Sektionen
- 7: Abstracts
Abstracts
Sektion I
"Defining the Human: Man-Animal Relations in Literature"
Montag, 24. September 2007
Plenarvortrag
Harriet Ritvo (14.00-15.00):
"The Animal Turn in British Studies"
It is only recently that literary scholars and other humanists have begun to take the relationship between people and other animals seriously as a topic for research and interpretation - one that can reveal a great deal about human culture, as well as about the experience of the non-humans who come into contact with us. This expansion of interest parallels a much longer and more gradual expansion of interest among scientists and social scientists, and of sympathy in Anglophone culture at large. In particular, there has been an increasing willingness to see the human beings as part of a zoological continuum. I will offer an overview of these trends, and then illustrate them with reference to several examples drawn from the Victorian period in Britain.
Jürgen Meyer (16.30-17.15):
"'Italianate Englishmen' and Other Renaissance Chimaeras"
The image of anatomical hybrids is fostered by a growing interest in the body during the Early Modern Age, the human-animal interface being topical in Renaissance culture. My paper discusses four possible types of 'mimicry' in (non-)fiction.
1) Mapping the human body, even such progressive anatomist-surgeons as Vesalius in his De corporis humani fabrica septem libri (1543) forged a number of illustrations of human organs using animal material, thus blurring the boundaries of human and animal physique in what may be defined as 'pictoral mimicry' - a common practice in the Galenic anatomy which Vesalius tried so hard to improve.
2) Ascham's The Scholemaster (1568/70) throws a tantrum at those Englishmen who (re-)turn 'Italianated'/alienated, turning into monstrous chimaeras by 'cultural mimicry'. As a Protestant, Ascham forgets his humanism and denies English Catholics both their status as educated subjects and as human beings.
3) Sidney begins his Defence of Poesy (1582/95) with an Italianate anecdote, in the course of which the speaker almost forms the wish of becoming a horse, if it were not for his down-to-earth attitude about remaining where, and what, he is ('self-reflexive mimicry'). His initial implication of Pegasus, mythical patron of high-flying fiction, stands in sharp contrast to the final allegory of England as explicit "stepmother" to poetry.
4) Baldwin's Beware the Cat (1552/70), following Vesalius' treatise in chronology, is a prose narrative of a persona who mixes a potion that allows him to comprehend the cat noise around him, and thus to understand that animals are sly but (arguably) reasonable creatures. The text invites a reading as an allegorical satire against Cat(holic)s, employing a representational mode of 'psychedelic mimicry'.
Thus, the discussion of 'humanoids' in Renaissance texts is situated in the controversies over such questions as 1) where, in the great chain of beings, 'man' can be located ("angel" or "animal"), 2) which are the cultural denominators for being (or not being) an Englishman or, for that matter, a genuine human ("nature" or "nurture"), and 3) in what way English 'poesy' can be fostered to become a valuable body in literature ("romance" or "realism").
Andreas Höfele (17.15-18.00):
"Staging the Species Boundary in Shakespeare's Theatre"
In what we might call the perceptual topography or, to use a term coined by the Russian structuralist Yuri Lotman, the semiosphere of early modern London, the playhouse, the bear garden, and the site of public execution generate a powerfully synoptic vision. Horizontally linked with the other contemporary forms of public spectacle and vertically placed on a sliding scale between heaven and hell, Shakespeare's stage thrives on an economy of endlessly fungible signifiers which this symbolic order of space offers. The paper will explore how this economy provides the frame within which the early modern theatre negotiates "the place of the human."
Dienstag, 25. September 2007
Virginia Richter (11.30-12.15):
"Moving Machines, Suffering Creatures: Animals in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture"
Joseph Wright of Derby's painting Bird in an Airpump (1768) depicts a group of spectators, of different ages and sexes, watching an experiment performed on a small bird. The animal's lifeless body, placed in the vacuum produced by the eponymous airpump, demonstrates the effects of the lack of oxygen on the organism. The glances of the spectators mingle scientific curiosity with pity for the expiring creature. Wright's painting thus epitomizes the contradictory functions of animals in eighteenth-century culture: In Descartes' definition, animals are pure matter, devoid of both reason and feeling, and therefore uniquely suitable objects of experimentation. By contrast, philosophers of sentiment like Rousseau und Shaftesbury see animals as sentient beings and fellow-creatures; their ability to feel, and consequently, to suffer, renders them a gauge of true humanity - man's ability to feel empathy. In literary texts, the emotional refinement of characters is often shown through their compassion with dumb creatures, as in the case of Sterne's sentimental travellers mourning dead asses and captive birds (A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy). The culture of sensibility thus prepares the way for the nineteenth-century discourse of anti-vivisectionism and animal protection, while Enlightenment interest in science places the animal body at the centre of an unprecedented theatre of cruelty - the experimental laboratory. This contradictory take on the animal body as object of science/object of pity is accompanied by continuous speculations about the central Cartesian difference marker - rational speech. In inquiries about animals' capacity to acquire language, from Locke to Lord Monboddo, the difference between humans and animals - and man's uniqueness within God's creation - is at stake. - The eighteenth century, in all its discursive polyvalence, is a period central to modern conceptions of human-animal relations; however, so far this aspect of eighteenth-century culture has been under-researched and deserves more critical attention.
Greta Olson (12.25-13.00):
"Evolving Images of Beasts in Eighteenth-Century Britain"
Thinking about animals forces us to question our status as humans. Recently, philosophers like Peter Singer have argued that the traditional assumption that non-human beings are inherently inferior is analogous to the poor thinking that has informed racist as well as sexist attitudes. This 'speciesism' needs to be overridden. The roots of animal liberation philosophy can be found in eighteenth-century literary fiction, science, philosophy, and law. The Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham reasoned that if animals can suffer, and clearly they can, then they deserve rights and protection just as humans do. Increasing moral injunctions and laws against cruelty towards animals were based on the growing conviction that animals were sentient beings. To torture animals signified not only a lack of civility on the torturer's part but also the potential instigation of other forms of violence. Analogously, arguments developed about the need to discontinue public executions, flogging, and pillaring, because such practices incited certain types of individuals to perform other acts of cruelty. Hogarth's engravings, the "Four Stages of Cruelty" (1750/51) depict how childhood brutality to animals will lead to vicious criminality in adulthood and be repaid by hanging, anatomization, and finally having one's entrails eaten by a canine. Similarly, the psychological sadism enacted by Samuel Richardson's rake/villain Lovelace against Clarissa is in part explained by childhood propensity for hunting and killing small animals. And Caleb Williams is pitied in prison because he is being held - without bedding and chains - in conditions worse than a dog. Yet Robinson Crusoe equates "savages" and "cannibals" with wild beasts, and imposes rule over them on his island, and vicious criminals were frequently compared with beasts in contemporary legal texts and debates.
In this presentation I consider evolving contradictory attitudes towards animals during the long eighteenth century in legal, scientific and literary texts to argue that the elevation of animals to the sentient did not necessarily bring a betterment of inter-human relations. Forbidding animal (and human) torture and bloodsports so as to save 'dangerous' humans from viciousness meant that those designated as 'dangerous' were assigned to an ontological category inferior to that which had formally been considered brute. The process was akin to early racialist theories that insisted that blacks were more like apes than white Europeans.
Mittwoch, 26. September 2007
Oliver Lindner (10.30-11.15):
"'Stout Competitors': Man and Animals in British Science Fiction, 1880-1930"
Ants, Bacteria, Bees and Birds, Apes and
Monkeys – early British science fiction literature teems with animals. From
H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau
(1896) with its depiction of a scientist's efforts to humanize animals onwards,
science fiction has questioned existing boundaries and presuppositions of the
man-animal relationship. Unlike other genres of literature, science fiction is
not bound to the ties of realistic description, and therefore it provides a
fruitful field of speculations on the future state of mankind, its place within
the universe and also its relation to the animal world. With its potency of
reshaping the relationship between man and animal, British science fiction of
the period 1880-1930, particularly in the wake of biological science and
evolutionary theory, has sketched many ways of interaction between man and
animal and thereby focused on topics such as subjugation/domination,
progress/degeneration or instinct/reason.
From
the extinction of animal species in W.D. Hay's early utopian novel Three Hundred Years Hence (1881) and O.
Stapledon's Last and First Men
(1930), the re-emergence of animals as dangerous force in the post-apocalyptic
scenery of R. Jefferies's novel After
London; or, Wild England (1885), the use of animals as domestic servants as
dpecited in P. Greg's Across the Zodiac
(1881) or man's overthrow by a generation of large and intelligent ants in A.L.
Green's short story "The Captivity of the Professor" (1901) or in the
remarkable novel The Polyphemes
(1906), written by the prominent British physician F. Hernamann-Johnson,
science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals a
wide range of possibilities.
The
paper will argue that from the 1880s onwards the function of animals in science
fiction literature has increasingly changed from early portrayals of strange
animals as exotic ingredients to a futuristic setting or servant-like domestics
to the depiction of animals as competitive species that challenge man's
dominance on earth and create their own societies and structures by developing
intellectually equal or even superior modes of thought and existence. Whereas the
dominance of mankind had been exclusively threatened by extraterrestrial beings
in early science fiction, such as H.G. Well's pathbreaking The War of the Worlds (1897), from the early twentieth century
onwards animal species are also used as powerful competitors questioning
mankind's superior position both on earth and within the larger universe. The
paper will use an interdisciplinary approach by setting major developments
concerning the relationship of man and animals in science fiction literature against
the backdrop of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates in
zoological discourse and evolutionary theory.
"'I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters. I never saw one alive before': The Cultural Construct and Significance of the Unicorn in Nineteenth- and Twentieth/Twenty-First-Century Texts"
With the exception of the dragon, probably no imaginary animal has had a greater appeal to human beings than the unicorn. For more than two thousand years it has acquired a range of symbolic meanings, and its legend has many different facets in various cultures from classical antiquity to the Western world of the present. Thus it will be the concern of my paper to trace the cultural significance of the unicorn in such different texts of the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first centuries as Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie, C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, Theodore Sturgeon's "The Silken-Swift", Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn, Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn and Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter series in order to throw some light on the following questions: How did authors construct this imaginary animal? Which cultural values (such as courage, wisdom, virtue, nobility or rather pride, wrath and destructive forces) does it symbolise in which cultural contexts? Does the unicorn symbolise either good or evil or does its significance remain ambiguous? Could one even go so far as to assume that its strength represents the invincible power of Christ respectively the destructive power of Satan? As it will turn out, the symbolism connected with the cultural construct of this imaginary animal throughout the centuries is so complex and meaningful that its appeal will undoubtedly continue for a long time to come – and surely until Münster 2007.
Beatrix Hesse (12.00-12.45):
"Learning from Animals: T.H. White's King Arthur"
In The
Sword in the Stone, the first volume of his tetralogy on the King Arthur
myth, The Once and Future King (rev.
ed. 1958), T.H. White introduces a new variation of the traditional motif of
man-animal metamorphosis. In order to teach him about the various forms of
political organization, his tutor Merlyn successively transforms the youthful
Arthur into a perch, a merlin, an ant and a wild goose. This idea is clearly
indebted to evolutionary theory in general and, more particularly, to the
evolving discipline of ethology. The theory of evolution provided a scientific
justification for the time-honoured tradition of comparing different types of
state and government to the organization of communal life among animals. Apart
from his own observations of ants, birds of prey and wild geese, White drew
upon studies by Julian Huxley, W.H. Hudson, Auguste Forel and Konrad Lorenz.
Among writers of fiction, White acknowledged the influence of Selma Lagerlöf
and Rudyard Kipling. But while earlier treatments of the man-animal dichotomy
had tended to treat it as a binary opposition with man defined by what
distinguishes him from animals, White deliberately distances himself from this
technique by turning Arthur into the ideal representative of humanity precisely
by acknowledging his kinship with other species.
In
my paper, I will sketch White's evolutionary philosophy as expressed in The Once and Future King and its
intended fifth volume, The Book of Merlyn
(which, although completed in 1941, was only published posthumously in 1977),
and examine the various influences of literary sources and textbooks on
ethology consulted by White. The second part of my paper will follow up the
conspicuous parallels between The Book of
Merlyn and Konrad Lorenz' Das
sogenannte Böse (1963) noticed by François Gallix and Sylvia Townsend
Warner. These similarities are the more remarkable for the fact that, due to
dates of composition and publication, neither of the two books can actually
have influenced the other. In the case of The
Book of Merlyn and Das sogenannte
Böse, literature and science closely approach each other – however, the two
books met with a widely different reception: While Lorenz was awarded the Nobel
Prize, White's transformations of Arthur into various animals were turned into
a Disney movie. In fiction, representations of animals seem to be unavoidably
associated with children's literature.
Sektion II
"The Documentary Turn"
Montag, 24. September 2007
Gerd Bayer (16.30-17.15):
"Fake Films As Media Criticism"
Even though mockumentary films represent a rather recent sub-genre of the history of cinema, they already come in a number of different shapes and flavours. Some simply try to amuse, others aim for more parodistic effects. Some allude in a reverential manner to earlier films, others introduce a more skeptical note into the discourse on the role of cinematic texts. This paper will concentrate on the latter variety, on mockumentary films that provide a commentary, through their parody, on the state and role of visuall media. Since mockery and parody rely heavily on the delivery of precise verbal gestures, the question of style is of prime concern to an understanding of the subtle workings of mockumentaries. Whereas documentary films claim to present to their viewers real events, mockumentaries refer less directly to the everyday reality of their audience. The precise relationship between the filmic text and its purportedly genuine object is determined by its level and degree of artificiality, that is, by its artfulness. This paper, then, will outline some of the aesthetic strategies used in such different mockumentaries as Woody Allen's Zelig (1983), Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap (1984), Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde's Man Bites Dog (1992), as well as Peter Jackson and Costa Botes's Forgotten Silver (1997), commenting also on the films by Christopher Guest. The machinery for creating both the humor and the criticism inherent in mockumentary films rests on a stylistic program that emphasizes the constructedness of film, its artifice, with the intention of glossing over its artificiality. In an ironic twist on viewers' expectations, mockumentaries make use of the mediatory qualities of film for heightening the alleged veracity of their content, or rather, for emphasiszing the unavoidable status of film as a mediation and therefore interpretation of reality. I argue, first of all, that the ostentatious use of artifice in mockumentary films functions as a means to lessen the sense of artificiality usually attached to cinematic texts and, in a second step, that this emphasis on the mediality of film derives from the metanarrative criticism of mockumentaries.
Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier (17.15-18.00):
"'Many a weary mile have I gone with Herr Guillaume at my side': Michael Frayn's Democracy as Docudrama"
While the freedom of expression in journalism has suffered from the row about the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, the ancient medium theatre is becoming the place to freely negotiate political issues. The new genre of verbatim theatre has gained importance over the past years: "[People] come to the fun palace, to the dream house, to hear the truth", as director Samuel West puts it. In an article in The Guardian, Lyn Gardner claims that verbatim theatre is the new journalism, but that the journalistic style of the play Guantanamo offers only black and white, while Michael Frayn's Democracy permits the exploration of grey areas. Interestingly enough, Frayn's play Democracy (2000), which depicts the rise and fall of Willy Brandt and focuses on the role of GDR spy Günter Guillaume, has won even greater acclaim by its continued comparison with verbatim theatre. Though plays like Democracy were not initiated by people who were personally involved in the historic events presented, their object is likewise to make history come alive, to physically represent anew what is past but has survived in oral reports, books, journalistic reports, etc. History plays are especially interesting insofar as they represent "true history", but can actually never be "true", because they are only the reproduction of a reproduction (cf. Foucault). Gardner's criticism of Guantanamo highlights the question of how much factuality and realism a theatre play needs. This paper argues that actually little is needed to achieve an impact with a documentary-style drama when the author can rely on the audience's knowledge, memory and imagination. With only the help of the actors, lights, noises, chairs and a table, Democracy producs the image of a certain medium as well as images known from a certain medium. Without aiming at historic verisimilitude, moments of political importance can be reproduced, cause great compassion and stimulate the discussion of current issues. What the audience experiences is a new perception of something extraordinary that they are already familiar with from other media. I would like to call this an "intermedial déjà-vu", which is achieved by the reproduction of historical events in a "magnified" version or as if they were acted in "slow motion" (cf. Benjamin). Thus Frayn brings about a documentary aesthetics that is at the same time an "intermedial synaesthetics". Due to its strong intermediality, the old medium theatre conjoins well with new media and non-fictive elements. The increasing hybridisation of the theatre emphasises the irretrievable character of historical moments and each theatre performance, nourishes the cult of images (cf. Kamper), but also sharpens the mind for current political discussions.
Dienstag, 25. September 2007
Martin
Doll (11.30-12.15):
"'Documents' from The Atlas Group Archive - Of a
Witness Telling His Story/History: 'Hostage: The Bachar Tapes'"
At Documenta 11 a multiplicity of documentary works were exhibited. Thus one could get the impression that artist are awarded the ability to depict historical and social phenomena in a more reliable way. Against this background, Walid Ra'ad showed his project 'The Atlas Group', though his works are characterised by not clamining an authenticity of the representations based on a special artistic gaze but by questioning certain forms of aesthetization, i.e. illustration of historical reality in general. However, I want to focus on Ra'ad's lecture performance The Loudest Muttering is Over. Documents from The Atlas Group Archive as a case study. In this performance he presents his works: several forged 'files' of the Lebanese Civil War. On the one hand, he puts found photographs from newpaper archives in a narrative context. On the other hand, he feigns historical materials with a link to well-known events and allegedly made available by eyewitnesses: videos and notebooks with commented photographs. Thereby the audience's background knowledge, primarily derived from the mass media, is used, recontextualised and through the uncovering of the fake - different pieces of information become contradictory or Ra'ad reveals it overtly to the audience during the discussion, which is itself manipulated by briefed audience members - finally rendered doubtful. Sometimes culturally determined previous knowledge of the percipients is demonstrated: The 'witness' of the Bachar Tapes - a pretended, sixth Kuwaitian hostage among the five well-known Americans durning the Hostage Crises 1985 and the Iran-Contra Affair respectively - is played by a famous actor in Lebanon. Fakes, as soon as they are revealed or marked a such, may disclose ex post the rules that govern a particular discursive formation of a field of knowledge, because it is this formation that assures their discursive correctness despite their falsity. The term discursive formation, borrowed from Foucault, is to be understood as a polymorphic network that rules the appearance of a specific discursive practice, i.e. particular utterances of experts. Ra'ad's works, as they are solely presented within the art context, do not pose as direct intervention in the political scene. Because, by evoking a shift in the way we usually conceive historical facts and primarily their arrangement to create meaning, they rather have an indirect impact on the field of knowledge described above. Whereas in historiography contingent, 'irrelevant' and 'minor' events usually are suppressed in favour of a coherent text and argumentation, Ra'ad focuses on these seemingly marginal aspects: Contemporary Lebanese history is therefore shown as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous events and the search for a historical reality is marked as an inexhaustible task.
Christian Huck (12.15-13.00):
"Rockumentaries: Putting Music in Pictures"
According to the Guardian's eminent music critic Alexis Petridis, rockumentaries seem to have gone through some kind of a renaissance in recent years. As if to proof this, in October 2005 London's Institute for Contemporary Art screened more that twenty films in their Uncontainable: A Music Documentary Season. However, there is something awkward about the idea of documenting music in pictures, of translating a predominantly aural medium into an audio-visual presentation. It seems no coincidence that the term 'rockumentar' was apparently first used in This Is Spinal Tap (1984) - a mockumentary about the non-existing heavy metal band Spinal Tap. Fascinatingly, This is Spinal Tap is arguably the most successful attempt to produce a documentary on a rock band. In my talk, I attempt to unearth a paradox that lies at the heart of rockumentaries in general, and which is cleverly revearled in This is Spinal Tap. My central argument will go along the following lines: Pop/Rock music, although being an aural experience first and foremost, has been just as much obsessed with its visual image as with its sound. From Elvis to Britney Spears, artists and record companies have always attempted to control the visual image: on record covers, in music videos, during live performances, etc. When trying to filsm such acts in documentary's favourite fly-on-the-wall mode, the films have often great difficulties penetrating the visual image that the bands and the record companies have produced themselves. If a film attempts to go beyond the prefabricated image, it has to create new images. But is that still 'documentary'? Spinal Tap, on the other had, have no image(s) that This is Spinal Tap would have to take into consideration in the first place - and consequently the film succeeds in giving an inside view into the life of a rock band, albeit a non-existing one. After outlining a general overview of classical music documentaries from Martin Scorcese's swan song for The Band, The Last Waltz (1978), to 2003's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, I will concentrate on more creative takes on the idea of documenting pop and rock music. Apart from This is Spinal Tap, other (more obscure) mockumentaries like Michael Aptedt's Stardust (1974) or thr recent Brothers of the Head (2006) will be analysed, but also more complicated undertakings like Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (2002), which 'documents' the rise and fall of the Manchester music scene from Joy Division to the Happy Mondays. The aim of my paper is not only to introduce the genre of rockumentaries, but also to question the role of the documentary in an image-based culture in general. Can the documentary show something that is otherwise unseen, or can it merely 'edit' the images that are constantly being produced by companies, stars, mass media, etc.?
Mittwoch, 26. September 2007
Roger Lüdeke (10.30-11.15):
"'Documentary Drama' and the Theatricality of Politics: Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo"
Documentary drama assembles "authentic speeches, essays, clippings, pronunciamentoes, pamphlets, photographies and films, historical characters and settings" (Erwin Piscator, 1929). It aims at "criticizing deception, counterfeit and lies" (Peter Weiß, 1968). Apparently, the political stance of documentary theatre is based on premises that have undergone a fundamental revision during the last thirty years. Representation and referentiality, intention and authenticity, history and truth have been and still are the major points of attack in the theory of language and culture. Their various re-conceptualizations have left their marks both in literary studies and in aesthetic practice. Under these circumstances a contemporary notion of documentary drama seems hardly feasible anymore. However, an important current within contemporary British drama is characterized by a renewal of documentary techniques of representation; not only authoers such as Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard exhibit a - meanwhile rather long lasting - 'turn' to the political documentary. For several years now the London Tricycle Theatre has been a major forum for contemporary documentary theatre. One of the more recent Tricycle productions is Victoria Brittain's and Gillian Slovo's Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'. First performed in 2004, it has meanwhile gained worldwide success. Guantanamo uses interviews with detainees freshly released from the Camp X-Ray detention centre, situated at the Bahía de Guantánamo in Southern Cuba, in February 2004. The way Brittain and Slovo combine personal statements, letters, political speeches, legal and medical comments can hardly be distinguished from the kind of docu-montage the genre's precursors had practiced long before them. It is striking, however, how Guantanamo - possibly drawing back on Brecht's theory of Verfremdung - reflects its proper theatrical situation and how it uses illusion breaking techniques of representation for its specific political purposes. The strategic impact of these techniques becomes clearer, once Guantanamo is analysed with the help of contemporary theories of the political. For the last fifteen years authors like Pierre Legendre and Jacques Rancière have discussed the problem of political institution and sovereignty within a decidedly theatrical frame of reference, too: as a stage of language (Jacque Rancière) and as a fantastmatic scene of primordial violence (Pierre Legendre). Using these conceptualisations of the political seems promising: on the one hand, it allows for a description of the functional particularities of contemporary docu-montage in distinction from its historical precursors; on the other hand, it can help to make us see the gains of freedom of the contemporary docu-drama by concentrating on the aesthetic difference between theatrical performativity and socio-political communication.
Kathleen Starck (11.15-12.00):
"My Name is Rachel Corrie"
"Theatre can't change the world. But what it can do, when it's as good as this, is to send us out enriched by other people's passionate concern. " (The Guardian) This might well be the motivation behind the 2005 Royal Court staging of the writings of Rachel Corrie, which proved to be a great success in London and at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The text for his production - one hesitates to call it a play - has been edited from Corrie's e-mails and journals by Alan Rickman and Katharina Viner. It is the story of a 23 year-old woman who leaves her comfortable American life to stand between a bulldozer and a Palestinean home. She does not survive. The question that arises is: why stage it in Corrie's own words instead of writing a script on the basis of her writings? I would like to argue that the use of 'original' writing in combination with a performance aesthetics reminiscent of journal writing itself serves to produce a more immediate audience response. I will analyse how the distance that one would expect to be created between the narrated events and the spectators is seemingly erased by the simultaneity of the staging of the events and their being written down/read out by the actress. All this, in turn, is heightened by the audience's knowledge that these are Corrie's own words and that there are eye witness reports, statements of her friends and family as well as photos to be found on the internet. Within this greater context then, I would like to look at the apparent audience's need of witnessing 'the real thing' and question its value.
Soenke Zehle (12.00-12.45):
"Passions for the Real: How Sorious Samura Redeems Reality"
Sorious Samura, an acclaimed Sierra Leonean documentary filmmaker now living in London, has taken it upon himselft to 'represent the innocents' in his work. His documentaries, characterized by a unique reality-TV style and a maximization of authorial intervention, are regularly featured on CNN International, and Samura has become an important voice in the debate over how issues related to Africa more generally are represented in the media. By way of a critical exploration of his approach, I want to identify elements of a specifically transcultural perspective on contemporary documentary film, with a particular empasis on the return of 'dv-realism' (Manovich) and its relationship to a violent 'passion for the real' (Badiou).
Sektion III
"Representations of Evil in Anglophone Cultures"
Montag, 24. September 2007
Michael Szczekalla (16.30-17.15):
"'Radical Evil' in Huxley and Burgess"
Much recent fiction seems to confirm a view of evil as "pointless negativity", a "mere whim" engendered by boredom (Sloterdijk 2005: 269). It may therefore be tempting to turn towards writers whose oeuvre still poses a challenge to the postmodern trivialisation of evil. My paper will be on the short twentieth century, Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of Extremes", as it is reflected in two major works of this period, Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley and Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. Separated by almost half a century, both novels are philosophically ambitious. It is my contention that Huxley's highly problematic critique of Western dualism is no less capable of stimulating intriguing discussions of evil than Burgess' carfully argued defence of free will.
The strength of Huxley's 1930s novel clearly lies in its sound and often prescient criticism of contemporary ideologies. Disillusioned with liberalism, the young elites of Europe betray "a passion for liquidating people". Thus Anthony Beavis, the novel's hero, makes the anti-utopian point that a government with a comprehensive plan for betterment always uses torture and therefore pleads for dealing with situations "as they arise" - "piecemeal". Ironically, Huxley's own brand of illiberalism may have helped him to suppress this truth when he started to write Island, his last novel. Eyeless in Gaza, in fact, marks a transition from the author's earlier cynicism to the semi-religious convictions of his late fiction. This transitional status is revealed by the characters themselves. They either belong to the earlier period or point into a new direction. Interestingly, the 'good' ones cannot claim to be more "enlightened" - to use Huxley's later quasi-religious jargon - than the others. Thus, Anthony's betrayal of his old friend Brian Foxe, an altruist with an incurable stammer, may almost be forgiven as the latter's idealism is the negation of true happiness. The title alludes to Miton's Samson Agonistes. Blinded, moving in a circle, succumbing to the drudgery of a daily of routine - to whom does this refer? At least the importance of literature is still taken for granted. If Hamlet had known as little as Polonius, he would have been happy. Tragedy consists in knowing too much. In Island, Huxley will fall back behind this insight. Here dogmatism is still held in abeyance.
Earthly Powers purports to contain the life and thoughts of Kenneth Toomey, a second-rate writer and brother-in-law of Carlo Campanati, a cleric who ascends to the chair of St. Peter. Dedicated to the debunking of optimis, which is revealed as a poor and lifeless abstraction, this novel has been called a "twentieth-century's Candide" (Gilbert Adair). Optimism is replaced - not by its opposite - but by life in all its variety. Even in purely quantitive terms, Earthly Powers proves to be much more informative about evil or radical evil than Eyeless in Gaza. It is impossible to refer to all the different locations the reader is introduced to - be it the Edwardian dental practice of Toomey's father, a gambling hall in Monaco, a dive in the old port of Marseille, a restaurant where the young Toomey meets the incessantly talking Havelock Ellis, the Paris of the lost generation, Nazi Germany, colonial Malaya where Toomey meets a doctor treating yaws cases, the frozen meat storage in Chicago where the eldest son of the cheese-exporting Campanati clan is found murdered by the mafia, Tangier, which once used to be the residence of choice for non-conformists of all persuasions, and so on. The novel doesn't solve the puzzle of the liberum arbitrium though it is as humane as Candide, albeit more knowledgeable.
It would be a mistake to chide either Huxley or
Burgess for their adherence to traditional concepts of philosophy or theology.
Rather than revealing an ideological commitment, these concepts have become
tools for probing the multifarious nature of evil. At least in the case of
Burgess, the result is not only a vivid rendering of the life of a twentieth-century
hero but a philosophical tale which makes a serious attempt to engage with the
century's major conflicts.
Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (17.15-18.00):
"The Evil Empire: Representations of Evil in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction"
Colin McGinn in his study Ehics, Evil, and Fiction (1997) selects works of English and American literature to exemplify his theoretical approach, which says that ethical knowledge can best be aesthetically mediated and that not only the Ten Commandments are a form of moral discourse, but that the second one is the parable. Fiction, according to McGinn, allows ethical experience and promotes moral understanding through emotional fascination as well as ethical information.
Lately the absence or presence of moral values in postmoderinzed fiction has been the reason for controversial criticism. In my paper I propose to show that in recent works we have diverse manifestations of evil, which are presented with clear ethical labels: evil persons, evil governments, evil prinicples. Evil is often linked to physical violence or extermination, but also to psychological and emotional injuries; the novels express some kind of transcendental belief more often than not.
The texts I have chosen are from different Commonwealth countries. They epitomize that the representation of Evil can produce a wide scope of writing in diverse fictional subgenres: we find more or less realistic texts opposed by fables or allegories teaching a moral beside examples or metaficiton and the fantastic.
J.M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) has supplied the title for international theatre events, e.g. last year in Salzburg and this year in Duesseldorf; the title has come to lead an existence separate from Coetzee's novel, while the book presents an archaic fable about the One Just Man in the midst of Evil brought about by oppression and violence in a political system. Ian McEwan's Black Dogs (1992) assumes the character of a universal parable, mixed with topical events and superstition and resulting in the proclamation that Evil is the evil in us - in each of us.
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) presents a realistically portrayed world where individuals fall victim to other individuals, immoral and vicious ones supported by a society ignoring human dignity where it seems opportune. In Margarete Atwood's Blind Assassin (2000) the realistic stroyline about the fate of two sisters, one of whom becomes a fiction writer while the other one tells their biography, is intertwined with a second one which metafictionally unfolds a fantasy novel entiteld The Blind Assassin.
Dienstag, 25. September 2007
Patricia Plummer (11.30-12.15):
"The Return of the Gothic in Contemporary Anglophone Crime Fiction"
Since Edgar Allan Poe created his mastermind detective C. Auguste Dupin,
crime fiction has developed from a marginal genre to a global phenomenon. It is
written in most countries across the globe and has become a serious market
force. While one major trend of the late 20th century was the emphasis
on the personal as the political, i.e. the creation of investigators that
reflect specific lifestyles, confront social problems and are clearly targeted
at various ethnic, social and/or gendered communities (e.g. feminist, African
American, Native American, Black British, lesbian etc.), the first decade of
the 21st century has witnessed a marked shift to fast-paced and
decidedly violent mystery fiction.
One of the most popular contemporary crime writers is Dan Brown whose
books have quickly captured an international audience. As I will argue, the
success of Brown's thrillers Angels and
Demons and The Da Vinci Code is
based on a certain formula: Brown's Indiana Jones-style protagonist investigates
mysterious codes, is sent off to lonely country mansions, palaces, dungeons,
cemeteries or churches where he is confronted with members of secret societies
/ murderous monks / the Vatican and encounters massive acts of violence related
in gory details – in short, Brown has successfully reactivated the Gothic mode
and adapted it to a 21st-century popular fiction framework.
Bibliography
Brown; Dan. The Da Vinci Code.
- - -. Angels and Demons.
Cornwell, Patricia. The Last
Precinct. St. Ives: Warner, 2001.
- - -. Blow Fly.
James, P.D. Death in the Holy
Orders.
Reichs, Kathy. Cross
Bones. London: Random House, 2005
Frank Austermühl (12.15-13.00):
"'Fighting Evil'? The Strategic Use of Evil in British and American Political Discourse"
This paper analyzes the representation of evil in the discourse of
British and American political leaders, focussing on both its semantic and
pragmatic dimensions.
A staple ingredient of the War on Terror, the term evil has gained renewed topicality, above all in the context of the
public speeches of
This paper attempts to address the above mentioned
shortcomings by presenting a diachronic and comparative analysis of the use of
evil in the discourse of American and British leaders. Starting with speeches
by Tony Blair and George W. Bush, the analysis will show that the use of evil
in political discourse pursues a set number of pragmatic goals. While, in
general, these goals do not differ between American and British discourse, we
will show that
Mittwoch, 26. September 2007
Plenarvortrag
David
S. Reynolds (09.00-10.00):
"'Evil Propels Me, and Reform of Evil Propels
Me': Literary and Social Versions of Evil in the American Renaissance."
When Walt Whitman's persona in "Song of Myself"
announced that he was propelled both by evil and the reform of evil, he was
speaking for American culture as a whole. On the one hand, few other
periods produced such resonant literary explorations of evil as the American
Renaissance: one thinks especially of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. At
the same time, few eras have witnessed so earnest and intense a devotion to
ridding the world of evil as this one: witness antebellum America's countless
reform groups, driven by an optimism that found heightened expression in the
Transcendentalists. Whence this paradox of an era obsessed by evil yet
confident of its reform? The evidence suggests that certain writers became
deeply preoccupied with psychological or metaphysical evil, partly as a result
of their keen perception of ambiguities in the very social or cultural problems
that defined evil for many of their contemporaries. Others fastened on a
particular social ill as evil and imagined a redeemed America cleansed of
it. Still others-Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman in particular-took an
expansive view of both evil and its reform, drawing heavily from Romantic
philosophy and American liberal religion to forge freshly affirmative responses
to the problem of evil.
Lutz Schowalter (10.30-11.15):
"Satan and the Anti-Christ: Fictionalizations of the Ultimate Evil in Contemporary North American Cultural Production"
The Christian book market in North America is
currently going through a period of remarkable success. By far the most
thriving publishing phenomenon within this segment of cultural production is
Jerry Jenkins’ and Tim LaHaye’s series of Left Behind novels and related
spin-off products that present a fictionalization of the apocalypse as it is
foretold in the Book of Revelations. The main series of Left Behind
comprises twelve novels that chronicle / imagine the seven-year period known as
the ‘tribulation’ which supposedly takes place before Jesus’ second coming and
the ensuing millennial kingdom of God on earth. The premise of the Left Behind novels is that true
Christian believers are raptured [i.e. saved by God] before the period of
tribulation starts. Those who are left behind on earth subsequently live
through plagues and catastrophes of previously unknown proportions and also
encounter the two beings which might be said to represent ultimate evil: the
Anti-Christ and Satan himself.
Rüdiger Heinze (11.15-12.00):
"'Evil' Protagonists in American Fiction and Film:
Charm and Persuasion of Psychopaths, Serial Killers, Murderers and Co."
The ‘evil-ness’ of fictional
protagonists, especially in first-person narrative fiction, derives not only
from their placement within a literary and cultural historical tradition of
representations of evil but in large part also from an ‘extreme’ divergence of
the character’s actions, thoughts and values from the norms, values and
conventions of the audience/readers receiving the text/film. The arising moral
and ethical confrontation between reader and text constitutes a significant
aspect of literature and film and their reception as well as of the aesthetic
distancing of evil by its representations. Censorship debates regularly revolve
around these issues. While it is relatively easy to condemn protagonists like
those of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” or Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho
(leave alone monsters such as zombies, aliens and other ‘creatures’) because
the narratives and their textual/filmic strategies offer little ground (for
various reasons) for a complex moral evaluation, it is considerably more
difficult to deal with the substantial number of apparently eloquent,
sympathetic and charming murderers (Denis Johnson: Angels, Mark
Childress: Crazy in Alabama, Robert Rodriguez:
Sin City), serial killers (Stewart O’Nan: The Speed Queen, Joyce
Carol Oates: Zombie), pathological liars and thieves (The Speed Queen,
Bryan Singer: The Usual Suspects), as well as terrorists and potentially
homicidal schizophrenics (Chuck Phalaniuk: Fight Club, Alan Parker: Angel
Heart).
In my talk, I will analyze the textual and filmic strategies, narrative techniques and rhetoric of persuasion employed in the constitution of 'evil' protagonists in the aforementioned novels and films. Special attention will be paid not only to the attending notion of character but also to the moral and ethical confrontation between reader and text/film and the subsequent evaluation involved in the reception process. The talk will close with an attempt to systematize degrees of ehtical variance between text and context.
Hans-Ulrich Mohr (12.00-12.45):
"Neo-Noir Films: Evil and Postmodernism"
My paper wants to trace the
representation of evil in the recent neo-noir movie. Films I will focus on are: Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Joel & Ethan Coen’s Barton
Fink, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of
the Lambs, Quentin Tarantino‘s: Pulp
Fiction, Mary Harron’s American
Psycho, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Lost Highway.
In the 18th century, evil
became functionalized in the context of an optimistic theogony (Physico-Theology). It became
aestheticized as the fear and horror component of the two-step experience of
the sublime which had its closure in a feeling of liberation. In Naturalism,
horror and evil were relocated in everday experience. The inspiration of
(early) film noir goes back to naturalistic texts or texts that took their
clues from naturalism. Above all the writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler had articulated a response to the situation caused by the Big Depression of the late
1920s and the 1930s.The collapse of the Victorian society and of the monetary
system led to an anarchic extension of human behavior beyond the existing
social codes: men appear in a net of corruption, immorality, violence, sexual
drives and greed for possession. The world is obscure, only the hard-boiled
detective who is a free-floating, hedonistic, modern-time dandy, manages to
survive cynically, keep up some justice and values because he does not hesitate
to use the methods of the criminals.
The neo-noir descendants of this genre are not only characterized by turning black and white film shots into colors that still convey the noir mise-en-scène they also show a society that is characterized by the omnipresence of corruption and destruction. The human consciousness is a wild collection of drives. Society is the result of collective social construction and thus it includes all the irrational strata and drives of its members. This intertwining of good and evil makes these films correspond with basic tenets of postmodernism. David Lynch's Lost Highway is probably the most complex approach to all this. It thematizes the modes of human perception and blurs the line between consciousness and subconscious and deconstructs the repertoire of neo-noir modes of expression.
Sektion IV
"Cognitive Approaches in Literature and Linguistics"
Montag, 24. September 2007
Margarete Rubik (16.30-17.15):
"Cognitive Strategies of Presenting Non-Linear Emotional Experience in Narrative"
I am interested in the presentation of experience and memory and the schemata employed to invite readers to recreate such experience empathetically. In the case of Kureishi's "My Son the Fanatic" the schemata evoked are conventionally narrative: both in imagining the (supposed) fanaticism of Islamic fundamentalists and the money problems of drug addicts readers will draw on knowledge that is in itself narrative in nature, i.e. information of sequences of actions which are likely to follow from religious fanaticism or heroine addiction. The case is more complicated in She. To be sure, Rider Haggard draws heavily on the concept of evolution, which is itself a grand narrative of progression, but can also be reversed, since we equate temporal with special movement (employing an image schema of a trajectory on a path RIGHT/LEFT or UP/DOWN into the future), so that regression (i.e. reversing the direction - imagining that the fascinating woman turns into a monkey before her death) presents no serious cognitive problem. The challenge in the novel lies in conveying She's profoundly sensual appeal, since experiences of sexual desire and frustration do not present themselves as linear narratives (as our hearsay (?) knowledge of fundamentalist outrages or drug addiction) but challenge a physical response relying on visual, haptic, tactile and hormonal impressions which must, however, be communicated by the novelist in narrative form. I would suspect that similar problems occur when experiences of pain are to be communicated.
Pascal Fischer (17.15-18.00):
"Trouble in the Family: Neoconservative Discourse on Transatlantic Relations"
In recent years cognitive science has supplied the most useful tools for comprehending political language and worldviews. With George Lakoff one of the eminent exponents of this approach has even sketched out a coherent model for explaining the major differences between conservatism and liberalism (Lakoff 1996), and occasionally cognitive linguists - usually writing in a critical mode - have studied international politics (Lakoff online 1990 and 2001, Chilton 1996, Dirven 2001). Building up on their findings, this paper scrutinizes the language used to describe the relation between the United States and Europe in leading neoconservative publications in recent years. After a brief introduction into the phenomenon of neoconservatism, arguably the greatest influence on foreign policy in America today, the most prominent conceptual metaphors for expressing the problematic relation between America and Europe are identified, categorized, and interpreted. It is, for instance, not only striking that the two powers are often referred to as an "estranged couple", but also that it is almost always Europe that is taken to be the female part of the relationship. Among other anthropomorphizations of Europe the "sleeping patient" and the "flamboyant degenerate" appear. To fully appreciate the use of these central metaphors, they are considered in historical perspective. Are these images older ones which may have roots in the "international theme" in American literature and have consequently become inscribed into the collective identity of Americans, or are they new inventions to conceptualize a new foreign policy? In a last step, the paper will discuss how its findings can contribute to our understanding of neoconservatism in particular and of transatlantic relations in general.
Dienstag, 25. September 2007
Plenarvortrag
David S. Miall (10.00-11.00):
"Cognitive Poetics: From Interpreting to Experiencing What is Literary"
Cognitive poetics has brought a number of interesting tools to the analysis of literature, and seems well positioned to become an important new, interdisciplinary paradigm in literary theory. But it has also imported several unresolved problems, partly inherited from its origins in cognitive science. First is the ambivalence of many scholars over the status of literariness, i.e., whether it is tenable to regard literary response as distinctive compared with other types of reading. Second, despite the remarkable recent growth in interest among psychologists, neuropsychologists, and philosophers in emotions and feelings, few scholars seem able to integrate this domain into their investigations. Third, the aim of cognitive approaches is often the interpretation of texts, an aspect that is probably of little relevance to the reading processes of ordinary readers. Fourth, cognitivist poeticians, with a few notable exceptions, take no account of the reading processes of real readers, nor do they seek to investigate these empirically in the light of their theoretical premises. In this paper I will outline some prospects for realigning cognitive poetics to resolve these problems. I show how it might take advantage of empirical method to examine experiences of reading among all types of readers; I suggest that interpretation is only one among several possible outcomes of a literary reading; and I argue for an approach that will allow us to assess the evidence for literariness in readers' responses. Above all, I propose that emotions and feelings are central to literary response, and that our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in reading will flow from this.
Jochen Petzold (11.30-12.15):
"Constructing the Speaker in (Lyrical) Poetry - A Cognitive Approach"
Lyrical poetry is frequently defined with reference to the importance of the speaker, who presents his or her very own, and very subjective, impressions of an incident, an object, a thought or feeling. Quite often - particularly but not exclusively among 'lay-readers' - there is even a tendency to equate speaker and empirical author. Yet the speaker of a poem is hardly ever named, and in many poems he/she is not even made overt. Nonetheless, most readers of poetry do form at least a weak 'image' of the speaker. In this paper I will examine the cognitive processes that are involved in a reader's construction of a mental representation (mental model) of a poem's speaker. Special emphasis will be placed on the textual features (primarily on the lexical level) that trigger (or hinder) the construction of such a model - ranging from explicit self-reference of a speaker (i.e. through pronouns) to less easily tangible strategies for creating (and letting the reader share) a specific point of view. The discussion will be based in part on the statistical data gained in the analysis of a corpus of roughly 2000 poems in the course of my DFG-sponsored research project "Sprechsituationen in Englischer Lyrik", but the main focus will be on a more detailed analysis of a small selection of poems from the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries.
Christoph Schubert (12.15-13.00):
"Orientational Metaphors in Romantic Poetry: A Cognitive Semantic Perspective on Verticality"
In the field of orientational metaphors, verticality is a fundamental dimension, since it provides a geocentric and hence absolute frame of reference. Accordingly, the two vertical poles of three-dimensional space serve as source domains mapped onto various target domains. Along these lines, the notions of "happy is up/sad is down or more is up/less is down" form metaphorical extensions of spatial meanings conveyed by locative expressions such as adverbs (e.g. to feel up/down) or verbs of motion (e.g. prices rose). More recent approaches stress the conceptual blending of mental spaces, whereby a generic space comprises common elements. On the basis of these premises, this paper intends to introduce cognitive metaphor theory by investigating vertical imagery in Romantic poetry.
Spatial perception plays a fundamental role in numerous romantic landscape poems, where the concrete physical world is typically permeated by imagination, so that an abstract emotional or transcendental understanding of nature is evoked. Therefore, the poet is a 'seer' in more than one meaning, which suggests a figurative reading of space. For example, in Wordsworth's well-known lines "[m]y heart leaps up when I behold / [a] rainbow in the sky" (1.1-2) the metaphorical mapping in 'leaps up' reflects the upward movement of the speaker's gaze. In other words, both the conceptualization of happiness and the actual spatial motion rely on the same locative configuration of trajector and landmark in the corresponding image schema, which thus forms a generic space. Analogously, the negative value of 'down' occurs in Coleridge's poem with the etymologically telling title "Dejection: An Ode", where the speaker complains that "afflictions bow me down to earth" (1.82).
It can also be demonstrated that in Romantic poetry the conceptual metaphors of verticality are frequently retransferred to their spatio-physical basis. For instance, Shelley's "Sky-Lark", which is located high above the speaker's head, is praised for its 'joy' (1.15). Additionally, in Shelley's "Mont Blanc" the orientational metaphor of 'having control' or 'force is up' corresponds with the sublime appearance of the mountain, as a statement like "Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: - the power is there" (1.127) implies. Conclusively, conceptual metaphors and the underlying image schemas do not only help to structure human experience and spatial cognition but are also mirrored in the construction of semantically charged space in poetic texts, so that they play a key role in literary interpretation.
Mittwoch, 26. September 2007
Sven Strasen (10.30-11.15):
"Cultural Models, Cognitive Environments, and the Reading of Literary Texts: Towards a Cognitive Reinvigoration of Reader-Response Theory"
What determines the meanings readers attribute to literary texts - the text, the psyche of the reader, or socio-cultural influences? This has always been the central question of reader-response theory. Of course, every theorist worth her salt has claimed that the responses of readers are influenced by all of these factors, but reader-response theory has never been able to provide a convincing model of the complex interaction between text, reader psychology, and culture. Instead it has a) introduced idealisations like Iser's "implied reader" to avoid the difficulties inherent in dealing with actual, empirical readers, or b) despite all the claims to the contrary, privileged one or the other of the three main factors in the reception process at the expense of the two remaining ones. The last 15 years, however, have witnessed developments in cognitive science, linguistic pragmatics, and cultural anthropology that may help to overcome this situation. Especially research on the cognitive mechanisms and cultural conditions underlying the formation, perpetuation, and change of "cultural models," i.e. culturally shared cognitive schemata, is promising in this respect. These cultural models are a decisive point of intersection of the mental, social, and material dimensions of culture and seem to structure the cognitive environments of readers to a considerable degree.
In my paper I will describe the most important mechanisms at work in the formation of cultural models, the modes in which these models influence the contextualisation of literary texts by individual readers and, consequently, the attribution of meaning by those readers. Furthermore, I will sketch some of the theoretical consequences of integrating the concept of the "cultural model" into a theory of literary reception. One of the most important of those consequences is the fact that any attempt to conceptualise the mechanisms at work in actual reception processes has to start from a reconstruction of the relevant cultural models. This, in turn, means that a theory of literary reception can only be successful if it widens its scope to include the cognitive and cultural conditions of the formation of cognitive environments that are the basis of contextualisation and the attribution of meaning by readers.
Beatrix
Busse (11.15-12.00):
"Writing is Medicine: Conceptual Blends in Interplay
With Fundamental Metaphorical Mappings in Paul Auster's Narrative
Fiction"
This paper will investigate the interplay of conventional conceptualisations and fundamental metaphorical mappings with complex blends in selected works by Paul Auster. Traditional metaphors like "life as journey" constitute the basis of rich and meaningful blends that evolve around the processes of human experience and growth of identity. In Auster's narrative fiction, one of the metaphorical blends that expresses these concepts is "writing is medicine." For example, in The Book of Illusions (Auster 2002: 5), Professor David Zimmer, who lost his two sons and his wife in a plane crash, reflects on the writing of a book about the comedian Hector Mann in the following way: "Writing about comedy had been no more that a pretext, an odd form of medicine that I had swallowed every day for over a year on the off chance that it would dull the pain inside me."
The components of the metaphorical blend "writing is medicine," in turn, invite further metaphorical associations in Auster's work: medicine, for example, can be sweet or bitter and can alleviate and heal but also provoke painful purgation; similarly, writing can be a private coming to terms with one's own thoughts, but it also communicates intentional reaching out to a recipient. These blends can apply to characters within the narrations but also to narrators, as they call attention to the process of narration itself. As a theoretical framework, this paper will make use of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), both of which are considered interdependent. The novels that will be investigated are Timbuktu (1999), The Book of Illusions (2002), Oracle Night (2003) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).
Alexander Bergs (12.00-12.45):
"Can We Take Construction Grammar Beyond Sneezing Napkins Off Tables?"
Traditional grammatical analyses have always had a hard time with the fringes and exceptions in grammar: how, for example, can we explain that "John kicked the bucket" looks like an ordinary sentence with subject, verb and object, but in fact does not behave like one - we cannot use the plural (*John kicks buckets.), the long passive sounds infelicitious (?The bucket was kicked by John.), the short passive even impossible (*The bucket was kicked.). The traditional way to solve this problem was to call these structures exceptional phrasal idioms, which are part of the lexicon/vocabulary, not part of the grammar. And, it was argued, they are marginal phenomena, and so they need not play a role in the basic grammatical description of a language.
Construction Grammar (CxG) has developed out of various functional-cognitive approaches to grammar over the last thirty years or so. In contrast to most traditional approches, CxG does not exclude the phenomena mentioned above as fringes and exceptions, but here they take center stage. It is argued that if a model can capture these 'marginal' phenomena, it will have only few problems with the grammatical 'core'. In other words, if we can explain "kick the bucket" and its related phenomena, we will have only few problems in explaning "John ate a cookie", the regular SVO pattern. In CxG it is argued that linguistic systems do not consist of items like nouns, noun phrases, or adjectives plus rules that put these items together, but rather that language is a structured inventory of conventionalized form-meaning pairings at all levels of linguistic structure. In other words, grammar does not differ in any fundamental way from the lexicon, the vocabulary of a language. These elements, the conventionalized form-meaning pairings, are the CONSTRUCTIONS of a language, and they can be found on the level of syntax, morphology, discourse, and possibly also discourse and texts. Moreover, in contrast to most traditional approaches to grammar, CxG claims to be a cognitive model, i.e. it aims for psychological plausibility and bases its analyses on actual language data culled from large collections of actual spoken and written language. This presentation first offers a brief survey of the basic ideas, principles, and methods of CxG. It will be shown that many analyses, for obvious theoretical reasons, have focused on idiomatic/phrasal constructions and verb-argument structures (such as the intransitive use of "to sneeze" [John sneezed.] and the new occurence in "John sneezes the napkin off the table"). This naturally leads to the question if we can take CxG beyond this level and these questions, and if so: how? In particular, this presentation will look into the possibilities of extending CxG ideas to the analysis of texts and literature.
Sektion V
"Englishes in Contact"
Montag, 24. September 2007
Stefan Thim (16.30-17.15):
"The Rise of the Phrasal Verb in English: A Case of Scandinavian Influence?"
It is well-known that the linguistic contact between Old English and Old Norse in large areas of Anglo-Saxon England led to a considerable influx of Scandinavian loans. The bulk of these loans does not show up until Middle English, predominantly in the dialects of the former Danelaw.
The development of the English phrasal verbs has frequently been connected wit Old Norse, which exhibits similar verb-particle combinations. The attestation of larger numbers of Scandinavian loans in the Middle English period roughly coincides with the rise of the phrasal verb. By late Middle English, the development of the structure 'verb plus postposed particle' is virtually complete, although the degree of idiomaticity is in most cases still quite low compared to that of many phrasal verbs in Present-Day English.
In accounts of the history of the English phrasal verb and in the standard textbook accounts of the history of the English lexicon it has become customary to associate this structure with the Scandinavian model. The development in English is seen as either induced or, at least, strengthened by influence from Old Norse. This assumption seems to be supported by the facts that the verbal elements of a number of phrasal verbs are Scandinavian loans (e.g. muck up) and that numerous phrasal verbs have formal and semantic parallels in Old Norse (e.g. give up).
In contrast to the standard view and with reference to comparative evidence from other West Germanic languages, I will argue that these and other arguments brought forth in favour of Scandinavian influence are not convincing and that an explanation of this characteristic feature of Modern English as a language-internal structural development is more plausible.
Hildegard Tristram (17.15-18.00):
"Shifting Britons: The Impact of Late British on Medieval English"
During the first 600 years of English in the Island of Britain, the nascent language was exposed to threee types of language shift scenarios between resident and immigrant population groups. In sociolinguistic terms, this involved (in chronological order) 'bottom up' shifts (Late British, British Latin, possibly Frankish, later also Flemish), shifts between contiguous dialects (English and Scandinavian) and 'top down' shifts (nNorman French/Anglo-Norman).
The latter two types of language shift have been extensively studied since the Nineteenth Century. The literature is legion. The linguistic impact, however, of the 2m to 4m speakers of Late British who adopted the language of their Anglo-Saxon masters (spoken only by 25 000 to 250 000 immigrants according to English revisionist historians and archaeologists) has been notoriously underresearched.
Three reasons may be held to have been responsible for this. The most important reason is the prevalence of nineteenth-century colonial concepts concerning the 'ethnic purity' of the Anglo-Saxons. This found expression in the 'double-X' theory (expulsion and extermination of the native Britons). Second, former linguists misunderstood the nature of 'bottum up' shifts. These typically do not involve transfer of lexis to the target language, but rather grammatical and phonological transfer. Recently, Thomason & Kaufman (1988), Thomason (2001), Vennemann (1995) among others paved the way for a more adequate understanding of this type of shifts. Third, scholars engaged in studies on language shift scenarios should be experts in both the source and the target language(s). Unfortunately, anglicists and celticists are not normally known to share their linguistic insights with each other.
In this paper, I will endeavour to further substantiate my claim that the shifting Britons are responsible for the advanced analycity of English grammar which surfaced in Middle English after the replacement of one type of diglossia (with OE as the roof language) by another type of diglossia (with Anglo-Norman as the roof language) (Lutz 2002, Tristram 2004). Drawing on Peter Schrijver's research (1995, 1999, 2002), I will also claim that the shifting Britons restructured immigrant West Germanic phonology on the model of Late British.
Dienstag, 25. September 2007
Plenarvortrag
Donald Winford (09.00-10.00):
"New Englishes in the Context of Contact Linguistics"
Most
of the discussion about the origins, history, classification and
contemporary sociolinguistic status of the new Englishes has focused on
the so-calles "indigenized" varieties that arose in multilingual
settings such as those in India, Singapore, Malaysia and the former
British colonies of Africa. - all members of the "outer circle".
Investigation of these forms of English has been conducted primarily
within the framework of a field of study variously labeled "World
Englishes" or "English as a World Language" (EWL). However, it is clear
that the issues debated in the field of EWL overlap considerably with
those of researchers in the broader field of Contact Linguistics,
including Creole Linguistics.
This paper
discusses some of the issues related to questions of origin, with particular
reference to the kinds of restructuring and the mechanisms of change that
produced these vernaculars. It has long been noted that there are strong
typological/structural similarities between English-lexicon creoles on the one
hand, and “indigenized” varieties on the other. This would suggest that they
were all shaped by similar processes and principles of change. In addition, the
socio-historical circumstances in which they arose share many similarities. For
these reasons, it seems desirable to account for their formation and
development within a unified theoretical framework. This paper argues that the
theoretical framework within which “natural” second language acquisition (
Lucia Siebert (11.30-12.15):
"'I don't know nothing on cricket'. Negative Concord - an Atypical L2 Feature?"
Despite its being a common feature of many non-standard varieties world-wide, negative concord is largely absent from second language varieties in Asia and Africa, with the exception of Liberian English and Butler English (Mesthrie 2004: 1136). Although no mention is made of negative concord in most recent overviews on Black South African English, it is reported to be a feature of this variety (Mesthrie 2004: 1136). South Africa seems to be an interesting context to study negative concord in more detail, as this feature does not only occur in Black African English but is also attested for other sub-varieties such as South African Indian English and Cape Flats English as well as 19th century Settler English (Mesthrie 2004: 1136; McCormick 2002, Mesthrie and West 1995: 127).
This paper aims to shed light on the interplay between non-standard dialect input, influence from other contact varieties and second language features. Even if negative concord is a relatively rare feature, recent evidence from data on Black South African English indicates that its context of occurrence merits closer analysis: when does it occur, which forms does it take and who uses it? I will further argue in this paper that negation on the whole deserves more attention, including other negation features such as invariant don't and never as preverbal past tense negator. Using Anderwald's study on non-standard negation in British dialexts as a reference point, a typology of negation patterns in L2 varieties will be attempted.
Carolin Biewer (12.15-13.00):
"Concord Patterns in South Pacific Englishes - the Role of New Zealand English and the Local Substrate"
The outer circle varieties of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Island show similarities as well as differences, among other things due to the Melanesian and Polynesian substrate influence. Another possible source for the unity and diversity of the South Pacific Englishes is the fact that - due to geographical, political and economic reasons - New Zealand English and Australian English may in some of the islands supersede the former prestigious American and British varieties as a model for the national standard.
To discuss the unity and diversity of the new Englishes in the South Pacific, the focus of this paper will be on aspects of subject-verb agreement. In Fiji English the verb is often used in singular even if the subject is plural (Mugler & Tent 2004: 782). This may also be of some relevance for the usage of collective nouns, where normally both singular and plural concord marking on verbs is available. The paper will discuss whether preference of singular verb with plural subject or a particular usage of collective nouns is a common trait of all three varieties in question and whetherthe local substrate languages and/or New Zealand English as a model for the national standard have some influence.
Data will be provided by a corpus of newspaper articles downloaded from the internet from newspapers representing the three different outer circle varieties. For Fiji English the press section of the ICE-Fiji will also be included. The paper discusses the results as a step towards a general description of the 'South Pacific Englishes' and also considers the suitability of the WWW as a source for such a case-study.
Mittwoch, 26. September 2007
Angelika Lutz (10.30-11.15):
"Types and Degrees of Mixing: A Comparative Assessment of Latin and French Influences on English and German Word Formation"
The effects of language contact on the lexicon and word formation of European languages have been the subject of numerous detailed studies. As a rule, however, such studies have focused on only one recipient language at a time. My paper aims at a more precise characterisation particularly of intense language contact by studying its effects on the lexicon and word formation of two closely related languages, English and German. In particular, I intend to show (1) that the enormous cultural influences of Latin in the late Medieval and Renaissance periods led to remarkably different linguistic reactions in the two recipient languages in terms of borrowing and word formation; and (2) that these reactions depended on the different character of previous French influences on the two languages to a much greater degree than has been assumed so far.
Joybrato Mukherjee (11.15-12.00):
"The New English Triangle (NET): Institutional Second-Language Varieties between Common Core, Interference and Autonomy"
Schneider's (2003) dynamic model of New Englishes posits a diachronic pattern of five evolutionary phases which are assumed to underlie the processes inherent in the emergence of New Englishes world-wide. In this model, the major driving forces in the formation of New Englishes are, firstly, changes in identity-construction both on the part of the settlers (STL strand) and on the part of the indigenous population (IDG strand) and, secondly, changes in the interaction between the two groups.
In the present paper, I will argue that the dynamic model - especially with regard to the later phases - is better suited to STL-dominated varieties (e.g. Indian English, Nigerian English). While STL-dominated varieties typically correlate with native varieties of English, IDG-dominated varieties are 'institutionalised second-language varieties' (Kachru 1985). In the context of institutionalised second-language varieties like Indian English the dynamic model has to be modified. These varieties cannot be expected to end up in the final fifth phase, in which English will turn into (one of) the dominant native language(s) of the population, but may well remain in phase 4, which is marked by a largely non-native status of English although the language is endonormatively stabilised.
From a diachronic perspective, the present phase-4 situation of Indian English, which I focus on as a paradigmatic example of institutionalised second-language varieties in general, can be seen as a stable and productive steady state in the evolutionary process in which there is a tension - and balance - between conflicting forces of progression and conservativism. This steady state is linked to the synchronic view of present-day Indian English as a semi-autonomous variety, which is characterised by three major determinants: common core, interference and autonomy. These three determinants can be visualised as a triangle. The New English Triangle (NET) model provides a useful reference framework because all varieties of Indian English - from the acrolectal standard to basilectal pidgins, from written to spoken - can be plotted on different positions in the triangular field. Essentially, the model integrates language contact (betweel local L1s and English) with variety contact (between Indian English and native varieties).
Peter Siemund & Lukas Pietsch (12.15-13.00):
"Contact-Induced Change and Linguistic Universals: The Case of Irish English"
In the study of Irish English it has beome customary to analyse the non-standard properties of this variety as either retentions that have been passed on from earlier historical stages of English or as transfer from the Irish substrate. Both approaches have a good deal of plausibility, but strictly speaking for most non-standard phenomena it has turned out difficult to decide which of the two alternatives should be given preference.
A discussion of the origin of such non-standard features must of course proceed from a proper empirical reconstruction of the historical facts of the older forms of the dialects in question. While many of the relevant features are already well known and have been extensively discussed in the literature, there are still substantial gaps in our knowledge of what innovations happened when and where. The present study is therefore based on a fresh effort at collecting a large amount of original historical data, resulting in a corpus of letters written to and from Ireland (mainly in the context of emigration to America and Australia) between c.1700 and 1900. This period saw the most intensive language contact between English and Irish and the eventual shift from Irish to English by the greater part of the Irish population, and it thus covers most of the formative period of the Irish English dialects as we know them today.
However, even more important than this mere factual reconstruction is the elucidation of the causal mechanisms involved in the linguistic changes in question. Earlier treatments in the tradition of the retention-versus-transfer debate have sometimes tended to reduce the issue to an exchange fair of pre-existing structural options, without much regard to the actual underlying processes that need to be posited to explain it. A theoretically informed approach to explanation must focus on the dynamics of the contact situation itself, under social, cognitive, systemic and typological perspectives. In our contribution we would therefore like to shift the discussion away from the retentionist/transfer debate as such and towards a closer examination of the contact situation. The linguistic changes most interesting under this perspective are those where contact has led to structural innovations that are found in neither of the two original languages. These cases are particualrly valuable since they potentially open up a window into the genesis of languages. Explanations of these cases must take recourse to principles discussed in universal grammar, in typological universals research, and in grammaticalization theory.
The contribution will illustrate this approach with findings from the grammatical domains of case marking, non-finite complementation, and tense-aspect constructions. In all of these domains, Irish English varieties have developed independent properties that are neither simple retentions from earlier forms of English nor cases of simple structural takeover from Irish.
Sektion VI
Varia
Montag, 24. September 2007
Wolfram R. Keller (16.30-17.15):
"Fresh Colours of Rhetoric: John Lydgate and Medieval English Nationhood"
Recent studies in the growing field of Lydgate criticism engage with the various dichotomies in his work (e.g., Edwards, Simpson, and Watson), whereby it has been suggested that the containment of disorder under a veil of order in the synthesis of contradictory sources represents a Lydgatean aesthetic (Nolan). This paper argues that several linked dichotomies in Troy Book – related to competing Virgilian and Ovidian poetological models (Mars, Greek, stasis, and empire versus Venus, Trojan, change, and nation) – partake in a debate implicit in all Troy Stories descending from Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie and Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae. Both of these texts explore the inherent contradictions between personal and collective identities. Guido's Historia, Lydgate's principal source, envisions selfhood in terms of masks that are narratively constructed and vertically layered – narratives that are largely mythical in a structural sense (Lévi-Strauss). In Guido and Lydgate, the Trojans aim for an inscription of personal desires into the collective mask that results in transparency: all masks collapse into one another. In contrast, the Greeks construct an opaque collective mask veiling personal desires, a Virgilian model conducive to maintaining empire. Lydgate's Troy Book offers a paradigm of mythological bricolage allowing for the individual to deconstruct national narratives and to find connections between national and personal masks at the level of central goods or mythemes. Multiple horizontal connections (cores?) thus initiate a continual revision of national mythologies. Whereas Chaucer's Troilus ultimately dismisses a mono-mythological Trojan historiography as too limited for English nationhood, Troy Book advances a "fresshe colour / Of rhetorik" destabilizing the Troy Story from within. Lydgate's Virgilian opening of the poem slowly disintegrates into an Ovidian model of changeability for the narrative construction of both self and nation, anticipating and critiquing the early modern endeavour of nation-making.
Till Kinzel (17.15-18.00):
"Benjamin Disraeli and Carl Schmitt's Political Theology"
Carl Schmitt was arguably one of the most enigmatic figures in twentieth-century thought. His importance in political thought is widely acknowledged. After a long period of either polemical disputes we have now entered a phase where dispassionate consideration of the implications of his work seems possible. As there is much to criticize in Schmitt's word, this is no mean feast and it is surely not self-evident, as earlier attempts to exclude Schmitt's work from serious scholarly discourse amply testify. Schmitt the political theologian did not only contribute to our understanding of political things in what he held dear. He was engaged in a kind of mythologizing move in order to give a deeper meaning to his own plight as an individual suffering from his political misjudgements and living in a state of defamation and persecution.
Surprisingly, English and American literature provided Schmitt with some of the most fascinating narratives, images and symbols he could make use of too create himself anew and thereby turn himself into a mythical figure, e.g. by identifying with Melville's 'Benito Cereno'. In this paper, which is part of a larger project dealing also with Schmitt's Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Melville, I want to explore some of these connections, concentrating on Schmitt's appropriation of Benjamin Disraeli whose Tancred, or the New Crusade Schmitt deemed to be of crucial importance, though it is as yet unclear how extensive Schmitt's knowledge of Disraeli's other books dealing with theologico-political and Jewish themes such as Alroy or Lord George Bentinck actually was. Schmitt's reception of Disraeli adds an important chapter to recent concern with "Disraeli's Jewishness", for Schmitt ominously read Disraeli as an "Elder of Zion" during the Nazi regime, excising these references after WW II. In the case of Disraeli, he studied th writer in order to get a better grip on what he believed to be the enemy, i.e. the Jews, but also to highlight the geopolitical situation of the 19th and 20th centuries. Schmitt's famous one-minute-lecture (based on Collingwood's question-answer logic) to the effect that "Every sentence is a response - every response answers to a question - every question arises out of a situation" serves as a useful hermeneutical tool to make sense of his reading of Disraeli. Of particular concern will be the issue of both "land" and "sea" as political symbols that inviet mythologizing interpretations. Schmitt's reflections on "Land and Sea" offer, among other things, an interpretation of British imperial sea power with which Disraeli was intimately connected.
Dienstag, 25. September 2007
Sebastian Domsch (11.30-12.15):
"18th-Century Man as Sex-Object: Eliza Haywood and the Contruction of Desirable Men"
So far the
study of masculinities in literature seems to be mainly concerned with
adressing absences. Especially with women writers that were rediscovered during
the establishment of gender studies, the almost exclusive focus on
constructions of femininity and female gender roles has more often than not
left male protagonists virtually untouched. Eliza Haywood is a case in point.
This
fascinatingly prolific novelist (she has produced more than sixty works of
fiction – novels, secret histories or scandal chronicles, tales, and romances)
has recently become, in the words of Catherine Ingrassia, "the darling of
eighteenth-century scholarship."[1]
Or, as Kathryn R. King states it, "Eliza Haywood is everywhere these
days."[2]
One reason for this blooming interest is certainly the fact that all of her
novels deal intensely and extensively with female identity, sexuality and
behaviour. Almost all studies of Haywood therefore concentrate on these
aspects, while questions of masculinities remain largely an absence. A
representative reaction is the following from Mary Anne Schofield's study on Quiet
Rebellion. The Fictional Heroines of Eliza Fowler Haywood: "And what
of the typical male? Though Haywood's concern is with the woman, she must
cursorily describe the male adversary. Again she relies on stereotypes."
(Schofield 27)
Against this
general conviction of the relative unimportance of men for the amatory fictions
of the type that Haywood writes, I would like to argue that they not only
construct masculinities (which is a simple truism), but that beyond the all too
familiar stereotypes some of them construct a type of men that is itself
otherwise virtually absent from discussions of gender in the eighteenth century
simply for being almost unspeakable: man as sexually desirable.
In a heteronormative society, men and women are interpreted to be natural
complements, biologically as well as socially, especially when it comes to reproduction.
In the eighteenth century discourse on sexual desire this complementarity also
meant that the male part was expected as being actively desiring, the female
part passively yielding. The overwhelming majority of sexual encounters in the
works of Haywood (and most others) follows this norm. After all Haywood was
instrumental in establishing the "damsel in distress" stories that
figure rape and seduction (by men) prominently. But there are instances in her
early work of women seeing men as sexually desirable.
This, of course, was nigh unthinkable in contemporary heteronormativity.
Desiring women in the early eighteenth century could therefore be described,
following Cathy J. Cohen's discussion of single mothers or sex workers, as
being heterosexual, but not heteronormative. They transgress social as well as
generic rules. If women could be conceived of as active seducers, they are so
usually for reasons outside of sexual attraction, but rather for financial
reasons, or, as the Baroness in Haywood's The Injur'd Husband, for
revenge. Haywood in those cases seldom omits to point out that there is
absolutely no real attraction involved: "in reality she never knew what
'twas to love sincerely." (132) But in her first fictional work Love in
Excess from 1719, she creates the male protagonist D'Elmont, who passively
engenders desire in the novel's female characters:
The Beauty of his Person, the Gaiety of his Air, and the unequal'd Charms
of his Conversation, made him the Admiration of both Sexes; and whilst those of
his own strove which should gain the largest Share in his Friendship;
the other vented fruitless Wishes, and in secret curs'd that Custom
which forbids Women to make a Declaration of their Thoughts. (Love in Excess
40)
Other examples from Haywood's work
would be Cleomelia, or The Generous Mistress (London 1727), where the
protagonist physically yearns for three different characters – and gets all
three of them; or Fantomina: or, Love
in a Maze.
My paper will adress the
implications of this (within the conservative discourse of desire) unspeakable
and unthinkable construction of desirable men by a female writer, its
challenges to heteronormativity and its relation to that discursive
area, where a sexually desirable man is part of (usually male-authored) generic
conventions, namely pornography. This will hopefully make it possible to
transcend the opposed and critically well-established stereotypes of
rake/seducer/sexual aggressor on the one hand and asexual sentimentalist on the
other, by an examination of the highly subversive and widely repressed category
of man as object of desire.
Katharina Böhm (12.15-13.00):
"The Invention of the Dickensian Child - From Sketches by Boz to Oliver Twist"
Dickens’s portrayal of children, their place
and function in his fiction, passes through a fundamental transformation in his
early writings. The child figures we meet in Sketches by Boz (1836), comprising the journalistic pieces and
tales penned between 1833 and 1836, and The
Pickwick Papers (1837) are signally different from later figures such as Oliver,
Smike and Little Nell. While Dickens’s depiction of childhood in his later works
has received a substantial share of critical attention, his deeply ambivalent,
sometimes contradictory idea of childhood has never been investigated
thoroughly in these early novels. Situated at the margins of the narratives,
the children in Sketches and Pickwick are ‘laughable gargoyles’:[1]
thick and selfish little creatures, whose abuse and misfortune offer comic
relief. The Pickwick Papers, for
example, feature grotesque children like the retarded Fat Boy, the bleeding
baby and the rattling boy. The cruel
sadism these children are exposed to contrasts with the light-hearted and
comical tone of the novel. Although there is no humour in Dickens’s depiction
of juvenile convicts in the Sketches
piece ‘A Visit to Newgate’, this early journalistic text also portrays children
as far removed from human sensibility and moral consciousness. Ultimately, the
children of Dickens’s earliest works appear as something less-than-human; their
depiction contrasts most markedly with the sentimental denouements granted to
the adult characters.
Dickens’s early depiction of childhood in Sketches and Pickwick complicates those received critical perspectives on
Dickens’s view of children which champion Dickens for importing the Rousseauesque-Romantic
ideal of childhood into Victorian literary discourse.[2]
The early, goblin-like children of Sketches
and Pickwick rather seem to
belong to a different, and possibly lower, species than the Wordsworthian child.
They may owe less to Rousseau and Romanticism than to the eighteenth-century
writers which Dickens had read in his youth, such as Pierce Egan, Tobias Smollett,
and Henry Fielding. My paper seeks to address a number of questions connected
to this: If Dickens’s early works
offer a perplexingly different view of childhood, why did the figure of the
innocent and pure child move to the centre of the books that followed Pickwick, such as Oliver Twist (1837-38),
Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), and The
Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41)? How did these novels come to be concerned
with the vulnerability of the child’s body – a concern which allowed Dickens to
negotiate the corruption of the new prime characteristic of childhood,
innocence, over images of actual and threatened physical abuse?
In the present paper, I aim to examine the
early metamorphosis of the Dickensian child from gargoyle to innocent infant in
relation to the role played in Dickens’s early works by contemporary scientific
and medical notions of childhood. With the rise of paediatrics, comparative
anatomy and early evolutionary theory, systematic approaches to childhood came
to a first peak within medical and scientific circles in the late 1830s. These
new ideas in their turn helped to fuel campaigns against child labour which had
wide public repercussions. Indeed, although Dickens himself abandoned
several journalistic projects in aid of the child labour cause, his
correspondence shows that he knew the tracts and reports published by social
reformers. Moreover, it seems clear that Dickens had access to the new
scientific perspectives on children. For instance, Dickens moved in medical
circles throughout his life and attended medical lectures at the University
College of London in 1838, where he was especially fascinated with the cases of
juvenile patients.
Approaching the emergence of medicalized childhood
in Dickens’s early works from the angle of science, medicine, and social reform
helps not only to illustrate how closely scientific and fictional discourse
came to be interrelated in the early nineteenth century. Dickens’s novels took
up the newly arising concern with the vulnerable child’s body, but the cultural
work they performed entailed much more than just disseminating concepts which
had originated in medicine and science. Shaping cultural ideas about childhood
and the child, his novels from Oliver
onwards present case histories of medicalized children whose ailments are most
often shown as the results of grim social circumstances and bureaucratic
failure. Novel reading can thus to some extend become a therapeutic enterprise,
offering both diagnosis and treatment in the form of social critique.
[1] David Grylls, Guardians and Angels, 133.
[2] See for example Malcolm Andrews article on childhood in Dickens in Paul Schlicke’s Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (2000); Peter Coveney’s chapter on Dickens in The Image of Childhood (1967) and Malcolm Andrews’s Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (1994).
Mittwoch, 26. September 2007
Anne Hoyer (10.30-11.15):
"Linguistic Changes of a Popular Scottish Comic"
The talk will present the results of the PhD thesis written on the subject of "The Scottishness of Oor Wullie" from a sociolinguistic and cultural perspective. Oor Wullie, also known as 'Our little William', is a comic which has been published by the Scottish Sunday Post since 1936. The protagonist of the year 2004.
With Scottish themes and language, Oor Wullie is appealing to the entire social and age spectrum. The partly nostalgic representation of Scots supports the group identity of the nation by reminding its readers of their cultural good, which was once a full working language. The contact between Scots and Scottish English becomes apparent. The quantitive analysis in the study showed that Scots-specific features have been decreasing. This has been observed on the phonological, morpho-syntactic and lexical level. In the 1930s there was frequent use of the word awfie 'awfully' which now occurs predominantly in the Standard form. Furthermore, it is noticeable how the language is becoming less specific of the North-eastern origins of the comics.
The corpus-based PhD thesis which is unpublished so far has been covered by numerous newpapers and radio stations in Scotland and Germany. Discussions in the media have focussed on the change of the language and content-related stereotypes and the increasing Englishness.
Christiane Brand (11.15-12.00):
"From Killer Bug to Novel Coronavirus - Collocational Variation, Lexical Priming and Institutionalisation in Scientific Discourse Popularisation"
The corpus-based study of popularised
scientific information is not only of particular interest to the field of
Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) but also offers valuable insights for the
description of lexical processes since this
particular genre can be regarded as a dynamic point of interception between two
distinct levels of discourse (cf. Niederhauser 1999). Information that
is technical in nature and was previously restricted to the scientific
discourse community, is nowadays covered independently by the newspress and is discussed
on a large scale by a lay audience.
The present study focuses on lexical processes,
such as lexical priming and institutionalisation, that lead to a modification
of the specialised lexicon in the popular texts. In order to trace collocational
variation, a corpus of 500,000 words has been analysed that consists of medical
journal and general newspaper articles that are exclusively concerned with the
SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)
epidemic in the year 2003. Following Hoey’s (2005) approach of lexical priming, distinct lexical
profiles, which consist of collocations and semantic associations, have been
established and analysed. Hoey argues that every word is primed to be used in a
particular genre. The different realisations of the term ‘virus’, for example,
appear in both corpora with almost identical frequency; they differ, however,
fundamentally in their collocational profile. For example, while ‘coronavirus’
co-occurs with a limited set of neutral pre-modifying adjectives (e.g. ‘novel’
or ‘respiratory coronavirus’), the realisation of the institutionalised
hyperonym ‘virus’ shows a clearly negative semantic prosody rather than sets
(e.g. ‘deadly virus’, ‘killer virus’).
The findings of the present study open up a new
perspective on the process of institutionalisation as described by Fischer
(1998) since through lexical profiling of scientific and semi-scientific terms a prototypical pattern of genre-specific priming within the process of
institutionalisation can be established.
Daniela Wawra (12.00-12.45):
"America at its Best: The Discoursive Construction of American Identity in the Inaugural Addresses of US-Presidents Since 1789"
In 1789 George Washington is sworn in as
the first President of the USA. In his inaugural address he presents a
“program” for his people: He sets basic cultural values for the American nation
and thereby defines the basic identity of the then just born American nation.
In this paper the original pillars of American identity are revealed and it is
examined how they are presented linguistically. It is then analysed what has
been left of these basic traits of American cultural identity in the inaugural
addresses of Washington’s successors over more than 200 years and if there are
major changes in the style of the addresses. Thus, questions that will be
addressed in this paper are: Have all or some of the cultural values survived?
Have new traits been added? What does the addition or loss of values tell us
about the cultural development of the American nation? What is the linguistic
style of the addresses and in what ways has it changed over the centuries?
The text corpus that is the basis of the analysis ranges from George Washington's address to the inaugural address held by George W. Bush in 2005. The corpus thus comprises 55 speeches given by 38 US-presidents. A functional stylistic approach is chosen for the linguistic analysis of the addresses. The linguistic presentation of the cultural values is examined with the help of collocation analysis.
Informations- und Diskussionstreffen: Modularisierte Lehramtsstudiengänge (Dienstag, 17.00-18.30)
Leitung: Apl. Prof. Dr. Ilse Wischer (Universität Potsdam)
Im Rahmen dieses Informations- und Diskussionstreffens sollen Erfahrungen mit der Umgestaltung der Lehre in den Lehramtsstudiengängen ausgetauscht werden. Dabei werdenen u.a. folgende Fragen diskutiert:
- Wie weit ist die Umstellung vom Staatsexamen zum Bachelor/Master bereits erfolgt?
- Welche Vorteile/Nachteile hat die Umstellung gebracht?
- Werden die Bologna-Ziele durch die Umstellung erreicht?
- Wird die Mobilität der Studierenden gefördert?
- Wird eine höhere Qualität der Lehre erreicht?
- Garantiert der Bachelor tatsächlich einen ersten berufsqualifizierenden Abschluß
- Wie wird der durch die Modularisierung begründete striktere Studienablauf kapazität und organisatorisch bewältigt?
- Wie erfolgen die Modulprüfungen?
- Gibt es zusätzliche Stellen (für organisatorische Erfassung, Lehrkräfte für besondere Aufgaben, etc.)
- Wird ein- oder zweimal im Jahr immatrikuliert, wie werden zeitliche Überschneidungen im Lehrangebot verhindert, gibt es feste Fächerkombinationen?
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