotations) and idioms.
The present paper focuses upon semantic and functional properties of English and Russian biblical idiomatic expressions referring to the concept of time. Drawing on the data of two large historical corpora (Russian National Corpus / RNC; Corpus of Historical American English / COHA) this research traces minute semantic changes that have diachronically affected the meaning of such axiologically relevant New Testament sayings as “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof” (St. Matthew 6: 34) – “Довлеет дневи злоба его” (Мф. 6: 34).
The total number of corpus uses of the integral biblical expression is not large, yet it regularly occurs in both American English and Russian samples of all historical periods (1820-s – present time). The meaning, acquired by the saying in discourse, depends mainly upon the genre of the text and the author's axiological Weltanschauung. In fiction and magazine articles the expression is mostly synonymous to an appeal not to worry about the future; in philosophical prose, on the other hand, the saying is often a starting point for complex deductions about national mentality, the nature of time or the aim of life.
The profound cognitive shift that affected European society in the second part of the XIX century resulted in a gradual abandonment of the traditional axiological outlook. It manifested itself, among other things, in a more “liberal” attitude to the word of the Scripture. Fragments of well-known biblical quotations, taken out their original context, were conventionalised in a transformed meaning, sometimes entirely devoid of its initial biblical contents. In the present paper we examine – as an instance of the above mentioned process – the origination of a Russian idiom “злоба дня” (literally “the evil of the day”).
Anna Stachurska, University of Humanities and Technology, Radom, Poland, a.stachurska@uthrad.pl
Semantic and pragmatic specifications in dictionary definitions of selected English idioms
A lexeme typically conveys a variety of senses. This depends on its actual semantic structure, involves presupposed meanings and embraces conversational and situational implicatures. The meaning of a lexeme is also determinated by the context, the situation of its use and the knowledge of the user of a particular language. Hence, the information provided by a particular work of reference is twofold in its nature – semantic and pragmatic. Accordingly, the main objective of the paper is to outline lexicographic techniques of representing semantic and pragmatic information, specifically in reference to selected English idioms and with special emphasis on their pragmatic labelling in EFL lexicography. It is to be achieved by:
(i) delimiting the scope of pragmatics
(ii) outlining the concept of presumptive meanings (to describe the theory of generalised conversational implicature)
(iii) outlining the notion of usage
(iv) describing techniques of pragmatic labelling in EFL lexicography.
Pragmatic specifications are a very significant issue in lexicography. The term itself is attributed to Morris (1938:6), who distinguished within semiotics the areas of syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. As to the term itself, he defined it as the relation of signs to interpreters.
As to the linguistics analysis, the borderline between pragmatics and semantics has always posed a matter of controversy. According to Burkhanov (2003:103) ‘(…) delimination of pragmatics is also complicated by the fact that it infringes upon the domains of stylistics and sociolinguistics, that later being a relatively new branch of linguistic inquiry’.
Obviously enough, pragmatic analysis covers not only situational and sociocultural context, but simultaneously linguistic context. This approach enables bridging the gap between analysis of syntagmatic properties of lexical items (here: valence, collocability and idiomaticity) and analysis of social, culture – bound properties.
As far as pragmatic representations in lexicography, according to Zgusta (1988) there can be distinguished the following aspects of its specifications:
(a) cultural setting in dictionaries,
(b) equivalence in bilingual dictionaries,
© definitions in monolingual dictionaries.
Pragmatic specifications in lexicography deal with the speaker`s attitude to reality, the message and/or the interlocutor, which is encoded in linguistic signs.
At the same time, investigation of pragmatic specifications in lexicography cannot refrain from the analysis of semantic properties of lexical items. (Landau, 1989)
Bożena Kochman-Haładyj, Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów, Poland, bhaladyj@op.pl
Towards Gender Stereotyping in English Proverbs
According to Hussein (2005:60), gender ideology may be defined as ‘[…] a systematic set of cultural beliefs through which a society constructs and wields its gender relations and practices’. One may generalize and say that every society creates its own gender ideology in which men and women are placed in somewhat different/opposing social positions and patterns of expectations. However, a commonly assumed idea, observable – it is fair to say – in every culture, is that men are perceived as hard and tough, whereas women are viewed as soft and vulnerable, which – in turn – entails entirely different gender-related life attitudes.
Beyond any conceivable doubt, the female image emerges more precisely, since women’s roles and status constitute the core subject of many proverbial sayings, regrettably of negatively-coloured perception, both at a European and a universal level, as instanced by: Women and their wills are dangerous ills (English); When woman gets off the wagon, horses have easier work (American, Polish); When an ass climbs a ladder, we may find wisdom in women (Hebrew). Petrova (2002:344) provides evidence that out of 106 English axiologically negative gender-related proverbs as many as 83 reveal an adverse attitude and/or perception towards women.
On close inquiry, however, one has grounds to distinguish certain categories of proverbs which value women positively, for example the category of mother (as in e.g. God couldn’t be everywhere, therefore He made mothers) and grandmother (as in e.g. Respect your grandmother, because without her your mother would not have existed) or the universal ones where woman is presented through such female features which men either most need or admire (e.g. A good wife and health is a man’s best wealth (English); A good wife guards her husband from bad ways (Chinese); Beauty in women is like a flower in the spring; but virtue is like a star in heaven (English, American)).
The male sex appears much less frequently in the paremiological literature of the subject; and when it does it is mostly of positive stereotyping (e.g. A man of straw is better than a woman of gold (Portuguese); Thoughts are male, words are female (Italian)). Such a highly unequal distribution of male and female proverbial repertoires may testify to the fact that either men do not provide as much interesting and challenging material for analysis as women do or – more justifiably – ‘due to the male-dominated world, folklore scholarship pertaining to women had been kept to a minimum and thus largely excluded women from the picture of civilization’s progress’ (see Kochman-Haładyj 2012a:321).
In recent times, though, we have observed a major paradigm shift in gender-related issues manifested by, among others, the easily verifiable fact that men are slowly losing their traditional dominance within society and women have taken centre stage both within the household and in the workplace, thereby challenging rigid, traditional gender roles (e.g. He wears the trousers in his house – right under his apron; A career girl would rather bring home the bacon than fry it).
Bystrov, Yakiv, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine, ybystrov@ukr.net
Preface as Fractal Structure in Biographical Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Approach
The widely-spread chaos theory as a guiding aesthetic principle in Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd allowed to introduce a new conceptual structure—namely the fractal—that governs a unique approach to biographical narrative. The idea of history writing and imitation-with-distortion of history is extended and emphasized throughout the narration of Chatterton.
With the publication of Benoît Mandelbrot’s Fractal Geometry of Nature (1983) the notion of fractality has been used in different branches of science and also for textual analysis in particular. According to his theory, fractals may have various characteristic sizes, fractal shapes or structures are self-similar and independent of size or scale, and they are the result of an iterative or recursive construction.
The approach that can best accommodate the multiple meanings of the text is arguably a poststructuralist one, which is an assembly of varied pieces that can be repeated, played or skipped, attended to in a different order, etc. These bifurcated fragments in biographical narrative result in the fractal model of rhizome that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical prototype and exit points in historical originality of Chatterton’s real life and death and its possible representation. Consequently, Chatterton’s biography is extended through the novel’s strategy of giving real biographical information and its juxtaposition with the fictive.
Both the narrative structure and the preface of Chatterton display recursive patterns of self-reference and self-similarity. Ackroyd prefaces the novel with a brief summary of Chatterton’s life and career, emphasizing his dream of poetic fame. The dream was to be realized posthumously in terms of fractal model of rhizome that “may be conceptualized as a feedback where the length of the loop curve is infinite while the structure itself only occupies a finite amount of space” (Wenaus 2011: 159).
The preface contains four fragments from the novel, introducing the protagonists and forecasting the themes that are further extended to make up a multilayered “truthful” biographical portrait of Thomas Chatterton. Fractal analysis, including the procedures of iteration and recursion, is chosen as a method with the view of finding out certain linguistic conditions under which the preface can be read and filled with fractal models. The main linguistic characteristics of the preface as fractal structure are as follows: the preface like a geometric configuration with four fragments maps onto self-similar language structures in the main text; the language the writer uses to describe what happens in the text represents the shift onto repeated, rotated or recycled intertextual fragments resulted in the themes of imitation, parody, distortion, and plagiarism.
SLANG9 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A)17.15–18.45 Room S5/Sunday 31.8.2014 (B)11.00–13.00 Room S5, ( C ) 16.00–17.30 Room S5
INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE
Convenors:
Libuše Dušková, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, libuse.duskova@ff.cuni.cz
Jana Chamonikolasová, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, chamonikolasova@phil.muni.cz
Renáta Gregová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, renata.gregova@upjs.sk
The seminar presents different approaches to and different applications of the theory of information structure. The focus is on the multifarious aspects of information structure stemming from its close relationship to other linguistic disciplines. The topics of papers cover the dynamics of discourse especially from the viewpoints of the structure and character of context, the theme-rheme / topic-focus structure of sentences, the structure of larger textual units, paragraphs and whole texts, and the role of intonation in spoken discourse. The analyses are based on the material of written and spoken texts, as well as on parallel bi-lingual or multi-lingual materials.
Participants
Jana Chamonikolasová, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, chamonik@phil.muni.cz
Martin Adam, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, martinadamcz@gmail.com
Irena Headlandová Kalischová, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, irenahk@gmail.com
Martin Drápela, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, martin.drapela@phil.muni.cz
Lenka Stehlíková, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, stehlik.lenka@gmail.com
Creating a System of Annotation for FSP
In the framework of the Firbasian theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP), it is essential to base research on a thorough and precise analysis of text material as there may be occasional instances viewed differently by different analysts. The objective of the paper is to present the results of a preliminary comparative FSP analysis of selected abstracts of fiction texts carried out by a team of five FSP researchers. The procedure comprised five parallel analyses which focused on the basic theme-transition-rheme structure and were completed independently by the individual annotators; they were then compared against one another as well as against Firbas’s original analysis (if existent). The ultimate aim of our research is to find a degree of annotator agreement in the interpretation of FSP structure of the given text. We would like to see this as the first step towards the anticipated creation of an FSP-tagged electronic corpus.
Leona Rohrauer, University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic, drenkoval@seznam.cz
Major Approaches to Information Structure in British and American Theories Related to the FSP Theory
In this paper, approaches to information structure as presented by foremost British and American linguists are put side-by-side with the Functional Sentence Perspective theory as it has been developed on the principles of the Prague School. The British approaches are represented by A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), and by M.A.K. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985, 2nd ed. 1994). The American approach is represented by Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Consciousness, and Time (1994). The FSP theory, against which these approaches are appraised, is presented within the framework developed by Jan Firbas (1992), built on the work of Prague School linguists, particularly Vilém Mathesius, and further elaborated by Aleš Svoboda (1981) and Czech scholars currently working in the field. The conceptions of the basic constituents of information structure, i.e., the theme and the rheme, are compared and contrasted, as well as the fields of relations where they operate. The bearing of context, semantic content, word order, and intonation is examined with respect to the assessment of information structure by each theory. It is argued that FSP validly aligns our intuition about information processing with a consistent theoretical basis. This claim is demonstrated through examples drawn from the aforementioned works.
Vladislav Smolka, University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic, smolka@pf.jcu.cz
Linearity in FSP: The Strength of the Weak Factor
In the theory of FSP, the linear arrangement of clause constituents is considered the weakest of the four factors indicating the distribution of communicative dynamism over a sentence, following the contextual factor, the semantic factor and, in spoken language, prosodic prominence. The relative weakness of linearity as an FSP factor results from limited positional mobility of clause constituents in English, where the position of an element in the sentence primarily indicates its syntactic function.
However, the linear distribution of clause constituents may sometimes override the other factors and become the principal indicator of FSP. In such cases, the importance of linearity is signalled by the choice of an arrangement that is normally dispreferred because it conflicts with the usual word-order principles. These deviations from the usual word order include, for example, movement of a constituent from its usual position and instances of flouting the principle of end-weight.
The paper will explore the range of structures where linearity overrides the other FSP factors and the conditions under which it can assert itself as the leading indicator of FSP.
Gabriela Brůhová, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, gabriela.bruhova@ff.cuni.cz
Passivization of English ditransitive verbs from the FSP point of view
The present paper aims at contributing to the study of passivization of ditransitive complementation from the FSP point of view. English ditransitive verbs generally allow two passive constructions, i.e. the subject of a passive can in the active correspond either to Oi (Jack was sent a copy of the letter) or to Od (A copy of the letter was sent (to) Jack). As the passive usually serves as one of the means used to achieve the basic distribution of communicative dynamism, the choice of the subject and the object of the passive can be supposed to be motivated, respectively, by their thematic and rhematic function. Thus, the sentence is perspectived away from the subject and constitutes the quality scale. The aim of the paper is to verify this assumption and to find out whether a passive sentence with a ditransitive verb can also implement the presentation scale, i.e. whether the sentence can be perspectived towards the subject and introduce a phenomenon into discourse. Attention is paid to the semantics of the verb, the semantics of indirect object (whether the recipient is actual or intended) and the expression of the by-agent. The analysis is based on examples obtained from the British National Corpus.
Jiřina Popelíková, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, popelikovaj@seznam.cz
Adjectival predicates with infinitives and the problem of givennes:
Are tough-constructions FSP motivated?
This paper presents an analysis of tough-constructions (also referred to as easy- or easy-to-please clauses) which attempts to describe the formal syntactic properties of these constructions in the light of their functional sentence perspective. According to Quirk et al. (1985), Mair (1989) and Biber et al. (1999) the usage of TCs appears to be motivated, inter alia, by the information structure of the sentence content, i.e. the ordering of individual clause elements in such a way that the linear arrangement complies with, or at least closely imitates, the natural progression of an utterance from what is circumstantially given to what is immediately new. TCs, therefore, are expected to be favoured in situations where the noun phrase in the position of their subject is functionally thematic, containing an information item already mentioned in the previous discourse.
The aim of the research presented in this paper is to investigate the extent of the role that the FSP motivation plays in the usage of TCs containing adjectives of ease or difficulty. The focus is placed on determining whether or not the subjects of the TCs are retrievable from the immediately relevant previous discourse. The FSP properties of TCs are viewed in relation to the properties of other related syntactic constructions that contain adjectival predicates, namely extraposed and intraposed clauses.
Libuše Dušková, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, libuse.duskova@ff.cuni.cz
Textual roles of two forms of rhematic subjects: initial rhematic subjects vs. subjects rhematized by it-clefts
The paper discusses the question whether different realization forms of rhematic subjects play a role in the assignment of the sentence to the presentation scale. The two forms under discussion include the presentation type constituted by an initial rhematic subject and a presentation verb, i.e. the type based on the interplay of the contextual and semantic factor; and subjects whose rhematic function is in speech indicated by the intonation centre. In writing, this type is as a rule indicated syntactically, viz. by means of the cleft-construction. The paper attempts to find out to what extent these two forms are differentiated or interchangeable by examining both their FSP aspects and their position and role in the text. The treatment of the two structures includes rhematic subjects in their respective subtypes, viz. the extended presentation scale and the two types of the cleft construction, stressed-focus and informative presupposition it-clefts, and takes into account the semantics of the verb. The material of the study is drawn from computerized fiction texts.
Lenka Kopečková, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic, Lenka.Kopeckova@osu.cz
Thematic layers in the Czech and British Prime Ministers’ political speeches
The paper examines the thematic layers in the genre of political speeches within the Firbasian framework of the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective, drawing on the research carried out by Professor František Daneš, and Professor Libuše Dušková, but also by Ludmila Uhlířová, Martin Adam, Martin Drápela and the others. The thematic layers have been analyzed in a contrastive way, on the basis of the parallel corpus of the Czech and British Prime Ministers’ political speeches with the aim to find out typical thematic structure of the political speeches. The results of the contrastive analysis show the sequence of thematic elements in the Czech and British political speeches.
Renata Pípalová, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, m.pipal@volny.cz
On the Thematic Build-up of Abstracts and Concluding Paragraphs of Research Articles
Abstracts and conclusions represent undoubtedly prominent sections in the academic genre of research articles where the authors strive to capture the attention of prospective readers and summarize some of the most significant findings in a succinct, though convincing way. This paper attempts at throwing some light on their typical thematic build-up. Using the framework of paragraph typology introduced by Daneš (1994), and elaborated elsewhere, it scrutinizes a corpus of recently published research articles drawn from two distinct fields of soft disciplines, namely literary science and linguistics. It aims at identifying some of the prominent tendencies which assert themselves in this academic genre in both the fields under scrutiny and in the two distinct sections analyzed. The findings of this paper might prove beneficial to courses of academic writing, discourse analysis, translation studies, etc.
Silvie Válková, Palacky University in Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic, silvie.valkova@upol.cz
Jarmila Tárnyiková, Palacky University in Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic, tarnyi@ffnw.upol.cz
Focus formulas and their role in information packaging (a text-level perspective)
The paper is based on the assumption that such formulas as [The thing/trouble/problem/issue/… is that + content clause], though peripheral in comparison with the core constructions for highlighting, can become useful manoeuvring tools serving various context-sensitive manifestations of communicative strategies (focalizers, topic shifters, hesitation markers, smoke-screening devices compensating for vague conceptualization, and many more). Emergent from our corpus-based analysis is a need for a dynamic approach to focus formulas (FF) based on an on-line process of negotiation of their roles in the interplay of communicatively constitutive and communicatively regulative units of discourse (Leech, 1983). In the application section, the discussion will focus on the interplay of the paradigmatic axis of alternation (the point/thing/problem/trouble…) and the syntagmatic axis of co-occurrence of FF with other discourse signposts (Válková, 2012), such as discourse markers or hedges, as in Well the thing is you see I think from what I have gathered that…). The aim is to contribute to a more “delicate” (in the Hallidayan sense of the word) delimitation of the status, formal and functional properties of FF and their role in information packaging, smooth flow of communication, and avoidance of face-threatening acts. Our contribution is based on the BNC and COCA corpora.
Sara Gesuato, Universita di Padova, Padova, Italy, sara.gesuato@unipd.it
Information units in written thanks
The study examines the sequencing of information units in 43 written thanks (3,000 words) elicited from American English native speakers through written prompts outlining situations in which the provision of a good service casts two interlocutors in the roles of the benefactor and beneficiary, and which call for the beneficiary’s reaction to the beneficial event in writing.
The analysis shows that the texts display a formal structure comprising classic opening and closing formulas which address the phatic needs of communication. This provides the logistical, contextual framework for encoding gratitude. The gratitude-oriented messages are characterized by a macro-cyclical pattern, with the expression of gratitude first announcing and eventually ratifying the purpose and topic of the texts. Sandwiched in between are information units which provide clarifications and details about the topic and rationally sustain the purpose of the texts. The texts therefore appear to answer the principle of communicative effectiveness – the observation of the quantity, manner and relation maxims makes it possible for the reader to accurately process the texts – and that of social acceptability: the additional, originally phrased information units both support the illocution and sustain the role-relationship with the readers, which makes the texts more plausible, motivated and credible.
Dorota Rut-Kluz, University of Rzeszów, drk@univ.rzeszow.pl
You talkin’ to me? A case of specific reply by means of election campaign advertisements
The presentation aims at an analytic description of a specific type of exchange occurring during political campaigns. The candidates often engage in a virtual dialogue; that is, an exchange of points made by means of campaign advertisements. The specific type of exchange or reply is in certain aspects no different to an ordinary conversation; however, what influences it most is the context of public/mass communication. The main concern of the presentation is to investigate, within the framework of Relevance Theory, ways in which a candidate’s reply to the opponent’s advertisement is actually a message to the viewers and prospective voters rather than to the rival himself. The analysis is carried out on selected advertisements for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama broadcast during the U.S. presidential election campaign in 2012.
Astghik Chubaryan, Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia, astghik.chubaryan@gmail.com
Ruzanna Karapetyan, Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia, rkarapetyan79@gmail.com
Complexity of Natural Phenomena through the Prism of Linguistic Coherence
The given research seeks to examine the role of adverbial participial -ing clauses in Academic English in terms of their semantic variability and peculiarities of their functioning. Special emphasis is placed on the intercultural aspect. More specifically, it is examined how the units mentioned are used by Russian and Armenian physicists (based on the study of numerous scientific papers from arxiv.org) with the aim of uncovering the regularities, scope, frequency and inaccuracies of the use of these clauses encountered in the papers of non-natives. The results of this analysis are backed up by the data collected from the papers of English and American scientists in the same sphere. Preconditioned by their structural incompleteness, participial clauses occupy a unique niche in the syntactic and informative organization of scientific English. Thus, the principles of cognitive and functional linguistics are employed to make the given study more comprehensive. Another approach which proved quite feasible to ground the wide-spread use of participial clauses, as well as to bring in more precision into application of the latter in scientific English, is the concept of complexity and coherence viewed as a paired configuration and regarded as constituting parameters of a ‚good‘ text (Schmied et al. 2007:1).
SLANG10 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A9, (B) 17.15–18.45 Room A9
INVESTIGATING ACADEMIC DISCOURSES: ENGLISH LANGUAGE USE AT EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES
Convenors:
Vander Viana, University of Stirling, UK, vander.viana@stir.ac.uk
Aisling O’Boyle, Queen’s University Belfast, UK, a.oboyle@qub.ac.uk
Academic discourses have become a focal point for both language researchers and teachers. With universities aiming to expand their international reach, it is vital to examine how English is used in various academic contexts. This seminar explores the notion of academic discourses, investigating English language use in diverse spoken/written genres and registers, subject areas, and national varieties. In the long run, the results of such empirical investigations will not only provide a detailed understanding of the ways of being and doing in contemporary academia, but they should also be pedagogically useful in the design of modules on English for academic purposes.
Participants
Vander Viana, University of Stirling, UK, vander.viana@stir.ac.uk
Academic discourse in English Language and Literature: a contrastive corpus-driven investigation
Despite the vast literature on written academic discourse, few researchers have examined the genre of PhD theses (e.g. Swales, 1990, 2004; Bunton, 1998; Thompson, 2001; Hyland, 2009). This study aims at filling this gap by contrasting how PhD candidates in two specific disciplines report their findings in English. The choice of disciplines is innovative in the sense that the present research distances itself from the traditional EAP (English for Academic Purposes) focus in medical, scientific and technological fields (cf. Biber et al., 2002; Flowerdew, 2002). Instead, it examines two related disciplines – namely, English Language and English Literature, which have received little attention so far (MacDonald, 1990). To this end, two specialized corpora were compiled, each containing 20 theses and approximately 1.5 million words. The corpora were probed by WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2008) with a view to identifying the key words that characterize each discipline, which were then qualitatively categorized in semantic groups. The results show that the semantic configuration of theses in English Language and English Literature differs not only in terms of the concepts they draw on, but also in relation to which references are made and to how the texts are structured.
Paul Thompson, University of Birmingham, UK, paul_ccr@fastmail.fm
English in interdisciplinary research writing
Recent research (e.g, Hyland 2000, Fløttum, Dahl & Kinn 2006) has revealed much about linguistic variation in and between disciplinary discourses, but little as yet has been written about the features of interdisciplinary research writing. It is probable that researchers working in an interdisciplinary research context have to frame their messages for a broader audience than they would do when writing for a discipline specific journal, and consequently we predict that the linguistic features of papers in interdisciplinary research journals are distinctively different from those in monodisciplinary journals.
In this talk I will report on the first stages of an ESRC funded project carried out at the Centre for Corpus Research, Birmingham, in collaboration with the publisher Elsevier, in which we investigate, using corpus linguistic techniques, the entire holdings (1990 onwards) of a successful journal in an interdisciplinary field: Global Environmental Change. We have clustered the articles variously on different dimensions using Biber's Multidimensional Analysis in order to capture congruences of features between them, and we have also focused on certain features through close textual analysis. Our findings are augmented with interview and survey data.
Chiara Nasti, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy, chiara.nasti@unina.it
Marco Venuti, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy, marco.venuti@unina.it
Sole Alba Zollo, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, solealba.zollo@unina.it
European university websites: An integrated multimodal and corpus-based approach
The present paper is part of a wider project involving researchers from different fields (linguistics, multimodality, university governance studies and economics) aiming to assess the level of internationalization and integration of European universities and in particular of Italian universities within the regulatory framework set by the Bologna Process.
The corpus under examination is the acWac-EU corpus, which is a collection of Irish, British and Maltese university websites and European university websites in English. The corpus was developed at the University of Bologna through the web-as-a-corpus method and is itself part of a larger project (Bernardini & Ferraresi 2013).
Through a multimodal discourse analysis approach (Lemke 2002; Adami 2013) on a sample of Italian and UK university websites, we will try to identify the verbal and non verbal distinctive features of the collected data. The multimodal analysis will be integrated with the outcome of a corpus-based investigation (Biber 2006) of the main communicative features of the Italian and British sub-corpora.
The study aims to evaluate the present level of integration and internationalization adopted by the Italian academic system, and to verify the extent of the interplay between verbal and visual features in creating an effective web-mediated communication.
Aisling O’Boyle, Queen’s University Belfast, a.oboyle@qub.ac.uk
Grounding perspectives and negotiating alignment: Dialogicality in small group discussions at university
This paper presents an investigation of spoken academic discourse, in particular, the discourse of small group discussions in university classrooms. The perspectival nature of interaction is taken as a key tenet of this investigation of university classrooms. In this study, university classrooms are conceptualized as collaborative spaces for sharing ideas and labouring on goal-directed tasks. University classroom talk is a collaborative struggle to make meaning. The data used in this study is a spoken corpus of academic English created from recordings of a range of subject discipline classrooms at a UK university. First, question and answer sequences are explored as a means of examining how interactants engage with disciplinary knowledge and enact stance-taking. Second, the process that elaboration plays in grounding perspectives and negotiating alignment of interactants is examined. Elaboration affords the space for the enactment of student stance in relation to the tutor embodiment of discipline knowledge.
Rachel Germanier, Les Roches International School of Hotel Management, rachel.germanier@lesroches.edu
How international post-graduate students use humour in the vocational-university classroom
Teachers’ classroom humour has been investigated before (Wanzer, Frymier, Wojtaszczyk, & Smith, 2006) but rarely is students’ interaction put centre stage. A qualitative case study using Linguistic Ethnography and a Conversational-Analysis informed approach was undertaken to determine how and why international postgraduate students were using humour in peer-peer classroom talk. The findings show that students use humour often as a means to create affiliative links with each other. Affiliation in the sense of feeling part of the group has been specifically mentioned as contributing to international post-graduates’ requirements for learning (Ryan & Viete, 2009). Recommendations are made concerning the role of the teacher in establishing a classroom environment in which such affiliative humour is encouraged.
References
Ryan, J., & Viete, R. (2009). Respectful interactions: learning with international students in the English-speaking academy. Teaching in Higher Education, 14, 303–314. doi:10.1080/13562510902898866
Wanzer, M. B., Frymier, A. B., Wojtaszczyk, A. M., & Smith, T. (2006). Appropriate and Inappropriate Uses of Humor by Teachers. Communication Education, 55, 178–196. doi:10.1080/03634520600566132
SLANG11 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room S5, (B) 14.30–16.30 Room S5 ( C ) 17.00–18.30 Room S5
CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC GENRES
Convenors:
Karin Aijmer, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, karin.aijmer@eng.gu.se
Diana Lewis, Aix-Marseille Université, France, diana.lewis@univ-amu.fr
The seminar explores the comparability of discourse-pragmatic characteristics of genres across European languages, using parallel corpora (aligned translated texts) and/or comparable corpora (genre-matched original texts). Genres, defined by sociolinguistic contextual parameters, often show distinctive patterns of frequency and distribution of linguistic features in relation to other genres or to the wider language. The seminar compares such patterns across English and (an)other language(s), in areas such as modality, pragmatic markers, speech acts, rhetorical structure. It deals with spoken, written or multimodal genres within domains such as political discourse, public communication, journalism, academic and professional discourse, addressing both methodological and theoretical issues.
Participants
Karin Aijmer, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, karin.aijmer@eng.gu.se
The semantic field of obligation in an English-Swedish contrastive perspective
The aim is to compare the use of deontic modality across fiction and non-fiction text types in English and Swedish on the basis of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). The ESPC contains comparable original texts in English and Swedish with their translations, altogether 2.8 million words representing both fiction and non-fiction texts.
Both in English and Swedish modality can be expressed by a modal auxiliary (English must and Swedish måste). However the modal cognates are not always mutually translatable. English must was translated as ’måste’ in 67% of the examples. On the other hand, Swedish måste had a large number of competing correspondences, especially when måste was deontic (måste was translated as ’must’ in 44% of the examples).
The research questions will focus on the following three aspects:
- how is deontic modality expressed in English and Swedish on the basis of the translation correspondences?
- when must and måste are not each other’s correspondences, what are the reasons for selecting another variant?
- what is the influence of genre? The ESPC corpus makes it possible to compare modality in comparable sub-corpora of fiction and non-fiction
The translations of Swedish måste into English show that there are a large number of forms competing with must in English. These correspondences include a periphrastic form of obligation such as have to, have got to, had better or a (different) modal auxiliary such as need to, should, ought to.
When we consider the Swedish correspondences of the English must there are both similarities and differences. The English must with deontic meaning was for example (also) translated as an imperative, by a (different) modal auxiliary få (’may’), ska (’shall’), skulle (’should’), bör, borde (’ought to’) or by a periphrastic form (vara tvungen ’be obliged to’).
Lieven Buysse, KU Leuven University of Leuven, Belgium, lieven.buysse@kuleuven.be
English so and Dutch dus in a parallel corpus: an investigation into their mutual translatability
One of the most daunting challenges in the description of pragmatic markers is posed by their polyfunctionality, which raises questions as to their functional scope as well as to the (inter)relatedness of their functions. Translations of pragmatic markers have been suggested as one way towards resolving such issues (see e.g. Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2003; Aijmer et al. 2006; Johansson 2006; Degand 2009). This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of two highly frequent and versatile markers of result or inference, viz. English so and Dutch dus. In a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis into the mutual translatability of these markers we will map for both how they are translated into the target language for each of their functions, as well as how they are backtranslated (e.g. which Dutch forms have so as their translation equivalent in English?). The investigation is based on close scrutiny of the bidirectional Dutch-English component of the Dutch Parallel Corpus (Macken et al. 2011), a 10 million word sentence-aligned corpus of translated texts. Special attention will be paid to the particular issue in using parallel corpora to study features typical of – albeit not limited to – spoken discourse by distinguishing between texts that were (meant to be) spoken and those that were intended to be read.
References
Aijmer, K., A. Foolen and A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen (2006). Pragmatic markers in translation: A methodological proposal. In K. Fischer (Ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 101–114). Oxford/Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Aijmer, K. and A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen (2003). The discourse particle well and its equivalents in Swedish and Dutch. Linguistics 41(6), 1123–1161.
Degand, L. (2009). On describing polysemous discourse markers: What does translation add to the picture? In S. Slembrouck, M. Taverniers and M. Van Herreweghe (Eds.). From will to well. Studies in Linguistics offered to Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen (pp. 173–183). Gent: Academia Press.
Johansson, S. (2006). How well can well be translated? On the English discourse particle well and its correspondences in Norwegian and German. In K. Aijmer and A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen (Eds.), Pragmatic Markers in Contrast (pp. 115–138). Oxford/Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Macken, L., O. De Clercq and H. Paulussen (2011). Dutch Parallel Corpus: a Balanced Copyright-Cleared Parallel Corpus. META 56(2), 374–390.
Michaela Martinková and Markéta Janebová, Palacký University of Olomouc, Czech Republic, michaela.martinkova@upol.cz
What can English translation equivalents reveal about the Czech modal particle prý: A cross-genre study
According to Czech monolingual dictionaries (Mejstřík et al. 2009), the Czech modal particle prý [“supposedly”] expresses the speaker’s doubt about the truth of what is being reported. The particle has been ranked among lexical evidential markers (Hrschová 2012), more specifically the markers of reported evidentiality of the hearsay type (see Aikhenwald 2003), where the source of the reported information is not known. If it is known, arguably, it is questioned. Our analysis of prý in Czech target texts (translations from English in the parallel translation corpus InterCorp, subcorpus of 3,273,952 words) reveals, however, that in the texts of fiction the source of reported information is known in the majority of tokens (61.7%) and in most cases not questioned; in 43 out of the 192 tokens (22.4%) prý translates a reporting clause with say and in another 23 tokens (12%) a clause with other reporting verbs; prý is often used to introduce a segment of a long reported complex. This reflects its original usage; according to Machek (2010, 481), prý is a reduced form of the verb form praví [say:prs.3sg] or pravi [say:aorist]. In journalistic texts, on the other hand, the source of the reported information is often left unexpressed; prý allows the authors not to take responsibility for what is stated. We hypothesise that the modal overtone of doubt, frequent in spontaneous conversation, developed as a pragmatic strengthening in the sense of Traugott (2003).
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2003. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP.
Czech National Corpus – InterCorp, Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Prague. Accessible at WWW:<http://www.korpus.cz>.
Hirschová, Milada. 2012. Evidential markers, modifiers, sentence adverbs, predicates – another interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics within syntax. Guest lecture delivered at Palacky University in Olomouc.
Hopper, Paul, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.
Machek, Václav. 2010. Etymologický slovník jazyka českého. Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny.
Mejstřík, Vladimír, František Daneš, Jaroslav Machač, and Josef Filipec (eds). 2009. Slovník spisovné češtiny pro školu a veřejnost. Prague: Academia.
Maria Pavesi, University of Pavia, Italy, mariagabriella.pavesi@unipv.it
Formulaicity in and across film dialogues: the case of demonstrative clefts
English demonstrative clefts (e.g. That’s what I mean; this is where I’m staying) can be viewed as a special case of formulas (Calude 2009). Although their structure is not entirely rigid, they come in recurrent patterns that allow for only limited variation. They are also restricted in distribution, occurring almost exclusively in conversation (Biber et al 1999), where they play a major structuring and interactional role connected with their deictic function (Miller and Weinert 1998). In contrast, although spoken Italian employs different cleft types, formal equivalents of these English clefts are very rare in spoken Italian (Roggia 2009). Demonstrative clefts thus represent an interesting case for the investigation of cross-linguistic equivalence in translation (cf. Johannson 2001).
By drawing on the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue – a one-directional parallel corpus of orthographically transcribed film dialogues totalling about 500,000 words – this study addresses the following research questions: What is the frequency and formulaicity of demonstrative clefts in English film dialogues? And in this respect how does this genre compare to spoken conversation?
How are these formulas translated into Italian? Do they lead to formulaic patterns in the target texts? The results will show that demonstrative clefts are very frequent in Anglophone film language, where they hence contribute to the naturalness of the genre. In the Italian translation, English demonstrative clefts give way to repeated solutions, which also add to the formulaicity of Italian dubbed language.
Magdalena Szczyrbak, Jagiellonian University, Poland, mdczernek@interia.pl
Modal adverbs of certainty in EU legal discourse: A cross-linguistic study
While traditional grammar books seem to overlook the distinction between the semantic and pragmatic meaning of modal adverbs, this study follows the interactional, heteroglossic approach to modal adverbs of certainty, stressing their context-bound readings. To this end, in agreement with Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007), it is argued that modal adverbs of certainty (subsuming epistemic, evidential, expectation and speech act adverbs) are used for rhetorical purposes which are not necessarily related to the speaker’s assessment of the reliability of knowledge. Thus, following the view that adverbs of certainty serve, among other goals, to foreground stronger arguments and to background alternative voices, the analysis draws on data from EU legal discourse to explore the deployment of these adverbs in forensic argumentative writing. As a genre-based study, it confronts English- and Polish-language versions of the Opinions of the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice, exemplifying written legal communication in a multilingual setting. Adopting the English version as a point of departure, the investigation aims both to analyse the choices made by Polish translators and to identify language-specific uses of the analysed adverbs. In sum, besides demonstrating that modal adverbs of certainty are a frequent argumentative device in the analysed genre, the study reveals their rhetorical potential and highlights the role they play in influencing the reader’s attitudes and beliefs, both in English and in Polish.
Emmanuel Baumer, University of Paris-Diderot Sorbonne Paris Cité CLILLAC-ARP EA 3967, France, emmanuel.baumer@wanadoo.fr
Co-referential chains in journalistic portraits: a comparative study (French / English)
This paper is a corpus-based comparative study of co-referential chains in English and French, within the framework of A. Culioli’s Theory of Enunciative Operations. The study focuses on maintained reference to single (human) individuals in journalistic portraits and aims at showing that the distribution of indexical referential expressions (particularly proper nouns and nominal anaphors) is not random, but primarily depends on several factors, such as discourse structure and point of view, most of which operate at discourse rather than sentence-level. One of the main contrastive phenomena observed is the recurrent use of “subjective” nominal anaphors (with an implicit predicative value) in French, whereas in English the use of (reduced) proper nouns is much more frequent. The interactions between referential markers and “framing adverbials” (Charolles 2003) will also be closely analysed.
Hilde Hasselgård, University of Oslo, Norway, hilde.hasselgard@ilos.uio.no
Adverbial clauses in English and Norwegian
This investigation concerns the position and the information structure of adverbial clauses in relation to their matrix clauses in English and Norwegian. The study focuses on two genres, fiction and news reportage, and is primarily based on original text in both languages. Translations in the ENPC have been consulted where English and Norwegian originals differ markedly. The adverbial clauses are annotated for their syntactic and semantic type (finite vs. non-finite; time, contingency, manner, etc.), position (Initial, Medial, End) and information structure. The following hypotheses will be tested:
- The languages will have different positional preferences: Norwegian will use initial position more often than English (Diessel 2001, Hasselgård 2014a & b).
- News will have a greater proportion of its adverbial clauses in initial position than fiction (Hasselgård 2014a).
- Different syntactic and semantic types of clauses may have different positional preferences, and the preferences may vary between languages and genres.
- Adverbial clauses containing given information are more likely to be sentence-initial; those containing new information are more likely to be sentence-final (Ford 1993, Ford & Thompson 1986).
- Text strategies (Enkvist 1981) or clause relations (Winter 1994) are likely to determine the order.
Material:
The British part of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB)
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC)
A collection of news articles from Norwegian online newspapers
Diana Lewis, University of Aix Marseille, France, diana.lewis@univ-amu.fr
Discourse marking and information structure in English and French political speeches
As has been observed in a number of contrastive studies of French and English, there appear to be significant differences in the patterns of discourse marking between the two languages. There has been little agreement, however, on the nature of such differences. While some have argued that markers of discourse coherence seem to be more necessary in English than in French, others have claimed that French has a preference for a greater density of discourse marking. This paper takes a look at discourse marking in political speeches, a genre of written-to-be-spoken language that is broadly speaking persuasive in intent. The study is based on a French-English comparable corpus of speeches containing approximately 1m words in each language. It identifies markers within three broad groups of coherence relations: additive/elaborative, contrastive/concessive and causal/resultative. An analysis of the distribution of the most frequent markers in the two languages suggests that, in this genre, density and variety of marking, particularly of additive relations, tends to be greater in French. Particular patterns of marking are identified for each language, and the role of the markers in shaping information structure is discussed.
Ivana Reznickova, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, Ivana.Reznickova@osu.cz
Pharmaceutical advertising leaflets as a specific discourse
The paper deals with the linguistic as well as non-linguistic means of communication used in advertising leaflets promoting pharmaceutical products. These leaflets form a very specific type of semi-professional text determined by its persuasive aim, legal restrictions and even a physical placing. The multimodal analysis has revealed a number of features generally applied to advertising texts but also several features which make these texts distinctive from any others in the field. The results of analysis demonstrate a specific use of paralinguistic means, such as pictures, colours and fonts of letters as well as a specific use of linguistic means such as distribution of relevant lexical elements, syntactic structures and general informational structure from the viewpoint of functional sentence perspective. The paper is based on a comparative study of Czech examples and their closest English counterparts. We speak of the closest counterparts (not equivalents) since the different legal approaches in both countries towards the pharmaceutical advertising may generally cause significant differences. However, as to the leaflets aiming at a unified communicative purpose we may assume that they exploit the language and paralinguistic means in a comparable manner.
Anna-Brita Stenström, University of Bergen, Norway
Spanish and English teenagers' use of vocatives
Vocatives are realized by taboo words (Sp. hijo de puta/Eng. son of a bitch) as well as non-taboo words (Sp. tío/Eng. man). In a corpus-based paper presented at the ICAME conference in Santiago de Compostela 2013, I showed that the top five taboo vocatives were more common in Spanish than in English teenage conversations, arguing that they were not intended to offend but to create an intimate contact between speaker and hearer.
In this paper I will widen the study and include the top five non-taboo vocatives and with particular emphasis on the gender aspect. What I hope to be able to show is not only to what extent boys address boys and girls address girls using taboo and non-taboo vocatives but also how boys adress girls and girls address boys in mixed conversations, and whether there is a difference between Spanish and English teenagers in these respects by studying the conversational encounters in Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT).
What I expect to find is that there are differences in all these respects, judging by the frequency of use, which is related to the speakers' age and socioeconomic and not least their cultural backgrounds.
Catherine Chauvin, University of Lorraine, France, catherine.chauvin@univ-lorraine.fr
Constructing narrative coherence in stand-up comedy: on genre-specific strategies
Narrative coherence has been repeatedly studied, but analyses have either tended to focus on literary narratives, frequently 19th-20th c. narrative fiction, or oral narratives, sometimes elicited (e.g. Labov et Waletsky: 1967, Haliday et Hasan: 1976; Labov: 1997, 2001, 2004, 2006; Slobin: 2005; Duchan, Brudan, Lewitt: 1995). Taking into account other modes of narration can therefore turn out to be interesting to broaden perspectives and allow for the identification of what is more typical of a given genre. We will therefore put forward a few strategies used by several comedians (currently active British comedians: B. Bailey, J. Brand, J. Carr), and see what they can contribute to the study of cohesive devices. In this short presentation, we propose to focus on two or three modes which could be deemed typical: “call-backs” (reference to a topic mentioned earlier in the show after it has been abandoned for a while), structural repetition, and perhaps (according to time) the use of certain discourse markers (cf. so, right), which may be less distinctive but could perhaps have specific uses. We will also raise a few methodological questions about what the corpus can bring to the study of cohesion and genres.
Laura Hidalgo Downing and Yasra Hanawi, Autónoma University of Madrid, Spain, laura.hidalgo@uam.es
Bush and Obama’s addresses to the Arab World: A comparison of discourse pragmatic features of stance in political discourse
The present paper compares the stance styles which characterise the speeches addressed to the Arab world by US presidents Bush in 2008 and Obama in 2009. Keyword analysis and concordance searches are used to explore the frequency and co-occurrence of stance markers within the areas of indexicality and modality (see, for example, Ajmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2007, Biber et al. 1999, Chilton 2004, Englebreston 2007, Givón 1993, Halliday 1994, Hunston & Thompson 2000, Martin & White 2005). The objectives of the study are the following: 1) to identify the frequency and keyness factor of modality markers, verbs of cognition, negation and personal pronouns,: 2) to explore the co-occurrence of these linguistic features; 3) to explore the similarities and differences between the two speeches with regard to the choices mentioned above, and, 4) to argue how they shape different stance styles in the two politicians within the same genre. Results show significant differences in the choice and frequency of markers of modality and negation and their co-occurrence with personal pronouns. While in Bush there is a lower frequency and variety of modal verbs and negation, Obama’s speech shows a significant use of these features and interesting combinations with specific pronominal choices.
Tereza Malčíková, University of Ostrava, Tereza.Malcikova@osu.cz
The role of metadiscourse in genre analysis: research article and undergraduate textbook
Metadiscourse has been used quite frequently as a tool for characterizing various genres of academic discourse, despite the fact that some researchers point out its theoretical and methodological shortcomings. The paper aims to compare several approaches to metadiscourse, especially the so-called ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ approach identified by A. Mauranen. Drawing on the model introduced by Ken Hyland (2005), which presents metadiscourse as one of the significant attempts to conceptualize the interpersonal aspects of language, the paper sets out to compare two genres of academic discourse, undergraduate textbook and research article, within one discipline – Applied Linguistics. The analysis shows the distribution of metadiscourse features in the two genres and focuses on the categories that proved the greatest differences, such as engagement markers. The use of metadiscourse reflects different purposes and audiences of the two genres – the instructional goal of the textbook on one hand, and a more persuasive goal of the research article on the other. It also reflects the unequal relationship between the writer of the textbook and the readers as novices in a discourse community. The analysis revealed some genre-specific features of the undergraduate textbook, which still tends to have a peripheral status among academic genres.
SLANG12 Saturday 30.8.2014, 11.00–13.00 Room A7
REPRESENTATIONS OF (NEW) EUROPEANS IN PRIVATE, MEDIATED AND PUBLIC DISCOURSES
Convenors:
Jan Chovanec, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, chovanec@phil.muni.cz
Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Opole University, Poland, molekk@uni.opole.pl
The seminar aims to address the discursive construction of Europe’s citizens and nations, with a particular focus on the countries that recently joined the EU. We wish to explore, among others, the discursive strategies in which the opposing groups of “us” v. “them” – (e.g. old/new, 17/27, North/South) – are formulated, with their underlying ideologies and resulting projected identities. We welcome case studies as well as comparative (e.g. cross-cultural or diachronic) analyses based on material from diverse sources (e.g. media, political speeches, policy papers) that preferably approach the issue from the perspective of (critical) discourse analysis and pragmatics.
Participants
Jolanta Szymańska, Opole University, Poland, jolszym@uni.opole.pl
Discursive strategies of constructing oppositions in British quality press
This study analyses British media texts in search of discursive strategies of constructing oppositions within the European Union as reflected in the language of a quality newspaper. The corpus of texts of 550 000 words comprises articles retrieved from the Internet site of the Daily Telegraph from the 1st of May, 2004, the date of the EU enlargement, to the 1st of May, 2009. The articles have been selected according to whether they included the words Europe or European in the headline. The initial quantitative analysis has revealed an interesting distribution of the adjectives Eastern and Western, with the former outnumbering dramatically the latter whenever collocated with lexemes Europe or European, which might suggest the projection of identity of Europeans as West Europeans and East Europeans as non-Europeans. Further, both quantitative and interpretative analyses have been conducted in order to formulate a more complete description of the discursive strategies dominating the corpus.
Przemysław Wilk, Opole University, Poland, przemekwilk82@gmail.com
New Europeans in the Guardian: a pilot study
Applying the theoretical and methodological frameworks of Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics, the paper examines the alternative construals of the new EU members that joined the European family during the biggest EU enlargement in May 2004. The analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising over 900 000 news items retrieved from the Guardian, a liberal left-of-center British quality daily. Operationalizing ideology reproduction in terms of van Dijk’s (1998) concept of ideological square and the discursive strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, the study also addresses the ideological tensions between us (the old) and them (the new) EU members.
References
van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.
Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Opole University, Poland, molekk@uni.opole.pl
The discursive self-representation of the Polish immigrant community in the UK
MojaWyspa.co.uk (MyIsland) is one of the largest Polish-language online hubs designed for the substantial Polish community living currently on the British Isles. The website offers news updates, opinion and advice columns, carries job and housing advertising, and enables networking, picture-sharing and user commentary. Discursively, this portal also works to forge a sense of collective identity and to provide bonding opportunities for the Poles who have decided to migrate to the UK but continue to align themselves with Polish-language rather than British media. The present study investigates the disparate entextualizations of the complex identities of Polish immigrants to the UK. The study is based on a 20,000-word sample of articles posted on MojaWyspa’s column section “The Pole on the Isles” between October 2013 and February 2014. The main aim is to review the dominant self-presentation techniques (incl. member-categorization and appraisal), and argumentative maneuvers (e.g. othering and victimization).
Jan Chovanec, Brno, Czech Republic, chovanec@phil.muni.cz
The representation of Eastern Europeans in British internet debates
The paper analyses reader comments that accompany recent reports on immigrant-related problems in the UK, contrasting the opinions and evaluations expressed by readers in the UK and in the country from which some of the immigrants come. While the analysis reveals several common sentiments, there are some marked differences between the data. In the UK blogs, references to EU policies are repeatedly voiced and immigration is perceived both as a threat and a benefit to the receiving country. In the Czech data, such topos are entirely missing; what prevails is a group confirmation of existing ethnic stereotypes, since the whole issue of emigration/immigration is framed as affecting only the Roma population. While UK readers’ comments occasionally deal with ethnicity as well, their discussions are not limited to this issue only and address a broader range of issues.
SLANG13 CANCELLED
LATE MODERN LOWER-ORDER LETTERS: MIRRORS OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Convenors:
Matylda Włodarczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, wmatylda@ifa.amu.edu.pl
Mikko Laitinen, Linnaeus Universtity, Sweden, mikko.laitinen@lnu.se
Anita Auer, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, A.Auer@uu.nl
Letter-writing is a linguistic activity which reflects sociocultural processes. In particular, epistolary evidence from the Late Modern period opens insights into the changing lives of the middling and lower orders in the era of industrialisation, urbanisation, increased mobility and even democratisation. Yet, linguistic publications popularising lower-order letters are scarce, while projects aiming to render the data in a searchable digital format have so far only been teething. This seminar seeks to draw the attention of researchers in language, history, society and culture to the need for studying archival letter collections not only of a specialist, but also of broader interdisciplinary interest and value. Contributions are welcome from scholars working in the field of discourse and language, and we particularly welcome approaches attesting the social circumstances and contacts as well as professional and family histories of the lower social classes in Late Modern Britain and the colonies.
SLANG14 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room A10, (B) 17.15–18.45 Room A10, Sunday 31.8.2014 ( C ) 11.00–13.00 Room A10
CHANGING DISCOURSES, CHANGING WORKPLACES: POSTMODERN TRENDS IN INSTITUTIONAL COMMUNICATION
Convenors:
Cornelia Ilie, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates, cornelia.ilie@gmail.com
Giuliana Garzone, University of Milan, Italy, giuliana.garzone@unimi.it
In increasingly multicultural and interconnected work environments, members of communities of practice start by applying existing discourse-reinforced conventions, while gradually adjusting and changing them, which leads to a hybridisation of discourse structures and strategies across workplaces and cultures. The seminar aims to explore effects of the interplay between discourse styles and workplace practices enacted in culture-specific and multicultural institutional or organisational contexts (e.g. business, education, media, politics). A special emphasis will be on metadiscourse and intertextuality in professional discourses, face-to-face and online negotiation of identities, culture-based and cross-cultural attitudes to leadership roles, and stereotypes related to race, gender and class.
Participants
Cornelia Ilie, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, cornelia.ilie@gmail.com
Donatella Padua, University for Foreigners, Perugia, Italy, donatella.padua@gmail.com
Multi-channel banking, multi-channel discourses? Challenges of customer-centred communication in Emirati and Italian banks
The impact of ICT, multi-channel banking, and the emergence of more demanding and informed customers, have significantly modified the relationship between customers and banks over the past decade. Despite high maintenance costs and elaborate management, there is little increase in customer satisfaction. What are the implications of consumer migration from bricks and mortar to digital services? Very little research has been done so far to understand the factors underlying customer dissatisfaction and to correlate them with the sources of miscommunication and misunderstandings in the communication process between customers and bank employees.
Our study seeks to bridge this gap through a comparative analysis involving banks in two countries that are representative for their respective geo-political regions: the UAE – with a newer, but strong banking sector in the Middle East region, and Italy – with the oldest banking system in the world (Monte dei Paschi di Siena, from 1472, is the oldest bank). This paper is based on a project that examines, through an empirical data-driven (surveys and interviews) and interdisciplinary discourse-analytical approach, the main factors that impact bank customers’ perceptions of and attitudes to bank communication services, on the one hand, and the bank employees’ perceptions of and attitudes to changing customer communication services, on the other.
Paola Catenaccio, Università degli Studi di Milano, paola.catenaccio@unimi.it
Negotiating discourses of healthcare across professional groups: a linguistic and discourse-analytical study of a multi-party interaction
This paper investigates the interplay and negotiations among different professional groups engaged in discussion over the adoption of standardized IT-driven clinical record-keeping in the US. The debate brings into play multiple issues that have been central to the provision of medical care for quite some time now, where an emphasis on multidisciplinarity in clinical care has more recently been compounded with a heightened attention for electronic record keeping (Iedema 2003b), frequently (though not exclusively) in the service of financial efficiency, as a consequence of the new managerial turn in healthcare provision (Bezes et al 2012).
Bearing in mind the above, and in light of recent studies on the impact of organizational discourses on professional ones (Iedema 2003a, 2007; Sorenesen/Iedema 2008), the study seeks to identify signs of competing and converging discourses in the transcript under investigation, with a special focus on the identification of discursive traits which may be seen as characterizing the emergence of hybrid discourses resulting from interprofessional and professional/organizational negotiations.
The method of analysis is discourse-analytical in focus and will be combined with the use of analytical tools drawn from corpus linguistics. It is expected that this approach will help shed new light on an increasingly topical issue.
CANCELLED Luisanna Fodde, University of Cagliari, Italy, lfodde@gmail.com
Leaders and leadership in times of (financial) crisis: agentiveness and accountability
It is commonly assumed that crisis-related topics, when analysed with a critical approach, provide an excellent basis for examining issues like power and ideology (A. De Rycker & Z. Mohd Don 2013: 4; Fairclough 2005: 55). Those actors that seek to interpret, predict and control crisis – the leaders and the experts – more than often are forced to represent their views in novel ways. In a crisis context, the linguistic representations of the events can prove particularly significant to language scholars (Van Leeuwen 2008).
This paper will attempt to analyse a certain kind of crisis participants – financial leaders and experts – and describe the types of crisis discourse that are displayed in financial analysts’ reports, one of the main sources of financial markets’ public information. The linguistic strategies associated with this genre are geared towards reporting facts, assessing them and predicting future actions in a way that seeks to make the data and figures easier to understand for both expert and non-expert readership (O. Denti & L. Fodde 2013). In particular, we will try to highlight how agentiveness and accountability are construed and how rhetorical strategies of power, subordination and exclusion are displayed in these documents by leaders and experts.
Michela Giordano, University of Cagliari, mgiordano@unica.it
Hillary Clinton’s townterviews and cyber-diplomacy: the hybridization of political discourse
During President Obama’s first term (2009–2013), Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton identified cyber issues as a key priority of American foreign policy. The joint aim of cyber-diplomacy and 21st century statecraft is to connect the private and civic sectors with America’s foreign policy efforts by utilizing new technological and communicative resources. Among the initiatives promoted during her secretariat, the townterview, a mix of town hall and political interview, represents a newfangled combination of genres deemed as both the product and the producer of discursive practices taking advantage of the “multimodal affordances of new media” (Jones 2008: 433). Starting from the assumption that “(t)he political interview is a genre in which the construction of meaning occurs at the intersection of two institutional discourses, both of which are culturally produced: the discourse of the media and that of politics” (Johansson 2007: 141), this study explores the generic hybridity and the blurred boundaries between the private and the public domain (Fetzer, Johansson 2008) in townterviews. The analysis investigates how this type of institutional discourse tends to informality, personalization, and inclusiveness (Mottura 2012), predictably leading up to negotiation of identities, conversationalization (Fairclough, Mauranen 1997) and thus democratization of discourse (Fairclough 1992; 1995; 1998).
Nils Braad Petersen, Business Communication, Aarhus University, nibp@asb.dk
Constance Elizabeth Kampf, Business Communication, Aarhus University, cka@asb.dk
Understanding the virtual team challenge – a discourse perspective on sensemaking in a global organization
The literature on virtual teams describes knowledge sharing and trust-building challenges. However, few studies take into account the complexity of the work context in these virtual teams. Key factors affecting complexity include situations in which employees are involved in several teams and projects simultaneously; some virtual, some co-located. This multi-team membership complicates relationship-building within each individual team. To understand how employees make sense of this complex, or equivocal (Weick, 2001) environment, this paper adopts a discourse perspective combining Austin’s speech act theory (1975) and Gee’s discourse analysis (2011). This perspective is used to analyze 21 interviews to understand how employees construct meaning in semi-virtual multi-team environments. The analysis shows how a few autonomous employees are able to use their extended networks in a global organization to circumvent organizational strategic discourse. In this process, they build teams and communities based on trusted weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; Levin & Cross, 2004). Furthermore, the study shows how difficult it can be for management to listen in on and react to this discourse change. If management is unaware of this reconfiguration of discourses and relations it may challenge organizational leadership.
CANCELLED Laura Alba-Juez, UNED, Madrid, Spain, lalba@flog.uned.es
The expression of emotion as a key feature of the changing discourse of corporate/institutional discourse
In this presentation I will focus on the discourse of computer-mediated communication related to workplace practices in a bilingual environment (English-Spanish), where the expression of emotion and stance not only plays a relevant role in everyday interaction, but also proves to be a key feature for success in any kind of negotiation, whether it be commercial, personal or social. The expression of emotion is herein seen as a pragmalinguistic phenomenon which shows the relationship brain-body-world within a dynamical system (Gibbs 2010, Alba-Juez & Alba-Juez 2012), and which also constitutes a reflection of the so-called ‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman, e.g.: 1995, 2006).
Some differences between English and Spanish speakers regarding how they perceive or experience their own and others’ feelings at the workplace will be explored, by looking at the expression of emotions and stance at all the levels of linguistic description (phonological, morphological, etc.). This analysis will hopefully allow us to draw conclusions as to the difference between successful and unsuccessful communication ‘at work’ in a bicultural environment, which will show, for instance, how the failure to express the right emotion appropriately might end up in an unsuccessful business transaction, the lack of corporate leadership, or even the total blockage of communication.
Junko Winch, University of Southampton, jw1f11@soton.ac.uk
A case study of multicultural workplace impact on language teaching staff at a British university language centre operating in China
This study investigates the interaction pattern of a Language Centre at a British university on a Chinese campus where the main campus is situated in the north of England and has two other overseas campuses (China and Malaysia). In British universities’ Language Centres, the language teaching staff usually interact with at least two cultures, that is, the English culture and their mother language culture. The language teaching staff at the Language Centre of this study involve at least three cultures, that is, English, the individual’s mother tongue language and Chinese culture. This study uses Hofstede’s dimensions of culture as a framework of the study and the main question of the study is how various culture interplay among the staff’s value orientation. As for the methodology, discourse analysis of e-mails which dealt with problems during 14 months was used focusing on two language staff (Japanese and French). The results indicated that teaching staff in a multicultural workplace appeared to alter and replace their own value orientations on a mix and match basis, which may affect the changes of their personalities. It also suggests that cultural acquisition could occur regardless of personality maturation.
Ahlam Mohammed Almohissen, Northeastern Illinois University, a-almohissen@neiu.edu
Saudi identity and ideology in comics
Little research has been done on how ideology and identity are reflected within pop culture in Saudi Arabia. This presentation analyzes a set of comics created by Saudi artists and representing negative behaviors of Saudis during Ramadan. In so doing, this research builds on the call by Bramlett (2012), inter alia, for more cross-cultural linguistic research on comics. Eight comics from various Arabic websites that have religious and entertaining content provide the data for this analysis. The comics include the following Saudi cultural content: fashion styles of the younger generation, economic concerns, and media use. Using visual semiotics, I analyze how their linguistic and visual content projects a clash of ideologies when comparing old and modern Saudi tradition observance.
Critical discourse analysis is used to explore spoken and written utterances that function as a call to social action. The analysis of linguistic and visual elements in cartoons reveals how ideology and identity are discursively constructed about both self and other. While the non-traditional practices in this set of comics are not adopted by all Saudis, they humorously focus on non-observant practices, showing how some Saudis inappropriately perceive Ramadan as a materialistic and entertaining month rather than as a most pious time of the Islamic calendar.
Giuliana Garzone, Department of Studies on Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication, Università degli Studi di Milano, giuliana.garzone@unimi.it
Arbitration and mediation on web 2.0: the professionals' debate
Top international arbitration and mediation practitioners provide an example of a rather dispersed professional community operating within the framework of arbitration institutions which, despite country-specific physical location, operate internationally across borders. While in the past opportunities for exchange of views and opinions among arbitration professionals were virtually limited to institutional occasions and international events, today social media offer them a convenient and constantly available opportunity to keep in touch and debate topical issues and problems that emerge in their practice. This paper considers various social media used by arbitration and mediation professionals to discuss professional issues, and examines the different shapes taken by discursive exchanges in various social media, focusing on variations in textual and discursive organization as a function of the peculiar characteristics of each medium/genre. A small corpus of materials extracted from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and various thematic blogs will be analysed to shed light on professionals’ interaction on web 2.0 and identify the textual and discursive constraints and advantages inherent in each of the social media examined. The study is set in a discourse-analytical framework, and will also draw on ample linguistic literature on arbitration and mediation, as well as on works on multimodal and web-mediated communication.
Olga Denti, University of Cagliari, odenti@unica.it
From websites to apps in tourism discourse
Institutional discourse, which is strongly affected by professional discourse, refers to those institutional practices common among professionals and clients, exchanged between institutions, their employees and clients (Sarangi & Roberts 1999: 15).
The present paper aims at analyzing tourism institutional discourse on the web. The focus will be on how tourism communication has developed from the Web 1.0 to the Web 2.0, from websites to apps. Thanks to the use of apps, tourism information has become faster and easier to access, more effective, pervasive and participatory.
The analysis will be carried out under two main perspectives: genre analysis, with reference to the concept of genre networks (Swales 2004, Catenaccio 2012), and multimodality.
The investigation will focus on textual organization and consumption modes (Garzone 2007, Campagna, Garzone, Ilie & Rowley-Jolivet 2012, Askehave/Ellerup Nielsen 2004, 2005), on the relationship between authorship and audience, consumers and producers. The role of web users is now blurred due to their involvement not only in the downloading of the information but also in its uploading and co-constructing (Campagna et al. 2012). This new role has also resulted in the shift of communication flow between institutions, tourists and tourees, from hierarchical to more democratic and collaborative (also Dann 2012).
Roxanne Barbara Doerr, University of Verona, roxanne.doerr@yahoo.it
The (work)force is strong with this one: office workers' socially networked attitudes, identities and discourses
In the current globalized world, new media and social networking have prompted various forms of “blurring” between workplace discourse and social networking. Many office workers and managers in particular have begun to network about various aspects of their profession and workplace during office hours and at home, leading to the creation and expansion of websites and blogs dedicated to and written by workers. Such digital spaces vary greatly in language and content and make full use of available multimedia material to create an online network and reservoir of information, assistance and solidarity for today’s “office worker 2.0”. The present study will therefore enact a qualitative analysis of a collection of American and English blogs written for and by office workers from January to May 2014. The blogs’ flexible and personalized nature, in the light of Discourse Analysis methodology and recent studies on workplace discourse and new media literature, will thus provide insight into relevant linguistic and cultural forms of and trends in office workers’ online identification and attitude towards their workplace and profession, as well as their desire to safeguard their interests and wellbeing and tip the balance of power between their category and more powerful ones in their favour.
CANCELLED Małgorzata Sokół, Szczecin University, msokol@autograf.pl
Interdiscursive and intertextual strategies in academic weblogs
This paper argues that hybridity and functional diversity of the academic weblog genre can be explained by interdiscursive and intertextual strategies that are exploited by blogging scholars to realize their professional and disciplinary objectives. Focusing on the Polish blogosphere, I aim to identify the characteristics and function of the interdiscursive and intertextual patterns in the corpus of academic blogs run by individual humanities and non-humanities scholars. The theoretical-methodological basis of the study is the socio-pragmatic approach to web-based genres and Bhatia’s distinction between interdiscursivity and intertextuality in the context of professional communication (Bhatia 2004, 2010). The study proves that interdiscursivity and intertextuality are enabled by the functionalities of the medium that meet the changing expectations of the blogs’ authors and their audience. Additionally, the cross-generic and intertextual relations present in the data result from the bloggers’ pursuit of educational and science popularization purposes, which are the dominating uses for both humanities and non-humanities bloggers. The humanities blogs, however, reveal a greater diversity in the use of interdiscursive and intertextual strategies.
References
Bhatia V. K. (2004) Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based View. London/ New York: Continuum.
Bhatia V. K. (2010) “Interdiscursivity in professional communication”, Discourse & Communication 21(1): 32–50.
SLANG15 Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A6
CORPORA OF ACADEMIC SPOKEN ENGLISH – ISSUES IN COMPILATION, TRANSCRIPTION AND USE
Convenors:
Stefan Diemer, Saarland University, Germany, s.diemer@mx.uni-saarland.de
Maria Georgieva, St. Kliment Ohridski University, Bulgaria, maria.mageorg@gmail.com
The ever growing spread of English as the language of communication in international academic settings has uncovered the need to further extend and diversify the range of speech samples in terms of language and cultural background of the interlocutors. We invite speakers who want to discuss or offer solutions to problems of building Spoken English corpora. Some issues of interest are: recording, combining and standardizing audio and video, tagging structural and communication features, transcribing non-standard language use, conversation planning and background data, technical aspects of using video-/audio-recording programmes for corpus compilation, transcription systems, storage and availability of large spoken corpora.
Participants
Marie-Louise Brunner, Saarland University, Germany, ML.Brunner@t-online.de
Selina Schmidt, Saarland University, Germany, e-mail: hslinguistics@gmail.com
„A piece of cake? – Developing a pragmatic annotation layer for a corpus of international academic spoken English“
The current paper aims to contribute to the development of a pragmatic annotation layer for the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE), an international corpus in an online environment, which is currently being compiled at Saarland University, Germany, in cooperation with partners from Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, as well as the USA. Conversations have a set topic and are conducted via Skype. The paper presents first results on how Skype-based corpora can be analyzed pragmatically, focusing on conversational structure and paralinguistic behavior. Even though CASE conversations share basic similarities with other spoken discourse, for example telephone conversations, there are features of conversation organization and conversation starts, such as the structuring and negotiation of openings (cf. Schegloff 1968, 1986) as well as topic introductions (cf. Geluykens 1993, Couper-Kuhlen2001, Brunner 2014), that are specific to the medium and the set-up of the corpus. In addition, paralinguistic issues such as laughter, which is often used for rapport management (cf. Spencer-Oatey 2002, Chafe 2007), have to be considered already during the transcription stage as they require pragmatic tagging. Thus, the paper provides suggestions for a pragmatic annotation layer including tags for different kinds of opening sequences, topic types, topic negotiation strategies, and paralinguistic features.
Mario Cal Varela, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, mario.cal@usc.es
Francisco Javier Fernández Polo, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, xabier.fernandez@usc.es
A corpus of conference presentations at the University of Santiago: data collection and transcription issues
This paper reports on methodological issues encountered during the compilation of a corpus of conference presentations. The corpus is part of an ongoing project whose main aim is to describe this academic genre and to identify differences in presentation style between English native and non-native speakers. Its current holdings consist of circa 40 video-taped presentations, about half of which have been completely transcribed. The analysis so far has yielded results on features such as opening strategies, humour, audience involvement or pronoun choice. We shall focus on several problematic issues related to both the collection and transcription of data. Drawing from our own ‘local’ experience and from a general overview of existing academic corpora, we intend to address a range of topics relevant to the collection and exploitation of multimodal data and to the sharing of these resources with the wider research community. Given the human and financial limitations faced by research teams, much is to be gained from a discussion of such issues as the convenience of having a clear research agenda before the data are actually compiled, the right technical decisions as to the recording itself or the right amount of detail that is to be recorded in transcription.
Stefan Diemer, Saarland University, Germany, s.diemer@mx.uni-saarland.de
Caroline Collet, Saarland University, Germany, caroline.collet@gmx.de
Transcribing academic spoken English: Challenges and issues
The paper investigates key issues arising during the transcription of conversation data from the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE), compiled at Saarland University, Germany. The corpus intends to close a particular gap in the available data on academic international English: spoken discourse in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) environment (via Skype). Although several corpora of international academic English exist, such as ELFA (Mauranen 2008) and VOICE (Seidlhofer 2013), none of these document Skype conversations in an informal setting, which pose a particular problem for transcription due to the combination of spoken and CMC features. Using data samples from the corpus, we discuss problems arising during transcription and annotation, such as the choice of transcription systems and standardisation, the organisation of the general transcription process, potentially problematic areas, such as particular technical and CMC-related issues, and spoken international English features such as the question of how to identify and transcribe non-standard language, the integration of pragmatic annotation during the transcription phase, and the use of cloud-based cooperative communities for the coordination of transcription work. Possible solutions and recommendations for best practice in spoken corpus transcription are then put forward to supplement existing practice as presented in Wynne (2004).
Maria Georgieva, St Kliment Ohrisdsky University Sofia, Bulgaria, maria.mageorg@gmail.com
A corpus-assisted study of compensatory strategies in cross-cultural communication
Communication strategies can generally be defined as potentially conscious plans for solving what to a participant in a communicative exchange presents itself as a problem in reaching a particular communicative goal. Speakers involved in cross-cultural communication can be expected to deploy an abundance of communication strategies since owing to their different language and cultural backgrounds they need to exert more effort to overcome or alleviate real or apparent conversational glitches and establish the minimum of intersubjectivity necessary for the smooth flow of the interaction process. The Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE) can offer good opportunities for an in-depth analysis of speakers’ strategic behaviour if a good system of marking was designed. In this talk I shall discuss some specific properties of communication strategies that make their tagging extremely difficult. Thus they may stretch across several moves and usually need larger context to be properly interpreted. In the end I shall share some ideas about possible solutions of the problem.
Šárka Ježková, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, sarka.jezkova@upce.cz
Corpus of university students’ interviews
Building a corpus of spoken learner English is one of the goals of a bigger multidimensional project called “Aspects of English Language Acquisition of Czech Students on the Onset of Teacher Education”. It is carried out at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Pardubice, and aims at identifying factors influencing the process of learning English as a foreign language by Czech speakers. After the analysis of previous pilot stage, the process of compilation was designed as collecting audio-recordings of the first year students’ interviews, transcribed by the students themselves and then checked by the research team. Thus the corpus comprises more than fifty dialogues and one hundred monologues. Tagging the corpus seems to be the biggest issue since it should be used for multiple purposes: (a) grammar and discourse analysis of students’ performances and (b) identification of the most frequent deviations and errors analyzed with respect to the second language acquisition processes and considered within the background of systemic differences between English and Czech languages. Especially for error analysis it remains a question if tagging (including emendation and error categorizing) can serve as an effective tool since it includes error interpretation, which can be relatively subjective.
Nuzha Moritz, University of Strasbourg, France, moritz@unistra.fr
Corpus of Tandem Interaction: English-French – A Multi- Purpose Annotation System
The CTI/E-F project (Corpus of Tandem Interaction: English-French) aims at collecting Multi-purpose interactional data. The project is based on the “Tandem Learning” framework (O’Rourke: 2005), where a tandem of native speakers of two different languages communicate to learn each other’s language. The corpus combines audio and video recordings of spontaneous interactions. To gather relevant and comparable output, the face to face (F2F) interactions (Kendon: 1990) were based on oral communicative activities and a reading task. The oral exchanges between the tandem of native speaker (NS) and non-native (NNS) were annotated using PRAAT according to ten tiers including verbal, non-verbal, and kinesics data: (NS) trigger utterance + (NNS) reply, Words, Tonality (intonation phrases), Tonicity (nuclear syllables), Tones (pitch movements: ToBI annotation), Fundamental frequency (voice variation and functions: surprise, question…), Silence (duration, fillers…), kinesics/gestures and body postures (head, hands, eyes, trunk…, synchronised to the upper tiers), Negotiation strategy/misunderstanding (clarification, echoes, reformulation…), Pronunciation mistakes (vowels, consonants…). The taxonomy for each tier explains the different possibilities. Although the CTI/E-F annotation system is rather heavy, its multi-modal approach is considered as an asset which permits analysis in various fields like phonetics, didactic, interactional and cultural studies. We would like to share our experience and discuss the difficulties encountered.
SLANG16 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A) 11.00–13.00 Room S4, (B) 17.15–18.45 Room S4
LEXICAL BUNDLES IN ENGLISH NON-FICTION WRITING: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS
Convenors:
Jukka Tyrkkö, University of Tampere, Finland, jukka.tyrkko@uta.fi
Joanna Kopaczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, jkopaczyk@wa.amu.edu.pl
One of the key benefits of corpus linguistic methods is that they give us access to otherwise hard-to-discern lexical, phraseological and grammatical patterns. Lexical bundles, or n-grams, can signify fixed practices of language use. In diachronic study of language such patterns are often related to linguistic processes of change such as grammaticalization and semantic entrenchment, and they also testify to the operation of Sinclair's idiom principle. Contributions to this seminar will discuss these fixed repetitive sequences in non-fiction writing, with particular reference to text-type-specific aspects of formulaicity, complexity and (non-)creativity in written English. The papers will be published in a peer-reviewed edited volume.
Participants
Federica Barbieri, Swansea University, UK,f.barbieri@swansea.ac.uk
I don’t want to and don’t get me wrong: Lexical bundles as a window to subjectivity and intersubjectivity in American blogs
Despite the increasing interest in computer-mediated discourse, including (micro-) blogging, to date, relatively little is known about the linguistic characteristics of web-based registers or genres (Grieve et al., 2010; Titak & Robertson, 2013), including blogs. Lexical bundles are important building blocks of discourse in spoken and written registers, allowing researchers to uncover unexpected structural and lexico-grammatical characteristics of texts (Biber et al., 2004; Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Csomay, 2013). Accordingly, the present study uses lexical bundles to explore structural patterns, and their related communicative functions, in blogs.
The study is based on a 2.2 million-word corpus of personal blogs in American English (2003–2005; Grieve et al., 2010), representing 500 blogs. Preliminary findings reveal that there are over 80 different 4–5 word lexical bundles occurring at least 40 times per million words in blogs. Thus, blogs are similar to classroom teaching in frequency of bundle types, and have far more different bundles than casual conversation (cfr. Biber et al., 2004). Further, a preliminary functional classification reveals that blogs’ lexical bundles are overwhelmingly ‘stance expressions’, which points to the predominantly interpersonal function of this register. Zooming into these stance bundles, I will show how they can uncover more fine-grained interpersonal functions, such as subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
Jukka TYRKKÖ, University of Tampere, Finland, Jukka.Tyrkko@uta.fi
Joanna KOPACZYK, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland,jkopaczyk@wa.amu.edu.pl
Blogging around the world: Universal vs localised lexical bundles in Internet Englishes
The borderless nature of blogging begs the question whether in that context the traditional regionally defined varieties of English continue to hold true (see Crystal 2011). In order to investigate the extent to which the language published online without external intervention is similar around the world, this presentation investigates repetitive patterns found in blogs in the 583-million-word GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013). The data will show that two types of repetitive word sequences or lexical bundles (LBs, Biber et al. 1999) are found: those that are frequent in all or most of the twenty geographic locations represented in the corpus and others that are unique to specific regions. Three correlated research issues are addressed by this study: 1) the ratio of LBs in blogs from various World Englishes, which will shed light onto the degree of formulaicity in Web Englishes around the world (cf. Tyrkkö forthcoming), 2) the overlaps between various locations in terms of preferred LBs, which may reveal local or global standardization hubs on the level of sentence and text construction, in self-presentation patterns or in other salient features of online discourse; and 3) finally, the status of model-providing varieties for internet communication, especially American English, in view of the most frequently constructed LBs in other locations (cf. Mair 2013).
Joe McVeigh, University of Helsinki, Finland, joseph.mcveigh@helsinki.fi
Lex communitas: Lexical bundles in email marketing directed at lawyers
Legal language is thought of as being formulaic and dry (Gibbons 1994, Schane 2006), while advertising is generally considered dynamic, innovative and ever-changing as it borrows lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features from many other genres. The recent growth of email marketing and marketers’ attempts to better target their copy at specific communities of discourse sets up the possibility of an interesting comparison of genres. Do the lexical features of the genre of marketing targeted at lawyers mirror legal texts, or are they more similar to marketing texts targeted at other professionals since they are written by the same copy writers? Adopting a similar approach as Breeze (2013), this article examines a corpus of email marketing texts directed at lawyers in the USA. The lexical bundles in these texts are extracted and then classified based on their function. They are then compared to the lexical bundles in marketing texts aimed at other communities of discourse and lexical bundles in other legal texts. Finally, the functions of the bundles in the email marketing texts are discussed in relation to the wider literature on lexical bundles.
Turo Hiltunen, University of Helsinki, Finland, turo.hiltunen@helsinki.fi
Lexical bundles in Wikipedia articles and related texts: Exploring disciplinary variation
Wikipedia is widely used both by academics and students in higher education, but there is little research on the linguistic characteristics of this genre. This paper investigates the role of lexical bundles Wikipedia articles representing three different fields (medicine, economics, literary studies), compared to two academic genres, student essays and research articles. The preliminary findings indicate that the use of lexical bundles varies between texts representing different disciplines, which is in agreement with the results of earlier studies. Wikipedia texts also contain relatively few bundles indicating stance and engagement, suggesting that these collaboratively written articles interact less with their readers than academic texts, whose success depends on a credible authorial persona.
Antonio Pinna, Università degli Studi di Sassari, Italy,dedalo@uniss.it
David Brett, Università degli Studi di Sassari, Italy, dbrett@uniss.it
Constance and variability: Using PoS-grams to find phraseologies in the language of newspapers
The Part-of-Speech-gram (usually abbreviated to PoS-gram) is a string of Part-of-Speech categories (Stubbs, 2007: 91), the tokens of which are strings of words that have been annotated with these PoS tags. By casting a considerably looser net than that of the n-gram and the skip-gram, PoS-grams may be very effective in the discovery of relatively long sequences that fly below the statistical radar of the former techniques.
This paper will illustrate the utility of PoS-grams by way of analysis of a 1M token corpus composed of texts from ten subsections of the British newspaper The Guardian. The main aim is to identify if there are PoS-grams that occur more frequently in some sub-genres of newspaper language than in others. Lists of 6-slot PoS-gram types (f ≥ 5) extracted from the different sections were compared with a database of analogous PoS-gram types obtained from the 100M token BNC. Those that were statistically significant were then analysed from a lexical point of view: the same slot is frequently found to be occupied by the same word form, a synonym, or one from the same semantic field. When this occurs over several slots, it may be suggestive of a phraseology typical of a particular sub-genre.
Anu Lehto, University of Helsinki, Finland, anu.lehto@helsinki.fi
Lexical bundles and complexity in Early Modern English statutes
This paper studies lexical bundles in Early Modern English legal writing. Lexical bundles are recurrent multi-word units that are often non-idiomatic and do not form complete structural units (Biber et al. 1999: 990). Earlier studies have concentrated on the grammatical structure and function of lexical bundles in different genres such as in university registers (e.g. Biber, Conrad and Cortes 2004, Hyland 2008) and in historical legal writing in Scottish burghs (Kopaczyk 2013).
Drawing from these studies, my paper analyses the structure and function of 3-grams in parliamentary acts in the self-compiled Corpus of Early Modern English Statutes 1491–1707. The paper further considers the formulaic elements from the point of view of complexity, as one aspect of complexity is the number and variety of different elements in a system (Rescher 1992: 9–10). Complexity is assessed by studying the frequencies and variety of lexical bundles and by comparing the results to other complexity features in the material (Lehto 2013). The study shows that historical legislation often relies on repetition, as lexical bundles are highly frequent. The findings are further examined in their socio-historical context, e.g. the beginning of the printing of statutes had a possible standardizing effect on legal writing.
Jean-Louis Duchet, University of Poitiers, France, jean-louis.duchet@univ-poitiers.fr
Olivier Chaulet, University of Poitiers, France, olivier.chaulet@univ-poitiers.fr
Lexical bundles in the legal English of two comparable corpora (the European Acquis and the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada)
The legal texts produced by courts in their formal decisions are likely to exhibit aspects of formulaicity. The two legal and, more broadly cultural, environments of bilingual Canada and multilingual European Union show partially similar but also largely different patterns. The study of two massive corpora in French and English brings evidence that formulaicity requires a detailed semantic analysis of lexical bundles in spite of their supposedly fixed nature. The correspondence of English lexical bundles with their French equivalents as provided by the concordance lines extracted from both corpora (around 50 million words each) tends to show that 1) the lexical bundles we studied are functionally used as articulators of the legal discourse, 2) the use of lexical bundles comes close to a wording habit in the European Court decisions, and 3) the detailed observation sheds light on the vagueness which is often typical of some lexical bundles in English legal prose, whereas the French equivalents, on both sides of the Atlantic, aim at being more explicit and therefore provide a variety of multiword expressions to this effect. We are led to discuss the six characteristics of multi-word sequences as laid out by Conrad & Biber (2004) and compare our results with those reached by Jablonkai (2009) in the analysis of “in the light of” and Jablonkai (2012) in the analysis of binomials.
Gintare Grigonyte, University of Stockholm, Sweden, gintare@ling.su.se
Gerold Schneider, University of Zurich, Switzerland,gschneid@es.uzh.ch
From lexical bundles to surprisal: Measuring the idiom principle
Lexical bundles (LB) testify to Sinclair's idiom principle (SIP), and measure formulaicity, complexity and (non-) creativity (FCN). We exploit the information-theoretic measure of surprisal to analyze these.
Frequency as measure of LB has been criticized (McEnery et al, 2006:208–220), instead collocation measures were suggested until Biber (2009:286–290) raised three criticisms. First, MI ranks rare collocations, which often include idioms, highest. We answer that also idioms are formulaic, and there are collocation measures which have a bias towards frequent collocations.
Second, MI doesn't respect word order. We thus use directed word transition probabilities like surprisal (Levy and Jaeger 2007):
3-gram surprisal =
Third, formulaic sequences are often discontinuous. We thus sum over sequences, use 3-grams as atoms, and address syntactic surprisal.
We argue that abstracting to surprisal as measure of LB and FCN is appropriate, as it expresses reader expectations and text entropy. We use surprisal to analyse differences between:
- spoken and written learner language (L2);
- L2 across proficiency levels;
- L2 compared with L1
We test Pawley and Syder (1983)'s and Levy and Jaeger (2007)'s hypothesis that native speakers play the tug-of-war between formulaicity and expressiveness best, thus minimizing comprehension difficulty, according to the uniform information density principle.
Gerold Schneider, University of Zurich, Switzerland,gschneid@es.uzh.ch
Gintare Grigonynte, University of Stockholm, Sweden, gintare@ling.su.se
From surprisal to tagging and syntactic parsing: measuring the idiom and syntax principle
We introduced surprisal as abstraction from lexical bundles to lexical bundleness. There are forces beyond lexical bundles: on the one hand word-sequence abstractions to word classes, on the other hand the syntax principle (SSP) in contradistinction to the idiom principle (SIP). We ultimately aim for a model of their mutual influence (Sinclair 1991).
We motivate the use of models, then abstract to word-class models using a part-of-speech tagger, and to syntactic models, using a large-scale parser. Part-of-speech taggers assign word-classes based on sequences. They typically achieve high accuracy. Areas of low accuracy and low tagger confidence for word class assignment indicate low model fit, and thus often high entropy, lack of formulaic sequences. Tagger model fit can be used as measure of morphosyntactic bundleness.
Although creative language (SSP) is rarer, it needs to be respected. We thus also use a syntactic parser language model (Schneider 2008) which combines SSP in form of a hand-written competence grammar and SIP as probabilistic performance disambiguation, paying tribute to Hoey (2005)'s insights on lexical priming. We show that parser model fit is lower on low-level L2 texts, as we can expect according to Pawley and Syder (1983). Finally, we introduce measures of syntactic surprisal.
SLANG17 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A9
CORPUS PRAGMA-STYLISTICS
Convenors:
Ursula Lutzky, Birmingham City University, UK, ursula.lutzky@bcu.ac.uk
Carla Suhr, University of Turku, Finland, carla.suhr@utu.fi
This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the rising field of corpus pragma-stylistics. Its aim is therefore to demonstrate how the study of language in use and the study of language in (literary) texts can be combined in order to arrive at innovative results. Additionally, this seminar seeks to attract papers using a corpus linguistic methodology to this end; that is to say, they will exploit tools and resources developed in the field of corpus linguistics to gain insights into a specific (collection of) text(s). The seminar welcomes both synchronic and diachronic studies from all periods of the English language.
Participants
Heather Froehlich, University of Strathclyde, heather.froehlich@strath.ac.uk
“Thus to make poor females mad”: finding the ‚mad woman‘ in Early Modern drama
In this paper I address three binary sets of unique gender-specific collocations derived from the Shakespeare corpus. I use three comparatively larger corpora (Shakespeare’s plays, a corpus of early modern drama, and Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership Phase I) to analyze gender, which has historical sociolinguistic implications. Is Shakespeare representative in his use of gendered binary pairs? I will address how statistically-predicted lexical relationships from the Shakespeare corpus compares to a larger corpus of early modern drama in relation to early modern print as a whole.
Presence is informative because it shows ways that Shakespeare is like other early modern dramatists. But absence is in many ways more suggestive than high-frequency presence of statistical predictions. The focus of this paper will be on the construction mad woman, which is a highly salient concept in our understanding of early modern drama, but appears infrequently in Shakespeare. I will ask if Shakespeare’s use of mad woman is like that of other Early Modern dramatists, arguing that mad woman is a highly infrequent construction in all of early modern drama, although the literary concept of a ‘mad woman’ remains highly salient.
Gabriela Csulich, Birmingham City University, Garbriela.Csulich@mail.bcu.ac.uk
Linguistic expression of (im)politeness in Early Modern English trial proceedings – a corpus-based approach
In the field of historical pragmatics, studies on the Early Modern English courtroom have in particular investigated the spoken interactions between trial participants regarding forms of address, turn-taking, or questions and answers.
In this paper, I will investigate how different trial participants express (im)polite behaviour linguistically in different trial proceedings (ordinary criminal trials as opposed to high treason trials) and what extra-linguistic parameters (age, gender, role, status, religious/political issues) are most influential in which proceedings. This study is based on the trial section of A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED) and its sub-corpus the Socio-Pragmatic Corpus 1640–1760 (SPC). Additionally, I will use trial records from various manuscript collections, add them to the first two sub-periods of the CED (1560–1639) and annotate all files from this time span socio-pragmatically, thereby extending the SPC to the beginning of the EModE period, i.e. 1560–1639.
I will use a form-to-function approach by starting out from a wordlist to identify the most frequently attested (im)polite expressions in these records. These search results will then be analysed for their distribution regarding extra-linguistic factors as well as different kinds of trials.
References
A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).
Socio-Pragmatic Corpus. 2007. Annotated under the supervision of Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University). A derivate of A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).
Michaela Mahlberg, Peter Stockwell, Rein Sikveland, University of Nottingham
Michaela.Mahlberg@nottingham.ac.uk
CLiC Dickens: Towards a cognitive corpus stylistics of characterisation
This paper suggests an innovative approach by combining corpus linguistic methods with research questions from cognitive poetics. It is a large-scale study that aims to demonstrate how computer-assisted methods can be used to study literary texts. In cognitive poetics, readers engage in ‘mind-modelling’, i.e. they take textual and inferential cues and build up a fictional mind which is an empathetic simulation with experienced felt effects (Stockwell 2009). So far very little attention has been paid to the crucial texture of the literary work in providing the material cues for these engagements. Our contribution is to make relevant contexts for fictional characterisation available for detailed study and comparison. In this paper we focus on fictional speech patterns in Dickens’ novels. Building on Mahlberg (2013), we investigate clusters of fictional speech, but instead of analysing clusters across the whole text, we compare clusters in quotes against non-quotes. The paper uses examples from Dickens’ novels to illustrate our interpretative account. It also illustrates some of the functionalities of the tool CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire) that we are developing to retrieve relevant data.
References
Mahlberg, M., 2013. Corpus stylistics and Dickens’s fiction. New York & London: Routledge.
Stockwell, P., 2009. Texture: a cognitive aesthetics of reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Victorina Gonzales-Diaz, University of Liverpool, V.Gonzalez-Diaz@liverpool.ac.uk
Jane Austen, degree adverbs and ‘female’ language: A corpus-based study
Degree adverbs are normally recruited to highlight a speaker’s point of view in a distinctive manner (Peters 1994: 271). They can also signal in-group membership and are often subject to fashion (Bauer and Bauer 2002, Tagliamonte 2008).
It is the in-group function of degree adverbs that interests me here, as it has been consistently exploited in literature for the creation of social identities. For instance, Burrows (1987: 64–5) states that quite is “one of the marks of Jane Austen’s vulgarians, especially the women who predominate among them”.
Through a corpus-based analysis, this paper takes further Burrows’ (1987) claims by scrutinising the socio-stylistic mappings between characters and functions of quite in Austen. The results indicate that gender (rather than vulgarity) is the main factor determining the socio-stylistic variation of quite in Austen’s novels. More generally, the study contributes to a better understanding of Jane Austen’s practices of linguistic gendering. It suggests that Austen may have drawn on 18th century stereotypes of ‘female’ language for the stylistic stratification of quite in her novels, although introducing variations that allow for a differentiation of ‘female’ idiolects.
References
Bauer L and Bauer W (2002) Adjective boosters in the English of young New Zealanders. Journal of English Linguistics 30: 244–257.
Burrows J (1987) Computation into Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Peters H (1994) Degree adverbs in Early Modern English. In: Kastovsky D (ed.) Studies in Early Modern English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 269–288.
Tagliamonte S. (2008) “So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada”. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361–394.
Mariana Sargysan, Yerevan State University, mariana_sargsyan@yahoo.com
Pragmastylistic Perspectives of the Study of Literary Images
Presently, the traditionally established systematic-structural approach to the study of literary texts is considered insufficient as far as the authentic understanding of the propositional and communicative-intentional aspects of the text are concerned.
From the pragmastylistic perspective adequate understanding of texts can be achieved by observing how the text message is materialized in various text levels and underlining those key elements which contribute to establishing dialogic relations between the text and the reader to a great extent. It is reasonable to argue that in the formation of the pragmastylistic information and estimation of the predictable pragmatic effect on the reader the crucial role should be ascribed to literary images, the pragmastylistic, functional and communicative features of which can be fully exposed in a complex study by the application of the corpus approach.
Thus, the present paper is aimed at building a corpus excerpted from the British Modernism, with major concentration on the themes of alienation and the estrangement of an individual. By the methods of comparison and quantification we aim to reveal the role of the frequently repeated words and images realized in various stylistic devices in the creation of the pragmatic and pragmastylistic meaning of the text.
SLANG18 Saturday 30.8.2014 17.15–18.45 SLAB
CORPUS INTEROPERABILITY AND SPOKEN DIACHRONIC DATABASES : THE NECTE-DECTE CORPORA
Convenors:
Nicolas Ballier, Université Paris Diderot, France, nicolas.ballier@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Karen Corrigan, University of Newcastle, UK, karen.corrigan@btinternet.com
Hermann Moisl, University of Newcastle, UK, hermann.moisl@newcastle.ac.uk
The seminar welcomes papers dealing with sociolinguistic surveys of Geordie encapsulated in the NECTE and DECTE corpora. In the wake of Beal, Corrigan and Moisl 2007 selection of papers, the two corpora will be discussed by linguists investigating syntactic, prosodic and phonetic features, questioning the connections between linguistic data, corpus annotation, linguistic research questions and technological queries.
Participants
Maelle Amand & Nicolas Ballier, Université Paris Diderot, EA, nicolas.ballier@univ-paris-diderot.fr, maelle.amand@gmail.com
A sociophonetic approach to the DECTE corpus.
This contribution investigates the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) via an acoustic analysis of seven speakers’ TLS files.
The DECTE corpus includes various aspects: it comprises the NECTE corpus, set up between 2001 and 2005 – Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (Milroy et al. 1994) and Tyneside Linguistic Survey (Pellowe et al.1972) respectively – and NECTE 2, a collection of interviews on the Tyneside area since 2007. Put together, NECTE and NECTE 2 cover no less than five decades of dialectal oral data with 99 interviews, 70 hours of audio files and 160 speakers representing each gender and of various social backgrounds.
On a technical point, DECTE comprises WAV files and standard orthographic PoS tagged transcription, along with tagged parts-of-speech aligned and available on the DECTE NECTE website.
Our analysis involves a thorough examination of the TLS phonetic transcription scheme thanks to a series of experiments of re-alignment of the original data with SPPAS. The TLS establishes “correspondences between phonetic segments and the symbols assigned to them at the “OU, PDV, and State levels, together with associated numeric codes”. We propose a revaluation of some of these codes and a phonetic analysis of the KIT vowel and of the GOAT vowel, revisiting previous cluster analyses based on the initial perceptual phonetic transcription of the TLS.
References
Bigi, B. (2012) „SPPAS: A Tool for the Phonetic Segmentation of Speech.“ Proceedings of the Language Resource and Evaluation Conference. LREC 2012, 1748–1755.
Milroy et al. (1994) „Glottal stops and Tyneside Glottalisation: competing patterns of variation and change in British English“ Language Variation and Change 6, 327–358.
Pellowe, J., et al. (1972) „A Dynamic Modelling of Linguistic Variation: The Urban (Tyneside) Linguistic Survey.“ Lingua 30, 1–30.
Karen P. Corrigan and Adam J. Mearns, Newcastle University, UK, karen.corrigan@btinternet.com, a.j.mearns@newcastle.ac.uk
The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English: History in the Making
The increasingly widespread use of Information Technology (IT) in most spheres of human activity since the mid-20th century has facilitated and continues to generate digital electronic natural language text, audio and graphics on a huge scale. A major aspect of the impact of IT and allied subject areas on research in language variation and change across time and space has been the creation of innovative public and private corpora via digitization of legacy materials or the synthesis of these with new ones. As the number of collections has grown, a variety of conceptual, technical and ethical issues having to do with the preservation and re-use of such resources by academic and non-academic audiences has arisen.
This paper focuses on the development of one such resource known as the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) and its affiliated websites: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/ and http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon. The data for this corpus were gathered between the 1970s and the present day and were generated principally by staff and students at Newcastle University but with contributions from scholars affiliated with the universities of Durham, Edinburgh, Sheffield and Leipzig. In addition to detailing the history of this corpus-building programme, we focus on two specific issues: (i) the challenges posed by the digitization of dialectal legacy data and (ii) recent developments in the augmentation of DECTE and its sister corpus, the Talk of the Toon.
Esther Le Grézause, University of Washington, USA, elg1@uw.edu
Categorization Issues and Part of Speech Tagging of the marker ‘so’ in Oral English
The marker so has been categorized under various syntactic categories such as degree adverb, connective adverb or conjunction of subordination (Biber et al. 1999, Larreya and Rivière 1999, Huddleston and Pullum 2006). So is also commonly categorized under semantico-discursive categories such as modal marker (Gilbert 2004), deictic marker (Huddleston & Pullum 2006) or polarity marker (Boulonnais 2006). Part of Speech Taggers (POS) such as TreeTagger and CLAWS7 use syntactic categories to tag. The percentage of correct tags varies significantly between oral and written English with a large amount of errors when tagging the marker so in oral English.
This study tackles the issue of categorizing and POS tagging the marker so in oral English by looking at two POS taggers, TreeTagger and CLAWS7, and using two corpora, the Seattle Corpus and the NECTE. The NECTE is used as primary source for tokens of the marker because it presents several advantages due to its size and multiple layers of annotations. In this study I show that a strictly syntactic categorization of the marker does not encompass all of its uses in oral English and that taggers therefore fail to correctly tag. I also offer to look at the acoustic parameters such as pitch, amplitude, duration and vowel quality of the marker in order to correlate the acoustic cues and its functions in discourse to reinforce the tagging system.
I propose a different categorization based on the discursive functions of the marker in order to establish a systematic and universal categorization system for the marker so: inference, purpose/result, intensifier, resumptive, sequence-incipient and conclusive. Tables 1 and 2 below summarize the error and success rates of both TreeTagger and CLAWS7, whereas the new categorization system allows the correct labelling of all tokens.
| CLAWS7 | general adverb | subordinating conjunction | degree adverb | TreeTagger | adverb | subordinating conjunction |
| Precision | 94.74% | 76.19% | 0% | Precision | 100% | 0% |
| Recall | 59.02% | 88.89% | 0% | Recall | 61.04% | 0% |
| FPR | 11.11% | 8.33% | 100% | FPR | 0% | 38.96% |
The findings of this study show that the categorization of markers can be improved by considering a new categorization system of discourse markers and offer the possibility of using acoustic cues in order to reinforce the tagging process.
Philippe Martin, Université Paris Diderot, France, philippe.martin@linguist.jussieu.fr
WinPitch: an integrated concordancer for multi-layered annotated spoken corpora: the case of the NECTE-DECTE corpora
A lot of interest is presently devoted to the linguistic analysis of non-prepared speech, and in particular to the prosodic correlates of syntactic and macrosyntactic units. WinPitch is a software program devoted to acoustic analysis of speech with, as its name suggests, specialized functions for research in prosody. It has been continuously developed since 1995 and runs under Windows (any flavor) on PC and Mac personal computers. Many original functions allow effective acoustical analysis of large speech corpora, as demonstrated in its use in the C-ORAL-ROM project, which assembled, transcribed and aligned large spontaneous speech recordings dealing with similar topics in French, Italian, Spanish and European Portuguese (http://lablita.dit.unifi.it/coralrom/). Currently, WinPitch implements a number of new innovative functions and is intensively used in the project C-ORAL-ROM Brasil (http://www.c-oral-brasil.org/). By design, large corpora must be easy to investigate, and available tools such as concordancers have been used for a long time for easy information retrieval in text corpora. Likewise, speech analysis tools of large corpora should include equivalent functions, allowing not only quick and easy retrieval of sound segments related to a given text, but also performance of acoustic analyses displaying information such as fundamental frequency, intensity and duration curves, together with the corresponding spectrograms.
In the particular case of NECTE-DECTE recordings with poor to average quality, with low signal to noise ratio, echo, speech overlapping, etc., signal analysis tools must be capable of delivering reliable information. To address these conditions, WinPitch offers multiple pitch tracking algorithms essential to acquiring reliable pitch curves, whose validity can be visually checked against a simultaneously displayed narrow band spectrogram.
Raphael Salkie, University of Brighton, UK,
Direct and indirect reported speech in NECTE and speech act types
Consider this extract from decten1pvc09:
I went to see one of those interviews you know like careers interviews
<interruption> last week
<A> oh yeah
Mr (NAME)
<A> <laughter>complete waste of time just get a print out on that computer that's all you
get <interruption> like we used to get about two years ago
<A> in careers right
saying if you can be a bricklayer <interruption> or a <unclear> or a racing driver or
something <interruption>
<A> <interruption> aye that's it <interruption> I got a painter and decorator for mine
did you
<A> yeah I went ‚great‘
<interruption> <unclear>
<A> which I quite understand because I said I liked all the outdoor <interruption>
activities
yeah <laughter> <unclear> painting and decorating <interruption> outside
The only instance of direct reported speech (DRS) is introduced by went. The two instances of the verb say (‘saying’ and ‘said’) introduce indirect reported speech. Although examples of say introducing DRS can be found in NECTE, they seem to be rare compared to its use in IRS and other constructions such as ‘well I could have said that’ (decten1tlsg16). This observation has two interesting consequences. Firstly, it invites us to reconsider the traditional claim that say is the default speech reporting verb: it appears instead that a range of verbs are becoming specialised for different uses. Secondly, it suggests that the distinction between DRS and IRS needs to be rethought: instead of focussing on formal properties (shift of tenses and other deictic expressions in IRS) or faithfulness to the ‘original utterance’ in DRS, we should see DRS and IRS as two different types of speech act which have different discourse functions. In this presentation I explore the implications of these two consequences.
SLANG19 Monday 1.9.2014 17.00–18.30 Room A10
DIACHRONIC CORPUS STUDIES OF ENGLISH
Convenors:
Jan Čermák, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic, Jan.Cermak@ff.cuni.cz
Rafał Molencki, Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach, Poland, molencki@poczta.onet.pl
Digitalization of historical corpora of English has significantly affected the diachronic studies since the early 1990s. Earlier studies were based on the relatively short text samples of the Helsinki Corpus, but now the complete Old English corpus, numerous Middle English and Early Modern English texts, as well as major historical dictionaries are available as huge searchable databases. More and more libraries offer digital versions of complete medieval manuscripts enabling scholars to verify the (mis)interpretations of earlier editors. These technological advancements have made the work of a historical linguist easier in terms of speed and text accessibility, but have also created some new problems.
PARTICIPANTS
Javier Calle-Martín and Jesús Romero-Barranco, University of Málaga, Spain, jcalle@uma.es – jromer@uma.es
Finite Complementation in Early English Medical Writing: A Case Study of Syntactic Constructions in Competition
Object infinitive constructions are the most frequent type of non-finite complement clauses, in which the object infinitive may occur either marked (+TO) e.g. to-infinitive or unmarked (-TO) e.g. bare infinitive (Fischer 1992: 316). From a historical viewpoint, the bare infinitive is found to be the preferred form in Old English, the number of examples being comparatively small though. This picture changed drastically in Middle English, when the to-infinitive outnumbers the bare infinitive in this kind of clauses (Visser 1973: 2235). A number of Middle English verbs, however, had to choose between the marked and the unmarked infinitive because the rule had become lexicalized, thus being impossible for the same verb to select both the to and the zero infinitive (Fischer 1997: 131). The verb make, among some others, can be considered to be an exception to this, as it is found to accept both types of constructions from the Middle English period onwards (Visser 1973: 2261).
The present paper investigates the construction makes to vs. makes ø in a corpus of late Middle English and early Modern English medical writing with the following objectives: a) to analyze the distribution of the marked and the unmarked infinitive in combination with this verb in the period 1350–1700; b) to classify the phenomenon in different text-types; and c) to evaluate the contribution of the following factors in the choice of one particular infinitival form, i.e. i) the presence of intervening elements between the matrix verb and the object infinitive (whether a noun phrase, a pronominal or an adverbial); ii) the size of the infinitival clause (Rohdenburg 1996: 156); and iii) the morphology of the matrix verb (whether a finite or a non-finite form of the verb make). The data used as source of evidence come from the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e. Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1350–1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT for the period 1500–1700).
Nikolaos Lavidas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, nlavidas@enl.auth.gr
Problems and benefits of a diachronic corpus study of transitivity in English
This study will discuss how the diachronic corpora of English (e.g., the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English or ARCHER), as well as searchable databases of dictionaries (e.g., OED online), can reveal aspects of the development of transitivity in English and its correlation with other grammatical phenomena. We will present some case studies that primarily concern the questions of changes in the omission of objects and in the presence of cognate objects in different stages of the history of English. English lost the possibility of omitting referential objects (only generic null objects are possible in present-day English, e.g. They have the ability to impress and delight ∅) but extended the range of cognate objects (e.g., He smiled a disarming smile). Diachronic corpora have made the work of testing the hypothesis of a connection between the availability of such (de)transitivization processes and changes that affect, for instance, the aspectual distinctions, faster and more reliable. We will analyze the main problems of studying transitivity with diachronic corpora—for example, the lack of coding for null objects—and how statistical analysis and historical dictionaries (examples of the first appearances of verbs and constructions) can help in overriding these difficulties.
Mirosława Podhajecka, University of Opole, mira.podhajecka@wp.pl
Calepino’s Dictionarium undecim linguarum … (1590): Tracing the English wordlist to its sources
Large-scale digitization of old glossaries, vocabularies and dictionaries has opened new vistas for scholars with a particular interest in the history of lexicography. Digital dictionaries have obvious advantages over printed ones, but if the text is keyed into a fully analyzable, machine-readable form, it offers an even wider range of search functions, such as Boolean or proximity searches. A database of mono-, bi- and multilingual resources for English (ca. 1400–1700) that has been named Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), compiled under the editorship of Ian Lancashire, deserves special mention in this respect. Despite including at present only approximately 15% of the total of 1229 lexical and lexicographic materials identified so far, it displays the results of queries in chronological order and can therefore be used successfully as a diachronic corpus.
The present paper focuses on establishing the scope of affinity between the English wordlist admitted into Ambrogio Calepino’s Dictionarium undecim linguarum … (1590), whose compiler has been unknown, and the collection of Renaissance English dictionaries comprised by LEME. For this purpose, a sample of nearly 500 Latin lemmas paired with their corresponding English items was selected from across the alphabet of Calepino’s polyglot edition; the choice of the sampling technique was based on the premise that a stratified research sample is likely to provide the most reliable outcomes (Bukowska 2012: 33). The study is the first fully-fledged attempt to trace Calepino’s English wordlist, which has escaped the attention of English scholars, back to its sources. This issue has only been tackled, very briefly, by Podhajecka (2013, forthcoming) only.
The findings of my research indicate that a predominant majority of Calepino’s English glosses, including structurally complex ones (i.e. clauses), can be found in different sixteenth-century reference works: from Thomas Elyot’s The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot Knyght (1538) to Thomas Thomas’ Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae … (1587). While many glosses must have been copied verbatim from one dictionary or another, a proportion of them were also modified in varying degrees, which makes the compiler’s stylistic preferences more difficult to pinpoint and his lexicographic identity less distinct than was originally assumed. In my talk I will illustrate some of the methodological problems of the search procedure that had to be dealt with.
CANCELLED Lidija Štrmelj, University of Zadar, Croatia, lstrmelj@unizd.hr
Word formation in late Old English and late Middle English Based on the translations of St. John’s Gospel from Latin
The Late Old English translation, taken from the West Saxon Gospels (11th ct.), abounds with noun and pronoun compounds, as well as with prefixed and phrasal verbs. On the other hand, the Late Middle English translation, taken from Wycliffe’s Bible (15th ct.) and based on the same source text, generally shows a considerable decrease in the number of compounds and prefixed verbs. The noun compounds found in it involve Latin borrowings and calques, and a few modified Late Old English (LOE) compounds. The LOE pronominal and adverbial compounds are partly preserved as such in the LME translation, and partly shortened and transformed into simple words. It is noticeable also, that many LOE prefixed verbs are replaced with simple verbs, while the number of phrasal verbs is, by contrast, significantly increased, since they are used instead of both, LOE prefixed verbs and LOE simple verbs.
The paper aims to give evidence of the changes in word-formation that happened in English in the period between two target texts, as well as to determine their internal and external causes.
SLANG20 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A2
PRAGMATIC VALUES IN NON-DIALOGIC TEXTS: A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE
Convenors:
Gabriella Mazzon, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Gabriella.Mazzon@uibk.ac.at
Minna Nevala, University of Helsinki, Finland, aunio@mappi.helsinki.fi
The seminar aims at discussing ways in which texts from various times, belonging to genres that are not explicitly dialogic or fictional, encoded pragmatic meanings to construct their readers as interlocutors, and to pursue their communicative goals. Correspondence, early newspapers, instructional texts, religious and political prose, had different strategies to establish relationships with their addressees, and to perform their role as “macro-speech acts”. These strategies changed over time in connection with changes in language, in society and in specific textual communities, and can be traced (synchronically or diachronically) through indicators such as personal pronouns, modal markers, pragmatic markers and others.
Participants
Sonia De Angelis – University of Lancaster, s.deangelis@lancaster.ac.uk
Establishing a relationship through narrative and politeness: Elizabeth Jeffries and Mary Blandy’s correspondence
The aim of this research is to shed light on the use of story-telling and politeness in the correspondence between two early modern English prisoners, Elizabeth Jeffries and Mary Blandy, who were convicted for murder in 1752. The main questions to be addressed are the following: How are story-telling and politeness used in order to establish a relationship between two people who have never known each other before? What discourse goals do these strategies respond to? How do they create common ground for the establishment of a new friendship?
After a review of the notions of genre and narration as they are conceived in discourse analysis (Longacre’s 1974; Swales 1990; Van Leeuwen 2008), as well as of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) face model of politeness, I will briefly focus on how such notions have been interpreted in some of the most relevant historical pragmatic studies on early modern letter writing (Daybell 2001, 2006; Fitzmaurice 2006). I will then introduce the data and methodology used in this study and proceed with the analysis of story-telling and politeness in some letters taken from the collection of Miss Jeffries and Miss Blandy’s correspondence.
My findings show how Blandy’s and Jeffries’s story-telling is strategically used to project the correspondents’ identity and common experiences, which encourages mutual solidarity and support, and how negative and positive politeness strategies serve the aim to build a relationship that strives towards in-group identity without appearing excessively obtrusive.
Daniela Francesca Virdis, University of Cagliari, dfvirdis@unica.it
Pragmatic Values and Interactive Strategies in Romantic Ecological Prose
In the last few decades, the new theoretical paradigms and analytical approaches of ecolinguistics and ecocriticism have emerged as flourishing fields of academic research and teaching. Consequently, several critical texts discussing the relation between ecology, language and culture and encouraging scholars and general readers in environmental activism have been published. Although presently growing with a large number of contributions, ecocriticism has its origins in the studies and essays of those authors from the past, particularly from the Romantic period, advocating a ‘greener’ investigation of cultural, literary and, more recently, linguistic issues.
In order to examine critical prose — here ecological prose — as a text-type, let us take into consideration Short’s (1996: 39) prototypical discourse situation or structure of texts, where an addresser (a speaker or writer) conveys a message (a sentence, utterance, or entire text) to an addressee (a listener or reader). Consequently, as can be easily inferred, in the apparently non-dialogic text-type of ecological prose a researcher or scholar, by means of an article or short treatise, constructs a dialogic structure and explicitly addresses a reader to communicate a militant message and to persuade that reader of their views and opinions.
Historical pragmatics has recently identified the interactive strategies employed by various authors to directly address their readers. They include, among others, such devices as address terms, performative verbs, imperative clauses, interrogative clauses, discourse markers, interjections and expletives. In this paper, I would therefore like to scrutinise a small corpus of Romantic ecological prose (Coupe 2000: Part One) with a twofold research purpose: 1. to detect and analyse what pragmatic values and interactive strategies are more frequent and effective in the nineteenth-century corpus; and 2. to examine whether and in what ways such values and strategies and the resulting dialogic structure are utilised in a non-dialogic text-type to ‘steer’ the reader and to convince them of the writer’s viewpoint.
Jukka Tyrkkö – University of Tampere, Jukka.Tyrkkö@uta.fi
From Me to You to Them: Tracing Diachronic Fluctuations in the Pronoun Frequencies of Political Speeches
The primary objective of political speaking is to affect the opinions and choices of others. This usually involves the juxtaposing of opposing views and, consequently, the construction or maintenance of affiliations and allegiances (Hahn 2003, Allen 2007). One of the key techniques in political rhetoric is the setting up of contrasts between us and them, the in-group and the out-group, the latter often portrayed not merely as the Other but as a Threat or the Enemy (see Pennycook 1994, van Dijk 1997, Joseph 2006). Indexicality, or “the implicit signalling of political affiliations”, is the first item on Chilton’s list of theoretical propositions regarding political discourse (2003). As Chilton notes, a variety of linguistic devices ranging from the deliberate choice of register-specific words to the use of address terms can be employed for signalling distance or solidarity and for establishing group boundaries. Likewise, the “purposeful use of pronouns”, as described by Thomas and Wareing (1999), is recognised by scholars as one of the most salient features of political discourse and a powerful means of foregrounding issues of group membership.
This paper will approach the issue from a corpus linguistic perspective, offering an analysis of frequency changes in the use of personal pronouns in British and American political speeches over the last 200 years. Using as primary data the latest version of the Small Corpus of Political Speeches, a corpus comprising 700 full-length speeches and 2.5 million words, I will demonstrate how the diachronic shifts that have taken place over the last two centuries years in Anglophone political speaking have not always followed a linear cline and how major world events such as wars and the introduction of broadcast media have had an effect on the frequency and use of personal pronouns. Methodologically, this paper will discuss the need to analyse diachronic changes using analytical methods that lend themselves to non-linear and multidirectional phenomena.
Maija Stenvall – University of Helsinki, mstenvall@mappi.helsinki.fi
Notes on the history of ‘objective’ journalistic voice – examining news agency reports on violence
A shift in the writing style from the detailed, realistic narratives towards the ‘objective’, impersonalised voice of today’s hard news reports has in some studies been credited to the invention of the telegraph and the birth of the wire services in the mid-19th century. Other studies, however (e.g., White 1998; Schudson 2001) argue that the objectivity norm in journalism emerged several decades later – around 1910, or even later.
The paper examines Reuters and AP (the Associated Press) news agency reports on violence, as presented in newspapers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Drawing on the Appraisal Framework (e.g. Martin & White 2005) I explore how journalists have construed the perpetrators of violent acts (murderers, terrorists, soldiers, etc.). A central question is whether the journalist’s attitudes (Judgment or authorial Affect, for example) are clearly shown in the text, or whether s/he has tried to hide them. In addition, the strategies that aim at blurring perpetrators’ responsibility are analysed, using tools from Halliday’s Functional Grammar (1994).
My data show that the change in style gradually became manifest during the first years of the 1900s. The AP correspondent, reporting on the hanging of Modoc Indian warriors (Oct 5, 1873), does not hide the feelings of empathy towards the doomed Indians. S/he refers to them as “poor fellows” and “pinioned victims”, and states that they had “evidently resolved to die as bravely as they have lived”. On Nov 9, 1892, the AP journalist, reporting on a bomb attack in Paris, expresses her/his judgment both implicitly and explicitly: “they [anarchists] are probably jubilant over the outcome of their dastardly crime”. However, by 1906, the style has undergone considerable changes. In Reuters telegrams on Siedlce pogrom (Sept 11, 1906), the journalist, for instance, often resorts to ergative choices and nominalisations (cf. Halliday 1994), thus obscuring Russian soldiers’ cruelty against Jews: e.g. “the search soon changed into massacre and robbery”. The ideal of objective voice can be seen quite clearly.
SLANG21 Sunday 31.8.2014 16.00–17.30 Room A6
GRAMMATICALIZATION, LEXICALIZATION, CONSTRUCTIONALIZATION
Convenors:
Jan Čermák, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic, Jan.Cermak@ff.cuni.cz
Rafał Molencki, Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach, Poland, molencki@poczta.onet.pl
The idea of grammaticalization was introduced to linguistics by Meillet (1912), who defined it as the attribution of grammatical character to a formerly independent word. In modern times the term is used to refer to the wider phenomenon when a new linguistic form simply becomes fixed or obligatory. Lexicalization takes place when a complex phrase comes to make a new lexical unit. In the early 21st century a new concept of constructionalization appeared, described as a process of conventionalization of the whole new construction (Traugott & Trousdale 2010). All these related terms are used in recent diachronic studies of languages, including English.
Participants
CANCELLED Goshylyk, Volodymyr, Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine goshylyk@ukr.net
The Grammaticalization of the English Analytical Future Tense Forms
The statement that the theory of grammaticalization contributed greatly to the unveiling of the hidden mechanisms of the human languages grammar creation and functioning is undoubted. The idea of attributing a grammatical character to a formerly autonomous word, according to which a lexical item (or a sequence of items) becomes a grammatical morpheme, changing its distribution and function, remains very popular and research-productive (Meillet 1912, Lehmann 1982, Heine and Reh 1984, Bybee 1985, Traugott and Heine 1991, Hopper and Traugott 1993, Pagliuca 1994, Lehmann 1995, et al.). This approach proved to be rather helpful in elucidating the nature of various analytical constructions as language universals, Future Tense forms in particular.
The paper aims at analysing the English analytical Future Tense forms within the framework of the basic cognitive processes – conceptualization and categorization. These very fundamental processes in the human being’s cognitive activity ensure a deeper insight into the mechanisms of the grammar-mediated rendering of the complex conceptual structures. The author questions the validity of the traditional three-stage grammaticalization scale (full verb > auxiliary > clitic > affix) and offers ideas on the possible ways of its transformation.
Hae-Yun Lee, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea, lee.haeyun@gmail.com
On the grammaticalisation of aspectual verbs In English and Korean
Some verbs in many languages have undergone grammaticalisation. Hopper & Traugott (2003) proposed the following stages: verb > auxiliary verb > clitic > affix. If we restrict ourselves to the transition from verbs to auxiliary verbs, we can notice some intermediate stages of grammaticalisation. According to Heine & Narrog (2010), the process starts from the form of V-V1, where V is a nonfinite verb and V1 is a main verb. During the process, V loses its original content and instead has grammatical functions. English verbs such as ‘be’ or ‘have’ are typical examples of the grammaticalisation. For example, the verbs of many languages corresponding to ‘have’ are proven to show the following steps of grammaticalisation: ‘have’ > resultative > anterior >perfective > past (Bybee et al. 1994). In Korean, it is known that some verbs have undergone the grammaticalisation which concerns aspect. But it is unclear which aspect each verb is related with.
In this talk we will show that some verbs are related with Aktionsarten and other verbs with aspect, assuming that aspectualities are divided into Aktionsarten such as state, process, accomplishment and achievement, and aspects such as Perfective and Imperfective. Every sentence represents an aspect that manifests itself at auxiliary verbs or other lexical items. The lexical item which is responsible for an aspect requires a predicate with a specific Aktionsart. If a main predicate does not satisfy the requirement of the lexical items, an in-between auxiliary verb changes its Aktionsart into the required Aktionsart. In this way, we can explain the complex sentences where more than one auxiliary verb appears in a sentence.
Przemysław Łozowski, Uniwersytet Technologiczno-Humanistyczny, Radom, Polska, prloz@wp.pl
On Origins of Grammaticalization: *magan in the Paris Psalter
In search of the roots of modality, we explore a possibility of relating the ”permission” semantics of *magan (= ModE may), as found in the Paris Psalter, King Alfred's West-Saxon translation of the first fifty psalms, to Alfred’s private life. As the paraphrast of the psalms, Alfred is thus believed to have projected his own experience, both royal and personal, into a subtle expressive interplay of (externally-granted) permission and (participant-internal) ability/capacity. That it was specifically Alfred that might have been on the way to novel dimensions of *magan comes from comparing Alfred’s own translation preferences and choices vis-a-vis the word-for-word rendering in the extant interlinear glosses. In doing so, we call for a private and individualized approach to grammaticalization as both an alternative and a complementation to the standard corpus-based grammaticalization research.
Jim Walker, Université Lumière Lyon 2, France, Jim.Walker@univ-lyon2.fr
He's only gone and come back – Hendiadic GO AND and the development of ONLY in contemporary British English – a case of dual grammaticalisation?
This paper will start from the observation that the adverb ONLY would appear to have developed a discourse marker function, in contemporary British English at least, whereby it can serve to mark a form of mirative or counter-expectational stance on the part of the speaker, as in the following examples:He's only gone and come back round again. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not reckoning that Paul Lambert is the future of football.Unbelievable, he's only gone and done it! Well done Andy! Sporting hero!!!I don’t believe it – he’s only gone and made a podcast! When we got him back into the Pit, he's only turned round and said that the racing game wasn't what he thought it was, and he was jacking it in
This is a usage which seems not have received any coverage in the literature, and we will therefore examine it as a possible example of pragmaticalisation. However, it cannot fail to be noticed that, while exceptions exist, it is overwhelmingly the case that what I shall refer to as the ‘extraordinary ONLY’ collocates very significantly with the hendiadic GO AND construction, as in the above examples. This is a feature which has received more coverage in the literature (Hopper and Thompson 2002; Nicolle 2009; Bachmann 2013) and has at times been cited as an example of grammaticalisation. This research therefore attempts to establish whether the two constructions or usages have entered into some form of co-development.
While grammaticalisation as a theory has proved immensely powerful in recent years, it has quite rightly been subject to growing criticism from a number of quarters. Among the criticisms (Walker, forthcoming) are firstly its failure to adequately thus far take dialectal features into account in a polycentric language such as English, and secondly a tendency perhaps to cite textbook cases of grammaticalisation (GO TO + V, the development of the HAVE-perfect in various languages, the rise of the future tense in the Romance languages) as self-contained phenomena, without sufficiently accounting for effects that parallel or contemporary grammaticalisations may have had on one another. This paper will explore the idea that two grammaticalising phenomena may emerge and reinforce one another, and will further add to the aforementioned critique of grammaticalisation, inasmuch as it will be shown that both these phenomena are very much British in origin, and do not seem as yet to have any parallels in other varieties of English, which raises a considerable problem for theorists.
SLANG22 Sunday 31.8.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room A7, (B) 16.00–17.30 Room A7
WRITING IN NON-STANDARD ENGLISH
Convenors:
Isabelle Roblin, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, Isabelle.Roblin@univ-littoral.fr
Linda Pillière, Aix Marseille Université, France, linda.pilliere@univ-amu.fr
Jane Hodson, University of Sheffield, UK, j.hodson@sheffield.ac.uk
In recent years, the once firmly held opinion that English is a homogeneous language has been called into question by linguists and literary scholars alike. This seminar will bring together researchers in literature, stylistics and linguistics to share and compare methodologies for analyzing the representation of non-standard English in literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. Topics will include the role of non-standard English in literary texts, reader-response to non-standard English in literary texts, the ideological implications of representing non-standard English, the diverse literary and linguistic strategies used by writers to represent non-standard varieties, and the relevance of linguistic verisimilitude when analyzing literary dialects.
Participants
Julie Loison-Charles, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France, jloison@u-paris10.fr
“Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens”1: Nabokov’s code-switching for monolingual readers
In his American novels, Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov demonstrates his perfect mastery of the English language but he also exhibits his personal multilingualism. This can lead to the impression that his oeuvre was meant for an elite sharing the same idiolect as him. However, we intend to show that the inscription of foreign words (or xenisms) in the midst of English words is actually a means of preparing the monolingual English-speaking reader to Nabokov’s heteroglossia: indeed, the typography and many metalinguistic comments surround the foreign word with a cushion of precaution, so that the reader grows accustomed to this recurring transplant into her mother tongue. Moreover, the reader is granted an intellectual access to xenisms thanks to different types of explanation and translation; but she’s also given a sensory and sensual perception of foreign languages, which become connoted with pleasure and even eroticism. The heteroglossic text turns out to be a palimpsest which puts to the fore what the Nabokovian reader was supposed to be for the demanding writer: “a good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled”.2.”
Notes
1 Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, in Novels, 1969–1974, Ed. Brian Boyd, (New York: Library of America, 1996), p. 198.
2 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 183.
Lynn Blin, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III, France. lynn.blin@univ-montp3.fr
Babu English and Fiction – Standard, Standardized, and the Nonstandard in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” and
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdhin Electrician”
Babu fiction is, to quote Tabish Khair, “literature written by a privileged section/elite of a once colonized people (colonial subalterns)”. This paper will attempt to explore linguistic facets of Babu English in Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” and Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdhin Electrician”.
Though Babu English is not nonstandard English in the strict or even loose sense of the term, the English, or rather Englishes, used in this type of fiction invite investigation into the nuance between Standard English and standardized English. A linguistics analysis of the different Englishes used and the degrees of meaning thus introduced help the reader to gain access to other levels of meaning in the two stories discussed.
I will examine various linguistic characteristics of the three types of English used and demonstrate how the deft narrative weaving of these various Englishes gives a specific texture to the narratives. If, as Khair states, Babu English is the English of colonial subalterns, what dimension does this add to the characters who speak it and to those who don’t? What are we to make of the dialogues in English which are translations into English from one of India’s 16 official languages 1652 mother tongues? To quote Tabish Khair, “how can agency be expressed and recognised when the medium of expression is not the agent’s?”
Pop Titus, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, titus2011p@googlemail.com
Derek Walcott and his writing in Jamaican Creole
Jamaican Creole is a variety of English in which postcolonial writers such as Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, or Linton Kwesi Johnson have expressed themselves. Most of these writers widely use Jamaican Creole to express their cultural resistance to the hegemonic power. In this paper, I will refer to the way Jamaican Creole, as a language variety, works both as an intercultural bridge and as a marker of postcolonial identity in Derek Walcott´s poetry and drama. At the same time, I will prove how, by switching from English to non-standard English (Creole) and vice-versa in many of his significant works, Derek Walcott paves the way towards establishing cross-cultural and hybrid writing as an alternative to canonical writing.
Michael Percillier and Catherine Paulin, University of Strasbourg, France, percillier@unistra.fr
Local Englishes, local literatures: representing the non-standard in writing
Given the spread of English as a world language and the subsequent development of numerous varieties during the colonial and postcolonial periods, the emergence of local literatures using local varieties of English was only a matter of time. The sheer diversity of non-standard Englishes, literary traditions and motivations to use the non-standard in writing results in a wide range of strategies at the disposal of writers who choose to incorporate the non-standard in their work. By compiling corpora of selected literary works, we perform an analysis of various non-standard features, which enables us to address the following questions:
- which non-standard features are represented?
- does the motivation to use a particular set of non-standard features become apparent? (e.g. support for local forms, characterisation)
- is the non-standard in writing a symbolic or mimetic enterprise?
By focusing on West African and Southeast Asian texts and also drawing on European texts for purposes of comparison, we provide qualitative and quantitative insights into the emergence of country-specific practices of non-standard representation, which may even go beyond political boundaries and apply to entire cultural spheres.
Jane Hodson, University of Sheffield, j.hodson@sheffield.ac.uk
The Language of the Peasant in British Fiction 1800–1836
The impact of Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) on later English poetry has been extensively explored during the 200 years since its publication. In this paper I direct my attention to the relationship between the Preface and the novels written in its aftermath. The “Dialect in British Fiction 1800–1836” project has surveyed the novels published every four years, creating a database of 100 novels. Overall, the project reveals a significant rise in the quantity of literary dialect, as well as a shift in the function of that dialect. Unsurprisingly, this shift is led by novels featuring Scottish English, and the influence of Burns and Scott on the development of the dialect novel is enormous. Nevertheless, the influence of Wordsworth can also be detected, and I consider his legacy specifically in relation to the representation of the English rural poor. I focus on two novels which typify the shift in the treatment of dialect-speaking peasant characters: Horace Smith’s The Runaway (1800) and Henry Luttrell Deale’s Craven Derby (1832). In conclusion, I consider what the history of the ‘language really used by men’ in the novel reveals about literary language and genre during this period.
Izabela Szymańska, Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland, i.szymanska@uw.edu.pl
Dialect as ‘linguistic allusion’. Functional approaches to non-standard English in Polish literary translation
The treatment of geographical dialects in literary translation is one of the thorniest problems of translation theory, explored as a vivid example of issues of linguistic usage and cultural associations inextricably intertwined. With varieties of English being increasingly represented in literature and English-language literature being translated all over the world, research on methods of rendering language varieties develops rapidly, showing the changing approaches of translators, conditioned by the interpretation of the functions of language varieties in literary texts, as well as by the changes in the assumed response of readers to non-standard linguistic features in target texts. This presentation will consider attested methods of dealing with language varieties in Polish literary translation, focusing on the issue of geographical dialects and on translations from English, and taking as the starting point the functional approach worked out by the Polish classic of translation theory, Olgierd Wojtasiewicz, who as early as in 1957 described the use of dialect in literary works as ‘linguistic allusion’ aimed at evoking complex cultural associations. It will also trace changes in the translation norms of the target culture regarding language varieties. Examples will be drawn from several Polish translations of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secrect Garden, a children’s classic in which dialect has a vital communicative function, starting from the earliest and best known rendition from 1914 but focusing especially on the newest one, published in 2012.
Linda Pillière, Aix-Marseille Université, France; linda.pilliere@univ-amu.fr
Standardising children’s fiction: when Brutish sociolects and dialects fail to cross the Atlantic
Children’s fiction frequently features characters that do not speak Standard English. The different language varieties may reflect the geographical origins of the characters (diatopic variation); the social groups to which the characters belong (diastratic variation); or the situation of communication (diaphasic variation). Children’s fiction can thus be highly informative in representing how we use language in different situations and contexts. Yet it is also a politically sensitive area: how far should children be exposed to non-standard varieties?
By comparing a corpus of British contemporary children’s fiction with the equivalent US editions, I will demonstrate the different ways that editors intervene on a text and modify the representation of these non-standard varieties, through omission, standardization or substitution. Standard English is defined by Swann et al. as a ‘relatively uniform variety of a language which does not show regional variation’.
Isabelle Roblin, Université du Littoral-Côte d’Opale
In the City by the Sea (2011) by the Kamila Shamsie and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) by Salman Rushdie: Towards a Re-definition of the English Novel?
In the City by the Sea (2011) by the Pakistani-born Kamila Shamsie and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) by the Indian-born Salman Rushdie are children stories whose heroes, Hasan and Haroun, are young boys who, on the edge of adulthood, are confronted to major upheavals (a mother who runs away with the neighbour, a powerless father for Haroun, a beloved uncle arrested and charged with treason for Hasan) and have to find a way to deal with them. The stories can of course be read – and enjoyed – on several levels, by adolescent and adult alike. Written in English and ostensibly set in imaginary countries (“the city by the sea” of the title in Shamsie’s story and Alifbay in Rushdie’s), the novels nonetheless clearly refer back to the Indian sub-continent culture and way of life, particularly through their frequent uses of Urdu or Hindustani words or expressions. Whereas no translation is provided in the case of In the City by the Sea, there is in Haroun a sort of glossary at the end, giving the meaning, the etymology and in some cases the pronunciation of the words. In both cases, the authors’ will to incorporate the vernacular within the English texts is far more than an exercise in “local colour” (as was the case in Kipling’s stories, for example). What is the use of these foreign words in an English context, then? And ultimately, who is the foreigner, the author, the narrator or the reader? Or is this question in fact meaningless? These are some of the stylistic issues I shall try and address in this presentation.
SLANG23 CANCELLED
NEWS TRANSLATION: JOURNALISM OR TRANSLATION?
Convenors:
Roberto A. Valdeón, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain, valdeon@uniovi.es
Krisztina Károly, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, karoly.krisztina@btk.elte.hu
Translating news as discourse has been in the focus of attention over the last 30 years. Major news agencies publish in English, news media are associated to share information and, often, many have versions in different languages, English being the central one. The characteristics of translating news are studied from several angles, focusing on language-pair-specific considerations, the special role(s) of the news translator, particular components of the discourse structure of news stories and various, suprasentential aspects of news texts. Focusing on these approaches, the seminar explores the extent to which the discourse production characterizing news translation approximates that of journalism or translation.
SLANG24 Monday 1.9.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room A9, (B)14.30–16.30 Room A9
THE PRAGMATICS OF BORROWING: ASSESSING THE PRAGMATIC EFFECTS OF BORROWINGS FROM AND INTO ENGLISH
Convenors:
Gisle Andersen, Norwegian School of Economics, Norway, gisle.andersen@nhh.no
Cristiano Furiassi, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy, cristiano.furiassi@unito.it
Biljana Mišić Ilić, Univerisity of Nis, Serbia, bmisicilic@gmail.com
Existing research on the influence exerted by English on other languages has predominantly been concerned with lexical aspects. Less attention has been paid to pragmatic aspects, e.g. socio-cultural prerequisites, the covert prestige attributed to the donor culture and factors affecting the transition from code-mixing to established borrowing. Against the backdrop of recent studies, this seminar focuses on pragmatic borrowing, which concerns both the incorporation of discoursal features from English into other languages, as well as contextual/socio-cultural motivations for the proliferation of English-based borrowings. Contributions on specific languages are welcome. The seminar is also open to studies looking at pragmatic borrowing into English.
Participants
Gisle Andersen, Norwegian School of Economics, Norway, gisle.andersen@nhh.no
Pragmatic borrowing: The case of English-based expletives in Norwegian
In this paper I argue that a comprehensive account of pragmatic borrowing requires a careful inspection of individual forms through comparative studies of their discourse-pragmatic functions in both the source and recipient languages. First, I present the concept of pragmatic borrowing in general terms, proposing a functional taxonomy that includes the borrowing of interjections, discourse markers, expletives, vocatives, general extenders, tags, focus constructions, intonation and paralinguistic phenomena. Next, I illustrate how pragmatic functions are transferred cross-linguistically, through notions such as functional stability, adaptation, narrowing, broadening and shift. These processes are illustrated through a corpus-based case study that focuses especially on the English-to-Norwegian borrowing of expletives that contain the f-word.
Anne-Line Graedler, Hedmark University College, Norway, anneline.graedler@hihm.no
Use of English in the linguistic landscape of Norway’s capital
This paper explores one particular contextual use of English in Norwegian society – specifically, multilingual language practice as displayed in public space through signs, billboards, etc. in Oslo. The study aims to further understanding of the role and identity of English in the Norwegian ‘linguistic landscape’, and explore the ways in which various contextual factors contribute to the meaning of lexical items of English origin: What messages are being delivered to passers-by? A secondary question concerns whether the findings agree with claims about the use of language in public space made by the Language Council of Norway. The theoretical and methodological approach falls into the field of linguistic landscape (LL), i.e. how languages are visually used on public and commercial signs in a multilingual society. The data sampling takes place in four areas of Oslo that vary according to commercial, social and demographic characteristics, and the categorization and analysis are based on procedures and taxonomies in previous comparable studies.
Henrik Gottlieb, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, gottlieb@hum.ku.dk
False love and the naming of storms: Pragmatic Americanisms in Danish society
This presentation focuses on two aspects of pragmatic borrowing from English: (1) formulaic language, including greeting patterns, and (2) naming habits. (1) While some Anglo-American discoursal features have been retained in Danish, whether now obsolete (so long) or still in use (okay), others have entered Danish as calques, e.g. the farewell formula I love you translated directly into Jeg elsker dig. Ironically, while this utterance is seldom used by Danes in its literal sense, it may thrive as an American-inspired stock phrase, devoid of its original meaning. (2a) Anglo-American naming habits in Denmark over the last 150 years tell an unusual story of lost prestige. Introduced by the upper middle class in the 19th century, English boys’ and girls’ names soon got popular among the working class, which meant that 20th century English names became ‘low-class’. (2b) A dramatic type of pragmatic borrowing is the adoption of the American habit of naming storms. Quite unprecedented, the most recent Danish storms were named in the US fashion zigzagging down the alphabet between boys’ and girl’s names. Thus, the storm in October 2013, which normally would be called oktoberstormen 2013, was baptized Allan, while the one in December 2013 was named Bodil (a Nordic girls’ name).
Elizabeth Peterson, University of Helsinki, Finland, elizabeth.peterson@helsinki.fi
Is laiffii really just ‘life’? The social and pragmatic function of Anglicisms in Finnish
Elämä on laiffii is phrase made infamous in Finnish discourse by the ski jump champion and public figure Matti Nykänen. On a superficial level, the utterance appears to be a tautology: ‘Life is life.’ I argue, though, that a more complex social and pragmatic intention and interpretation is instilled by the use of Anglicisms in such contexts, creating a robust indexical field for such terms as laiffii. In this presentation, I discuss how the use of non-domain specific Anglicisms in Finnish, including pliis ‘please,’ about and oh my God, enter into Finnish discourse for socio-pragmatic effect, having to do with notions such as urbanness, youth, and globalism, or additionally, as seems to be case with pliis, to fill a perceived pragmatic gap in Finnish. Once incorporated into Finnish, however, while continuing to index the pragmatic and social characteristics mentioned, these forms take on local meanings, functions, and even grammatical use. Presenting findings from recent studies on a few key Anglicisms found in everyday Finnish discourse, I discuss the socio-pragmatic motivations for borrowing these features, while also demonstrating in what ways the forms eventually become Finnish.
Sabine Fiedler, University of Leipzig, Germany, sfiedler@uni-leipzig.de
Pragmatic borrowing from English into German
The spread of English as the dominant means of international communication has an enormous impact on other languages. They undergo changes due to massive lexical borrowing especially in the sciences, in the media and in popular culture. This phenomenon, generally associated with the term Anglicism, has been intensively investigated. An aspect that has hitherto not attracted much attention is the pragmatic and cultural implications of these developments. They include the incorporation of discourse patterns, norms of interaction (e.g. the use of address terms and gestures), traditions (e.g. holidays), and symbols. Influences of this kind are often indirect or hidden. However, in the majority of cases linguistic and extra-linguistic elements are intertwined. The paper will address the changes that can be observed in German society with regard to communicative strategies in oral and written communication due to the ubiquity of US-products in the media, business communication training and Anglo-American style guides. It will be argued that the linguistic changes that manifest themselves on the surface are part of more fundamental processes of cultural transition. A special focus will be on contact-induced rhetorical formulae that are employed for particular discourse functions (e.g. greetings and farewells, expressions of thanks, opinion and disapproval).
Eline Zenner, KU Leuven, Belgium, eline.zenner@arts.kuleuven.be
Dirk Speelman, KU Leuven, Belgium, dirk.speelman@arts.kuleuven.be
Dirk Geeraerts, KU Leuven, Belgium, dirk.geeraerts@arts.kuleuven.be
A sociolinguistic analysis of borrowing in weak contact situations: English loanwords and phrases in expressive utterances in a Dutch reality TV show
In this paper, we present a quantitative corpus-based variationist analysis of the English insertions used by Belgian Dutch
and Netherlandic Dutch participants to the reality TV show Expeditie Robinson. The data consist of manual transcriptions of 35 hours of recordings for 46 speakers from 3 seasons of the show. Focusing on the expressive utterances in the corpus, we present a mixed-effect logistic regression analysis to pattern which of a variety of speaker-related and context-related features can help explain the occurrence of pragmatic English insertions (such as shit, oh my God) in Dutch. Results show a strong impact of typical variationist variables such as gender, age and location, but more situational features like emotional charge and topic of the conversation also prove relevant. Overall, in its combined focus on (a) oral corpora of spontaneous language use, (b) social patterns in the use of English, and © inferential statistical modeling, this paper presents new perspectives on the study of anglicisms in weak contact settings.
Cristiano FURIASSI, University of Turin, Italy, cristiano.furiassi@unito.it
The pragmatic salience of real and false phraseological Anglicisms in Italian
Phraseological and pragmatic aspects do not seem to have been widely discussed in the otherwise prolific literature on Anglicisms, at least not jointly. The aim of this paper is to assess the pragmatic salience, namely a property imposed by the speaker as a way of directing the listener’s attention to a particular aspect of discourse, of phraseological Anglicisms in Italian, thus bringing together both analytical frameworks. However, not only ‘real’ phraseological Anglicisms but also ‘false’ phraseological Anglicisms may be encountered – most likely uttered and/or heard – in present-day Italian. Examples of real phraseological Anglicisms used pragmatically are last but not least, on the road, and take it easy. Among false phraseological Anglicisms, likely falling within the label inglese maccheronico, fly down, lit. vola basso (En. keep a low profile), and I know my chickens, lit. conosco i miei polli (En. I know who I’m dealing with), are worth mentioning. Due to the fact that real and false phraseological Anglicisms in Italian are quantitatively very limited in terms of both vocabulary and frequency, in order to highlight their pragmatic salience, a qualitative approach must be adopted: monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, as well as corpora will be consulted during the analysis.
Biljana MIŠIĆ ILIĆ, University of Niš, Serbia, bmisicilic@gmail.com
Pragmatic Borrowing from English into Serbian: Linguistic and Sociocultural Aspects
The presentation addresses the issue of pragmatic borrowing, focusing on the incorporation of discourse-pragmatic features from English into Serbian, for which the term ‘pragmatic Anglicisms’ is proposed. The paper offers a multiple classification in terms of their linguistic form, the general type (obvious, raw and hidden Anglicisms), as well as contextual discourse aspects of their use. The analysis of pragmatic borrowing also includes some sociolinguistic and cultural aspects (users, register, stylistic and communicative markedness, motivation for their formation and use, their perception and evaluation by native speakers of Serbian). Apart from dealing with the commonly identified classes such as interjections and discourse markers, the paper recognizes the use of (calqued) discourse formulas and clichés from English in situations where there are common formulas or a pragmatic ‘gap’ in Serbian. This subclass is particularly interesting since it is not only a novel linguistic element that is thus introduced, but a novel communication and cultural pattern, from the Anglo-American globalizing culture, that gets adopted through the new discourse formula.
SLANG25 Sunday 31.8.2014 16.00–17.30 Room S3
IMPOLITENESS ACROSS LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
Convenors:
Małgorzata Szymańska, University of Wrocław, Poland, malgorzata.szymanska@uni.wroc.pl
Charles Bonnot, Université Paris-Diderot, France, charles.bonnot@yahoo.fr
The seminar will concentrate on issues related to linguistic impoliteness in various languages, contexts and cultures. The focus will be on pragmatic aspects of impolite or face aggravating linguistic behaviour. We will welcome contributions within pragmatic but also discursive, cognitive, and blended approaches to the study of anti-social language behaviour. Both theoretical and empirical papers are welcome.
Participants
CANCELLED Nataliia Goshylyk, Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, gosh_nat@ukr.net
Verbal Aggression as a Threat to the Ecolinguistic Balance
Ecolinguistics is an integrative approach formed at the crossing of social, psychological and philosophical branches of linguistics. Ecolinguistics was originally defined in 1972 by the Norwegian linguist Einar Haugen “as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (Haugen 2001: 57). This system of knowledge of the noospheric level encompasses the complex network of relations between the environment, languages and people speaking those languages. The environment within this approach is biological, physical and social and people in this environment should be balance seeking in all the existing spheres.
Impoliteness in language is the deviation of the verbal behavior. The metalanguage of this category is still developing and we come across such terms as “positive and negative aggravation”, “face-attack”, “verbal aggression”, “impoliteness”, etc. In the paper we regard aggression as the extreme type of impoliteness, a hostile or violent behavior or attitude toward another, readiness to attack or confront. From the point of view of Ecolinguistics this type of the verbal behavior is treated as a means of polluting the language. Verbal aggression violates the natural communication flow and should be regarded as a threat to the ecolinguistic balance of the world.
Verbal aggression may be produced not only directly by people, but also become an integral part of various metaphoric constructions. Thus, the conceptual temporal metaphor TIME is AN AGGRESSOR manifests the roles (time is a killer, time is a critic, time is an enemy), actions (time kills, time demands) and characteristics (ruthless time, cruel time) of the aggressive temporal entity.
Yeliz Demir, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, yelizd@hacettepe.edu.tr, ylzdemir@gmail.com
Ad Hominem attacks in online news comments: How much do reasonable argumentation and politeness in interaction matter?
Online news-commenting mechanisms allow internet users to comment on the news instantly and interact with other commenters. However, the current forms of online news-commenting often decrease the quality of argumentation and become a medium of attack rather than a constructive medium for exchanging viewpoints. The aim of this study is to study ad hominem attacks in unmoderated online news comments to reveal their role in hindering the resolution of difference of opinion and indicating an impolite form of interpersonal interaction. The study understands ad hominem attacks from the Pragma-Dialectical perspective (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1987; 1992a, 1992b; 2004; van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2003; 2007) and treats them as argumentative moves that violate the rules of a critical discussion. The study draws on data from the comments to three news stories published on the facebook page of a Turkish newspaper, Hürriyet. The news stories draw on the events during “Occupy Gezi” protests arising in Turkey between 27 May, 2013 and 10 September 2013. It is observed that ad hominem attacks not only decrease the quality of argumentation but they also mark an apparent hostility for opponents by foregrounding a “we” vs “they” distinction, a sign of political segregation in the society.
References
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Grootendorst, R. (1987). Fallacies in pragma-dialectical perspective. Argumentation, 1(3), 283–301.
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Grootendorst, R. (1992a). Argumentation, communication, and fallacies: A pragma-dialectical perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Grootendorst, R. (1992b). Relevance reviewed: The case of argumentum ad hominem. Argumentation, 6(2), 141–159.
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Houtlosser, P. (2003). Fallacies as derailment of strategic maneuvering. The argumentum ad verecundiam, a case in point. In F. H. van Eemeren, J. A. Blair, C. A. Willard & A. F. Snoeck Henkemans (Eds.), Proceedings of the fifth
conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (pp.289–292). Amsterdam: SicSat.
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Houtlosser, P. (2007). The contextuality of fallacies. Informal Logic. 27(1), 59–67.
Charles Bonnot, Université Paris-Diderot, France, charles.bonnot@yahoo.fr
Face-threatening acts (FTAs) and impoliteness in rock stars’ interviews
The essential fragility of the collaborative process at work in rock stars’ interviews can be better understood when considering the violent arguments which may arise between interviewers and interviewees. In such cases, artists usually suspend the interaction, either by refusing to reply or by questioning the relevance of a “bad question” and the competence of the journalist; in some cases, rock stars go so far as to insult the interviewer. However, one should bear in mind that journalists may also be responsible for FTAs (Brown-Levinson, 1987), since criticism and the mention of unpleasant topics might be considered as such by musicians.
Nevertheless, the fragility of these interactional collaborations cannot be explained only by conflicting interests and by the touchiness of artists resenting verbal attacks. Indeed, ever since the 1960s, “rock culture” has been associated with insolence, arrogance and even violence, especially that of the youth protesting against the domination of older generations (Frith, 1978; Chastagner, 2011). Though the idea of rock culture being inherently rebellious is highly debatable, the construction of a discursive ethos (Amossy, 2011) integrating impoliteness and re-enacting a generational conflict in the context of journalistic interviews seems to be an interesting hypothesis, which we shall study relying on the theoretical frameworks of discourse analysis and interaction analysis.
References
- Amossy Ruth, La présentation de soi : ethos et identité verbale, Puf, Paris, 2010.
- Brown Penelope and Levinson Stephen, Politeness, Some Universals in Language Usage, Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987 [2004]
- Chastagner Claude, De la culture rock, Puf, Paris, 2011
- Frith Simon, The Sociology of Rock, Constable, London, 1978
Małgorzata Szymańska, University of Wrocław, Poland, szymanska.m@poczta.onet.pl
The great Australian adjective and other impolite Australian expressions
From the early beginnings, Australian variation of English was perceived by Englishmen as rough, vulgar, improper and even obscene. Today, Australian English is perceived as funny and full of bizarre, strictly cultural expressions. However, the Great Australian Adjective, as W.T. Goodge referred in his poem to the word ‘bloody’, is controversial even nowadays. According to Wierzbicka (2002), the use of ‘bloody’ is perceived as rude, offensive and face aggravating in most English-speaking countries. Wierzbicka (Wierzbicka, A. (2002) “Australian cultural scripts—bloody revisited” [In:] Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002), 1167–1209) presents a wide range of examples, relating mostly to politics, supporting the claim of the impoliteness and inappropriateness of the word. Moreover, the release of the Australian tourist commercial in 2006 unleashed a storm of criticism among the viewers and organisations protecting the public from harmful or offensive material and stirred a heated discussion over the use of ‘bloody’ in the media. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present the case of the Great Australian Adjective and Australian English slang expressions considered as linguistically impolite across English-speaking countries.
Jitka Vlckova, FF MU Brno, Czech Republic, vlckova@phil.muni.cz
Perspectives on Politeness and Impoliteness in Australia
This paper is going to offer a contrastive view of communicative strategies in and between contact (native) and non-contact (Western) cultures. Written texts and scenes from Australian films, focused mainly on Aboriginals and white Australians, will exemplify the different ways of communication, many of which may lead to violating the culturally accepted norms of politeness. As a result, the speaker’s responses are taken as impolite, a fact which may then bring undesired consequences, for example at court cases. There are special manuals for judges to help them to understand certain phenomena in Aboriginal communication, such as delayed and incoherent answers, which are considered impolite, or even rude, in Western cultures. Visual images will illustrate both non-verbal aspects, such as eye contact, and verbal discourse, including the use of silence.
SLANG26 Monday 1.9.2014 (A)14.30–16.30 Room A5, (B)17.00–18.30 Room A5 / Tuesday 2.9.2014 ( C ) 11.00–13.00 Room A5
EUROPEAN VARIATIONS IN ESP ACROSS THEORY AND PRACTICE
Convenors:
Shaeda Isani, Grenoble University, France, shaeda.isani@u-grenoble3.fr
Alessandra Molino, University of Turin, Italy, alessandra.molino@unito.it
Michel van der Yeught, Aix-Marseille University, France, michel.vanderyeught@univ-amu.fr
Annalisa Zanola, University of Brescia, Italy, zanola@eco.unibs.it
As ESP research and teaching programmes multiply and evolve the world over, there is increasing diversity amongst researchers regarding the objectives and finality of the discipline and ways and means of achieving them. This seminar invites ESP scholars and practitioners to reflect on this diversity at national, European and global levels to identify differences and similarities and pave the way for greater exchange and collaboration amongst European ESP specialists. Proposals will focus on such key ESP issues as needs analysis, specialized languages as objects of scientific enquiry, synchronic vs. diachronic approaches, specialized domains and communities, specialized discourse, cultures and genres and interdisciplinary approaches.
Participants
Maria Tarantino, University of Bari, Italy, maria.tarantino@uniba.it
New lymph into ESP/EST studies
The paper suggests that ESP/EST studies should be revitalised by the inclusion of dialectic strands which fuel scientific investigation and argumentation. The discussion touches on the method scientists use to pose queries about physical processes, weigh and compare contrasting ideas and assumptions and advance knowledge about Nature. The features highlighted invite the conclusion that since dialectic sources seem to govern both pragmatic and epistemological aspects of scientific argumentation, their inclusion might infuse new lymph in specialist discourse analysis.
Catherine Resche, Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris, France, catherineresche@club-internet.fr
Mapping out research paths to specialised domains and discourse
There are many different paths a linguist can follow in order to study specialised varieties of English. Actually, specialised varieties of English lie at the crossroads between applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, terminology, genre and discourse analyses, stylistics, cultural studies and the history of ideas that helped shape a specific domain or disciplinary field. Examples from a corpus including various sources in the field of financial crises and business cycles will serve as a basis for offering an overview of the insights that can be gained when researchers use language as an entry point into specialised domains, milieus and areas of knowledge.
Joanna Kic-Drgas, Koszalin University of Technology, Poland, joanna.kic-drgas@tu.koszalin.pl
An interdisciplinary approach in the ESP teaching
Dramatic economic changes, globalisation and staff mobility are only a few visible signs of development mankind is facing in the current world. The role of the English language has become more versatile than ever before. With this broadening evolution, the context of language usage goes hand in hand also with an increasing specialisation of scientific and professional fields. The key to success seems to be implementing interdisciplinarity in ESP teaching. The presentation provides an overview on the diversity of current approaches including integrity of science and linguistics.
Philippe Millot, University of Grenoble, France, philippe.millot@univ-fcomte.fr
Approaching English as a professional lingua franca from a specialised perspective: A theoretical model and some pedagogical implications
This paper seeks to provide a corpus-based model for characterising English as a professional lingua franca from a specialised perspective. The model lies on the notions of “socio-professional networks” and “global users of English” where the specialised dimensions of language are not taken as a mere, descriptive option but form a fundamental aspect of observation. We then examine the practical implications this model may have on the teaching of English for professional purposes.
Fanny Domenec, University Panthéon-Assas, Paris, France, fanny.domenec@u-paris2.fr
ESP at a crossroads: the importance of text, context and subtext
This paper presents the three-step methodology devised to analyze the specific approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR) favoured by six American multinationals specialized in oil and gas, and agricultural biotechnology.
With the aim of addressing the various aspects of specialization, an interdisciplinary perspective was adopted. The latter considers both discourse (documents issued by the companies) and its production context, using a pseudo-ethnographic approach (interviews with corporate members and specialists) and tools borrowed from sociolinguistics (questionnaires to the general public).
Alessandra Molino, University of Turin, Italy, alessandra.molino@unito.it
EAP approaches to linguistic and cultural variations in English-medium lectures in native and non-native contexts
The higher education sector in Europe is characterised by the proliferation of English-medium courses, a situation that raises linguistic, educational and cultural challenges. This paper investigates differences and similarities in the use of metadiscourse by native and non-native academics in Physical Sciences and Engineering lectures in English. The recent literature on EAP is also explored to understand how different approaches interpret and conceptualise such linguistic and cultural variations.
Olga Ranus, Poznan University of Technology, Poland, olga.ranus@gmail.com
The Soft Skills of Professional English – education beyond technical knowledge
There is no doubt that hard skills, related to professional technical knowledge are an absolute essential for engineers to perform their jobs efficiently. However, the professional world of engineers is undergoing a dramatic change, where a huge number of highly-qualified graduates are losing out in the job market due to the lack of soft skills. Therefore, skills such as presentation delivery, intercultural communication, or interpersonal skills are added to educational programs and are taught most often by English Language Lecturers during ESP classes. The paper addresses the issue of teaching both Soft Skills and Professional English at Polish technical universities. It provides needs analysis and investigates how English for Specific Purposes courses (including Soft Skills and Professional English) are organized and delivered at Polish Universities. Finally, it discusses the changing role of ESP instructors, who gain a new responsibility of not only enhancing students’ linguistic competence, but also preparing them for new extra-linguistic demands.
Shaeda Isani, University of Grenoble, France, shaeda.isani@u-grenoble3.fr
Endo- or exolinguistic learning loci and the shifting dynamics of the “S” in ESP: English for specific, specialised or social purposes?
Given the global status of ESP, variations regarding teaching/learning finalities have emerged, questioning the epistemological core of the discipline itself. This paper discusses three phases in the evolution of the discipline’s defining objectives through interpretation of variances regarding the “S” in ESP, and seeks to relate divergences to the endo- or exolinguistic status of learning loci.
We first analyse the “S” as standing for “Specific” or traditional narrow-angled ESP objectives in endo- and exolinguistic contexts. Next, we analyse the evolution towards “S” for “Specialised” or the wide-angled approach prevalent in European exolinguistic tertiary loci (Petit, 2002). Finally, we address the controversial emergence of “critical perspectives” found in endolinguistic loci (Pennycook, 1999; Benesch, 2001) in the light of which the “S” tends towards “Social”. To conclude, the study attempts to identify possible areas of convergence and compatibility.
Angela Andreani & Virginia Pulcini, University of Turin, Italy, angela.andreani@gmail.com, virginia.pulcini@unito.it
Anglicisms in specialized discourse: a corpus-based (critical) study of English job titles in Italian
As studies on the influence of English on European languages show (Pulcini et al. 2012), specialized domains are characterized by the presence of anglicisms, used not only to fill lexical gaps, but also in competition with Italian equivalents. This makes the lexicon a fruitful area of enquiry for scholars of ESP (Gotti 2008), who must reflect upon such ‘multiple terminology’ (Pulcini 2012). Placing the lexicographic perspective within the debate on the position of English in national LSPs, we will address the communicative function of English (looking) job titles in Italian job advertisements (manager, engineer, shop assistant and runner) through a corpus-based analysis.
Danica Milošević, College of Applied Technical Studies, Niš, Serbia, danicamil@yahoo.com
ESP methods and techniques: student and teacher English language competencies in industrial engineering
Teaching ESP is an extremely demanding task for teachers who are involved in it, but also a great professional challenge that has to be taken wisely and attentively. On the other hand, ESP is no less challenging for students acquiring knowledge and skills in vocational English, whose mission is to make them linguistically competent for their future professions. The paper will draw attention to the ESP competencies, methods and techniques at the Technical College in Niš, Serbia at the Department of Industrial Engineering and indicate how it is possible to make them even more efficient, more vocationally-oriented and adjusted to the needs of the global market.
Caroline Peynaud, University Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 1, France, Ca.peynaud@gmail.com
News genres within the framework of specialized domains: a study of the US written press
Most news genre typologies are mostly based on the discursive features of the texts, whereas genres in general are primarily defined in relation to their communicative purposes. The theoretical framework of specialized domains takes the latter into account and thus may lead to analyzing news genres from a different angle. Discussing the results of a field study and a corpus of front page articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post, this paper attempts to compose a definition of news genres as being produced mainly to respond to the specific needs of the discourse community.
Silvia Molina Plaza, Technical University of Madrid, Spain, silvia.molina@upm.es
Applying politeness theory in specialized discourse: the case of EU fisheries
The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze three speech acts in the EU Fisheries Website, namely advising, requesting and performing, from both a quantitative (using the web as a corpus) and qualitative point of view. Results indicate that modality markers, particularly must, are used in declaratives with advising value. Another interesting finding is that the declarative sentence type is favored in requests, contrary to the findings of other studies. Lastly, explicit performative verbs contribute towards a proposition whose relevance lies in the way it directs the reader towards a particular interpretation of another proposition used for persuasion.
Viviana Gaballo, University of Macerata, Italy, viviana.gaballo@unimc.it
New phenomena in color terminology: A diachronic study of color terms in the language of tourism
The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of color terms in the specialized language of tourism – with an empirical approach and from a contextual perspective – by focusing on the pragmatic relevance of colors in tourist texts, and by investigating it from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.
After reviewing the milestones of research on color terminology across languages, we introduced a new type of relativism in color naming, induced by the increasing phenomenon of user-generated color names made possible by the latest Web 2.0 technologies.
The study also offers preliminary results from the contrastive analysis of two corpora of UK hotel web pages, collected in 1997 and 2012, which provided us with the opportunity to investigate linguistic variation across time, and expose any salient lexical change that intervened in the elapsed fifteen years in the use of colors to promote hotel accommodation in the UK.
Hélène Laffont, INSA Toulouse, France, helene.laffont@insa-toulouse.fr
The Evolution of French Research in the Specialized Domain of Engineering: From Specialized Communities and Discourse Study to more Interdisciplinary Approaches
The paper will present the work that has been conducted so far in the field of engineering, and more specifically civil engineering, drawing on a specific strand of French ESP initiated by Petit (2004, 2008) against the larger background of French enunciative-pragmatic discourse analysis.
The results of the field research undertaken today following Petit (2010) corroborate Detourbe’s view (2012) that specialized domains and communities are ever more complex research objects and that, consequently, ESP should now take a more multidisciplinary turn.
SLANG27 Sunday 31.8.2014 16.00–17.30 Room A8
ENGLISH IN EUROPEAN LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES
Convenors:
Milan Ferenčík, University of Prešov, Slovakia, milan.ferencik@unipo.sk
Judit Szabóné Papp, University of Miskolc, Hungary, nyejudit@uni-miskolc.hu
The seminar is intended to provide a forum for the discussion of the placements, functions and manifestations of English in the linguistic landscapes (LL) of the ´expanding-circle´ of European countries. It welcomes data-driven contributions by practitioners of different social-scientific research creeds, esp. sociolinguists, pragmalinguists and applied linguists, who have welcomed the emergence of the transdisciplinary approaches of ´linguistic landscape´ and ´geosemiotics´ and who have employed their methodologies in order to get to grips with the conspicuous presence of English language in the visual richness of contemporary urban landscapes.
Participants
Lydia Sciriha, University of Malta, lydia.sciriha@um.edu.mt
Is English a Second Language in Bilingual Malta’s Linguistic Landscape?
This paper focuses on the visibility and salience of English in Malta, a tiny island at the very heart of the Mediterranean, whose strategic position unwittingly contributed to its chequered history. Among its long list of colonisers, the Arabs (870–1090), the Order of St John (1530 –1798) and the British (1800–1964) left an indelible mark on the islanders’ linguistic repertoire. Maltese, which is a variety of Arabic, and English are now Malta’s official languages.
The steady rise of Maltese, the indigenous language, occurred during the twentieth century when it became both a national and official language. Moreover, more recently in 2002, it obtained official language status within the European Union, while in 2005 the Maltese government promulgated the Maltese Language Act to ensure the use of Maltese in institutional settings. Though such a government measure might suggest that Maltese is in need of attention and that it is losing its ground to English, nevertheless, large-scale surveys (Sciriha and Vassallo, 2001, 2006) and the 2005 Census data do not support this view. In effect, the data show that Maltese is spoken by the overwhelming majority of the population in Malta. However, particularly noteworthy is the fact that though oral interaction is in the indigenous language, the Maltese prefer English in written communication. (Sciriha and Vassallo, 2001, 2006).
This paper presents the results of 7346 signs obtained from a scientifically-representative sample of the localities in Malta and which have been analysed by both government and non-government domains in respect of (i) frequency of English on public signs; (ii) dominance of English in bilingual signs and (iii) autonomy of English.
The findings reveal that notwithstanding the drive by successive Maltese governments to ensure the visibility of Maltese especially in government domains, in the Maltese linguistic panorama, English is a second language in name only.
Steven Coats, University of Oulu, English Philology, steven.coats@oulu.fi
English-Language Social Media in Finland: Compilation and Analysis of a Twitter Corpus
The emergence of the internet and social media (SM) as important global communication platforms has prompted the corpus-based investigation of some of the linguistic properties of computer-mediated and internet communication in general as well as, to a limited extent, their geographical variability. However, properties of English varieties in second-language environments have been investigated mainly in terms of second-language interference or error analysis and their effects on language learning. As English continues to serve as the dominant language of global communication, a characterization of some of the linguistic properties of SM English in a second-language environment such as Finland can shed light on the relative contribution of genre constraints and second-language effects to the emergent properties of a global variety of English. A relatively large English-language corpus of Twitter communication originating in Finland was compiled and some of its collocational and distributional properties were compared with those of national varieties of English. The analysis may shed light on some properties of the lexis of a specialized global English variety, as well as suggest investigation of issues pertaining to language interference and stylistic variation.
Judit Szabóné Papp, Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Institute of Modern Philology, University of Miskolc/Hungary, nyejudit@uni-miskolc.hu
The Presence and Status of English in the Linguistic Landscape of Miskolc, a Major Hungarian City and Academic Centre
The paper gives an analysis of public signs in Miskolc, the fourth largest Hungarian city, a county capital and academic centre with its university, the successor of one of the world’s first higher education institutions in technology. The questions the paper seeks to find an answer to include the following: how is Hungary’s membership in the European Union reflected in the LL of the city? What is the linguistic effect of the presence of various foreign companies (e.g. Bosch, Takata, etc.) that the city, whose economy earlier relied mostly on the iron and steel industry and which therefore underwent a serious economic crisis after the shift of the country to a market economy, has long been trying to attract in order to stabilise its economic position? What is the effect of the numerous bilingual primary and secondary schools that have been established in the city and the region in recent years? Are other languages present anywhere outside the spheres of tourism and travel? What characteristic linguistic features or varieties can be detected? Are there any signs in the city’s LL of using English as a status symbol or on the contrary, of the long Hungarian tradition of ‘purism’, stemming from the anxiety about the national language being threatened by the dominant language/lingua franca of the era? Data collection covers public signs representing the major spheres of city life from public administration through economy, trade and tourism to education and life in an international university campus.
Milan Ferenčík, Institute of British and American Studies, University of Prešov, Slovakia, milan.ferencik@unipo.sk
English in the visual semiotics of a Slovakia’s cityscape: the case of Poprad.
There is hardly a better visual proof of the interconnectedness of the world than the ubiquity of English signage marking visual sceneries of the world’s cityscapes, let alone those attending to international travellers. It has been suggested that it is the variety of ‘English as a lingua franca’ (ELF) which serves as the principal language of international communication in touristy places, and its worldwide presence is explained as a consequence, vehicle, or facilitator of globalization. The paper attempts to contribute to the increasing body of studies which go beyond merely stating that English is omnipresent on the global scale and which look for the types of ELF manifestations and patterns of its interaction with other languages in tourist destinations. While drawing on the increasing body of research inspired by geosemiotics and linguistic landscape, the present empirical study of the ‘local linguistic landscape’ of a Slovakian town, a hub of Slovakia’s international tourism, attempts to problematize the understanding of its ‘English signage’ as being ELF. It is suggested that English in a particular place, rather than being transported from the ‘inner circle’ by the process of spread, is produced ‘locally’, i.e. through the practices of those involved in its making, and thereby it conveys both the sense of the locality as much as it is bound up with the global transcultural flows.
SLANG28 Monday 1.9.2014 (A) 17.00–18.30 Room A7
NON-WORDS, NONCE-WORDS AND MORPHOLOGY TEACHING
Convenors:
Silvia Cacchiani, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, silvia.cacchiani@unimore.it
Christoph Haase, Purkinye University, Czech Republic, christoph.haase@ujep.cz
While psycho- and neurolinguistics (e.g. Marslen-Wilson 2007, Rastle etal. 2008, Crepaldi 2010) have shown increasing interest in the representation of non-words, nonce-words or nonsensical words in the mental lexicon, their potential as a yardstick for the morphological competence of L2 learners has not been widely explored. The aim of this seminar is to bring together theoretical and applied research on non-words, nonce-words, and the teaching of English morphology. Suggested topics include (but are not restricted to): analogy in morphology and L2 learning; best practice in morphology teaching; learner access to lexical strata, feature percolation and permissibility, and related performance.
Participants
Elisa Mattiello, University of Pisa, Italy, e.mattiello@angl.unipi.it
Analogical nonce words and L2 learning
This paper investigates English nonce words obtained by surface analogy (Motsch 1981). In Dressler and Ladányi’s (1998: 35) approach, surface analogy involves assimilation with actual model words, as in pigeon-breasted formed on double-breasted. Therefore, it differs both from rule productivity, with a precise abstract pattern described in a rule format (Aronoff 1993), and from analogy via schema, with prototype actual words (or word families), but no exact pattern (Köpcke 1998). The main aim of the paper is, on the one hand, to show the relevance of analogical nonce forms to L2 learning, and, on the other hand, to propose an array of (phonological, morphotactic and semantic) similarities between analogical nonce words and the model words they are based on (cf. Kilani-Schoch, Dressler 2005).
The paper examines a collection of nonce words drawn from The Guardian and classifies them along scales of similarity between target words and model words. This classification is meant to: 1) identify tendencies in assimilatory processes concerning nonce words, and 2) corroborate tendencies previously identified in the coinage of neologisms (Mattiello forthcoming). Unlike neologisms, nonce words are coined for single occasions and generally fail to enter ordinary language. However, analogical nonce words may be viewed as useful tools to boost the morphological competence of L2 learners, in that analogy allows assimilations at various levels, thus facilitating word recognition and understanding.
Silvia Cacchiani, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, silvia.cacchiani@unimore.it
Non-words and nonce-words as hypostatization and attention seeking devices: some implications for L2 teaching and TLA
Starting on the assumption that work on recent L2 neologisms, nonce-words and non-words can help develop teacher language awareness (van Lier, Corson 1997: TLA) as well as L2 morphological awareness in advanced students, this paper provides a qualitative investigation into complex words used as attention seeking devices, for hypostatization and naming purposes (Lipka 2000, Hohenhaus 2007). Data are mainly taken from nonsense (Lecercle 1994) and children literature (e.g. Roald Dahl’s The BFG or McGough’s An Imaginary Menagerie) and complemented with examples from TV shows and series in which language play has a significant role (e.g. The Muppet Show), science fiction, adverts and online resources (e.g. WordSpy). Compounding, derivation and extra-grammatical word-formations will be addressed within Booij’s (2010) Construction Morphology framework in terms of analogical processes, paradigmatic relations and schemas, with special emphasis on intentional creative errors (Rodari 1973/2011) that amount to mismatched derived non-words (vs. regular non-words and pseudo non-words).
** CANCELLED Jiří Rambousek, Wei-lun Lu, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
jiri.rambousek@phil.muni.cz, weilunlu@gmail.com**
A contrastive approach to nonce-word formation: the case of Jabberwocky in English, Czech and Slovak
Despite the increasing scholarly interest that nonce-words have attracted, their cross-linguistic dimension has received only rather limited attention. In view of this gap, we propose to examine the formation of nonce-words in translations. The research material we choose is Jabberwocky and the passage of Humpty Dumpty by Lewis Carroll, where Carroll models English word-formation in a playful, yet plausible way. We will use the English original along with its two Czech translations by J. Císař and A. and H. Skoumal and one Slovak translation by J. and V. Vojtek. Given that the basic types of word formation (derivation, conversion, blending etc.) are cross-linguistically highly similar – even though their frequency or importance may differ substantially – a hypothesis would be that translations of these passages will preserve their instructiveness in this respect.
The result of our contrastive analysis is striking. It turns out that Carroll’s message about how a language may create new words is seriously distorted in some of the translations, even though the translators more or less successfully recreate the individual nonce-words in the two languages, including the regard to their much richer inflection.
In the translations of nonsense poems, semantic faithfulness to the original is a questionable concept, and the stylistic correspondence of the two texts becomes more prominent. Our findings suggest that the correspondence can be achieved by various means, among others the text producers’ tactical use of conventionalized form-meaning pairings in their respective languages. The paper briefly notices the functioning of these pairings on the level of inflection but the main focus is on nonce-word formation: the formation process in the original text actually goes far beyond clipping and putting together morphological elements. Instead, we propose that nonce-word formation should be seen as a highly conventional grammatical, and even stylistic, strategy, and that translators should be aware of its complexity in the process of text production.
** CANCELLED Mira Gurska, National Bank of Slovakia, mira.gurska@gmail.com
Preserving nonce words in Business English**
The subject matter of Business English (BE) is general and specific language. If nonce words exist in the English language as a whole, there is a high probability they exist in BE as well. The aim of my talk is to venture into extracting some more and less common BE nonce words, tie them with the whole concept of corpora, analyze or maybe speculate about their origin, and try to predict why some of them might become successful neologisms while some are just ad hoc ones and will soon disappear. I will also suggest some activities for preserving some interesting BE nonce words and incorporating them into everyday BE vocabulary.
Christoph Haase, Purkinye University, Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic, christoph.haase@ujep.cz
In-group and intergroup variability in Czech and German learners of English
In this contribution, data from a parallel study of learners with two different L1, Czech and German, is presented and compared in order to highlight important differences that could be used to enhance the teaching of English morphology. The results show stronger in-group variability than intergroup variability. This at first glance surprising fact will be attributed to the differing levels of proficiency among these groups. Thus, as a further parameter, the groups were tested also according to their proficiency levels in English. The findings are embedded in the overall framework of psycholinguistic research on morphological productivity and the processing of morphemes. In this way, it will be suggested that learners with different L1 will not only be characterized by performance differences but also by differences in sublexical processing. As this processing contains a phonological component, the differing L1 sound inventories may offer an explanation for the results obtained.
Martha Lampropoulou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, marthalamp@gmail.com
Children’s performance with non-words in Greek: evidence from a pilot study
This study is realized within the scope of Cognitive Linguistics and aims at giving insight into the way children treat words of coinage formed in accordance with the Modern Greek inflectional system. For the aims of this study brief interviews took place; this involved the participation of 20 preschool children of a Greek kindergarten who were asked to “explain” the meaning of 4 non-existent verbs in Greek within a given context. In particular, a periphrastic description of an action related to a frequently used concept (a noun) was provided and, in turn, the subjects were asked to “explain” the pseudo-word, or else the non-existent derivative having the nominal as base. The study attempts to examine how children conceive non-words and whether they resort to certain morphological strategies such as employing event schemata, or else Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff 1987; Radden and Kövecses 1999). This is in accordance with Dirven’s approach of perceiving actions, or better, verbs as a whole structure: “there is agent, an energy source that transmits energy to an object and an object which is affected by the energy […]”, an event schema (1999: 277).
SLANG29 Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A3
LEXICAL ISSUES IN L2 WRITING
Convenors:
Päivi Pietilä, University of Turku, Finland, paipi@utu.fi
Katalin Doró, University of Szeged, Hungary, dorokati@lit.u-szeged.hu
Renata Pipalová, Charles University, Czech Republic, m.pipal@volny.cz
This seminar addresses vital lexical issues in L2 writing from learning, teaching and research perspectives. The papers presented may attempt to answer the following questions, for example: How are accuracy, fluency and complexity intertwined in written texts? What lexical and other devices are used to achieve cohesion and coherence in texts written in L2 English? What kinds of lexical strategies do learners (at different proficiency levels) use in L2 writing? How is vocabulary use affected by factors such as text type, timing/lack of timing, topic, L1, individual learner differences, etc? What are the challenges of L2 academic writing and assessment?
Participants
Renata Pípalová, Charles University, Czech Republic, m.pipal@volny.cz
Reporting Verbs in Native and Non-native Academic Discourse
Intertextuality and indeed interdiscursivity have long been recognized as being indispensable features of academic writing. This paper focuses on manifest intertextuality only. More specifically, it explores linguistic and literary discourse produced by native professionals and non-native (Czech) novices (undergraduates). Of the many structures suggesting intertextuality in linguistic and literary discourse, it studies links to secondary sources only. Moreover, it scrutinizes two citation forms, i.e., direct and indirect speech. Adopting a multifaceted approach, the paper aims at investigating some of the prominent tendencies in the use of reporting verbs employed in these citation forms, e.g., their frequency, lexical range, type of subjects featured, their semantic parameters, etc. Specific attention is given to these verbs as markers of attitude/stance. An attempt is also made to offer a pragmatic account of the findings.
Minoo Khamesian, Yerevan State Linguistic University, Armenia, khamesian2006@yahoo.com
Rhetorical Impact through Hedging Devices in the ‘Results and Discussion’ Part of a Civil Engineering Research Article
It is common knowledge that hedging devices, as a rhetorical technique common in all persuasive writing, are of considerable importance in scientific discourse, for they are tools which facilitate presenting claims or arguments in a polite, acceptable and respectful manner. In addition they are discoursal resources available to a scientific writer’s propositions to express uncertainty, skepticism, and open-mindedness.
Research articles are an important means of communication between different members of a discourse community, and will be convincing to a certain extent only when authors are able to employ rhetorical conventions, such as hedging devices, persuasively. However, hedging is a problematic aspect in EAP learning, since rarely are the learners able to hedge their statements appropriately, engineering students not being an exception.
Therefore, this presentation intends to linguistically analyze the function of rhetorical impact of using hedging devices in the results and discussion part of a civil engineering research article published in the Asian Journal of Civil Engineering (Building & Housing) to conclude that greater and more systematic attention should be given to hedging devices, considering their importance in EAP.
Päivi Pietilä, University of Turku, Finland, paipi@utu.fi
Lexical Variation in L2 Academic Writing: A Look at MA Thesis Conclusions
Non-native writers have been shown to produce academic texts which differ in many ways from native speaker writing. Students writing their MA theses in L2 English may not have any major difficulty in producing grammatically acceptable language, but their vocabulary skills may not be equally accomplished compared with native speakers. This presentation offers an analysis of MA thesis conclusions written in English by Finnish and Czech students, and a corresponding corpus of native speaker writing. The main focus was on lexical characteristics, especially the lexical variation of the texts, and a closer look was taken at academic vocabulary (Coxhead’s AWL, Coxhead 2000). It was hypothesized that the NNS conclusions would manifest lower lexical variation, both generally and in the academic vocabulary used, than the NS conclusions. A comparison of the two NNS texts, on the other hand, was not expected to reveal major differences. The quantitative analysis of the academic vocabulary was complemented with a qualitative analysis.
References
Coxhead, A. 2000. A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly 34 (2): 213–238.
Katalin Doró, University of Szeged, Hungary, dorokati@lit.u-szeged.hu
Changes in the Lexical Measures of Undergraduate EFL Students’ Argumentative Essays
The Bologna process has opened up gates to larger and more varied student populations than the ones in the pre-Bologna era. In foreign language study programs this often means that students who enroll with inadequate language proficiency and content knowledge struggle through their studies and are less successful in their target language production tasks. This study analyzes the lexical measures of argumentative essays written by third-year BA students of English to see whether they confirm the general observation of human raters, according to whom the essays produced in the last few years are less accurate and varied than the ones that were written only some years earlier under the same circumstances. Two groups of essays written with a minimum of five years apart are investigated for their lexical profile (lexical complexity, density and sophistication), metadiscourse markers (such as boosters, hedges, also transition, attitude and stance markers) and reporting verbs. Implications for teaching and assessing EFL academic writing are discussed.
Marja-Leena Niitemaa, University of Turku, Finland, maleni@utu.fi
The Size of Learner Lexis and Looking up Words Online
The study reported in this presentation investigated the interconnection between the size of upper secondary English learners’ receptive vocabulary and their ability to exploit electronic dictionaries in writing tasks. In the experiment, the informants were first tested for receptive vocabulary, and based on the test results, a rough estimate of the learners’ receptive vocabulary size was calculated. Moreover, the informants’ receptive knowledge of collocations was measured. Then the informants conducted three writing tasks involving looking up words online. It was assumed that the larger the vocabulary size, the more likely it is that the learner is able to take full advantage of online dictionaries. In the presentation, I will introduce the preliminary findings on looking up phrasal verbs and collocations and discuss the observations within the framework of cognitive complexity. The study is a part of a larger project that looks into a language learning environment in which the students work in a web-based mode not only in the classroom but also during examinations.
SLANG30 CANCELLED
TEACHER’S PRESENCE IN CLASS. A JOB OR A PERFORMANCE?
Convenors:
Anatol Shevel, University of Rzeszow, Poland, ashevel@univ.rzeszow.pl
Nadja Mifka-Profozic, University of Zadar, Croatia, nmifkap@unizd.hr
The core of EFL teacher training can be formulated as ”Different people can do the same job, but depending on how they do it the final effect will be different”. The purpose of the seminar is to concentrate on “Teacher as a Performer” and bring to the fore a discussion on the following aspects: Appearance (dress code & sense); Voice management; Movement (appropriateness & proximity); Language (rough-tuning); Body language (gestures & mimics); Calligraphy; Sense of humour; Personality type; Life experience; Professional knowledge & skills (techniques). The speakers are invited to make a projection of the techniques used in coaching and management motivation onto EFL teaching. The research can vary within socio-cultural, psychological, linguistic studies.
SLANG31 CANCELLED
SUMMATIVE VS FORMATIVE FEEDBACK AND THE CREATION OF SCHOLARLY IDENTITY
Convenors:
Jane Mattisson Ekstam, Kristianstad University, Sweden, jane.mattisson@hkr.se
Claudia Doroholschi, West University Timişoara, Romania, claudia.doroholschi@litere.uvt.ro
In our seminar we shall discuss the functions and forms of teacher written feedback. Studies have demonstrated that while peer reviewing is an important part of the writing process for students, it is teacher feedback that is most highly appreciated (Ken and Fiona Hyland, 2006). We shall situate teacher written feedback in the context of the wider institutional, social and cultural factors which have been found to influence how feedback is given and received. We shall also discuss the „how“ and „what“ of feedback – the ways it is shaped through its modes of delivery and form. The aim of all writing must be to create a distinct scholarly identity. The basis for our discussions is thus the all-important question „To what extent has summative feedback, designed to evaluate writing as a product, generally been replaced by formative feedback that points forward to the student's future writing and the development of his or her writing processes?“
SLANG32 Saturday 30.8.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room A5, (B)17.15–18.45 Room A5
ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS – EXCEPTIONAL ENGLISH FOR EXCEPTIONAL LEARNERS?
Convenors:
Ewa Domagala-Zysk, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, ewadom@kul.pl
Edit Hegybiro Kontra, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, ehkontra@gmail.com
The seminar addresses educators and linguists involved in the recent upsurge of European action research focusing on learners with special educational needs. For many years in the past D/deaf, blind, intellectually challenged or dyslexic students were excluded from learning foreign languages, but contemporary educational and social trends such as normalization, integration or inclusion have changed this situation. The purpose of the seminar is thus to share experiences and bring to the fore a discussion on the following points: 1). Conceptual representations for words in English in individuals with sensory or cognitive challenges; 2. Teaching strategies and class techniques to enhance both motivation and language performance; 3. The role of oral communication and sign languages in EFL classes for the D/deaf; 4). Cooperative practices in primary, secondary and tertiary foreign language education for students with disabilities.
Participants
Edit H. Kontra, Piniel Katalin, Csizér Kata, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, ehkontra@gmail.com
Foreign language teachers at schools for the hearing impaired
This presentation will introduce teachers of English and German who work with D/deaf learners in special schools or classes for the hearing impaired. As part of a larger project all such schools in Hungary were visited, language lessons were observed and teachers were interviewed in order to find out about their work, the difficulties they face and the achievements their students make. In Hungary there are no pre- or in-service programs specifically designed for language teachers of the hearing impaired. Even the idea of teaching languages to the Deaf is frequently met with skepticism both by educators and the wider public. None of the participating teachers intended to choose this career; they just ended up where they are now, and in spite of the adverse circumstances and their resource-poor environment they are doing their job with exemplary devotion and enthusiasm. The presentation will introduce those aspects of their work that most call for attention: the lack of teaching methods and materials as well as the difficulties of closing the communication gap between teacher and students. Initiatives will be suggested for supporting these teachers by providing in-service and networking opportunities.
Ewa Domagała-Zyśk, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, ewadom@kul.pl
Teaching English as a foreign language to the deaf and hard of hearing adult learners of different educational backgrounds
The theory of practice of teaching English as a foreign language in Europe started not so long ago and it was mainly connected with teaching university students. They form a specific population within the category of persons with hearing loss, as their cognitive, language and social competencies are relatively high. Their specific learning strategies were described thoroughly in my latest book (Domagała-Zysk 2013). This experience is a good starting point to consider teaching strategies for deaf and hard of hearing adult learners of different educational backgrounds, not only university students or graduates.
The aim of this paper is to present the teaching and learning strategies in the process of an English as a Foreign Language course within a project “Breaking the silence”. 35 deaf and hard of hearing adults of different educational backgrounds participated in this 56-hour course, presenting a wide range of problems and learning strategies. The participants have experienced different barriers and difficulties during earlier stages their education so the main problem was to organize a motivation environment that enabled them to present fully their abilities. In this process the range of learning and teaching strategies should be even broader and only then will it answer the learners' special educational needs.
References
Domagała-Zyśk, Ewa. 2013. Wielojęzyczni: Studenci niesłyszący i słabosłyszący w procesie uczenia się i nauczania języków obcych. [Multilingual. Deaf and hard of hearing students in the process of teaching and learning foreign languages.] Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.
Domagała-Zyśk, Ewa (ed.). 2013. English as a foreign language for deaf and hard of hearing persons in Europe. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.
Nuzha Moritz, University of Strasbourg, France, moritz@unistra.fr
Oral communication and intelligibility in deaf speech
Speech of deaf people is generally considered as difficult to understand. For a better understanding of the characteristics of deaf-speech and the lack of intelligibility, this paper provides an insight on typical errors that deaf speakers produce. For pedagogical purposes errors had been classified in two categories: segmental and suprasegmental errors. The experimental literature showed that some segmental errors like consonant errors are more harmful to intelligibility than vowel; we will give a detailed account of this issue. If the results on segmental errors are quite uniform, the literature diverges with respect to prosodic or suprasegmental features, for instance: high pitch, rhythm, accentuation, speech rate, sentence intonation etc. The question is one that asks: what is the contribution of these errors to the low intelligibility of deaf speakers’ production? Which errors are considered as determinant of intelligibility? (Ben Maassen: 2010). The study explores the speech intelligibility of two deaf students after a cochlear implantation.
Patricia Pritchard, Senior advisor, Statped vest, Bergen, Norway, Pat.Pritchard@statped.no
English education for deaf pupils in Norway
This paper will describe and discuss Deaf pupils’ English education in Norway, attitudes to sign-bilingualism and English teaching, teaching methods for face-to-face communication and English literacy.
In Norway pupils have the legal right to be educated in and about sign language. There are national curricula for deaf pupils in English leading to national examinations.
The English curriculum aims to achieve age-appropriate English literacy and independent face-to-face communication. Due to the enormous variation in functional hearing, pupils have the freedom to choose an “oral language” suited to their individual needs: BSL/ASL (British Sign Language / American Sign Language), , Signed English, English speech, “chatting” or combinations. Oral examinations are arranged accordingly.
Negative results and attitudes exist and questions arise: Do we give the child the education that is locally available, or do we assess and cater for the needs of the individual?
Questions about necessary conditions in the classroom and the function of BSL in language learning are addressed. Teaching methods for expanding vocabulary with examples are given.
Additionally, learners need different to develop varied strategies to achieve English literacy. Phonetic reading has often been overlooked. Based on comparative analysis of Norwegian and English, we know which sounds we need to focus on and how they are represented in writing. By using all the senses and a systematic approach looking for writing patterns deaf pupils can also be confident readers.
Pupils need language skills they can use in the real world and opportunities to do so.
Anna Podlewska, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, podla@autograf.pl
The use of cued speech to support development of language skills in English language instruction for students with hearing impairments
The paper aims at presenting the results of research conducted by its author as part of her PhD investigations. It comprises two studies. The first study is a large scale investigation into the importance attached to mastering the four language elements (pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, and grammar) as well as the four language skills (extensive and intensive listening and reading, speaking, and writing) by hearing impaired foreign language learners from different countries. Data for the study were provided by a specially designed questionnaire translated into several languages, including sign languages. LSF version of the scale was prepared following the procedures for backtranslation. The four-year study was set out to examine the effect of Cued Speech enhanced EFL instruction on speech intelligibility scores of two highly motivated hearing impaired Polish university students. Ten speech samples, which included oral reading, spontaneous speech, and language elicited by the researcher, were provided by the subjects and later assessed by native and non-native listener judges. Five samples from each set were captured on audio and video recordings after two years of Cued Speech enhanced EFL training and five after four years. Overall, in terms of content comprehension, pronunciation accuracy, and the percentages of target words correctly transcribed, both of the students received statistically significantly better ratings for the recordings captured after four years of CS enhanced EFL training than for those captured after two years. In addition, pedagogical implications this research points to will be discussed.
Anna Nabiałek, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, annanab@amu.edu.pl
Immersion in the language
Teaching English to D/deaf and hard of hearing students is a tremendous challenge which academic communities have to face nowadays. What are the most effective ways and forms of teaching that can best meet the specific educational needs of hearing impaired university students? Immersion in the language and its culture is unquestionably one of them.
The main aim of this paper is to present a pilot project involving two universities: Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland and Buckinghamshire New University, UK.
Five Polish hard of hearing students who attend an EFL course at AMU were invited by Bucks to experience university life as Erasmus students and participate in some of the regular classes and lectures. During the seven-day visit they were engaged in a variety of activities and worked alongside English speaking students. They also gave presentations on themselves as well as on the situation and functioning of the hearing impaired at AMU and their participation in some breakthrough cultural events in Poznań. The students found the experience very rewarding and motivating as it gave them the opportunity to practice and develop their language skills in an English speaking environment and helped them build their confidence.
Joanna Falkowska, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland,
jfalkowska@wa.amu.edu.pl
Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual – what should an EFL class for the D/deaf look like?
The newcomers to the field of deaf education must constantly redefine their image of deafness. They quickly learn that for many deaf people the national spoken language is not equivalent to the mother tongue. Then, astonishingly, it turns out that not all deaf people claim to be part of a larger Deaf community and use sign language. The role of the teacher is to find the golden mean in educating these students, ensuring a respectful approach to all their needs.
The author of this analysis made observations of the learning process of 25 D/deaf adults that she taught in the academic year 2013/2014. Based on the interactional interpretation of disability (Karpińska-Szaj 2013: 19) the author postulates that the elimination of communication barriers is the primary means to successful TEFL for deaf students. The classroom environment should be monolingual, bilingual or trilingual – depending on the student’s fluency in English, level and type of hearing loss, willingness to speak, fluency in the national and sign language as well as his/her level of semantic, pragmatic and general knowledge deficits. The proposal undoubtedly requires further quantitative analyses. In this presentation, it will be supported by case study examples of the author’s successful and unsuccessful students.
Zuzana Fonioková, Teiresias Centre for Students with Special Needs, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, foniokova@teiresias.muni.cz
English for learners with hearing impairments: Challenges in written output
The aim of the paper is to present an analysis of frequent mistakes made by hearing impaired learners of English. First I will present my new course for hearing impaired students, which is online-based and consists mainly of guided discussions in online forums. This course offers opportunities for students to practice their writing skills in English while discussing interesting and/or controversial real-life topics with their peers, with feedback provided by teachers. Besides, the course supplies abundant material for analysis of the students’ written output. I will examine and categorize the most frequent problems, look into their possible causes (such as sign language interference, lack of phonological awareness or too little input), and explore the possibilities of effective intervention.
Jitka Sedláčková, English Department, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, jitkuj@gmail.com
Teaching reading strategies to deaf learners in the English classroom
The paper deals with the issue of reading skills development of deaf learners in English as their foreign language. It presents an example of reading strategy instruction practice within English classroom. The practice was developed for the purpose of an intervention stage of a research studying the benefits of explicit reading strategy instruction for the reading comprehension of deaf learners when reading in English as well as on their general attitudes to reading.
The main features of the instruction practice are explicitness, teacher modelling of the strategies presented and learners' repetitive hands-on practice. The instruction practice is designed so as to be a natural part of a standard practical English course to be applicable to the common teaching and learning reality.
Beside a detailed description of the reading strategy instruction practice, the paper comprises a theoretical framework supporting the implementation of explicit reading strategy instruction particularly with at-risk learners as well as observations made during application of the practice.
Monika Malec, Institute of Pedagogy, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, monikaamm7@gmail.com
Lesson content modifications: how to adapt ESL teaching strategies to the special needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing students
English language has a great impact on countries all over the world and became a factor conditioning the professional careers of many people and their functioning in contemporary global society. This, in a way, led to the development of foreign language teaching methods designed specifically for the deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Their growing needs and interest in taking part in English courses enhanced research into teaching methodology in the context of hearing impairments, language acquisition, and perception.
At this point, theoretical discussion should be supported by practical understanding of acquisition, teaching methods and styles of learning of hearing impaired learners. I decided, however, to focus mainly on some practical suggestions of how to implement this knowledge in ESL classes, in particular, how to adapt the mainstream methods of teaching English to the unique educational needs of learners with hearing loss. The exemplary lesson plans, techniques and reflections are based on my experience so far in working with deaf and hard-of-hearing adult learners at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin and in the project Breaking the Silence.
Marta Dick-Bursztyn, Rzeszów University, Poland, marta.db@wp.pl
Enhancing memory processes and information organisation in teaching English vocabulary to deaf and HOH students by the application of mnemonic devices
The interest in knowing different techniques that facilitate humans’ ability to remember facts, dates, names and/or places has existed for as long as 2000 years. Depending on the century and the availability of technological improvements, mnemonic devices have enjoyed wider or smaller popularity with people. However, with the introduction of various works of reference (e.g., encyclopedias, almanacs, etc.) and the internet, they have lost some of their day to day value.
The present paper will focus on addressing the question how and what sort of mnemonic devices can benefit the deaf and hard of hearing learners of English as a second language and, in particular, how these strategies can improve their skills to organize, remember and retrieve information. Moreover, we will try to review the literature and determine the degree of familiarity with mnemonic techniques among teachers of the deaf, as well as how frequently they incorporate them in their students’ instruction. Finally, we will recommend some of the teaching activities employing the strategies that will particularly please and aid this special group of ESL learners.
Culture
SCULT1 Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A4
WOMEN’S LIVES, WOMEN’S WORKS, A TALE OF MUTUAL INFLUENCES
Convenors:
Florence Binard, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France, fbinard@eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr
Julie Gottlieb, University of Sheffield, UK, julie.gottlieb@sheffield.ac.uk
Michel Prum, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France, prum.michel@wanadoo.fr
This seminar will aim to study the impact of women’s personal lives and experiences on their theoretical, fictional or artistic productions. Conversely the influence of women’s productions on their own lives will be explored. These mutual influences will be addressed from the perspective of the history of ideas. The geographical area will be Britain but women living and working in other areas, whether European or not, also fall into the province of this workshop provided that their biographies or autobiographies are in some way related to Britain. No historical period will be excluded. The reference to “women’s works” includes all kinds of intellectual activities: fiction, drama, poetry, philosophy, journalism, cinema, painting, sciences, etc.
Participants
Ágnes Beretzky, University, Budapest, Hungary, tzkyagnes@yahoo.com
The Two Harriets: Two Women Defying (Pre-)Victorian Conventions. A Comparative Analysis of the Life, Thought and Influence of Harriet Grote and Harriet Taylor
The two Harriets may be regarded as true manifestations of what women were capable of doing in a marriage of equals despite the lack of proper education in (Pre-)Victorian Britain. Harriet Taylor, especially in light of her relationship with and inspiration for John Stuart Mill, has received ample attention from scholars in sharp contrast to her contemporary, nearly as radical, yet no friend, Harriet Grote. Having been a largely self-educated follower of Benthamite Utilitarianism herself, Grote not only earned the title ’The Queen of the Radicals’ from the early 1820’s until the disillusionment of the group in 1839, but she was one of the first thinking women, if not the first herself, that the young Mill could meet and discourse with.
By contrasting the two radical thinkers’ lives, experiences and thoughts on the situation of women and the offered remedies, the present essay aims to prove that John Stuart Mill’s ideas in his fight for above all the equality of women eventually coincided with those of Grote. Harriet Taylor, on the other hand, by endorsing the even more radical concept of female independence, defied not only all traditional Victorian vocations, but also her husband’s stern belief that an anticipated woman’s goal would continue to be sharing ‘fully and intelligently’ her husband’s occupations and interests.
Mathilde Bertrand, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense,Paris, France, mathilde.bertrand3@laposte.net
“Picking up the camera became a multi-faceted way of trying to speak” : the politics of identity and self-representation in Jo Spence's radical photographic work.
Jo Spence (1934–1992) was a radical photographer whose entire artistic work was driven by a search for liberating and empowering photographic practices. Spence's work appears at once deeply personal and political, as she constantly weaves very intimate questions about the representation of femininity, the body and illness, with a critique of the social uses and ideological effects of photography in contemporary society. To study her development as a photographer, or “cultural worker” as she put it, is to unravel the intricate connections between defining moments of her personal life and the maturation of her radical approach to photographic practices and theory. Her different experiences as a woman, a studio photographer, a feminist and socialist activist, a secretary, a member of a radical photographic collective, a mature student, and, later, a patient struggling with cancer nourished her political and theoretical frame of reference, in turn feeding into her artistic production. “Looking at [her own] image in the wider context” aptly sums up Spence's quest for critical modes of representation grounded in a materialist feminism, which equally harness theory and practice. Spence conceived her work both as a resistance to the way the female body is represented and controlled, and as an opening to alternative ways in self-representation. The communication will explore Spence's work through the series “Beyond the Family Album” (1979), “Who's holding the baby” (1979 – in collaboration with feminist collective The Hackney Flashers), and the later series in which she developed the technique of “photo-therapy”. This was Spence's answer to her feeling of powerlessness regarding the treatment of her own body diagnosed with breast cancer and then leukemia.
Ágnes Györke, University of Debrecen, Hungary, gyorke.agnes@arts.unideb.hu
Writing an Urban Life: The City and the Self in Doris Lessing’s Fiction
My paper offers a gendered analysis of Doris Lessing’s London novels published in the 1960s, including In Pursuit of the English (1960), The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Four-Gated City (1969), in the context of her autobiographical work (Under My Skin, 1995; Walking in the Shade, 1997). The experience of migration to London is captured both in her novels and in her autobiographical writing, which provides a fruitful terrain to investigate the intersections between fiction, life writing, and displacement. The novels studied also demonstrate Lessing’s gradual departure from realistic narrative conventions and her experimentation with more innovative forms of writing. The transformation of the city in her novels reflects the transformation of Lessing as a writer: London, which is portrayed realistically in Pursuit, Lessing’s documentary novel, becomes associated with spiritual transcendence in The Golden Notebook and acquires futuristic aspects in The Four-Gated City. I argue that the transcendental vision of London, which incorporates the everyday, mundane reality (such as gloomy rooms, grey houses and dirty streets, for instance) as well as the spiritual, imaginative world of the protagonist, functions as a nostalgic image in these texts, which suggests that Lessing’s characters attempt to overcome their trauma of displacement by reimagining urban space.
Lenke Németh, University of Debrecen, Hungary, nemeth.lenke@unideb.hu
A Redeeming Journey: The Case of Adrienne Kennedy
This paper is premised on the notion that African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s voyage to Europe and Africa in 1960–61 gives rise to a burst of her artistic talents and creates her as a black female dramatist. Stimulated and stirred by her transatlantic cruise she completes her first play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962), which launches her more than fifty-year long dramatic career. I argue that crossing geographical borders for Kennedy entails transgressing metaphorical borders in the tormenting process of finding her own voice as a female author and of (re)discovering her people’s history. The journey reconnects Kennedy with her European legacies and inspirational forces—Shakespeare, the Brontë Sisters, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf—as well as with the mythical history of the blacks in Africa.
With reference to a selection of her autobiographically inspired plays and memoirs, I will study the transformative power that the journey exerts on her female self and racial identity by looking at the dramatic portrayal of female heroines who struggle to remove their personal and collective traumas and fears.
Julia Lajta-Novak, University of Vienna, Austria, julia.lajta-novak@univie.ac.at
Romantic Heroine to Political Poet: Novelistic Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been mythologized as an ailing Victorian lady who, Rapunzel-like, was saved from the claws of an evil sorcerer-father by a poet-knight with whom she lived happily ever after. Featuring in the popular imagination primarily as one half of a legendary couple who lived out one of the most spectacular romances of English literary history, her life has become the subject of countless biographies and has also been retold in several works of fiction. These fictional biographies deliberately blur the boundary between biographical fact and fiction as they add to, and sometimes contest, the image preserved of Barrett Browning in cultural memory.
Drawing on gender-sensitive approaches to biography, this paper aims to explore the ways in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life is related to her work in fictional representations, from Carola Oman’s Miss Barrett’s Elopement (1930) to Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008). These novelistic re-imaginings of Barrett Browning vary considerably in the significance they attribute to the poet’s work. It will be argued that together, they testify to the versatility of prominent female author figures as cultural signifiers that can be mobilized for a range of (gender-)political agendas.
Marie-Annick Mattioli, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France, marie-annick.mattioli@parisdescartes.fr
Methods of Social Study derived from and leading to Beatrice Potter Webb’s life
Beatrice Potter Webb had a high interest in social investigation. She started very young when she visited dwellings in the London area for the Charity Organisation Society; she also visited a Lancashire manufacturing town, and learned about the daily life of a working class community from the inside. When she returned to London, she was convinced to have “become an investigator of social institutions”. In My Apprenticeship, she wrote: “Yet the very subject-matter of my science is society; its main instrument is social intercourse; thus I can hardly leave out of the picture the experience I have gathered, not deliberately as a scientific worker, but casually as child, unmarried woman, wife and citizen.” (Webb, 1926, p.1).
This paper will focus on Methods of Social Study (1932), a book written by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It will first be argued that a great part of the book was written by Beatrice Webb and not her husband, as the introduction by T.S. Marshall to the 1932 edition suggests. It will also be shown that B. Webb was the one to have claimed to be a “social investigator” (“I describe the craft of a social investigator as I have practiced it” [1926, p.1]).
In a second part, B. Potter Webb's life will be examined and, in particular, the intertwined relations between her life and the object of her study. The following aspects will be dealt with: the way she always investigated social matters at every single stage of her life and how her upbringing by servants shaped her adult attitude (cf. M. Cole’s biography [1946, p. 10]: “it seems not unlikely that this early acquaintance with members of the lower classes as real persons helped her in later life […]).”
Finally, the different methods to work on social studies described in the book will be outlined: the Webbs shared the belief of many of their contemporaries that the scientific methods of observation, experiment, hypothesis and verification together with reliable quantifiable data and a high degree of objectivity used in hard sciences could be applied to the study of social issues.
SCULT2 Monday 1.9.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room A7, (B)14.30–16.30 Room A7
EUROPE FOOD INC.: EATING AND COOKING IN THE ARTS
Convenors:
Nieves Pascual, University of Jaen, Spain, npascual@ujaen.es
Silvia Baučeková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, silvia.baucekova@gmail.com
Over the last few decades, a number of studies have explored food as a central identity trope by focusing on artistic movements, historical periods, particular genres and ethnic groups within the United States. All of them reveal the theoretical fruitfulness that culinary-based analyses provide. In a European context, such research has been scarce. We welcome contributions that address the ways in which eating and cooking define and represent present-day Europe. Various types of texts may be considered, including literary works, works of cultural theory, newspaper articles, magazines, travel guides, webpages, media programs, films and visual arts in general.
Participants
Andrea Hübner, Eötvös Loránd University, hubnerandrea05@gmail.com
The Cannibal Butcher Shop: The Nature of the ’Exotic’
In an interdisciplinary approach my study wishes to investigate the nature how textual and visual tradition elaborated the topos of cannibalism from the medieval ages up to the colonial period. Examples of cosmographies, travel books and pieces of literature are to be paralleled with maps, emblems and illustrations in the semantic system to be decoded in the dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Images of the cannibal feast reveal ‘culinary’ interest along with the detailed descriptions of horroristic elements where fear mixes with ethnographic curiosity of the observer. The stereotype of the ‘other’ as potential threat who most probably will turn us into food is located in overlapping interpretative systems of the known and unknown. The ‘other’ is not only demonized, but also is domesticated. Pieces of human body chopped up and cooked help us approach the nature of flesh and decay in Christian culture in the context of exotic encounters. Stereotypes and topoi will be examined in relation to the different operation of symbols and iconography in visual and textual tradition. How do semantic layers of text and picture interpret or work against each other in the culinary context of human body as food?
Ahmet Koç, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University, ahmet.koc25@gmail.com
Presence of Tupperware and Tupperware Parties in the European Context
Tupperware is a US-based brand of culinary household products. The goods are sold directly by women, who can have a promising career outside the normal commercial system by enlarging their network. As a women’s event, Tupperware parties have acted as a celebratory and consciously feminine activity which is even mentioned in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, in which the heroine is a Tupperware partygoer. According to Rick Goings, CEO of Tupperware Brands Cooperation, every 2.6 seconds there is a Tupperware party held in the world, and Europe is among the most important markets. Reasons such as rapid growth in consumer products and consumption and the rise of suburban living after women were sent home from wartime factories fostered the brand’s development, along with a successful selling technique. “Today,” says Goings, “Tupperware is leveraging for women’s under-employment in emerging markets and benefiting from the time-starved, working women in developed countries.” In this study, Tupperware, the parties, European women’s tendencies and habits regarding the brand’s products will be examined as tropes or tools representing their backgrounds and economic and/or cultural status.
Carmen Lara-Rallo, Universidad de Málaga, carmenlara@uma.es
The Artistry of Food: The Representation of the Cook in Contemporary Interartistic Fiction
“Elegant arrangements of cookies or cakes, lavish and overflowing arrays of fruits, or the remnants of a gluttonous feast—depictions of food in art certainly convey a passion for culinary delights.” This statement opens the online announcement of the art exhibition “Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine”, held at the Institute of Art of Chicago between November 2013 and January 2014. The correspondence established here between food and cooking, on the one hand, and culture and the art of painting, on the other, acquires special relevance in the context of the treatment of the image of the artist in contemporary British literature. Nowadays, one of the most prolific trends in contemporary fiction is the interartistic dialogue, whereby novels and short stories enrich and deepen their referential dimension by crossing the boundaries with other arts such as painting and music. In some of those narratives, so my contention goes, the reflection on the role of the artist-painter goes hand in hand with the exploration of the image of the cook, as in A.S. Byatt’s “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”, where the interaction with Velázquez’s work provides the basis for the depiction of the cook as an artist with food. In this context, the aim of the present paper is to analyse the correlation literature-painting-cooking in contemporary British fiction, examining the aesthetic possibilities of food in terms of the literary-pictorial dialogue, and paying special attention to the figure of the cook as an artist.
Silvia Baučeková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, silvia.baucekova@gmail.com
Nourishment or Poison: An Analysis of Female Characters in the Novels of Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie has been labelled conservative, nationalistic, and traditionalistic. At the same time, Christie was one of the authors who participated in the trend of the feminisation of the classic detective novel, begun in the early 20th century. This trend resulted not only in the fact that crime novels became populated by numerous female characters, but also in the substitution of urban and public settings for rural and domestic ones. In contemporary food studies research, the connection between femininity, domesticity, and food has been given much thought. Carole Counihan points to the tension between the understanding of food as empowering women versus that of food as a means of patriarchal oppression. The aim of this paper is to explore domesticity and femininity in Christie’s female characters through the analysis of food and attempt to discover whether these characters indeed uphold conservative notions about femininity. It is assumed that the analysis of food as a literary and cultural symbol can help in such exploration. The hypothesis of the paper is that through the use of food as a characterisation and plot device, Christie was able to construct a number of unconventional feminine types, varying from the young adventuress to the female criminal.
Beatrice Laurent, Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Beatrice.Laurent@espe-martinique.fr
John Frederick Lewis’s Feast of Luscious Fruit
John Frederick Lewis, the well-known Victorian painter, is best remembered in Britain for his careful, almost ethnographic depiction of life in the East, and more specifically in Egypt, where he lived for ten years. His representations of Oriental life offer a wealth of details about the architecture, costumes and social practices of the East. Many of Lewis’s Oriental paintings also include an array of luscious fresh fruit. Little attention has been paid to this aspect of his art. The purpose of this paper is to assess the significance of this pictorial trope.
Arie Sover, Ashkelon Academic College & The Open University of Israel
Orna Ben-Meir, Wizo Haifa Academic Center & Seminar Hakibutzim College for Art and Education
ariesover@gmail.com
Food, Fun, Fashion: Oppenheim, Schiaparelli, Moschino, Westwood & Co.
In the last decade, food has become a subject of fashion, accompanied by humor. This finds expression in the works of significant avant-garde fashion designers such as Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, Jeremy Scott, Bernhard Wilhelm and others. This presentation seeks to show that the connection between food and humor in contemporary fashion is not just a commercial-marketing strategy, but rather a reflexive tool for a critical commentary on the consumption culture and the fashion conglomerates, which tend to brand each product, be it as basic as food. Since food is involved in satisfying one's basic necessities, its artistic representation is often expressed in low physical context, and hence its natural connection to humor. Humor belongs to the aesthetic category of the carnivalesque, wherein the funny, grotesque, chaotic, rude, obscene, macabre and repulsive dwell together. Food as an expression of humor pertaining to contemporary fashion has infiltrated modern art via Surrealism. Common to all these works is the breakthrough concept of combining aspects of different worlds, which had not been connected until then, and whose combination creates the uncanny and the humorous.
Nieves Pascual, University of Jaén, npascual@ujaen.es
Kitchen Gangsters: The Autobiography of Marco Pierre White
The current form of criminal autobiography partakes of “the popular discourse of the dangerous individual” (Kennedy, 1996: 195). This discourse brings to light an experience normally hidden from public view, thus seducing the audience, prioritizes stories of everyday life and mitigates the seriousness of the crime. Activities against the law are turned into cool gestures, while criminals morph into celebrities. Writing on the connection between celebrities and crimes, Pelford-Mounce posits that as criminals enter into a celebrated status through transgression, celebrities transgress norms by going wild and misbehaving (2009: 1). This presentation focuses on the kitchen as site of transgression and the autobiography of British celebrity chef Marco Pierre White (The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef, originally published in the U.K. in 2006 under the title White Slave) as a sample of the discourse of the dangerous individual. This “chain-smoking, pot-throwing enfant terrible of the kitchen”, known for his gruff character, has brought “a punk-rock sensibility to his craft, shattering centuries-old rules of fine-dining tradition (and bruising many egos in the process) in his pursuit for perfection,” reads Amazon.com Review of the text. The comment about his persona posted on Canadian RedFlagDeals on September 25, 2005 is also revealing: “For those who do not know about Marco, he’s basically the Godfather of how we view many cooks today (ie. Rockstar).” The author (ippon Deal Fanatic) continues: “Marco Pierre White is cool. I believe he is clinically insane, but he’s very interesting.” In light of this, this presentation a) probes the link between criminality and celebrity chefdom, b) investigates the ingredients that make White’s coolness work and c) examines the voyeuristic delight foodies take in his deviance.
SCULT3 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A3
GENDER ACROSS THE MEDIA: 21ST-CENTURY MASCULINITIES IN FILM AND TV FICTION
Convenors:
Marta Fernández, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain, marta.fernandez@uib.es
Martina Martausová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, martina.martausova@upjs.sk
After a period of agreement over a crisis in masculinity, the new century and its mediatized inauguration – 9/11 – seem to have reopened the debate about male identities. The fragmented status of feminism, the transnational crisis and the culture of fear after the 2001 bombings may have lit the revival of the John Wayne myth, as Faludi argues in The Terror Dream. This seminar explores 21st-century representation(s) and reception(s) of male figures in film and television fiction, continuing the discussion forwarded by Faludi and writers like Peggy Noonan, who in 2001 affirmed: “from the ashes of 9/11 arise the manly virtues”.
Participants
Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, r.jarazo@uib.es
Alienating Masculinities in British Sci-Fi TV series Doctor Who (2012–2013): Queer behavior and sexual categories in “The Lodger”
Although some sexual traits have been studied in relation to the representation of women both in the Classic-Who and New-Who series in the last fifteen years (Tulloch, and Alvarado, 1983; Tulloch, and Jenkins, 1995; Britton, and Barker, 2003; Chapman, 2006; Thomas, and O’Shea (eds.), 2010; Garner, Beattie, and McCormack (eds.), 2010; Wallace, 2010; Barron, 2010, Keen, 2011; and Duncan, and Duncan, 2001), the Doctor’s sexuality has almost been off the main discourse of the series until he passionately kisses his companion in the televised movie (1996).
After Russell T. Davies’s period as executive producer and main writer of the series, sometimes accused of having a “gay agenda” (Davies, 2008: 177–222), and ironically corresponding with the most heterosexualised Doctor (Coker, 2011: 93), played by David Tennant (2005–2009), Moffat’s interpretation of a Classic-Who comes back to the surface with the Eleventh Doctor played by Matt Smith (2010-).
Steven Moffat’s new design of the show based on a “big, fabulous fable” (SFX 2010) is tremendously influenced by Gothic horror and classic fairytales, constructed in the relation to the male and female protagonists (especially during the 2010–2011 season) (Collins, 2010: 3). Continuing themes such abandonment, commitment, and sexuality are dynamically established among the Doctor’s companions, specifically contrasted by a Peter Pan-esque queer Doctor (184–208).
But is the Doctor an asexual and naïve alien from a distant Galaxy? It seems that the Doctor’s sexuality is as flexible as his morality (Lewis, and Smithka 2011). In this paper we will overview both Classic-Who main masculinity/femininity traits, as well as analysing the Doctor’s blossoming ‘teenage’ sexuality during Seasons Six and Seven (2011–2012) of the New-Who, in contrast with the queer asexuality established in the previous season (2010).
Viera Nováková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, viera.novakova@upjs.sk
Claire Underwood and the Renewed Concept of Female Masculinity
Our society and contemporary media focus on the representation of the two mainstream traditional binary gender identities. These are the masculine heterosexual male and a feminine heterosexual female. Television programming is full of images of these gender identities. However, as traditional masculinity went through recent changes, so did the picture of the masculine hero. The traditional feminine heroine changed as well; however, the main characteristic features still remain the same as in the past. In order to accommodate all these changes, the television producers try to create a new type of hero/heroine. There are several interesting notions and ideas that explain the metamorphosis of the male masculine character. Yet nowadays, the masculine hero does not necessarily have to be male. The creators of the television series House of Cards introduced a new type of female character to their audience. Claire Underwood, one of main characters on the show, played by Robin Wright, presents the mixture of feminine and masculine traits. And although masculine females are usually not overtly popular with the audience, it can be argued that this character presents a new type of female masculinity, one that the viewership is able to accept.
Rubén Cenamor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, rubencenamor@hotmail.com
From Manly Virtues to Traditional Patriarchal Mysoginy: The Revival of U.S. 1950s Conservative and Sexist Models of Masculinity
Since 9/11 there has been the creation of truly admirable masculine figures but there has also been a revival of U.S. 1950s culture and literature, with the adaptation of 1950s novels such as Revolutionary Road and On the Road and the creation of TV series set on said decade such as Mad Men. Most scholars and feminists, including Elaine May and Betty Friedan agree that he United States in the 1950s were mainly patriarchal and misogynist and that the hegemonic masculinity of the time was especially conservative. In view of the revival and success of these productions and the fact that the public keeps asking for more we need to ask ourselves this question: do these films and TV series show an intention, which usually occurs in times of recession such as ours, to recover a more conservative, even patriarchal, models of masculinity? My paper will tackle this question by analyzing the representation of masculinity portrayed by the main male characters of the 2007 film adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road and the TV series Mad Men. , I will argue that these productions do seem to attempt to revive a more patriarchal, conservative sexist and misogynist models of masculinity.
SCULT4 Monday 1.9.2014 (A)17.00–18.30 Room S4/Tuesday 2.9.2014 (B)11.00–13.00 Room S4
GENDER AND POPULAR CULTURE
Convenors:
Astrid M. Fellner, Saarland University, Germany, fellner@mx.uni-saarland.de
Viera Nováková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, viera.novakova@upjs.sk
This seminar intends to explore cultural makings of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality through typical representations of gender within popular culture. Papers are invited on the topic of gender and popular culture, including historical frameworks and methodology of relevant disciplines in relation to the study of gender and culture. Looking into the ways in which gendered and sexual identities are shaped by, and in turn shape, popular understandings of gender, papers may also address the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality are interrelated with critical factors such as ethnicity, class, age, and region.
Participants
Irina Bodrow, Independent scholar, irinini@googlemail.com
Reel Women: Plotting Contemporary Cinematic Heroines
How do women accomplish heroic journeys in contemporary film? This research assesses the narrative structures of current female cinematic heroism. It starts out with a critical inquiry of the meaning of “heroism” in literature. Based on the literary prototypes biblical Judith, Lilith (Alphabet of Ben Sira) and Apuleius' Psyche, three narrative structures are distinguished: the homecomer, the emigrant and the lover. This theoretical distinction is followed by its application via the analysis of story type and structure of the 45 best rated movies (Numbers according to “imdb.com”, “rottentomatoes.com” and “metacritic.com”) with female leads from 2009–2011. The study of narrative patterns is based on Propp's Morphology of the Folktale. In conclusion, a new heroic plot succession is discerned. Its characteristic anti-heroine is an underachiever whose fragmented non-teleological journey remains uncompleted and unsuccessful. Paradoxically, being a popular heroine in current film means to be susceptible to epic fail, in the words of Walter Benjamin to “die from immortality”. While still seeking recognition in the realms of economy, justice and love (Axel Honneth), her heroic journey leaves her devastated in “transcendental homelessness” (Georg Lukács) during the passage through the abyss of her deepest fears. Where does she go from here? The thesis' interdisciplinary approach addresses the subject of American cinematic heroism from the angles of mythology and narratology as well as film, cultural and women’s studies.
Lea Gerhards, Saarland University, Germany, Lea.Gerhards@gmx.de
The Legacy of Lucy Westenra: Female Vampires in Contemporary Popular Culture
Recent popular culture is conspicuous for its investment in gothic film and television, which abound with vigorous female vampires. Characters like Caroline Forbes (The Vampire Diaries), Pam Swynford De Beaufort (True Blood), Bella Swan (The Twilight Saga) and Suzanna Waite (Being Human) are hugely popular with fans as the protagonists or secondary characters of their series’ narratives. The portrayal of these human females who are turned into vampires by male makers bears similarities to the depiction of Lucy Westenra – introduced by Bram Stoker as sweet and innocent, yet sexualised, Lucy is turned by Dracula into an aggressive, hypersexual creature refusing to conform to society’s rules. While Lucy is punished for succumbing to Dracula’s power so easily and for representing the opposite of patriarchy’s ideal pure maternal figure, our contemporary female vampire characters’ stories are more diverse and even positive in their outcome. This paper aims to shed light on the different ways popular cultural texts shape our understanding of femininity by examining how the above-mentioned series make sense of their female characters’ transition from human to vampire. While a number of the traditional elements introduced by Stoker in 1897 still haunt today’s cultural texts, the paper will show that some narratives play and sometimes break with those conventions.
Leopold Lippert, University of Graz, Austria, leopold.lippert@uni-graz.at
The Labor of Gender Performance in Mad Men
It has become a truism over the last two decades that gender performance, although it opens up possibilities for subversion and transgression, is always also constrained by social and cultural expectations, which force the body into normative regimes of behavior. Famously, Judith Butler has called gender “a strategy of survival”. However, like all performance practices, gender is also a form of labor, inhibited not so much by social and cultural norms, but by negative affect—the sheer exhaustion and weariness of the body. Conceiving of gender as a form of labor, we might bring into conversation two different theoretical strands in cultural studies, that of gender performativity and that of a critique of capitalism and labor.
In my paper, I want to look at the labor of gender performance as it is represented in the popular AMC television series Mad Men, a fictionalized historical portrait of the 1960s New York advertising industry, created by Matthew Weiner. By focusing on a number of popular and well-established personae such as the “frustrated housewife”, the “emasculated office worker” or the “charming and heavy-drinking salesman”, I want to show how the series constructs gendered behavior as a form of labor that underwrites the accumulation of capital and that eventually exhausts its performers. Curiously, however, although this very conjunction between labor and (gender) performance has intensified and proliferated since the 1960s as part of the rise of neoliberal capitalism and its trumpeting of creativity, flexibility, and performative work, Mad Men still insists on the historicity and periodical separateness of its representation. As I want to show, then, the series provides progressive reassurance to contemporary viewers at the expense of a more sustained critique of the still considerable exhaustion the labor of gender produces.
Alexandra Bikkyová, UPJŠ Košice, Slovakia, sandrik.bikkyova@gmail.com
Lady Gaga, the Mother Monster
The presentation will aim at depicting one of the most influential pop artists of our century, Lady Gaga, and her significance for contemporary youth. Even though Lady Gaga is hated by many, she has 41 million “followers” on Twitter and over 63 million “likes” on Facebook, and she serves as a role model for millions of people worldwide. Therefore, discussion will be devoted to the explanation of her importance by clarifying the concept of “Gaga Feminism”, a term coined by Judith Jack Halberstam in year 2012. One of the crucial approaches of Gaga Feminism is the celebration of those who are “monsters” in our society, or the ones deviating from the heteronormative ideal. Lady Gaga, as the “mother” of these monsters, has taken on the role of personifying queerness in popular culture. She is the mother of “new” gender identities, a feminist who encourages youth nowadays to accept who they are, to be brave and to embrace their sexuality. The presentation will make use of images of Lady Gaga, her videos, public appearances and her youth empowerment organisation in order to illustrate what Gaga Feminism looks like in reality.
Katharina Wiedlack, Universität Wien, Austria, maria.katharina.wiedlack@univie.ac.at
Pussy Riot Stole the Show From Madonna, The Fray and Blondie Last Night at Barclay’s
My paper analyzes the cultural makings of the female ‘Eastern’ body and identity within contemporary popular culture within the US. I analyze the representations of Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the two previously incarcerated Russian ex-members of the feminist activist group Pussy Riot, within US pop culture and media, especially their relation to pop stars like Madonna and Lady Gaga, or the more countercultural star JD Samson.
Analyzing representations of the two women within mainstream news, like the title on www.time.com in my heading, as well as through pop cultural solidarity actions, with the latest being Madonna’s speech/announcement and concert at the Amnesty International US gala this February, I look into the production of the figure of the vulnerable and yet powerful female dissident, and the ambivalent mechanisms and productions of similarity and difference at play. Following queer theory researchers like Robert Kulpa, Joanna Mizielińska (2011 and 2012) and others, I am interested in the complicated production of ‘Eastern otherness/similarity’ and ‘North/Western hegemony,’ especially through the globalization of US American popular culture.
I explore the specific ways in which the concrete representations of the two women within and through popular culture are gendered and ethnicized and how they shape or morph into more generalized US views and popular understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and age within Russia.
Veronika Babjáková, UPJŠ Košice, Slovakia, v.balazova@gmail.com
Semiotic Analysis of Gender in Slovak and British Television Commercials
The paper investigates gender portrayal and stereotypes in television commercials for Slovak and British products between 2006 and 2012. The hypothesis is that although products are marketed at a national level by commercials aimed specifically at national audience, due to long-term globalization and the international character of corporations owning the products and the local companies, the rate and the way of gender portrayal is (approximately) the same between the two compared countries (Slovakia and the United Kingdom). The method of comparative analysis evaluates 578 television commercials (216 Slovak and 362 British) for beer, tea, coffee, soft drinks, candies, dairy products and mobile network providers. The semiotic analysis and coding scheme are based on Goffman (1987), McArthur and Resko (1975), and Furnham and Mak (1999). The main goals are to determine in what way men and women are portrayed in commercials, whether gender is portrayed differently in commercials for different product groups, and whether the stereotypical portrayal of gender is the same in both countries, and to provide insight into portrayal of gender in Slovak (and British) commercials.
SCULT5 Saturday 30.8.2014 17.15–18.45 Room A7
ANGLICIST WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES OF CONTINENTAL EUROPE
Convenors:
Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany, haas@anglistik.uni-kiel.de
Andrea P. Balogh, University of Szeged, Hungary, andreapbalogh@gmail.com
The full academic establishment of Women’s and Gender Studies is one of the most important achievements of the past forty years. As decisive impulses came from the United States, English Studies had special chances of translation (in the broad sense of the word). In the various countries, colleagues have met these challenges in a variety of ways, and, in spite of much international cooperation, the specific conditions and developments are still too little known beyond national borders. Therefore, the contributors to a forthcoming volume will present and discuss the central insights of their historical surveys. The seminar is, however, also open to newcomers.
Participants
Dubravka Djurić, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia, dubravka.djuric@fmk.edu.rs
Politics of Women’s/Gender Studies and Anglo-American Studies in Serbia
The presentation will analyze the most important aspects of the connection between women’s studies and English and American studies in Serbia. As an important part of the political opposition to the Milosevic regime in the 1990s, women’s studies positioned themselves as a feminist activist project which created a space for feminist and anti-war activism as well as for feminist theoretical education. Women’s studies were one of the channels for the transmission of new global knowledge, and American and English Studies had the dominant influence in this process. Advocating women’s rights and opposing violence in the public and domestic spheres, the centres for women’s studies became generators of positive changes. Their political activism led to the passing of laws which protect women’s rights, the inclusion of women in important government bodies, and the introduction of gender studies into university curricula. The presentation will particularly focus on the centres in Belgrade and Novi Sad, as their histories reflect the development of women’s studies in the whole country.
Milena Katsarska, Plovdiv University, Bulgaria, milena.katsarska@gmail.com
Opening “Pandora’s box”: Anglicist Gender Studies in Bulgaria
The presentation aims at discussing the institutional history of Anglicist Gender Studies in Bulgaria, positioning it within the wider developments of Gender Studies in the country, which have been particularly dynamic since the 1990s. With respect to the latter, I will first focus on the multidimensional implications of the inception of the “Gender Studies project” narrative locally in the period of transition from national state communism to capitalist liberal democracy and then take stock of the ways in which GS currently inform and are positioned within the institutional spaces of HE. The somewhat ironically posed metaphor of the title refers to the first female graduate in English Studies in the country – Pandora Ivanova, in 1933, and suggests that with regard to Anglicist Gender Studies history in Bulgaria, the presentation will touch upon the changing demographics of students and faculty across time; the contributions of ES academics to GS institutional and scholarly developments locally and internationally; and the current disposition of GS content and perspectives in ES curricula, etc. against the backdrop of “politics of difference” entailed in the production and circulation of gender and gender sensitive discourses in the scholarly, pedagogical and institutional spaces of English Studies.
Seda GASPARIAN and Gayane MURADIAN, Yerevan State University, Armenia, englishphil20@gmail.com
Armenia: Ancient Traditions, Upheavals, and the Beginnings of Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies
Women’s and Gender Studies, aimed at the institutionalization of gender education to raise awareness and change gender stereotypes regarding women’s status in public and private life, is a discipline that has commonly been neglected in Armenian academic curricula. Although the Bologna agenda, in the context of curriculum reform, includes the introduction of new disciplines and inter-disciplines, so far little has been done to develop a full gender-inclusive curriculum in Armenian higher-educational institutions at large. It is hard to examine a highly dynamic situation, especially in a field as complex as higher education and in a discipline as sensitive as Gender Studies, though often changes that occur are gifts to the policy researcher. There have been changes in the past months, and indeed since we initiated this research. The positive dynamics in a whole range of issues related to the advancement of women, to the protection of their rights, to their empowerment, and the ongoing reforms in higher education make us hopeful that gender education will become part of officially adopted curricula and develop into a fully institutionalized discipline in all university fields in the Republic of Armenia, and that Anglicist women will have their say in the matter.
Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany, haas@anglistik.uni-kiel.de
Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies in European Perspective
Although decisive impulses came from the United States, Continental Women’s and Gender Studies is very much a European discipline (that is, if indeed it is a discipline). Most of its practitioners may not be aware of this in their usual research and teaching, as they may not be much aware of its broader local or national interdependencies either. Such often neglected contexts are, however, the focus of a forthcoming volume that assembles surveys of the development of Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies in a representative number of European countries. Parallels emerge through a similar structure of the chapters and certain accents (such as some consideration of the first women’s movement, whose influence was felt from Portugal to Turkey and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, or emphasis on aspects of institutionalization). On this basis, the presentation will highlight central common features, but also areas of divergence, unexpected insights as well as challenges. The volume raises fundamental questions and suggests new answers.
SCULT6 CANCELLED
HAPPINESS AS A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION: GENDER AND CONSUMERISM
Convenors:
Haluk Üçel, İstanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, h.ucell@gmail.com
Alexandra Bikkyová, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, sandrik.bikkyova@gmail.com
This seminar will focus on consumerism through construction of happiness and gender identities with past and contemporary references in modernity and postmodernity. Comparative cultural analysis will give a chance to explore the construction of happiness in meaning making. We will explore variety of print and audio-visual texts focusing on advertising and propaganda. We will question individuality in globalization and glocalization observing happiness as a commodity and as an ideological construction.
SCULT7 Sunday 31.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room S1
EXPLORATIONS OF ETHNICITY AND GENDER: (DIS)COVERING/ (DE)CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY IN AMERICAN FICTION
Convenors:
Cristina Cheveresan, West University of Timisoara, Romania, acheveresan@litere.uvt.ro
Brigitte Zaugg, Universite de Lorraine, France, brigitte.zaugg@orange.fr
From the “New Women”’s daring explorations of female identity at the turn of the 20th century to 21st century discourses on ethnicity and its (dis)contents, American writers have constantly set out to discover, understand and explain the mental, physical, emotional, and socio-political challenges of their condition. Irrespective of the paradigm they write in (be it Realism, Naturalism, Postmodernism or Postcolonialism), such innovators have broken taboos, exposed uncomfortable truths, fought stereotypes and opposed injustice. Papers are invited which analyze authors whose works have shaped evolving perspectives on ethnicity and gender in the United States by creatively emphasizing and transposing everyday issues.
Participants
Imola Bulgozdi, Independent scholar, bulgozdi.imola@gmail.com
Katherine Anne Porter, the Southern Lady and Autobiographical Narrative
Katherine Anne Porter, dubbed as the Grande Dame of American letters, was not only famous for her beautifully crafted stories, but also for creating a family mythology, by means of which she transformed herself from obscure Callie Porter into Katherine Anne Porter, aristocratic daughter of the Old South. This paper explores the contradictory tendencies characterizing the South in the first decades of the 20th century, warring in Porter’s life and work: her Victorian upbringing and the burden of the Southern lady, an image she altered to her liking but left her with an insatiable need for admiration; her public support of traditional ideals of womanhood in strong contrast with her dedication to her work, which ultimately left her with “no family and no husband and no lover”; and the way these are represented in the Miranda-stories. Porter’s nonfiction also attests that she craved acceptance as an intelligent woman artist, and her autobiographical main character, Miranda reflects the difficulty of coping with the rift between her social and self-identity. Porter’s process of constructing a literary persona, both incorporating and breaking with tradition, is all the more intriguing, since it sheds light on gendered technologies of the self, typical of white middle-class Southern women.
Gabriela Tucan, West University of Timişoara, Romania, gabrielatucan@yahoo.com
African American Women Writers Win the Home Front Battles
The Afro-American magazines from 1942–1945 give voice to the fictional and non-fictional stories of the virtually invisible black wartime women. In the realities of the times, the African American woman was assigned the role of a domestic servant, was offered negligible occupations, or was placed in unskilled positions, but in the Afro-American journals during the war (The Crisis, Opportunity, Negro Story, and Negro), the fictional female characters were empowered in new roles that gave them the confidence that the terms of their lives would be changed in a postwar world. A detailed analysis of these low-circulation magazines allows us to glimpse into the racist and segregated American society of the war period and draw conclusions regarding the legacy of World War II for Afro-American women. In light of this goal, in this paper I intend to make a selection of essays and fictional prose published in Afro-American journals in order to recover the black women’s illuminating role in the African-American community, their empowering discourse and rhetoric of strength. Subject matter will take priority over aesthetical qualities, as the topics adopted in these collections of fictional and non-fictional writings are essential reminders of the militant message contained in almost every fictional text or essay.
Judit Ágnes Kádár, Eszterházy College, Eger, Hungary, drkadarjudit@gmail.com
Multicultural Identity Negotiation in Louis Owen’s Mixed-Blood Narratives
This paper addresses the broader topic of 21st century discourses on ethnicity in the paradigm of Post-Colonialism, with special regard to the “broken taboos and uncomfortable truths” of mixed blood identity in the ethno-cultural Borderlands of the American Southwest. It is a so-called indefinable subject with the experience of the costs and benefits of belonging to more cultures. Contemporary New Mexico writing performs how the combination of Pueblo Indian, Mexican, Latino/a and various non-Indigenous ethnic heritages make each individual very specific in terms of ethno-cultural identity, while the “conflicting blood strains” also pose various challenges for them. I explore how these features are reflected in Louis Owens’s Bone Games (1994), Nightland (1996) and Dark River (1999), while I would like to share my reading of the radical textual undoing of ethnic identity concepts (including stereotypes) and how they present the “hybrid potential“ Owens has discussed in his critical writing. I study the fluctuation between more social identities and specifically the possibilities for escaping prescribed identity formulations and reconnecting with tribal heritage that manifests the clashing western and Indigenous cosmologies and tackles the problems of ethnic pride, shame and stigma. I explore ethnic identity transformations, the act and process of ethnic choice in the view of Owens’s novels.
Eva P. Sañudo, University of Oviedo, Spain, pelayoeva@uniovi.es
Sanitizing the self: contesting issues of belonging and identity in Italian American fiction
The gender and cultural imagery about Italian Americans has been primarily shaped around the institution of the family, through a masculine and negative optics: from a euphemism for mafia, women’s domesticity and submission, to hostility and distrust toward outsiders. Further depictions and interpretations have nonetheless been suggested by Italian American scholars and writers who approach ethnicity and gender relations not as a given but as constructs which vary according to very precise historical, political and social events. Thus, this new critical perspective has accounted for the different bonds between ethnicity and gender along particular circumstances, as is illustrated by the transition from a conception of inadequate motherhood on the part of Italian American women (during the progressive era) to the use and stereotyping of domesticity (as a reaction to second-wave feminist achievements in the United States). In this respect, Tina de Rosi’s Paper Fish (1980) or Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s The Right Thing to Do (1999) will be analysed for alternative gender representations of female agency, familiar relationships and cultural negotiations, contesting the influential amoral familism perspective and presenting instead contemporary revaluations of family and materno-filial relationships, as well as explorations of positive ethnic values informing feminist concerns.
Elżbieta Rokosz-Piejko, University of Rzeszów, Poland, erokosz@yahoo.com
What if Gogol was a girl? Ethnicity and gender roles in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Lahiri’s 2003 widely acclaimed novel The Namesake tells the story of a Bengali-American family, and tackles the issue of assimilation and cultural identity of the parents being first-generation immigrants (Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli), and of their American-born children (Gogol and Sonia). However, it is Gogol, whose point of view dominates Lahiri’s narrative, and he shares with the novelist a number of biographical traits (it is worth noticing that Mira Nair’s 2006 adaptation of the novel makes the autobiographical character of Lahiri’s text come to the surface). What interests me, and what I would like to focus on in my paper, is what issues Lahiri actually avoids by making her semi-alter ego male rather than female. How would Gogol’s story be different, had he been a Bengali-American girl? How would his ethnic/gender identity be constructed then? Trying to analyse the way in which Gogol’s Bengali-American experience is gender specific I will refer also to the way in which Lahiri makes two less foregrounded characters, being Bengali-American girls growing into young women, construct their identities, and those will be Gogol’s sister, Sonia and his wife, Moushumi.
Martina Koegeler-Abdi, University of Copenhagen, martina.koegeler@gmx.at
Strategic Auto-Orientalism in Mohja Kahf’s the girl in the tangerine scarf
The genre of the Arab American novel has experienced a veritable boom in the post 9/11 US era, and this development is set within a context of renewed orientalist stereotyping and an increasingly narrowing and homogeneous perception of ‚Arabness‘ and ‚Islam‘ equating ‚threat‘ and ‚oppression of women‘. In this presentation, I propose that Arab/Muslim American writer Mohja Kahf employs forms of strategic Auto-Orientalism to fight this stereotyping in her novel the girl in the tangerine scarf. Auto-Orientalism refers to citation of orientalist tropes by Arab American authors themselves, which provides access to hegemonic discourses surrounding Islam, Muslim women and Americanness. While such citations can easily confirm existing stereotypes, Kahf's subversive citation of orientalist stereotypes in her novel shows that a strategic citation may open up a space for contestation and subversion of a binary/feminized orientalist reference. Even though the most common form of Auto-Orientalism remains an essentialist type in the popular ‚oppressed Muslim women memoirs‘, I argue that Arab American feminist novels like the girl with the tangerine scarf challenge East/West binaries by squarely placing Islam as a heterogeneous religious practice within and as part of American culture via strategic auto-orientalist references.
SCULT8 Sunday 31.8.2014 16.00–17.30 Room A10
ACCESSION & IMMIGRATION IN THE UK AND ITS IMPACT ON IDENTITY FORMATION AMONG THE NEW DIASPORAS
Convenors:
Andrew C. Rouse, University of Pécs, Hungary, andrew.rouse@pte.hu
Julius Rozenfeld, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, julius.rozenfeld@upjs.sk
Immigration has become a perceivable culture-forming element in British society. The objective of our seminar is to analyze contemporary results of immigration studies jointly with diaspora research in order to test validity of the different immigration theories and to clarify shifts in the modern understanding of diaspora concepts. Primarily, Accession 8 immigration and its impact on British society are under discussion with a special emphasis on interaction between the majority society and the immigrant communities, assuming that contemporary transnational connections enable the formation of multiple identities and allow for better integration without necessary assimilation. If modern migration cannot be correctly described by a single migration theory, the question whether the people decide to migrate out of curiosity or simply because they can is investigated from aspects of class, ethnicity and religion.
Participants
Haluk Üçel, Istanbul Bilgi University, h.ucell@gmail.com
Televisual reconstructions of the past and identities in Turkey
This paper investigates televisual representations of the past and the construction of identities in Turkey. The paper mainly focuses on discourse analysis of the domestically and internationally acclaimed Turkish TV soap opera Magnificent Century, which is inspired by 16th century Ottoman history. The paper also observes consumerism through TV commercials which stem from the TV serial, representing the past and the audience identification with the text together with the main characters, building happiness and the reconstruction of identities. Magnificent Century and the related TV commercials reconstruct national identity through imagery and imaginary reconstructions of the past.
This paper observes the East-West debate in Turkey through secularist and Islamist discourse and representations. Secular and Neo-Ottoman identities are imagined identities. Televisual representations reflect nostalgia of the imagined reconstructions. Lost Empire, the independence war and the foundation of Republic are traumatic experiences in collective memory. „As the product of social change, moreover, memory was itself a process, an ever changing representation of the past“ (Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 1925).Magnificent Century makes history contemporary through the narrative structure of soap operas and reconstructs the grand narrative as a popular culture text.
Andrea Bila, Centre for research on the English-speaking world (CREW), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, France, andreabila@gmail.com
Fostering a Sense of Belonging Among Young British Muslims Through Active Citizenship Projects: a Case Study
Since the London bombings, Muslims have been increasingly depicted as an inward-looking community identifying more with their religion than with Britain (Malik 2005). A 2006 poll exploring attitudes of British Muslims revealed that 37% of 16–24 year olds preferred living under sharia law rather than under British law and 74% of the same age group preferred Muslim women to wear the veil (Policy Exchange 2007).
In order to change the public’s perception of Islam, several organizations, British Muslims for Secular Democracy and Citizenship Foundation to name but two, have encouraged young Muslims’ engagement in the democratic process through a series of grassroots projects.
My paper will analyze the impact of their work on the deconstruction of the myth that religion is a barrier to Muslims’ empowerment and political engagement. It will also assess their efforts to promote civic engagement among young Muslims through appropriate activities and resources.
I argue that instead of nurturing a grievance culture and victimhood, these organizations strive to deal with the radical elements within Muslim communities in a constructive way. Therefore, changes in the narrative and engagement with the mainstream society may lead to fostering a greater sense of belonging among the disenfranchised Muslim youth.
References
Malik, Kenan. “Multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism.” The Times. 16 July 2005. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.
Mirza, Munira, Abi Senthilkumaran & Zein Ja'far. Living Apart Together, British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism. Rep. London: Policy Exchange, 2007. Print. 5.
Julius Rozenfeld, Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Slovakia, julius.rozenfeld@upjs.sk, juliusrozenfeld@gmail.com
Questions of Assimilation and Integration in Slovak Immigrant Communities in the United Kingdom
Immigration has become a perceivable culture-forming element in British society. The objective of this paper is to analyse contemporary results of immigration studies jointly with diaspora research in order to test validity of the different immigration theories and to clarify shifts in the modern understanding of diaspora concepts. Primarily, Accession 8 and Accession 12 immigration and their impact on British society are under discussion, with a special emphasis on interaction between the majority society and the immigrant communities, assuming that contemporary transnational connections enable the formation of multiple identities and allow for better integration without necessary assimilation. Research has proved that massive presence of Accession 8 and Accession 12 immigrants in the UK has been generating turmoil in each and every level of the social sphere, provoking debates pro and contra. The primary goal of this paper is to present a case study, partially based on in field research, which makes an effort to answer the question, to what extent is it possible to develop and maintain Slovak national identity for children of immigrant parents? The goal of the study is to clarify the boundary between assimilation and integration and to test the British legislation to discover which element is more dominant when Slovak immigrant children are concerned.
SCULT9 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A8
THE PARTITION OF INDIA – BEYOND IMPROBABLE LINES
Convenors:
Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, marino@lettere.uniroma2.it
Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, Romania, dani.rogobete@yahoo.com
This seminar tries to explore one of the crucial events in India’s history, the Partition, and its impact upon the lives of the refugees caught in the process of reconfiguring physical boundaries and remapping geographical, cultural and political spaces. It will particularly focus upon various representations of Partition in literature and film as an event of massive displacement located between history and memory, between personal drama and collective trauma, between loss and rupture, between religion and nationalism, between longing and belonging. Topics may also include redefinitions of identity, domesticity and homeland triggered by the clash between memory, history and ideology.
Participants
Olivia Balanescu, University of Craiova, Romania, olivia.balanescu@gmail.com
Modern Delhi in the Light of Partition
Delhi, this ancient-modern capital, with its unique landscape of abandoned ruins and modern buildings, appears as a city where ages lay side by side, hinting at a long history of interruption, destruction and rebirth. In his travel book City of Djinns, historian William Dalrymple attempts to trace the enigmatic features of this palimpsest city and reveals a paradoxical situation: a great part of Delhi’s population does not have roots in the ancient soil of the capital, but came here late, in 1947. Many of the city’s inhabitants are Partition refugees, and this makes the events of 1947 the key to understanding modern Delhi. The aim of this paper is to analyse William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and highlight the social consequences of Partition on present-day Delhi.
Mehmet Ali Celikel, Pamukkale University, Denizli, Turkey, macelikel@pau.edu.tr
Reformulation of Language and Style in Arundhati Roy\s The God of Small Things
In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy explores the destiny of an Indian family with London connections. The story of the family and the changing points of characters bring a collage into the text while the family suffer from not only the consequences of imperialism but also of the sorrowful outcomes of splitting up. The partition and changes in culture and identity are represented by a river that divides the family house from the other parts of the land. This division marks not only the political but also the familial consequences of an imperial past. The God of Small Things in most respects proves to be a postcolonial text reverting the conventional colonial discourse.
This paper aims to analyse The God of Small Things through the story of the Indian family in order to point out the generation gap as significantly as the cultural gaps that affect the use of language and the structure of the story. It will also be pointed out that British colonialism in India caused enforced migrations within the country due to the partition of India and Pakistan as well as migrations to Britain that caused the collapse of so many families. By the same token, the paper will argue whether or not these consequences of partition in both senses create new stylistic and narrative forms in literature.
Alan Munton, University of Exeter, UK, A.Munton@exeter.ac.uk
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, between book and film: or What Went Wrong?
Why does the representation of Partition in the 2011 film of Midnight’s Children differ so substantially from that in his novel of 1981? Rushdie wrote both, yet the film is notably inferior, as most critical commentary has observed. Kate Stables wrote in Sight and Sound: “Rushdie’s narration and dialogue direct our attention ceaselessly, not trusting us”, remarking that the film required a director “who might have conjured cinematic images as potent and fantastical as those he produced in prose” (S&S January 2013, 103).
This paper will examine Rushdie’s twin narratives: the epic, disintegrative, voiced and satirical narrative of the novel; and the limited, cohesive, closely narrated and controlled story-telling of the film. Are such differences unavoidable because intrinsic to certain “essentials” of fiction and film? This is surely improbable: the filmic practice of the director – Deepa Mehta – must be relevant. Reference will be made to her Earth (1998), and to Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957), which Midnight’s Children references and rejects. Finally: between book and film, what are the consequences for the representation of Partition and its consequences?
Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy, emarino@hurricane.it
Moulding identities in Difficult Daughters (1998) by Manju Kapur and What the Body Remembers (2000) by Shauna Singh Baldwin
This paper will focus on Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur, and What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin. Despite appearances, the scope of the novels is much broader and deeper than the mere portrayal of generation gaps and value conflicts: the writers did not simply aim at exploring family relationships and women’s issues in a male-dominated society. It should not pass unnoticed that both stories are set against the background of the events leading to the Independence of India. Furthermore, the novels were published about fifty years after the end of the Raj when, in Bashabi Fraser’s words, following a long period of silence, “[t]here [was] a notable surge of interest in the Partition of India […it was] a time to reflect, look back and weigh what India gained or lost as a result of decolonization” ( Introduction. Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter. Ed. Bashabi Fraser. London: Anthem, 2008. 1–56.).
Hence, this paper sets out to demonstrate that the subtler purpose of both works is to establish a parallelism between the protagonists’ painful negotiation of their femininity and identity and the equally uncertain and ambiguous awakening of the writers’ mother-country to political, cultural, and social freedom, culminating in the 1947 Independence, gained at the cost of bloodshed, misery, and the Partition.
Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova (Romania), dani.rogobete@yahoo.com
Twin Wounds, Twin Stories: Trauma and gendered memory in Bapsi Sidhwa Cracking India and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers
This paper focuses upon the intricate relationship between trauma and memory in the process of healing wounds and exorcising the “collective” demons of history, as discussed in two novels inspired by the Partition: Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers. The coming to terms with the past suggested by these two novels – the former from a Pakistani perspective and told by a Parsi narrator, the latter from a Punjabi perspective and focusing on a Sikh family – is mediated by the complex mechanisms of remembering and forgetting and by a multi-dimensional approach that subtly combines political, historical, cultural and religious perspectives. The two novels share an allegorical vision of events that makes use of the same syncretic rhythms of life and history as recorded by the female narrators of the two stories and the same metaphoric representations of estrangement, displacement and rupture by means of different types of gendered memory at work in the attempt to recuperate the untold story of women’s plight during the events of the Partition.
SCULT10 CANCELLED
KISSING IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN: REASSESSING A CULTURAL PRACTICE
Convenors:
Béatrice Laurent, Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, beatrice.laurent@iufm-martinique.fr
Stefania Arcara, University of Catania, sarcara@yahoo.it
This interdisciplinary seminar intends to examine visual and textual representations of kissing in Victorian Britain from a cultural, socio-historical and gender studies perspective. Papers may propose analyses of kissing as a Victorian cultural and social practice in a variety of forms and contexts: the etiquette of “hand-kissing” as a mode of salutation, the chaste kiss of female friendship, the heterosexual lovers’ kiss as romantic climax or narrative turning point in art and literature, or as a subject of speculation for Charles Darwin, the “deviant” kiss of same-sex relations, the vampire’s or femme fatale’s deadly kiss, the stolen kiss penalized by Victorian courtrooms, the libertine or promiscuous kiss of pornographic fiction and many more variations. Examinations of Charles Darwin’s speculations on the origins of kissing would also be welcome. Through a discussion of the multifarious and diversified aspects of kissing in Victorian Britain we will seek to reassess the significance of a cultural practice, its literary and artistic manifestations and its place in the history of gender and sexuality.
SCULT11 Sunday 31.8.2014 (A)11.00–13.00 Room A5, (B)16.00–17.30 Room A5
GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN NEO-VICTORIANISM
Convenors:
Georges Letissier, University of Nantes, France, georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, University of Malaga, Spain, mirr@uma.es
The seminar will investigate the centrality of gender and sexuality in “neo-Victorianism”, including both scholarly works (history, cultural studies, social anthropology etc.) and creative works (fiction, film, arts) and the possible productive interaction between the two. The relevance of gender and sexuality identified as foundational at the inception of what is both a genre (with still undefined contours) and an academic discipline will be appraised by addressing questions of representation (performativity, scopophilia, voyeurism) and reception (“sexsational read”, bifocality etc.), without omitting the ethical and ideological implications of such aesthetic choices. The tensions between marginality and norms (queering, gender-bending) and the historical epistemology of sexuality may also be considered.
Participants
Alexandra Cheira, University of Lisbon, Portugal, alexandra.cheira@gmail.com
Sexual defiance/ deviance in A.S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian Morpho Eugenia: incest, breaking the virginity taboo and female sexual agency
In this paper, I will analyse Eugenia Alabaster’s (the female protagonist) deviant/ defiant sexuality in its triple condition of Victorian female sexual agency, breaking the incest taboo and breaking the virginity taboo against the backdrop of anthropological and psychiatric approaches (namely, Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopatia Sexualis and Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship). Eugenia, who is depicted as a carnal or voluptuous woman, does not subscribe to the sexual passivity that was assumed to be the typical sexual role of the Angel in the House.
Krafft-Ebing conveyed an important distinction between “perversion” and “perversity”: the first term referred to a disease, perversion of the sexual instinct, whereas the second meant the manifestation of a vice, perversity in the sexual act. It is in the light of this distinction that another aspect of Eugenia’s sexual behaviour – incest – shall be analysed. To be a woman and to have transgressed all prohibitions but always to keep her inner good and bad self to herself is an agglomerate of major subversions which A.S. Byatt fully explores in her composite portrait of her female protagonist.
CANCELLED Georges Letissier, University of Nantes, France, Georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr
Transgendering and Intersex in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry and Wesley Stace’s Misfortune.
The reflection on gender and queer theories has been a major field of investigation in the neo Victorian novel. It seems perfectly legitimate that this issue should be raised in the wake of Victorianism, a period that is remembered for having set out clearly defined gender norms (e.g. Coventry Patmore’s The Angel of the House and John Ruskin’s chapter “Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens” in Sesames and Lilies). However any reduction to binary oppositions between Victorian masculinity and femininity would not do justice to gender alternatives that were already conceived of at that time, as with Edward Carpenter’s uranians in The Intermediate Sex or Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus”. This being said, neo-Victorianism has undoubtedly benefited from the input from both post-structural philosophy: Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Michel Foucault and queer theory, notably with Judith Butler.
This paper focuses on cross-dressing and intersexed characters by selecting two fictions. Duncker’s is based on an authentic nineteenth century military surgeon, who on his death in 1865 drew public attention when newspapers ran stories that he had in fact been a woman. The latter is a fictitious invention by a novelist and musician who refers to Freddy Mercury’s exaggeration of drag in the “I want to be free” video clip.
Gordon J. Marshall, Istanbul Aydin University, Turkey, gjohnmarshall@aydin.edu.tr
Grafting the Past on the Body of the Present: Steampunk Culture, Gender and Desire
This paper examines the role of the female body in Steampunk, through Cosplay or as a series of visual or moving images, usually employing alternative models to portray scenes or exhibit clothing that are, if not problematic, in need of some form of contextualization. While the intention is to reflect a fantastic reimagining of the clothing and styles of the Victorian Era, it is through exposure of the wearer’s actual body, and mainly the woman’s body, that the costume becomes eroticized, negating, as Mike Perschon has argued, the power of women both in the present and in the past simultaneously. However, this does not happen with men, whose Cosplay styles more closely replicate the actual Victorian styles of the upper class.
This paper will attempt to strike a middle ground, analyzing the liberatory nature of Cosplay, while questioning how the eroticized female body fits into this without damaging a cultural framework based on freedom and choice for all involved.
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, University of Málaga, Spain, mirr@uma.es
Prostitution, Identity and the Neo-Victorian: Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet (1999) and the Ripper Street Series (2012).
The analysis of sexual abuse and violence in two Neo-Victorian literary and visual productions will be the object of discussion in terms of agency of and mourning for the abused.
Tipping the Velvet is set in the last decades of the nineteenth century and its two lesbian protagonists are given voice as the marginalised and the other. Judith Butler’s notion of gender performance is taken to its extremes in a story where male prostitution is exerted through a woman who behaves and dresses like a man, but who will also become the victim of sexual violence and abuse. In Ripper Street, the protagonist, the leader of the Whitechapel H Division, Inspector Edmund Reid, tries to do justice to the women who sell their bodies in London East End in 1889 after the Ripper’s murders. Their aim is not only to keep order in this working-class suburb, but also to find the way to show sympathy for the deaths and suffering of the “prostituted other”.
Therefore, drawing from Butler’s theories of gender, violence and mourning, this paper will address Victorian and contemporary discourses connected with the notions of sexual identity and agency as the result of sexual violence and gender abuse, and of the prostituted body as the site of vulnerability and dependency of “the other”.
Daný van Dam, Cardiff University, Wales, vandamhd@cardiff.ac.uk
Crossing the Boundaries of Sex and Race in Two Neo-Victorian Novels
In Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (2012), Elizabeth Ho states that in neo-Victorian novels, popular culture and Victorian studies, we “remember or misremember the nineteenth century as the apex of the British imperial project.” Two novels that distinctly show this presence of empire are Elaine di Rollo’s A Proper Education for Girls (2008) and Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (2009). In these novels, British women are forced by circumstance to move away from Britain to another part of the empire. For different reasons, the women choose to take up native dress, sometimes that of local women but more often adopting men’s clothes. As they don these outfits, they are forced to look at both themselves and their surroundings with a different eye. Thus in The Mistress of Nothing, the character Lady Duff Gordon looks at herself in a mirror, saying: “I don’t recognise myself! I’m neither English, nor Arab; I’ve become a kind of creature in between. I look a kind of man/woman, don’t I?” In this paper, I will discuss how the fact that these women cross-dress – as a native, as a man, or both – influences their perception of themselves and their position in relation to Britain and its colonies.
Simonetta Falchi,University of Sassari, Italy, simonett@uniss.it
Little Dorrit’s “tender feet” and “spare hands.” Eroticized sentimentality in Dickens’s Little Dorrit and its 2008 BBC remediation.
The current interest in the Victorian period is particularly evident in the multitude of successful period dramas and cinema productions deriving their inspiration from Victorian sources. Little Dorrit, Dickens’s “terrible and wonderful novel” (AS Byatt 2008), generated by the difficulties of understanding a “new” world and the changing roles of women, is possibly the ideal paradigm to explore this Victorian revival.
Comparing the source text with its remediations may prove a winning strategy to highlight how the issues of gender and sexuality have evolved in neo-Victorianism. It seems therefore here appropriate to offer an analysis of these issues through the perspective of the adaptations of Little Dorrit. I shall focus my analysis on the case study of Little Dorrit, because this novel strikes us “no less forcefully today in its indictment of society's ability to destroy through greed and crushing self-interest”.
The evolution of the topics of gender and sexuality will be studied focusing mainly on the 2008 BBC adaptation of Dickens’s text. Central to this analysis will be the changes in the “love” story of Amy Dorrit with Arthur Clennam, and the “queer” relationship between Tattycoram and Miss Wade.
Caterina Grasl, University of Vienna, Austria, caterina.grasl@univie.ac.at
‘Reader, I slept with him’: Sexsationalising Jane Eyre
My paper looks at recent rewritings of Charlotte Brontë’s novel and explores to what extent the “sexsationalising” (to borrow Mel Kohlke’s term) tendency of neo-Victorian fiction has shifted the focus of these works away from the pronounced feminist and postcolonial agenda of earlier texts (such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea of 1966, by now a classic in its own right). Rather than giving a voice to the “madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979), these later prequels, sequels and parallelquels concentrate on the allegedly “hidden” aspects of Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester’s stormy courtship, and on Rochester’s sexual relationships with the other women in his life. This applies to novels like Ken Jones’ The Memoirs of Edward Rochester (2011) and Tara Bradley’s Jane Eyre’s Husband (2011), both of which rewrite the original from a male perspective, but also, for example, to Emma Tennant’s Thornfield Hall (2009), Clare Mose’s Adele Grace and Celine (2009) or Kimberly Bennett’s Jane Rochester (2000), all of which likewise display a marked trend towards the sexsational. The aim of my paper is to explore the ways in which these novels engage with, confirm or subvert the political – particularly feminist – discourses of the original, and to shed light on the ethics and aesthetics of these neo-Victorian appropriations of Jane Eyre.
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Hong Kong Baptist University, tammyh@hkbu.edu.hk
Female Researchers in Neo-Victorian Fiction
Neo-Victorian novelists sometimes use graduate students – trainee academics – who research on nineteenth-century writers as primary protagonists. It is perhaps inevitable and predictable that the figure of the research student has a recurrent role in the neo-Victorian genre, as novelists tend to cannibalise their own experience and many of them have been postgraduate students. Graduate characters occupy a marginal or liminal position in the academic world.
This paper will discuss three neo-Victorian novels in which female postgraduate students take the centre stage. If Eliot’s representation of Casaubon in Middlemarch can be viewed as an ‘extremely subversive portrait of male authority’ (Gilbert & Gubar, 2000 [1979]:502), then the contemporary writers’ choice of female trainee academics is worth reflection. In Victorian literature, most scholars are male, which mirrors the gender bias in the academic world and in society at large at that time. The female figures in the neo-Victorian novels, then, speak to the changed gender make-up of contemporary academia. The fact that these females all choose to depart the university also forms a contrast with notions of the university found in Victorian novels, in which leaving or not attending university might have detrimental effects on the characters, in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), for example. In the contemporary novels, however, the beginning scholars willingly give up their academic pursuits, an act which could be read as either a form of female empowerment or a slightly retrograde view of women’s academic aptitude and perseverance.
Claire O’Callaghan, Brunel University, London, England, claireocallag42@hotmail.com
Nostalgic Romanticism? Sexual Politics and Historicity in Adaptations of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
An enduring appeal of Emily Bronte’s classic gothic romance, Wuthering Heights (1848), is the way in which Brontë romanticises the destructive nature of Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions which, Emily suggests, is so deep as to surpass the bounds of life itself. In her text, the heatedness of the semi-siblings desires are bound (more or less) by the gendered and sexual conventions of the day, but she is incredibly suggestive about the troubling relations between Heathcliff and Isabella Linton, Cathy’s sister-in-law, who Heathcliff marries in revenge. Subsequent adaptations of the novel and particularly those in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are released from the confining restrictions of Victorian gender and sexual politics and thus have played liberally with Bronte’s novel. Focusing on two different adaptations of Bronte’s classic novel, namely Peter Komsminsky’s 1992 film starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche and MTV’s 2003 series, this paper asks to what extent an overt historic frame (in other words, the Victorian-ness of “neo-Victorian”) provide a safe and comfortable lens for exploring the destructive nature of romance, sexual violence, and the violent side of passion, and to what effect? I will argue that the contextual framing lens of these adaptations create perspectives on the novel’s gender and sexual politics such that viewing the heated nature of the novel’s gender and sexual content without the period features uncomfortable renders visible the contemporary currency of the Bronte’s novel and gives focus to her exploration of passion, sex and violence.
Louisa Yates, University of Chester/Gladstone’s Library, louisayates@gmail.com
‘Can you see me? Am I real?’: poetics of neo-Victorian resonance
This paper proposes an introduction to the resonance between contemporary queer theory and contemporary neo-Victorian fiction, using Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) and Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter (2011) as particular examples. The neo-Victorian genre has, as Sarah Gamble notes, ‘flowered alongside’ queer theory (Sarah Gamble, ‘“You cannot impersonate what you are”: Questions of Authenticity in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 20:1 (Jan 2009), 128). This relationship is most easily traced through scholarly use of queer theory for readings of the neo-Victorian novel. This paper, however, suggests a different textual relationship: in Waters’s novels, postmodern intertextuality develops into a subtle resonance with the queer theory’s project of LGBTQ recognition.
Fingersmith and The Sealed Letter, like other neo-Victorian novels, adapt and appropriate external textual material. This paper proposes that queer theory, not nineteenth-century material, which functions as foundational texts. Fingersmith adapts and appropriates Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), in order to explore both issues of lesbian visibility and the representation of a normative, homophilic, lesbian relationship. This paper explores the moments in which Fingersmith, ostensibly a novel devoted to re-presenting the late nineteenth century, exposes its debt to the very modern model of the apparitionalised yet self-identified lesbian woman.
SCULT12 Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A5
PUBLICITY AND PROPAGANDA DISCOURSES IN THE MEDIA IN ENGLISH
Convenors:
María José Coperías-Aguilar, Universitat de València, Spain, maria.j.coperias@uv.es
Slávka Tomaščíková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, slavka.tomascikova@upjs.sk
The media have traditionally been said to have the function of informing, educating and entertaining, but they have also been the arena used by a wide range of people and institutions to convince us about the qualities and benefits of buying their products or following their ideas. Both, publicity and propaganda, explicit or subliminal, are present in all media in different ways and formats. Contributions to this seminar could be focused on the analysis of any elements which constitute a token of publicity or propaganda in any kind of media, traditional or digital.
Participants
Alice Byrne, Université Rennes 2, France, alicebyrne@gmail.com
Empire propaganda in war and peace: assessing cultural propaganda in Britain To-day (1939–1954)
When the British Council was founded in 1934, it was widely perceived as a cultural propaganda organisation. After the war, however, the Council sought to adapt to the new international context by redefining its mission as fostering international cultural relations. Henceforth the word ‘propaganda’ was proscribed – at least publicly.
Much historical research devoted to cultural propaganda/relations has tended to accept this postwar shift. However, by focusing on a British Council periodical, this paper will argue that this change was more apparent than real. The magazine Britain To-day was published by the Council from 1939 to 1954 and, as such, offers us a unique prism though which to assess the message transmitted to an international readership during the Second World War and the immediate post-war period. Drawing on an analysis of the magazine itself as well as archival documents, it will be shown that the magazine did indeed try to “boost Britain”, despite its claims to the contrary. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the magazine’s treatment of British imperial policy. Furthermore, the magazine’s pro-empire propaganda highlighted the contradictions between British policy in practice and the principles of liberal internationalism which Britain To-day claimed to champion.
Marine Dasse, University of Paris 10 Nanterre, mdasse@uci.edu
The ambivalence of Adbusters: the self-contradictory tactics of a nonmainstream media and the limits of apoliticism
The traditional America media has been widely criticized for being biased and dominated by advertising to such a point that it has been accused of delivering ‘info-tainement’ rather than worthwhile information. Among the fiercest critics of traditional media and advertising in general is Adbusters, an anti-consumerist and anti-advertising group located in North America. They promote the message of social justice and advocate a more sustainable development. They define themselves as a ‘global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age’.
They are part of a wider movement of ‘culture jammers’ whose goal is to create ‘subvertisements’ or spoof ads, which consist of parodies of corporate advertisements that deliver the opposite of the intended message with a comedic tone. Adbusters has also launched several international campaigns, including ‘Buy Nothing Day’ and ‘Occupy Wall Street’ whose goal is to change public opinion about environmental and social issues.
Though scholars have conducted very little academic research about the group, some have highlighted the inherent contradictions of a group that reuses the same capitalist strategies as their philosophical opponents. In this paper, I will define Adbusters’ identity but also assess their relevance in the world of nontraditional activist media. I will also evaluate whether or not they represent a counter hegemonic force and if so to what extent. Shall they be regarded as a powerful dissenting voice of unheard America in the mainstream media that questions media’s current legitimacy or is their message discredited by the various marketing strategies they
deliberately use to promote their ideals?
Smiljana Komar, English Department, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, smiljana.komar@guest.arnes.si
The Persuasive Function of Intonation in TV on-line Shopping Commercial in English and Slovene
TV on-line shopping commercials exhibit a very specific style of speech and delivery whose main function is to boost the product's value and sale. In addition to the length and type of sentences, the choice of lexis and reiteration, intonation plays an important persuasive role in achieving credibility of the advertised products.
This paper presents the main findings of the prosodic analysis of three English TV on-line commercials (Highstreet TV) and their Slovene equivalents (Topshop). In both languages the TV on-line shopping commercials use marked varieties of tonality (i.e. division into intonation phrases), tonicity (i.e. Nucleus-placement), as well as tone choices in order to give emphasis to all important pieces of information about the advertised product.
On the basis of a contrastive English-Slovene analysis we can conclude that the intonation of the Slovene TV on-line shopping commercials copies the intonation of the English originals which raises the question of its acceptability for Slovene consumers and hence the marketing effect and selling of the products. It is reasonable to believe that the judgement of English intonation by Slovene speakers will be made against the intonation patterns of their mother tongue, which differs from English in the number of tones and is neither in favour of level pre-nuclear segments nor pitch jumps or slumps.
Sławomir Kozioł, University of Rzeszów, inaros@poczta.onet.pl
Media publicity in contemporary art
The paper will focus on the ways in which contemporary art uses various techniques of publicity in order to reach potential customers. Ever since artists – led by the pioneering example of Andy Warhol – ceased to abide by what critics such as Clement Greenberg considered to be firm and essential division between principled avant-garde art and market-dependent kitsch, various means of persuasion have been used in the promotion of art. The paper will look at some of these means, starting from the traditional techniques of advertising like street hoardings and posters, and ending with sophisticated campaigns using digital media. In the process, the mutually influential relationship between art and advertising will be explored. Finally, the paper will consider the question of the value of art in the light of these developments and the relationship between the pronouncements of the institutionalized art world – which can be viewed as the inheritor of Greenbergian values – and the forces of the market.
Edyta Rachfał, Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Wschodnioeuropejska w Przemyślu, Poland, edytarachfal@gmail.com
Responding in Times of Crisis: A Study of the “News International Phone Hacking Scandal”
Although Crisis Communication is an independent academic discipline which has been around since the mid 1980s, it has not as yet earned enough scholarly interest from linguists.
The presentation is an overview of a study whose aim has been to fill this gap by approaching the theme of crisis from the perspective of Linguistics. Therefore, it handles public crisis communication, especially the crisis response phase, and examines how public figures respond in times of crisis, which goals they pursue and what linguistic features they employ to this end. The analysis in the study draws on the statements made in the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal of 2011. The speakers’ motivations behind their crisis response are interpreted through the linguistic and (critical) discourse analysis concepts of face concerns (Goffman 1967) and stance (Biber, et al. 1999).
The presentation will run according to the following plan: 1 Crisis Communication: an overview, 2 Case: phone hacking scandal, 3 Analytical framework, 4 Conclusions, and finally, 5 Crisis Response Model, which will focus on the presentation of the model that has emerged from the interplay between the speakers’ intuitive awareness of face concerns, the persuasive goals they pursue and the stance devices they employ to achieve their goals.
María José Coperías-Aguilar, Universitat de València, Spain, maria.j.coperias@uv.es
Slávka Tomaščíková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Slovakia, slavka.tomascikova@upjs.sk
An Exhibition on Propaganda, Power and Persuasion. A Review.
From 17 May to 17 September, 2013, the British Library in London presented an exhibition under the title “Propaganda: Power and Persuasion” with the aim of exploring the strategies and consequences of propaganda in the 20th and 21st centuries. However, the very selection of the items shown, as well as what was not shown, was an act of propaganda and persuasion in itself. To some people, propaganda may seem a comparatively recent concept, although it has existed for centuries, as the exhibition shows. What may be a more recent phenomenon is the somehow pejorative meaning this word has acquired; however, propaganda and its persuasive strategies are not intrinsically negative procedures. Both the exhibition and the book accompanying it went through the history of what could be considered propaganda and presented several definitions and showed many different examples in all kind of media. In this paper, we will review the contents of the exhibition and the book and, if necessary, challenge some of the options taken by the organizers and the author, respectively.
SCULT13 CANCELLED
SCANDALS & SCARES IN THE BRITISH MEDIA: DISCOURSE, REPRESENTATIONS, IMPACT
Convenors:
Susan Finding, Université de Poitiers, France, susan.finding@univ-poitiers.fr
Anémone Kober-Smith, Université Paris Nord – 13, France, anemone.kober@univ-paris13.fr
Michael Parsons, Université de Pau et du Pays de l'Adour, France, michael.parsons@univ-pau.fr
Edyta Rachfal, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice and PWSW Przemyśl, edytarachfal@gmail.com
What makes a media scandal? Why do scares regularly surface in the media? Why do they arise over issues of public health, private and national security, immigration, privacy, sleaze, public and private behaviour. How does the discourse reinforce or invalidate cultural studies theory? Does the reporting share narratives of decline and deviance? Secrecy and sources, information and transparency are themes that recur. This seminar will explore commonalities, instrumentalisation and impact on policy and politics and on the media. Comparative studies may explore how specific to the UK the way the British media deal with scandals & scares is.
SCULT14 Monday 1.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A2
UNCANNY PRESENCES: THE PORTRAYAL OF EVIL IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND AMERICAN TV SERIES
Convenors:
Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, Universität Hildesheim, Germany, brusberg@uni-hildesheim.de
Patrick Duggan, Exeter University, U.K., P.Duggan@exeter.ac.uk
This seminar investigates the construction of evil in contemporary British and American TV series, which operate on a symbolic level and express the anxiety of hidden evil alongside the wish for a tight control of deviation. They reflect today’s visuality and performativity and entertain by creating mixed feelings and sensations. The character constructions and aesthetics combine the realist with the mythical or super-natural and are influenced by Gothic elements, which is not surprising if one takes the domesticity of these media into account. Participants might discuss re-negotiations of cultural concepts and dichotomies or analyse the theatricality of contemporary small-screen cinematography.
Participants
Christophe Den Tandt, Bruxelles, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Christophe.Den.Tandt@skynet.be
Evil Contained: The Narrative Management of External and Internal Threats in 24, The Following, The Wire, and Sleeper Cell
This paper analyzes the strategies used by contemporary TV series in order to represent and contain external and internal social threats. The corpus taken into consideration for this research includes the FOX Network’s 24 and The Following, as well as HBO’s the The Wire and SHOWTIME’s Sleeper Cell. Taking its cue from Fredric Jameson’s reflections on the social value of romance, the present argument contends that TV narratives both foreground and contain social threats by means of practices ranging from personalized embodiment to narrative dissemination. In the former case, the threat is an embodied force, consubstantial to characters endowed with forbidding destructive powers. This representational choice fits an essentialist concept of evil and, in literary terms, anchors the series in the romance and the gothic. In the early twenty-first century context, it connotes a conservative agenda. Narrative dissemination, on the contrary, fits a constructionist concept of social dysfunctioning compatible with realism: negative elements are portrayed as shaped by social determinants, whose action must be traced through complex narrative developments. It is argued that the TV series in the present corpus draw on these two representational techniques in various degrees of dominance. An evaluation of their aesthetic and ideological value therefore requires analyzing the multiple visual and narrative devices generated by the coexistence of these two concepts of social threats within each work.
Jimena Escudero Pérez, Oviedo, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain, escuderojimena@uniovi.es
Fearful science at the heart of (post)human identity: playing with genes in contemporary narratives
The manipulation of human DNA in the form of eugenic pursuit, cloning, genetic engineering etc. has become a well-established subject in science fiction for decades now. In our days, this thematic trend, together with that of artificial intelligence, is probably the most prolific one when inspiring narratives in popular culture and (al)so constitutes the source of much bioethical debate. A common pattern derived from these practices is that they generate dystopian scenarios where a certain part or the totality of a community is oppressed and abused by “scientific means” rather than political ones. Together with the recurring theme of Orwellian surveillance or coercive technology, biomedical intrusion dominates such fictions. Although the power to blame is usually a governmental or corporative one, the agent responsible for such negligent management is embodied in a sort of anonymous inertia, implying that the scientific community in these fictions either lacks any kind of ethics whatsoever or is completely subdued to the established powers, proving to fail both in its professional code of ethics as well as/or in its self-governance.
The genome undoubtedly constitutes the best trace for human biological identity, but this also transcends other levels of our identity as a species and as individuals. When this code is altered or artificially created, fundamental questions about our own ontology are displayed. This presentation seeks to analyse that perverse science (the one that attempts to play with such a “sacred” trait) and the multiple negotiations of human identity that it produces, as depicted in various examples taken from literature, film and television.
Irén Annus, University of Szeged, Hungary, iannus@lit.u-szeged.hu
Blame It on Nature: Human Agency and Transgressions of Morality in Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad ranks among the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful television series to be produced in the US in recent years. Aired between 2008 and 2013, in tandem with the gradually evolving economic recession precipitated by the housing crash that has shaken mainstream understandings of both masculinity and morality, the series has been praised for tackling these (and other) issues. The presentation examines the “reluctant hero” of the program, Walter White—once a promising young chemist, but now a modest high school teacher—and the moral transformation that the news of having cancer has triggered in him. The paper surveys the specific moments and dynamics through which the natural evil that cancer represents—inflicting pain and suffering on the patient without any promise of accompanying relief and reward—gradually transforms him into the embodiment of moral evil—with the promise of a chance of life, financial security and a bright future for his family—which is a process he himself does not seem to notice or acknowledge. The paper argues that by locating the cause of his cancer in nature and in chemical changes, Mr. White is able to reject the moralizing and victimizing discourse so common in similar situations and embrace his cancer as an enabling and empowering experience through which moral boundaries may be increasingly transgressed until he is transformed into what is described as “the devil,” thus signifying the end of both traditional masculinity and morality as we used to know them.
Richard Schumaker, Maryland, University College, University of Maryland, USA, richard.schumaker@umuc.edu
Backgrounds of Evil: Breaking Bad, Christopher Marlowe, and Contemporary American Childhood
Breaking Bad, created and produced by Vince Gilligan and starring Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn, Betsy Brandt, and R.J. Mitte, recently ended its very successful sixty-two episode history. Viewers were fascinated by the transition of a seemingly average secondary school teacher into an engaged, often perverse, and demonic major criminal. The purpose of my communication about this iconic series is three-fold. First, I will explore the similarities and differences between Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus and the US TV series’ main character, focusing on the following themes: the underlying motivation for the existential shift, the transformation of social relationships, and the evolution of new values and behaviors in the midst of ‘breaking bad’. Second, I will analyze the evolving relationship between Walter White-Mephisto and the younger characters in the series, namely his son, his partner-in-crime, and some of the other younger characters. This analysis allows us better grasp the historical evolution of the US over the last forty years. Third, at the horizon of this communication, I will argue that the TV series has three specific limitations: its portrayal of North American society, its incomplete character analyses, and, finally, an extremely problematic account of the younger generations portrayed in the series. I will show that these limitations derive from the absence of a philosophical underpinning—exactly the sort of foundation that is a central part of Dr. Faustus. Ultimately, this presentation evaluates the canon and shows how important it is as a lens onto contemporary North American culture.
Serkan Sen, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey, srknsn@yahoo.com
The First Cut is the Deepest: From Dexter to the Dark Passenger
The aim of this paper is to analyse and discuss how Dexter’s childhood trauma of parental death transforms him from a victim into a perpetrator. Dexter (Showtime, 2006–2013), the popular American TV drama, centres on the life of Dexter Morgan. Witnessing his mother being chain-sawed to death in a shipping container, Dexter is left alone sitting in blood for three days. Unable to work through what he has witnessed, Dexter is caught in the acting out phase of trauma. In Dexter’s own words, “No matter where we go, we take ourselves and our damage with us”. As Estela Welldon suggests, victims become perpetrators when they re-enact the behaviour of their offenders motivated by a desire for revenge. Following his mother’s murder, Dexter becomes not only a forensic blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Homicide by day but also a merciless serial killer by night. By targeting murderers that have escaped punishment, Dexter is transformed from a typical serial killer into a vigilante, which fosters the viewers’ mixed feelings and sensations.
Julianna Borbély, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, juliannaborbely@gmail.com
Evil as a Formative Element and a Means of Development of (the) Good in Hannibal
The portrayal of evil in Hannibal displays a contrast between appearances and hidden suggestions, in addition to turning evil into a constructive element of the crime story. The AXN TV series Hannibal (2013–2014), created by Bryan Fuller, is based on the book trilogy by Thomas Harris, later turned into silver-screen thrillers. The small screen, however, reduces the “thriller” character of the original story, due to a carefully maintained balance between what is shown and what is suggested, i.e. between visuals and story. The TV series never shows how a crime is committed, only the outcome – the deed is suggested by means of editing. Based on contrast, the imagery parades the cannibalistic, beast-like deeds of a sophisticated and extremely human being. Hannibal’s portrayal suggests utter self-control and respectability by means of a carefully constructed mise-en-scène, which presents an impeccable, educated, and highly sophisticated gentleman, cool and detached in all he does, suggesting his superiority to others. As opposed to a classical whodunit, Hannibal reveals the solution to the mystery at the beginning already; hence, the story focuses on the game between the good and the evil, in which the latter is not a tragic, shattering experience, but it becomes a means of development for the good. Therefore, the paper proposes to discuss the role evil plays in the present TV series in addition to analysing the cinematic rhetoric used to suggest this role.
SCULT15 CANCELLED
EUROPEAN MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS (ESPRIT, THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR PERIODICAL RESEARCH)
Convenors:
Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang.Goertschacher@sbg.ac.at
Marianne Van Remoortel, Ghent University, Belgium, Marianne.VanRemoortel@UGent.be
On behalf of ESPRit we invite papers on topics related to editing periodicals. Papers for this Europe-related panel (including the UK) might address shifts and continuities from periodicals to networks and from editing to curating. They might focus on such topics as the history of editorship; the relationship between editorship and authorship; editing in wartime; women editors; editing colonial publications; the work of particular periodical editors; writers and their editors; editors and national literatures; advertising influence on editors; letters to editors; editors' relationships to one another; the many types of editorial work; editing in different countries; editing in the 21st century, and fiction, film, and essays about editors of magazines or newspapers.
SCULT16 CANCELLED
LINGUISTIC AND LITERARY CARTOGRAPHIES: VISUALISING LINGUISTIC AND LITERARY NETWORKS
Convenors:
Marina Dossena, Univerrsity of Bergamo, Italy, marina.dossena@unibg.it
John Corbett, University of Macau, Macao SAR, jcorbett@umac.mo
This seminar invites participation from scholars involved in the visualisation of linguistic, literary and historical relationships. There has recently been an upsurge of interest in linguistic and literary cartographies, and in particular the use of digital media to map linguistic change, literary data and historical networks. The seminar offers an opportunity for researchers this area to showcase their work in progress, and to share good practice in the development of methodologies and software. We anticipate that the session will be of interest to those working in the areas of historical corpora, correspondence and social networks, lexicography and the digital humanities.
SCULT17 CANCELLED
BODIES AND/AT THEIR LIMITS
Convenors:
Clare Barker, University of Leeds, UK, c.f.barker@leeds.ac.uk
MarilenaParlati, University of Calabria, Italy, m.parlati@unical.it
NicolettaVallorani, University of Milan, Italy, nicoletta.vallorani@unimi.it
This seminar aims at interrogating the perception, figuration, manipulation of bodies in our contemporaneity, with particular reference to the liminal condition imposed by illnesses and disability. We are taking our cues from, one the one hand, A. Giddens and his suggestion that “bodies are projects”; on the other hand, we are obviously aware of the various, and notorious, difficulties in inquiring upon such an articulate topic. The language of the body tend to be deeply modified by physical conditions that are marked as pathological, because, as Peter Brooks maintains, if the sociocultural body is a construct, an ideological product, the physical body is precultural and prelinguistic. Sensations of pleasure and especially of pain are held to be experiences outside language. If, as Nancy suggests, bodies are limits, the focus of this panel will be that of opening up a space for discussion on the delicate and essential encroachments between illness, disability, agency and cultural production.
SCULT18 Tuesday 2.9.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A6
SCULPTING THE OTHER: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN LAW, LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Convenors:
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Aarhus University, Denmark, litkms@hum.au.dk
Chiara Battisti, Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, chiara.battisti@univr.it
Sidia Fiorato, Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, sidia.fiorato@univr.it
The purpose of this seminar is to investigate the relationship between law and the Other in English literature and culture. Law has developed historically around figures of denial, prohibition and interdiction; juridical language aims at clearing reality of all its contradictions, reconducing it to univocal categories, defined roles and behaviour. However, the repressed Other threatens inexorably to return and it threatens to disrupt the order and reason of the legal system. The seminar will take into consideration the above-described issues from different theoretical perspectives fostering interdisciplinary approaches in the following fields: law and literature, visual arts, film studies, performing arts, ecocriticism.
Participants
Giampaolo Azzoni, University of Pavia, Italy, giampaolo.azzoni@unipv.it
“Presence-at-hand. The otherness of the Captain MacWhirr’s world in Conrad’s Typhoon.”
This paper looks at the external reality as the fundamental otherness with respect to the subject. The ways in which the relationship between subject and reality is moulded come to define the individual character and to shape concrete and discrete biographies.
In this perspective, in Conrad’s Typhoon, the world of Captain Tom MacWhirr could represent a luminous paradigm. The objects which surround this leading figure, such as the barometer and the flag, the entire, natural and artificial scenario have not for him other meanings than their phenomenological materiality. A deeper understanding of reality as the “proper otherness” leads us to interpret MacWhirr’s world as the ontological region of the so-called “presence-at-hand”, so to illuminate conradian plot, narrative and aesthetic through the lens of Heidegger’s philosophy. At the same time this phenomenological world is only apparently mute. A closer investigation reveals that it is apt to open and pose metaphysical questions, as, once again, the end of Conrad’s novel testifies.
Cristina Costantini, University of Pavia, Italy, cristina.costantini@unipg.it
“The „Geo-Other“. Comparative Law And Cosmographic Representations.”
This paper is aimed to critically discuss the proper methodologies of comparative law and its inner geopolitical potentialities.
The normative dissection of legal traditions, their strategic dislocation and their alternative isolation or hybridisation are the most significant products of the intellectual analysis in the field of comparative studies. The issue at stake is the proper creation of sections of space and blocks of competing identities. The narrative practices moulded by comparative scholars (which transplant literary devices, tropes and characterizations in the proper legal domain) lie at the root of an attractive process of correspondence between the memorial bodies of traditions and the carnal bodies of human beings: both of them come to be read geographically, as identical with the new geographic location built or imposed by a strategic project. On this ground, the purpose of the paper is to emphasize both the discursive transformation of the physical morphology of living bodies and dead corpses into a broader and metaphorical morphology (and morphogenesis) of different legal systems and, consequently, the metonymic relationship instituted between these two poles. The cosmographic representations, denoting different ways of envisioning space, make possible an effective meta-morphosis, sculpting the sense of belonging and the contrastive image of otherness, giving voice to interpretative communities and legal projections and imaginations.
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Jagiellonian University, Krakov, Poland, kowalcze.pawlik@gmail.com; anna.kowalcze-pawlik@uj.edu.pl
“Vanished cruelties, forgotten terror”:Law and Its Others in Bacon and Shakespeare”
This presentation provides a discussion of violence that is inscribed into the notion of law. The two texts providing the material for the comparative analysis in this respect will be Francis Bacon’s essay Of Revenge and William Shakespeare’s primary scene of violence fondatrice (“violence that founds”) in Act I of Titus Andronicus. The discussion of these two texts will serve me to outline the institution of law in and through acts of violence that are masked by Bacon and unmasked by Shakespeare who points to “the most perverse calculation” that resides at the heart of justice. Finally, I will address the political-moral argument tied with the call for justice and suggest an aporetic relationship between the notions of justice and revenge that pervades both Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s writing.
Christine Mangan, University College Dublin, Ireland, christinerosemangan@yahoo.com
“Unspeakable Narratives: Sodomitical Discourse in Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell”
Sixteenth-century jurist Sir Edward Coke wrote that sodomy is “a detestable and abominable sin, amongst Christians not to be named,” thereby initiating what legal commentators and scholars have since referred to as “the injunction to silence.” However, it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that publications began avoiding the terms ‘sodomy’ and buggery’ in preference to references such as “a most detestable crime” or a crime “not fit to be mentioned.” This paper will argue that the embedded narratives of trial, torture and imprisonment within Francis Lathom’s Gothic novel The Midnight Bell engage with contemporary discourse on the subject of sodomy and silence. For although Count Byroff, the protagonist of the embedded narrative under analysis, is guilty of murder and not sodomy, his ensuing incarceration can be read as representative of contemporary ideology and law’s determination to silence sodomites. With criminal law determining what could and could not be written about sodomy, coupled with the law’s continual referral to sodomites as “the thing that cannot be named,” the accused sodomite was transformed into the very thing which society warned against. As such, read in the context of contemporary sodomy trials, Byroff's narrative becomes emblematic of the discursive strategy of debasement that accused sodomites experienced under law. Thus, within The Midnight Bell, the law, or violence, is used to dehumanize the individual until “death,” both real and metaphorical, offers the only possibility of reclaiming agency.
Cristiano Ragni, University of Perugia, Italy, cristianoragni@yahoo.it
From ‘ harlequins’ and ‘Anti-Christs’ to ‘just enemies’. Dealing with ‘aliens’ in Shakespeare’s England
In the troubled context of late-1590 Europe, England was struggling to define its own identity, and in order to do so, it had to create the idea of an ‘Otherness’ to compare itself with and distinguish itself from. This strategy resulted in being twofold: on the one hand, it aimed at clearing the social relationships with the many foreigners living within its borders; and on the other hand, it meant regulating the political relationship with the other Europeans – and the Spaniards in particular, England’s enemies par excellence.
The aim of this paper is thus twofold as well. In the first part, I would like to discuss the socio-juridical strategies carried out by Queen Elizabeth and her counsellors to define roles and behaviour of the refugees and merchants that had found shelter in London and there prospered. In the fragile context of a nationhood yet to be defined and within an unstable economic situation, the prosperity of these foreigners had actually given rise to feelings of xenophobia and resentment among the English, which resulted for example in the creation of a variety of widely-believed stereotypes. These ones were used and made famous on the stages by playwrights such as William Shakespeare and William Haughton.
In the second part, I will particularly highlight the undeniable influence of the modern theories on international law expressed in those very years by the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University. The idea of the ‘Others’ which emerges from his De Iure Belli (1598) clearly stems from the juridical, civil grounds on which the relations between the new-born nations should have been based. In so doing, he also dropped out all the religious contrasts invoked instead by the exponents of both Catholic and Protestant factions struggling in Europe at that time. Gentili especially focused on the case of Spain, and his widely-known ideas may have influenced Shakespeare himself when writing his Henry V (1599), the play on England’s king-hero and his just war against the French – a clear metaphor of the 1590s contrasts with the Spaniards.
SCULT19 Monday 1.9.2014 (A)14.30–16.30 Room A8, (B) 17.00–18.30 Room A8
F[R]ICTIONS OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE: REFRAMING “TERRORISM” IN LITERARY TEXTS AND FILMS
Convenors:
Carla Sassi, Università di Verona, Italy, carla.sassi@univr.it
Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, jeskeal@unizar.es
As argued by many analysts in recent years, the way in which terrorism is defined and represented by the media “is an intrinsic part of how the thing itself – ‚terrorism‘ – came to exist as a social phenomenon in the late 20th century” (Jackson et al. 2011). The aim of our seminar is to investigate literary and filmic fictions of terrorism which, like James Robertson’s reframing of the Lockerbie case in The Professor of Truth (2013), function as a site of deconstruction and critique of the totalising discourse of terrorism by staging the quest for truth and justice as a painstaking and laborious process of negotiation between conflicting narratives.
Participants
James Roberston, novelist, Scotland, UK, james@kettillonia.co.uk
The narrative is how you get to the right destination
The novelist Julian Barnes has said that, ‘Fiction is telling the truth by telling lies, as opposed to telling less of the truth by telling facts’. This is what I set out to do in The Professor of Truth, which is in part an attempt to challenge, through fiction, the ‘official’ narrative of the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, the subsequent investigation and trial, and the conviction of Abedlbaset al-Megrahi. But while this is the most obvious way to read the novel, I also chose to reduce or obscure its direct reference points to Lockerbie in order to explore the other territory into which the writing of fiction can take us – where character and plot lead to unplanned or unpredictable moments of conflict, reconciliation or redemption. Some of these ideas will be described in this presentation.
András Beck, University of Salamanca, Spain, andras@usal.es
From Gagarin Way to The People Next Door: the Theme of Terrorism before and after 9/11 in Two Scottish Plays
Less than two years separate the premières of Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way (July 2001) and Henry Adam’s The People Next Door (2003), yet their treatment of the theme of terrorism, central to both works, could not be more different. Whereas through the tragedy of 9/11, history gave a clear answer to Gagarin Way’s meditation on whether a random, local act of terrorism can have a global impact and change the direction of world history, in The People Next Door, terrorism is presented as a likely threat and thus a natural part of everyday reality and consciousness, affecting human relations even on the level of small communities, including family and neighbours. Besides their ability to juxtapose shameless humour and sometimes violent brutality, the joint discussion of these plays also demonstrates how information spreads in the context of globalisation, and how fast the post-9/11 consciousness infiltrated our daily lives.
Katherina Dodou, Dalarna University, Sweden, kdo@du.se
Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, 9/11 Comedy and the Understanding of Terrorism
9/11 is often viewed as having heralded a new world order based on what has been called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and marked by the ‘war against terror’. In response to this view, an ever-growing body of work on discourses of 9/11 has appeared. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines have come together in their ambition to contest a hegemonic post-9/11 definition of terrorism, as propagated by the Bush administration and promoted by the American news media, and to reveal the consequences of adhering to that definition. The paper addresses the capacity of the 9/11 novel to re-think terrorism and its effects – with specific regard to post-9/11 American civic life – in relation to Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006). Kalfus’s novel, which uses comedy as its mode of approaching 9/11, affords an interesting occasion to examine the literary engagement with discourses of terrorism. Locating the novel in a cultural climate in which humor is seen as a potential vehicle for political intervention, the paper proposes that Kalfus’s choice of register complicates dominant narratives of terrorism in post-9/11 America by bringing into relief the ways in which ‘patriotic’ definitions of 9/11 have sought to domesticate America’s citizenry.
Adriana Kiczkowski, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid Spain, adrianaky@madrid.uned.es
The Limits of Literature and Politics: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
In Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner carries out a reflection on the relationship between literature and politics, a narrative game that moves between poetic work and reality. The game ends up being strengthened by the double reference, poetic and political, that can be deduced from the title of the novel itself, that of the homonymous poem by John Ashbery and the presence of the terrorist attack of March 11, 2004 in Madrid. The novel is constructed on a game of truth and lies, on the possibilities that art can, or can't, be a reflection of reality, or that it's a tool for social transformation. Taking a critical stance with post-9/11 literature, Lerner expresses his opposition to the need to produce an immediate artistic response to every social, cultural, economic or political event. Presented here is a tension between a possible way of experiencing the relationship between politics and literature, between a memory constructed from the past (that of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939) and the dissolution of memory among groups of intellectuals and artists in contemporary Madrid. All of this leaves us within the deep tension between the criticism of diverse forms of artistic and intellectual deceit, and a hopeless defense of the need, in the end, for art.
Karen Bennett, University of Lisbon (ULICES), Portugal, karen.bennett@netcabo.pt
Refracting terrorism: reviews, translations and adaptations of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Islamic fundamentalism, and the terrorism that often accompanies it, is so remote from the Western capitalist mindset that it can only usually be grasped through a process of Othering, which emphasises difference and reinforces damaging stereotypes. One notable exception to this pattern is Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which traces the process of radicalization through the voice of a protagonist with whom the target reader is invited to identify. This story of how a young Princeton graduate becomes disaffected with the American dream in the wake of 9/11 is thus an attempt to counter the dominant narrative with another that emphasises similarity rather than difference, and which deconstructs the very process of stereotype construction through an unsettling interpellation of the reader. This paper focuses on some of the refractions that this novel has undergone since it first came out in 2007. It looks first at the reviews that it received in the Anglophone press around the world, before moving on to discuss the Portuguese, Spanish and French translations. Finally it focuses on Mira Nair’s 2012 film adaptation, which transformed this formalized literary work into a blockbuster-style thriller. To what extent is the novel’s destabilizing message mitigated or distorted in its passage through these various cultures of reception?
Juanjo Bermúdez de Castro, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, juanjobermudezdecastro@gmail.com
From The West Wing to Homeland: Representing Post 9/11 Terror on TV Series
In March 2001 FOX broadcast the first episode of the TV Series The Lone Gunmen which, by focusing its plot on a hijacked airliner flying straight towards the WTC, foretold in some fictional way the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Three weeks after the attacks, and four days before US declared war on Afghanistan, the NBC popular TV series The West Wing opened its third season airing a special episode in which the fictional Presidential staff indoctrinates a group of students – as well as the audience – in what was to be thought about this alleged “new” terrorism. Since then, TV series such as 24 and Homeland have explored the topic of Islamic terrorism in fiction with more or less success or objectivity. This paper traces a brief history of the representation of terrorism on television in the last decade and analyzes in which ways such TV representation has changed or even evolved over the last years in line with the historical events that have occurred and thus modified our perspective on the matter.
Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza, Spain, jeskeal@unizar.es
Pictures of Lockerbie: An indirect approach to the remains of the terrorist attack
For the creation of the book entitled Looking for Lockerbie (2008) a group of students from Syracuse University decided to fly to Lockerbie to see the remnants of the terrorist bombing of PanAm 103 with their own eyes. There, they took pictures and some notes of what had happened back then. One of those students has stated that this experience provided him a salient look at the other side: “I had never stopped to think about how the same crash affected those in the town in which the plane landed”. This simple thought reveals a very interesting point: when the students were taking pictures at Lockerbie, a process of negotiation between the different narratives and points of view on the attack was taking place. The aim of my paper is thus to analyse those processes of negotiation between the different narratives and points of view on the attack, and to see if they can enhance resilience or other working-through processes that may help people in these circumstances. Besides, if contrasted and compared, this amalgam might offer us a reality that is closer to truth, by integrating the perspectives of many more people, from diverse places and backgrounds and with different experiences.
Colin S. Clark, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, scoczech@gmail.com
Art, Truth and Politics in the Novels of Iain (M) Banks
Violence and Terror are ubiquitous in the novels of Iain Banks, addressing as he does their recondite and overt use in individual and national narratives in Scottish life. Terror(ism) in Banks narratives is usually instrumental in maintaining the „authorly rupture“ he predicates his literary identity and narrative contracts upon. It is intriguing therefore to pursue the treatment of terror(ism) into the cultural and national worldmaking project that modern Scotland is the site of, and examine the manner in which Banks extrapolates both banal and exceptional incidences – seen as threads in national and imperial narratives of history, historicity and politics. Banks' sci-fi is concerned with speculative statecraft and uses intelligent cultural satire to deconstruct meta-narratives with the aim of highlighting agency, and is acutely sensitive to the shadow systems that constitute our communal existence. His mainstream novels are often concerned with „bridges“; connective tissue between fragmented aspects of the self, dissociated memories often estranged from contemporary realities through collective or personal trauma. Banks' oeuvre represents a unique attempt to engage with many of the manifestations of violence and terror in modern Scottish literature and as a survey/satire of the lexicon of state hypocrisy concerning the employment/sponsorship and neglect of this phenomenon.
Carla Sassi, Università di Verona, Italy, carla.sassi@univr.it
Re-Placing Terror: The Professor of Truth by James Roberston
James Roberston’s novel investigates the nexus between truth, trauma and justice in the wake of a fictional terrorist attack by re-telling the complex human and legal story of the Lockerbie case. While the ‘real’ Lockerbie case remains unnamed, the novel focuses, as announced in the title, on the quest for ‘objective truth’ in the face of loss and trauma staged by a single individual (the father and husband of two of the bombing’s victims), as much as on a wider meditation on the nature of truth and of its problematic (literary) representation. Deeply related to this meditation is Robertson’s central narrative strategy – the defamiliarising, fictional re-placement of the Lockerbie case. My paper will explore such strategy, with special reference to the novel’s complex dialectics between antagonistic places (global versus local, foreign versus domestic) and spaces (public versus private) as an effective way of re-placing the very notion of terror/ism.
SCULT20 Sunday 31.8.2014 11.00–13.00 Room A2
“1914”
Convenors:
John Mullen, Université Paris-Est Crétéil, France, john.mullen@wanadoo.fr
Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang.Goertschacher@sbg.ac.at
Few dates have the terrible resonance as does “1914”. On its hundredth anniversary, we propose to focus on the events, images, memories and commemorations of this date. Choosing the one specific year allows us to look both at the experience and meaning of the last months of peace, at the arrival of war, and at the gradual realizations of the depth of the changes involved. We hope for a wide range of proposals; preference will be given to those which examine less well-covered areas of culture, history, and civilization.
Himment Umunc, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey, umunch@baskent.edu.tr
Lawrence of Arabia: T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt
Following the outbreak of World War I, T.E. Lawrence, also dubbed “Lawrence of Arabia” later on, was appointed in December 1914 to the British military headquarters in Cairo to serve as a staff officer for cartography and intelligence. Obviously, this was a suitable mission for him, since he was well versed in Arabic and had a working knowledge of the geography of the region. Indeed, while stationed in Egypt, he was not only involved in intelligence work but also commissioned for a cartographical survey of the Sinai Peninsula prior to the British offensive under General Allenby against the Ottoman forces in the area. In the meantime, as part of the British war aims in the Middle East, the British government was resolved to benefit from a strategic cooperation with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who had already been making overtures through a series of personal correspondences with Sir Henry McMahon, the newly-appointed High Commissioner in Egypt, for independence from Ottoman rule as well as for the establishment of a new Arab state. So, what has historically been called “the Arab Revolt” began in June 1916 as a guerrilla campaign or asymmetric warfare against the Ottoman forces and installations in Arabia, Palestine and Syria.
As of October 1916, Lawrence was actively involved in this campaign and played a leading role in it not only as a consultant to Sharif Hussein’s commanding son Faisal but also as a tactician and fighter. As can be understood from his memoirs Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is a detailed account of his involvement in the Arab Revolt, Lawrence, personally motivated by a romantic perception of medieval chivalry and a fanciful Arab fanaticism, came to regard the campaign, on the one hand, as a chivalric mission that would bring him immortality for his heroic part in the achievement of Arab independence and, on the other, as a strategic opportunity for the realization of the British war aims in the Middle East. Hence, this paper is an analysis and discussion of Lawrence’s double perception of the significance and objectives of the Arab Revolt, with reference essentially to his Seven Pillars of Wisdom and letters as well as within the context of the British war aims in World War I in the Middle East.
Amy D. Wells, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, France, amy.wells@unicaen.fr
Gertrude Stein’s 1914 Combat: Publishing Portraits in Tender Buttons
The International Exhibition of Modern Art, or the Armory Show, opened on February 17, 1913, in New York. It “surprised, jolted and offended” the public in what is considered to have been the most revelatory and impacting art show of the century for both Americans and Europeans alike. Reflecting the opening of the art world to women, over 50 female artists were included in the show, and there were at least two other women who considered themselves a part of the show’s success: Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein. Stein’s portraitures, which attempt to capture in writing what Cubism does in painting, tie her to the Armory Show and led to her first paid publication.
The following year, World War I broke out with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. By that time, Stein was leading an artistic battle by publishing her collection of word portraits, Tender Buttons, in which the meanings of common words are challenged. Going beyond this literary work, Stein also participated in war efforts from France, receiving the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française in 1922.
This paper will cross Stein’s artistic combats with her military combats to understand what evolutions the 1914 experience brought to Modernist women’s writing and publishing. We will specifically analyze the word portrait innovation of Tender Buttons and how this artistic approach is representative of the changing geopolitical scene.
Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg,Austria, wolfgang.goertschacher@sbg.ac.at
Austrian Authors and 1914
This paper will consider the events of 1914 as they are memorialised in (short) fiction, non-fiction, and poetry by writers who lived in Austria-Hungary at the time (e.g. Georg Trakl, Hermann Bahr, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, Peter Rosegger), especially focusing on texts that have not been translated into the English language. From an angle of particular, personal interest, I shall consider how artists and authors from my native city of Linz, such as Julius Zerzer, Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti, as well as journalists in the newspapers of the city witnessed the pre-War events and reacted to the declaration of war.
John Mullen, Université Paris-Est Créteil, France, john.mullen@wanadoo.fr
How did the British popular music industry react to the outbreak of war?
The war dawned on a powerful music industry which was determined to continue to show its respectability through voluble patriotism, but within which its different actors also scrambled to position themselves in the new context, in order to ensure that the war would not harm them commercially and might even improve their profitability. Whether artistes or theatre chains, songwriters or record companies, each actor was obliged to take into account this new factor which added itself to the multiple existing constraints of their professions. This paper will evaluate these constraints and the weight of the new context, and will also attempt to judge the alleged jingoism of music halls of the time, by examining it within a much wider corpus of the songs of 1914, of which the vast majority did not speak of the war.
Flavien Bardet, Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, flavienbardet@yahoo.fr
War, Peace and Globalisation: Angell, Mahan and the lead-up to 1914
“The best way to make war impossible is to make victory certain,” or so Winston Churchill explained in an oft-quoted memorandum of 1912 to the German Chancellor. A promising Liberal politician, Churchill was held at the time as upholding the spirit of armaments that led to the balance of terror of the post-World War II era. Before the Great War however, Churchill’s own special brand of Liberal creed, made of old aristocratic feelings of racial superiority and of a strong belief that the Victorian party was indeed still on, was seen as a mere given of British foreign policy. This sea-borne nationalism upholding power politics as a pillar of imperial success started to crumble in the last years of peace, when it was realized that German might was not to be bought out: all of a sudden, writings appeared that held that international trade dealings had rendered the main European economies interconnected and that, consequently, war had become, maybe not “impossible”, but at least highly improbable.
Among the prophets of peace, the name of Nobel-Prize winner Norman Angell stands out, as he was considered in the pacifist ranks to be the very soul of internationalism: an internationalism that had not much in common with the working class ethics of people like Jaurès in France however, since Angell believed in the peace-making effect of global commerce, in an alliance of economic interests that could only make for peace, in the faceless and de-nationalised private interests of industrials and capitalists: traders of all countries unite!, in short.
Among the prophets of war, at the other end of the political spectrum, the American Admiral Alfred Mahan, in a series of articles published in 1910–1912, attacked the strictly economic version of Angell’s pacifism. Claiming that even the German and Italian socialists had turned their backs to internationalism and had been converted to the tenets of the nationalists by the turn of the century, Mahan remained persuaded that power politics, faith in one’s national identity and military might only could unite the peoples of Europe. Clearly, a European war was envisaged, but Mahan tried to find reasons to unite European powers in a common cause: a common external enemy thus had to be found.
Mahan and Angell both perfectly understood the dangers facing Europe: while the latter offered peaceful modern solutions for the 20th century-man, the former relied on century-old answers to international threats. Economics to bind together the elites of Europe in peace, or armaments to bind together the peoples of Europe in war, such were in fine the ins and outs of the debate. Between an unfettered globalised trade benefitting the West and an arms race weakening the East, Europe finally refused to choose, heading right for the mass suicide of 1914.
Trevor Harris, University of Tours, France, trevor.harris@univ-tours.fr
Y Drafod and Welsh Patagonian reaction to the early months of war
Among the millions of emigrants from the British Isles in the course of the nineteenth century, what was disparagingly referred to as the “Celtic Fringe” was always strongly represented. In addition to the vast Irish diaspora, there were appreciable numbers of wandering Scots. Welsh (like Cornish) emigration to the British Empire was, necessarily, on a much smaller scale. Pushed or pulled overseas by economic factors, Welsh emigrants also clung – more tightly still than many of their Celtic neighbours – to their language and culture. Indeed, a profound rejection of Anglicisation incited some Welsh immigrants to look for an un-English place in which to settle, outside the empire, beyond the reach of interfering English hands. Such a place they had found, in southern Argentina: a remote place where Welsh culture could survive and, it was hoped, even flourish anew… This paper, however, through a study of the principal newspaper of the Welsh Patagonian colony, Y Drafod, shows that at the outbreak of the Great War the Welsh colonists, far from rejecting the English- speaking world or the British Empire, often rallied to the cause, protested their loyalty, enlisting to fight with British and Empire regiments. Rather than consummating an estrangement from Britain among the Welsh colonists living on the distant, arid pampas, the year 1914 seems, in many cases, to have rekindled a spirit of imperial pride.
SOCIAL PROGRAMME
SOCIAL PROGRAMME FOR CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS AND ACCOMPANYING PERSONS
Free guided tours of Košice for groups of 20–30 people are offered on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. These can be booked by conference participants and accompanying persons during the conference at the Registration and conference information centre.
A reading by James Robertson, a Scottish writer, will take place in the House of Arts on Friday at 17.00 and will be followed by the Concert and Welcome Dinner for conference participants and accompanying persons.
The Conference Barbecue for conference participants and accompanying persons is scheduled for Monday at 18.30 at the Rectorate.
OPTIONAL PRE-CONFERENCE AND CONFERENCE TRIPS FOR CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS AND ACCOMPANYING PERSONS
NEW! FINAL OFFER OF CONFERENCE TRIPS!
Based on the existing bookings some of the trips were cancelled and we offer the conference participants and their accompanying persons options listed below. Please, contact Mrs. Gabriela Sujanova in case you want to change your existing booking / make a new booking at <gabriela.sujanova@progress.eu.sk>. The number of places for trips to be booked at the time of registration will be limited.
TRIP NO.1, 31.8. at 10.00 from Hilton Hotel
Levoca (UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Spisský Hrad (a medieval castle with a museum) – EUR30 per person.
TRIP NO.3, 30.8. at 10.00 from Hilton Hotel
Bardejov (UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Bardejovske Kupele (a spa and an open air folk museum of a Slovak village with a wooden church) – EUR20 per person.
TRIP NO. 6, 30.8. at 10 from Hilton Hotel
Trip through mountain villages – Tatranská Lomnica, Starý Smokovec, Strbské Pleso (a lake) – short walk and a visit to Belianska jaskyna (a cave) – EUR40 per person.
TRIP NO. 10 30.8. at 19.00 from Hilton Hotel, 31.8. at 19.00 from Hilton Hotel, 2.9. at 16.00 from Hilton Hotel
Visit to the Slovak Tokay wine cellars – trip to Ostrozovic Winery on Saturday, Sunday or Tuesday – EUR50 per person.
TRIPS NO. 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 CANCELLED
Conference participants and accompanying persons are offered several one-day trips and walks before and during the conference (from 25 August to 2 September). The contact person is Ms. Gabriela Sujanova (gabriela.sujanova@progress.eu.sk).
HOW TO BOOK OPTIONAL TRIPS
Bookings can be made online by filling in and submitting the Accommodation and Optional Trips Booking Form here. Once your booking has been received, you will be contacted by Ms. Gabriela Sujanov a with confirmation of your reservation and details of the amount to pay.
We recommend you to book your optional trips as soon as possible, before the end of June 2014 at the latest.
We reserve the right to cancel trips when fewer than 20 people are booked. If your preferred trip is cancelled you will be offered the choice of an alternative trip or a refund.
OPTIONAL TRIPS
TRIP NO.1
Levoča (UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Spišský Hrad (a medieval castle with a museum) – €30 per person. The fee covers transport by coach, a guide and entrance fees.
http://slovakia.travel/en/levoca-1
http://slovakia.travel/…-hrad-castle
TRIP NO.2
Stará Ľubovňa (a castle and an open air folk museum of Slovak village), Pieniny National Park, Červený Kláštor (a monastery), the Dunajec river trips on rafts – 40 EUR per person. The fee covers transport by coach, a guide, entrance fees, and trip on a raft.
http://slovakia.travel/…tara-lubovna
http://slovakia.travel/…k-of-pieniny
http://slovakia.travel/…veny-klastor
http://slovakia.travel/en/wood-rafting
TRIP NO.3
Bardejov (UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Bardejovské Kúpele (a spa and an open air folk museum of a Slovak village with a wooden church) – €20 per person. The fee covers transport by coach, a guide and entrance fees.
http://slovakia.travel/en/bardejov
http://slovakia.travel/…-of-bardejov
TRIP NO.4
Medieval wooden churches of Eastern Slovakia – €40 per person. The fee covers transport by coach, a guide and entrance fees.
http://slovakia.travel/…den-churches
(click on FILTERS and select Kosicky kraj and Presovsky kraj to view the wooden churches of Eastern Slovakia)
Trips to Vysoké Tatry (The High Tatras mountains):
http://slovakia.travel/…-high-tatras
TRIP NO.5
Tatranská Lomnica (a mountain village, a museum of skiing history) and cable car trip to Skalnaté Pleso (a tarn) /Lomnický štít (the second highest peak) – €60 per person. The fee covers transport by coach, a guide and cable car tickets.
http://slovakia.travel/…nska-lomnica
http://slovakia.travel/…-high-tatras
http://www.vt.sk/…alnate-tarn/
TRIP NO. 6
Trip through mountain villages – Tatranská Lomnica, Starý Smokovec, Štrbské Pleso (a lake) – short walk and a visit to Belianska jaskyňa (a cave) – €40 per person. The fee covers transport by coach, a guide and cave tickets.
http://www.vt.sk/…ska-lomnica/
http://slovakia.travel/…nska-lomnica
http://slovakia.travel/…trbske-pleso
http://www.vt.sk/…rbske-pleso/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
http://slovakia.travel/…jaskyna-cave
TRIP NO. 7
Starý Smokovec (a mountain village) and ground cable car trip to Hrebienok – one-way, back on foot (30 minutes down the slope on a paved surface – light walk) – €40 per person. The fee covers transport by coach, a guide and ground cable car tickets.
http://slovakia.travel/…ary-smokovec
http://slovakia.travel/…d-funiculars
Hiking trips to Slovenský Raj (the Slovak Paradise Park):
http://slovakia.travel/…lovensky-raj
TRIP NO.8
Tomašovský výhľad – for ordinary hikers – €20 per person. The fee covers transport by coach and a guide.
http://slovakia.travel/…lovensky-raj
TRIP NO. 9
Suchá Belá waterfalls – for experienced hikers – €20 per person. The fee covers transport by coach and a guide.
http://slovakia.travel/…lovensky-raj
Suchá Belá – A Guide to the Natural Wonders
http://stare.daphne.sk/…dacka_AN.pdf
Special offer:
TRIP NO. 10
Visit to the Slovak Tokay wine cellars – trip to Ostrožovič Winery on Saturday, Sunday or Tuesday – €50 per person. The fee covers transport by coach, tour of the cellars, 3-course dinner, and wine tasting.
http://slovakia.travel/…ion-of-tokaj
http://slovakia.travel/en/fotogaleria?…
Payment method
There are two ways of making payments.
1. payment by bank transfer to the conference bank account:
Any fees charged by remitting banks are to be paid by the conference participants. It is the responsibility of the sender to ensure that the conference receives the full amount. Any amount deducted by the banks for charges will be charged in cash on the first day of the conference.
Bank details for transfers:
Beneficiary name: Progress CA s.r.o.
Beneficiary address: Krivá 18, 04001 Košice, Slovakia
Bank name: Sberbank Slovensko, a. s. Košice
Bank address: Mlynská 29, 043 73 Košice, Slovakia
Account number: 4350225857/3100
IBAN: SK 14 31 00 0000 0043 5022 5857
SWIFT/BIC CODE : LUBA SK BX
Please ensure that your transfer is identifiable by including the message ‘ESSE 14’ and your name, e.g. ‘ESSE 14 John Smith’.
2. payment by credit card
To pay by credit card, please download THE CREDIT CARD AUTHORIZATION FORM here and complete it, ensuring that you sign it. Note that a 5% credit card fee must be added to the total. Send a copy of your form by fax (+421–55–680–6156) or as a scanned file attachment by e-mail (gabriela.sujanova@progress.eu.sk).
Receipts
Reception of payment will be confirmed by e-mail. Printed receipts will be issued at the registration desk.
INSURANCE
Please note that neither Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, nor SKASE, nor ESSE can accept liability for travel, accommodation, living or other expenses incurred by lecturers, convenors, co-convenors, or those invited to participate in round tables, seminars, PhD sessions or posters.
All conference participants should be aware that neither Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, nor SKASE, nor ESSE have or will accept any liability whatsoever for any damage or injury to visitors, to the university or to property, however such damage or injury may be caused. Delegates are expected to be fully insured by their own institutions or through their personal insurance for personal health, accident/property coverage (also against claims made by third parties) during their participation in the Conference.