30 August – 3 September 2021, Lyon
15th ESSE Conference Programme and Book of Abstracts
Edited by Jehanne Eveno, Valérie Favre, Vanessa Guignery, Natacha Lasorak, Héloïse Lecomte,
Romane Marcon and Marie Rabecq.
NB: Online links to all events have been sent to registered participants by email. Sessions can be
accessed by simply clicking on their names/numbers (underlined in blue) in the table.
If you have registered but haven’t received the links, please write to contact@esse2020lyon.fr
2
The Organizing Committee of the Lyon ESSE Conference gratefully acknowledges the
financial support of the following local research institutions:
HANDBOOKS OF ENGLISH AND
AMERICAN STUDIES
ction
English Studies Sele
Text and Theory
Edited by Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf
This handbook series has been designed to offer students and
researchers a compact means of orientation in their study of Anglophone literary texts. Each volume – involving a particular historical
or theoretical focus – introduces readers to current concepts and
methodologies, as well as academic debates, by combining theory
with text analysis and contextual anchoring. It is this bridging
between abstract survey and concrete analysis which is the central
aim and defining feature of the series, bringing together literary
history and interpretation, theory and text.
Individual volumes in this handbook series will typically provide:
f
knowledge of relevant literary periods, authors, genres, and
historical developments;
f
knowledge about the adaptation of literary texts through other
media;
f
knowledge of relevant literary and cultural theories.
New
PRICE PER VOLUME
HC RRP € 199.95 [D] / US$ 229.99 / £ 182.00
Standing Order price for subscribers to the complete work
RRP € 179.95 [D] / US$ 206.99 / £ 147.99
eBook RRP € 199.95 [D] / US$ 229.99 / £ 182.00
20%
DISCOUNT
Take advantage of our special offer for ESSE 2021 attendees!
https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/english-studies
Already Published
Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann, Gabriele Rippl (Eds.)
Hubert Zapf (Ed.)
HANDBOOK OF ANGLOPHONE WORLD LITERATURES
HANDBOOK OF ECOCRITICISM AND CULTURAL ECOLOGY
Barbara Schaff (Ed.)
Gabriele Rippl (Ed.)
HANDBOOK OF BRITISH TRAVEL WRITING
HANDBOOK OF INTERMEDIALITY
Sebastian Domsch, Dan Hassler-Forest, Dirk Vanderbeke (Eds.)
HANDBOOK OF COMICS AND GRAPHIC NARRATIVES
Ingo Berensmeyer (Ed.)
HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
Martin Middeke, Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Eds.)
HANDBOOK OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1830–1900
Forthcoming
Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter (Eds.)
HANDBOOK OF BRITISH ROMANTICISM
HANDBOOK OF BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Ralf Haekel (Ed.)
Christoph Reinfandt (Ed.)
Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns (Eds.)
HANDBOOK OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL OF THE TWENTIETH AND
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
HANDBOOK OF THE BRITISH NOVEL AND THE LONG
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
degruyter.com
https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/english-studies
https://www.degruyter.com/serial/HEAS-B/html https://www.degruyter.com/serial/HEAS-B/html https://www.degruyter.com/serial/HEAS-B/html https://www.degruyter.com/serial/HEAS-B/html https://www.degruyter.com/serial/HEAS-B/html https://www.degruyter.com/serial/HEAS-B/html
3
Contents
Conference Committees ________________________________________________________ 4
Programme Outline ____________________________________________________________ 7
General Programme ___________________________________________________________ 8
Online Social Programme ______________________________________________________ 10
List of Titles ________________________________________________________________ 11
Plenary Lectures _____________________________________________________________ 14
Parallel Lectures _____________________________________________________________ 16
Round Tables _______________________________________________________________ 28
Seminars ___________________________________________________________________ 32
Poster Session ______________________________________________________________ 304
ESSE Doctoral Symposium ___________________________________________________ 306
Index _____________________________________________________________________ 308
The conference will take place on Webex. You can download the application and test it by
clicking on https://www.webex.com/test-meeting.html
The Doctoral Symposium and the free guided tours of Lyon will take place on Zoom.
4
Conference Committees
Academic Programme Committee
Prof. Jana Chamonikolasová, Masaryk University, Czech Republic (Language)
Prof. Vanessa Guignery, ENS Lyon, France (Literature)
Prof. Giovanni Iamartino, University of Milan, Italy (Language)
Prof. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (Literature)
Prof. Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria (Literature/Culture)
Prof. Pierre Lurbe, Sorbonne Université, France (Culture)
Prof. Alexandra Poulain, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France (Literature)
Prof. Vincent Renner, Université Lumière Lyon 2, France (Language)
Local Organizing Committee
Samuel Baudry (IHRIM/Lyon2)
Stéphanie Bory (IETT/Lyon3)
Sophie Chapuis (ECLLA/Saint-Étienne)
Neil Davie (LARHRA/Lyon2)
Chloé Debouzie (CeRLA/Lyon2)
Marion Del Bove (CEL/Lyon3)
Jehanne Eveno (IHRIM/ENS Lyon)
Valérie Favre (LCE/Lyon2)
William Fize (LARHRA/Lyon1)
Vanessa Guignery (IHRIM/ENS Lyon)
Natacha Lasorak (IHRIM/ENS Lyon)
Héloïse Lecomte (IHRIM/ENS Lyon)
Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (IHRIM/ENS Lyon)
Philippe Millot (CEL/Lyon3)
Emmanuelle Peraldo (IETT/Lyon3)
Cécile Poix (CeRLA/Lyon2)
Vincent Renner (CeRLA/Lyon2)
Adam Renwick (CeRLA/Lyon2)
Carissa Sims (Lyon1)
Claire Téchené (Lyon2)
Pascale Tollance (LCE/Lyon2)
Michèle Vignaux (LCE/Lyon2)
Émilie Walezak (Passages XX-XXI/Lyon2)
Jim Walker (CeRLA/Lyon2)
5
ESSE Executive
Professor Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich, Switzerland (President)
Professor Biljana Mišić Ilić, University of Niš, Serbia (Secretary)
Professor Gašper Ilc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (Treasurer)
Dr Adrian Radu (Editor of The ESSE Messenger)
Dr Jacques Ramel (Webmaster)
ESSE Board
Dr Armela Panajoti (Albania)
Professor Seda Gasparyan (Armenia)
Mag. Dr Wolfgang Görtschacher (Austria)
Professor Bernard De Clerck (Belgium)
Associate Professor Željka Babić (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Professor Ludmilla Kostova (Bulgaria)
Professor Stipe Grgas (Croatia)
Mgr. Renáta Tomášková, Dr. (Czech Republic)
Professor Dominic Rainsford (Denmark)
Dr Minna Nevala (Finland)
Professor Alexandra Poulain (France)
Professor Felix Sprang (Germany)
Dr Vasiliki Markidou (Greece)
Professor Nóra Séllei (Hungary)
Jennier Lertola (Ireland)
Professor Carlo M. Bajetta (Italy)
Linara Bartkuviene (Lithuana)
Professor Peter Vassallo (Malta)
Assistant Professor Dragica Žugić (Montenegro)
Associate Professor Ruben Moi (Norway)
Professor dr hab. Jacek Fabiszak (Poland)
Professor Teresa Botelho (Portugal)
Dr Titela Vîlceanu (Romania)
Professor Yelena Nikolaevna Chernozyomova (Russia)
Professor Vladimir Ž. Jovanović (Serbia)
Dr Slávka Tomaščíková (Slovakia)
Professor Smiljana Komar (Slovenia)
Professor Montserrat Martínez Vázquez (Spain)
Professor Kristy Beers (Sweden)
Professor Anita Auer (Switzerland)
Professor Işıl Baş (Turkey)
Dr Will May (United Kingdom)
6
Webex coordinator
Aleister SUTTON, University of Lyon 3
Webex tutors
ARCOS CARRERO
BARDIN
BORY
BOTIA
CLAUZON
DEBOUZIE
DUPONT
EKPERARE
GODDARD
HILDEBRANDT
HYGONT
LASORAK
LECOMTE
MAHDI
MARCON
PACHECO
PERFETTINI
PHAM THANH
RUZHYLO
TAOUSS
TSIAMIS
VAN-BRABANT
Diego Julian
Charlotte
Louis
Nadège
Dorian
Chloé
Sophie
Adebukola
Apolline
Caroline
Lucie
Natacha
Héloise
Ahmed
Romane
Neven
Emma
Madeleine
Sofiia
Majda
Danaé
Arthur
University of Lyon 2
University of Lyon 1
University of Bourgogne
University of Lyon 1
University of Paul Valéry - Montpellier 3
University of Lyon 2 / CeRLA
University of Bourgogne Franche Comté
University of Clermont-Ferrand
University of York
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon / IHRIM
University of Lyon 2
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon / IHRIM
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon / IHRIM
University of Lyon 2 / CeRLA
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
University of Grenoble Rhône Alpes
University of Paul Valéry - Montpellier 3
University of Lyon 2 / LARHRA
University of Lyon 2
University of Pau and Pays de l'Adour
University of Lyon 2
University of Picardie Jules Verne
7
Programme Outline
PL=Parallel Lecture; S=Seminar; RT=Round Table
Monday 30th August
Opening of the conference
16:00-16:15
16:15 - 16:30
16:30 - 18:30
9:15 - 10:15
S04
1/3
S13
1/3
S14
1/3
S23
1/3
S24
S30
1/2
S42
1/3
S43
1/2
PL6
Alexander Onysko
PL7
M.S. Suárez Lafuente
10:15 - 10:30
10:30 - 12:30
S13
2/3
S14
2/3
S17
1/2
S23
2/3
S26
1/3
S30
2/2
S37
1/2
12:30 - 13:30
RT1
PL14
Šárka
Bubíková
PL10
Titela Vilceanu
coffee break
S42
S43
2/3
2/2
lunch break
S54
2/3
S60
1/3
S65
2/2
Doc. Symp
ling.
S54
3/3
S60
2/3
S66
1/2
Doc. Symp
ling.
S60
3/3
S66
2/2
Annual General Meeting
13:30 - 14:30
14:30 - 14:45
S01
1/2
S04
3/3
S09
1/2
S13
3/3
S14
3/3
S23
3/3
S26
2/3
17:00 - 19:00
S01
2/2
S06
1/2
S09
2/2
S19
1/2
S22
1/3
S26
3/3
S35
2/2
9:15 - 10:15
PL1
Anna Kérchy
14:45 - 16:45
S65
1/2
Tuesday 31st August
PL2
Rossella
Ciocca
S04
2/3
coffee break
S54
S49
1/3
16:45 - 17:00
coffee break
S37
S42
2/2
3/3
coffee break
S38
S48
S52
1/2
1/2
S35
1/2
RT6
Wednesday 1st September
PL12
Minna PalanderCollin
PL9
Silvia Caporale
10:15 - 10:30
10:30 - 12:30
S02
S06
2/2
S19
2/2
S21
S22
2/3
S27
S28
1/3
S36
1/3
12:30 - 13:30
14:30 - 14:45
S03
1/2
S07
1/2
S11
1/2
S12
S22
3/3
S25
S28
2/3
S03
2/2
S07
2/2
S10
1/2
S11
2/2
S17
2/2
S28
3/3
S29
2/2
16:45 - 17:00
17:00 - 19:00
coffee break
S38
S44
2/2
lunch break
S48
2/2
S55
1/2
S57
S64
1/2
S36
2/3
S51
1/2
S55
2/2
S64
2/2
S51
2/2
S56
1/2
RT4
coffee break
S32
S33
1/2
coffee break
S32
S36
S40
2/2
3/3
1/2
S29
1/2
Thursday 2nd September
9:15 - 10:15
PL5
Adrian Radu
PL8
Ignacio Palacios
PL15
Petr Chalupský
10:15 - 10:30
10:30 - 12:30
S08
1/2
S10
2/2
S15
1/2
S34
1/2
S40
2/2
S45
1/2
S46
1/3
S50
12:30 - 13:30
PL16
Markéta Malá
coffee break
S56
S59
2/2
1/2
lunch break
S61
1/3
13:30 - 14:30
Plenary speaker: David Britain
14:30 - 14:45
14:45 - 15:15
15:15 - 15:30
coffee break
Poster session
coffee break
S46
S59
S61
2/3
2/2
2/3
15:30 - 17:30
S08
2/2
S15
2/2
S18
1/2
S20
1/2
S34
2/2
S41
1/2
S45
2/2
S62
2/2
S62
1/2
PL3
Giuliana Elena
Garzone
9:15 - 10:15
S18 2/2
S20 2/2
PL4
Alessandra Petrina
S41 2/2
All times are Central European Summer Time
S46 3/3
PL17
Alexandra
Glavanakova
S63
1/2
RT3
S63
2/2
RT2
PL13
Lieven Buysse
coffee break
S53
S61 3/3
RT5
Doc. Symp lit.
Doc. Symp lit.
Friday 3rd September
10:15 - 10:30
10:30 - 12:30
Doc. Symp
cult/area
Plenary speaker: Fiona McCann
13:30 - 14:30
14:45 - 16:45
PL18
Efterpi Mitsi
S67
8
General Programme
All times are Central European Summer Time
Friday 27th August
9.00 – 18.30: ESSE Board meeting
Monday 30th August
16.00 – 16.15: Opening of the conference
16.30 – 18.30: Parallel Sessions 1
* Seminars 4 (1), 13 (1), 14 (1), 23 (1), 24, 30 (1), 42 (1), 43 (1), 49, 54 (1), 65 (1)
* Round table 1
Tuesday 31st August
9.15 - 10.15: Parallel Lectures, session 1 (lectures 2, 6, 7, 10, 14)
10.30 - 12.30: Parallel Sessions 2
* Seminars 4 (2), 13 (2), 14 (2), 17 (1), 23 (2), 26 (1), 30 (2), 37 (1), 42 (2), 43 (2), 54 (2), 60 (1),
65 (2)
* Doctoral Symposium: English Language & Linguistics 1
13.30 - 14.30: Annual General Meeting
14.45 - 16.45: Parallel Sessions 3
* Seminars 1 (1), 4 (3), 9 (1), 13 (3), 14 (3), 23 (3), 26 (2), 35 (1), 37 (2), 42 (3), 54 (3), 60 (2),
66 (1)
* Doctoral Symposium: English Language & Linguistics 2
17.00 - 19.00: Parallel Sessions 4
* Seminars 1 (2), 6 (1), 9 (2), 19 (1), 22 (1), 26 (3), 35 (2), 38 (1), 48 (1), 52, 60 (3), 66 (2)
* Round table 6
Wednesday 1st September
9.15 - 10.15: Parallel Lectures, session 2 (lectures 1, 9, 12, 18)
10.30 - 12.30: Parallel Sessions 5
* Seminars 2, 6 (2), 19 (2), 21, 22 (2), 27, 28 (1), 36 (1), 38 (2), 44, 48 (2), 55 (1), 57, 64 (1)
* Doctoral Symposium: Cultural and Area studies
13.30 - 14.30: Plenary lecture 2, Prof. Fiona McCann
14.45 - 16.45: Parallel Sessions 6
* Seminars 3 (1), 7 (1), 11 (1), 12, 22 (3), 25, 28 (2), 29 (1), 32 (1), 33, 36 (2), 51 (1), 55 (2), 64
(2)
* Round table 5
* Doctoral Symposium: Literatures in English 1
17.00 - 19.00: Parallel Sessions 7
9
* Seminars 3 (2), 7 (2), 10 (1), 11 (2), 17 (2), 28 (3), 29 (2), 32 (2), 36 (3), 40 (1), 51 (2), 56 (1)
* Round table 4
* Doctoral Symposium: Literatures in English 2
Thursday 2nd September
9.15 - 10.15: Parallel Lectures, session 3 (lectures 5, 8, 15, 16, 17)
10.30 - 12.30: Parallel Sessions 8
* Seminars 8 (1), 10 (2), 15 (1), 34 (1), 40 (2), 45 (1), 46 (1), 50, 56 (2), 59 (1), 61 (1), 62 (1), 63
(1)
* Round table 3
13.30 - 14.30: Plenary Lecture 3, Prof. David Britain
14.45 - 15.15: Poster Session
15.30 - 17.30: Parallel Sessions 9
* Seminars 8 (2), 15 (2), 18 (1), 20 (1), 34 (2), 41 (1), 45 (2), 46 (2), 59 (2), 61 (2), 62 (2), 63 (2)
* Round table 2
Friday 3rd September
9.15 - 10.15: Parallel Lectures, session 4 (lectures 3, 4, 13)
10.30 - 12.30: Parallel Sessions 10
* Seminars 18 (2), 20 (2), 41 (2), 46 (3), 53, 61 (3), 67
10
Online Social Programme
Free guided tours of the city center (broadcast live via Zoom) and a free lecture on the worldrenowned Lyon chef Paul Bocuse (broadcast via Webex) will be offered to registered participants
by our partner New Generation Guide. To sign up, please click on the following link:
https://www.newgenerationguide.com/en/guided-tours/ESSE2021
MONDAY 30 AUGUST
16.30-17.30: Lyon town center
18.30-19.30: Silk tour
TUESDAY 31 AUGUST
10-11: Vieux-Lyon
12.30-13.30: Fourviere Hill
14.30-15.30: Lyon town center
17-18: Silk tour
20-21: Paul Bocuse lecture
WEDNESDAY 1 SEPTEMBER
14.30-15.30: Fourviere Hill
16.30-17.30: Vieux-Lyon
18.30-19.30: Silk tour
THURSDAY 2 SEPTEMBER
9.30-10.30: Lyon town center
12.30-13.30: Silk tour
15-16: Vieux-Lyon
17.30-18.30: Lyon town center
FRIDAY 3 SEPTEMBER
9.30-10.30: Vieux-Lyon
12-13: Fourviere Hill
All times are Central European Summer Time
11
List of Titles
Plenary lectures
PLEN1 Fiona McCann: Epistemic Disobedience and the Faculty: Decolonial Pedagogies for a Sustainable Future
PLEN2 David Britain: Islomania and English: what can islands tell us about the past and the present of English dialects?
Parallel lectures
PL1
PL2
PL3
PL4
PL5
PL6
PL7
PL8
PL9
PL10
PL12
PL13
PL14
PL15
PL16
PL17
PL18
Anna Kérchy: Alice in Transmedia Wonderland
Rossella Ciocca: Between Literature and the Public Sphere. Postmillennial Trends in the Indian Anglophone Novel
Giuliana Elena Garzone: Dialogism and Discourse Analysis
Alessandra Petrina: The Construction of the European Intellectual: Petrarch in Medieval and Early Modern English
Literature
Adrian Radu: D.H. Lawrence’s Italian Rhapsodies
Alexander Onysko: Aotearoa English: Evidence from the New Zealand Stories Corpus
M.S. Suárez Lafuente: In the Waiting Room of Emotions: Love Fulfilled or Affects Thwarted
Ignacio Palacios: Grammatical and Lexical Innovation in London English. New Linguistic Practices among Teenagers and
Young Adults
Silvia Caporale: Narratives of Disposability in Contemporary British Fiction
Titela Vilceanu: Literary Translation Evaluation, Translator-Centredness and Translatorship
Minna Palander-Collin: Exploring Sociocultural Change and Language Change in the History of English
Lieven Buysse: Actually, there’s More to Pragmatic Markers in Learner Discourse than Meets the Eye
Šárka Bubíková: Representations of Space in Contemporary American Crime Fiction
Petr Chalupský: Echoes of the Spatial Turn in Contemporary British Fiction
Markéta Malá: Exploring Phraseology in Learner English Academic Texts
Alexandra Glavanakova: Migrating Literatures: Bulgaria in the American Imaginary
Efterpi Mitsi: Marlowe and Ruins
Round Tables
RT1
RT2
RT3
RT4
RT5
RT6
Literary Journalism and the P/Light of the ‘Lumières’
“We Too”: Female Voices in the Transnational Era of Crisis, Migration and Climate Change
Meeting of the Gender Studies Network
(Un)regulated Bodies in Contemporary Cultural Texts in English
Qualitative Approaches to English Historical Data in a Multimodal Perspective
Oscar Wilde in the New Millennium: Assessing Critical Approaches
Seminars
S1
S2
S3
S4
S6
S7
S8
S9
International Perspectives on Learning and Teaching English
Borrowings and Loan Translations from English Multi-word Units in other European Languages
Teaching and Learning EFL Grammar
English for Specialised Purposes & Humour
ESP and Professional Domains
English for Specific Purposes: What Theoretical Frameworks for What Teaching and Research Outcomes?
Recent Advances in the Study of the Information Structure of Discourse
Contrastive Approaches to Lexis and Grammar
12
S10
S11
S12
S13
S14
S15
S17
S18
S19
S20
S21
S22
S23
S24
S25
S26
S27
S28
S29
S30
S32
S33
S34
S35
S36
S37
S38
S40
S41
S42
S43
S44
S45
S46
S48
S49
S50
S51
S52
S53
S54
S55
S56
S57
S59
Discourse Analysis of Natural Disaster News in the Media of English-speaking Countries
Stance and Identity in Discourses
Dictionaries: Ideologies and Norm
Intralingual Translation: Rewriting for New Contexts and Readers
English as a Foreign Language for Students with Special Educational Needs – Strategies and Challenges
Phraseology and Business Terminology: The Points of Crossing
Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Approaches to Biblical Phraseology
Developing Genre-and Discipline-Specific Standards in Academic Writing?
The Discursive Management of Conflict in Interpersonal Interactions
Man utanbordes wisdom ond lare hieder on lond sohte – Relations between England and the Continent in the Middle
Ages
From Cottonopolis to the Ville Lumière of Silk: Factories, Fibres and Frameworks of Victorian Textiles
Sounds Victorian: Acoustic Experience in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Brexit and National Identities in the United Kingdom
Identifying and Representing Domestic Violence between Partners in European Countries (18th-21st centuries)
Assertiveness and Diffidence in Scottish Culture
Cities in Scotland: Cultural Heritage and National Identity
The World of Publishing
Spaces in Transit: Literary and Cultural Responses to Mnemonic Landscapes
The Perception and Representation of Plants in Early Modern England (1550-1700)
Cosmopolitans and Strangers: Literature, Culture and Conviviality in and beyond the West
Postmodernism and After: A Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Response to Postmodernism
Reorientations: Reading Neo-Victorianism in Contemporary Culture
English Printed Books, Manuscripts and Material Studies
Forms of Refugee Writing
The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
Just “making it new”? Modernist Fiction Writers Reaching Back to their Predecessors
The Roaring Novels of the 1920’s
Energy in Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad’s works
Theatre and Minorities
Revisiting the Periodical Essay (1860-1940)
Polyglossia and Multilingualism in Early Modern Travel Writing and Drama
Urban and Suburban Spaces and the Narrative of Locality in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction
Shell Shock in Modernist Fiction
Literary Studies after the Spatial Turn
Writing on the Move: The Conditions of Writing during / about Travel
Behind Closed Doors: Reconfigurations of Domestic Architecture and Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Indian
Literature in English
War and its Aftermath in Contemporary English-Speaking Theatre
Adapting Literature in Film and the New Media
European Translations and Adaptations of 19th-Century British Classics
Experience and Experiment: Seventeenth-Century English Essays and Other Nonfictional Prose Writing
Spaces and Places of Care: The Medical Humanities and Literature
Representing Brexit: Community and Body Politics in Contemporary British Fiction and Visual Arts
Orientalism and Borealism in the Long Eighteenth Century
Genre, Gender and Nation in Early Prose Fiction in English (1600-1700)
English Dialects from Page to Stage
13
S60
S61
S62
S63
S64
S65
S66
S67
Dickens: Heirs and Heirlooms
Hybrid Transtextualities: Adaptation and the Aesthetics and Politics of Form
Bodily (Re)Orientations in Neo-Victorianism
Textual Production and Reception under 20th-Century Censorship
Migrant Writers Writing in English
Material Feminism and Posthumanism in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Transnational Perspectives in, Transnational Perspectives on European Feminisms
The Lure of the Renaissance: The Representation of this Cultural Period in Historical Fiction, Fantasy, and Science
Fiction, in a Variety of Different Media
Posters
P1
P2
P3
Metaphorization of Economic Concepts in Business Discourse
Trumping Twitter: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism in President Trump’s Tweets
Affective Gender: Navigating the unknown in contemporary female solo travel writing
14
Plenary Lectures
Fiona McCann, University of Lille, France
Wednesday 1st September, 13.30-14.30
Epistemic Disobedience and the Faculty: Decolonial Pedagogies for a Sustainable Future
Chair: Vanessa Guignery, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
As we lurch towards irrevocable and devastating climate and biodiversity catastrophe, as high school
students take to the streets for the future, and as we deal with the impact of a global health pandemic, the
purpose and scope of education and educators is clearly up for discussion. How might we help to develop
a sustainable future through the development of meaningful pedagogies?
The aim of this paper is to consider the faculty as an educational space and, in more abstract terms,
following Aníbal Quijano, as the capacity or ability to do, to effect meaningful change as teachers and
students. My own positionality as a postcolonial studies scholar leads me to reflect on the kinds of
decolonial pedagogies (decolonial in content and in form) which could be explored in order to respond to
the present urgency. These pedagogies would, in the literature classroom, expose and interrogate the
“combined and uneven development” (Warwick Research Collective) across the globe based on the
destructive twins of colonialism and capitalism, and also sketch out possible contours of sustainable change.
These decolonial pedagogies call for what Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh call “epistemic
disobedience”. This would involve a significant shift in both the content and the terms of the conversations
we have in the faculty: breaking the teacher/student hierarchy (Rancière), radically rethinking why and how
and what should be evaluated (for what end, since the end is in sight?), focusing on exposing the fallacy of
universality that brought us colonial/modernity, and actively striving towards a “pluriversity” (Mignolo &
Walsh) which is necessarily uncomfortable. The gatekeeping of sub-disciplines (literature, “civilisation”,
linguistics etc.) and the unique prism of Eurocentrism are failing our faculties.
And yet, as thinkers, we surely have the faculty to reject these straightjackets which preserve a
precarious status quo and to embrace holistic managed learning strategies. I will make a case for the
necessity of espousing these radical changes which I have been inspired to pursue largely thanks to
decolonial criticism, and will proffer (tentative) examples of how this might be accomplished at
undergraduate and graduate level in the context of literature seminars. I will also address the paradoxes and
limits of doing so from within Europe. To provoke systemic change and to foster sustainable ways of living
on our planet we urgently need to overcome the epistemological prisons of Eurocentric “universalism.”
Fiona McCann is Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the University of
Lille and a Junior Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. Her teaching and
research are focused on contemporary Irish, South African, Zimbabwean and
Nigerian literature, decolonial praxis and theory, and, increasingly, decolonial
pedagogies. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on
postcolonial novels, prison writing, and the politics of aesthetics. She has also coedited several journal issues, is the editor of a collection of essays on Irish prisons
(The Carceral Network in Ireland: History, Agency and Resistance, Palgrave,
2020) and the author of a monograph (A Poetics of Dissensus: Confronting
Violence in Contemporary Prose Writing from the North of Ireland, Peter Lang,
2014). She is at present working on two book projects: a monograph on forms of
care in world literature and another on decolonial pedagogies.
15
David Britain, University of Bern, Switzerland
Thursday 2nd September, 13.30-14.30
Islomania and English: what can islands tell us about the past and the present of English
dialects?
Chair: Jim Walker, Université Lyon 2
Recent scholarship on so-called ‘lesser-known varieties of English’ (Schreier et al 2010) has foregrounded
the importance of often remote, often isolated, often small, and usually until recently ignored dialects of
English for understanding both the past and present of the language. This scholarship is important for a
number of reasons:
Firstly, such Englishes have usually emerged away from the normative pressures of the standard
language that have undoubtedly shaped the recent development of English in, for example, England.
Examining these varieties allows us to look at English unfettered, to examine what is possible in English
when less constrained by official normative influences.
Secondly, they have often emerged in unusual demographic circumstances, and are products of a
particular time in colonial history and in socio-historical contexts that, one might argue, we may well never
experience again.
They enable us, thirdly, to examine the role of relative isolation and peripherality at the moment of their
genesis, but, given the advent of greater mobility, the consequences of greater contact with other
communities more recently.
And finally, they, in many cases, enable us to problematize the divide between so-called ‘inner circle’
L1 Englishes, on the one hand, and so-called outer circle L2 ‘World’ Englishes on the other.
In this presentation, I will present results from sociolinguistic research conducted with my colleagues
and students on varieties of English that emerged in a wide range of socio-historical contexts on a number
of often rather remote (or so it seems) islands of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans – these include,
among others, Palau, Nauru, Kiribati and Tonga in the Pacific, the Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian
Ocean, and the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, as well as islands nearer to the ideological centre,
off the coast of Britain. I argue that such islands are especially rich sites for addressing the four concerns
raised above – the emergence of dialects outside of the influence of the mainstream, at particular moments
in colonial history, the impact of increased mobility and globalisation on their development and trajectories,
and the interconnectedness of inner and outer circle Englishes.
Schreier, D. et al (2010). The Lesser Known Varieties of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
David Britain has been Professor of Modern English Linguistics at
the University of Bern in Switzerland since 2010, having previously
worked in New Zealand and the UK. His research interests embrace
language variation and change, varieties of English (especially in
Southern England, the Southern Hemisphere and the Pacific), dialect
contact and attrition, dialect ideologies, and the dialectology-human
geography interface, especially with respect to space/place, urban/rural
and the role of mobilities. He is editor of Language in the British Isles
(Cambridge University Press, 2007), co-editor (with Jenny Cheshire) of
Social Dialectology (Benjamins, 2003), co-author (with Laura Rupp) of
Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme: Let’s talk
about -s. (Palgrave, 2019) and co-author of Linguistics: An Introduction (with Andrew Radford,
Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spencer) (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition,
2009). Dave was Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics between 2008 and 2017.
16
Parallel Lectures
PL1 – Alice in Transmedia Wonderland
Wednesday 1st September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Anna Kérchy, University of Szeged, Hungary (akerchy<at>ieas-szeged.hu)
Chair: Samuel Baudry, Université Lyon 2
Part of Alice’s appeal is her ambiguity, which makes possible a wide range of interpretations in
adapting Lewis Carroll’s classic Wonderland stories to various media. Popular re-imaginings of
Alice and her topsy-turvy world reveal many ways of eliciting enchantment and shaping makebelieve. Adventures get “curiouser and curiouser” once Alice ventures into Transmedia
Wonderland, transgressing the confines of the written text towards visual, acoustic, tactile, kinetic
and digital new media regimes of representation. Late 20th-century and 21st-century
adaptations dynamically interact with their Victorian source texts as well as one another to
enhance the immersion into an elaborate fictional universe and maximalize audience engagement,
while retelling a story that remains recognizably the same, yet turns radically different with each
new retelling. The journey to Wonderland today signifies a metafantasmagoric, metamedial
mission urging all to explore interactively the cultural critical and ethical stakes of our embodied
imaginative experience of making sense of nonsense.
PL2 – Between Literature and the Public Sphere. Postmillennial Trends in the Indian
Anglophone Novel
Tuesday 31st August, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Rossella Ciocca, University of Naples, Italy (rciocca<at>unior.it)
Chair: Vanessa Guignery, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
The Indian literary scene, after the breakthrough of the postcolonial novel, is now in its complex
entirety a space of extremely lively and variegated narrative production. After the groundbreaking
postcolonial sweep of the 80s and 90s with Rushdie, Roy, Seth, Mistry to set the model, in the
third millennium a vast train of authors continue to experiment with a multifarious variety of
trends, genres, forms and voices (Varughese; Singh). A new generation of writers chart out a
vibrant and energetic literary landscape in which the novelistic and other modes, such as the
graphic novel, the autobiography or the diary, question changing notions of authorship
and interrogate the role of English in creating reading communities across regional borders
(Ciocca & Srivastava; Tickell; Anjaria).Yet, due to its historical cultural activism, born from its
relation with the anti-colonial movement and the progressive modernist agenda (AIPWA), it is no
surprise that in India the dominant themes in writing from and about the subcontinent still engage
intensely with civic, public, political, historical issues. Addressing with new vigor the unsolved
tangle of problematic relations between different castes, religions, ethnicities and factors such
as the spread of the neoliberalism with its exploitative economic model, postmillennial writers are
ever more interested in delineating new political geographies in order to give voice to those who
have only recently acquired the right to speak. The aim of my talk is to contribute to a reflection
on the expressive possibilities of Indian postmillennial narrative prose in its particular relation with
17
literary specificity on the one hand and the peculiar interplay with the subcontinental Public
Sphere on the other. In this sense, I would like to address the particular case study
of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Continuing in fictional
terms the author’s life-long commitment against neo-liberal depredation of Indian
ecological resources and her unrelenting critique against the threats the rise of Hindu nationalism
poses to democracy, Roy confirms a gift for storytelling that is genuinely, and almost daringly,
literary. My aim is then to assess not only the breadth of this novel’s capacity to tackle thorny
political issues, giving voice to traditionally silenced social actors, but also to account for its
quintessentially artistic devotion to stylistic expertise and original rhetorical proficiency.
PL3 – Dialogism and Discourse Analysis
Friday 3rd September 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Giuliana Elena Garzone, IULM University, Milan, Italy (giuliana.garzone<at>iulm.it)
Chair: Philippe Millot, Université Lyon 3
This presentation intends to illustrate the application, in linguistics and discourse analysis, of the
notion of dialogism, and its sibling notions of polyphony and heteroglossia, originally
introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin (1929/1984) with regard to the novel and later expanded to
embrace all forms of linguistic communication (Bakhtin 1981). Recognising dialogism as an
inherent property of discourse means postulating the presence of different ‘voices’ in ‘speech
utterances’ (in Bakhtin’s terminology), i.e. the idea that discourse is never totally monologic: any
utterance has no meaning in itself, but responds to previous utterances and at the same time
anticipates future responses, being only “a link in the chain of verbal exchange” (“un maillon dans
la chaîne de l’échange verbale” (Bakhtin 1952/1979/1984: 302-303).In linguistics and discourse
analysis, the notions of polyphony and dialogism have been taken up and elaborated extensively
by various scholars especially in the French tradition, starting from Ducrot (1984), who actually
preferred the word “polyphony” to refer to the quality of text in which ‘the utterance signals, in its
enunciation, the superimposition of several voices’ (Ducrot 1984: 183, my translation), so ‘there
is a multiplicity of points of view that juxtapose, superpose or respond to each other’ (Ducrot 1986:
26). Among other researchers who have investigated these same aspects there are those belonging
to the praxematic circle, e.g. Jacques Bres, Alexandra Nowakowska and Jeanne-Marie
Barbéris (Bres 1999; Bres/Nowakoska 2005; cf. Barbéris et al.2003), and the Scandinavian
ScaPoLine group, e.g. Henning Nølke, Kjersti Fløttum and Coco Norén (Nølke, Fløttum & Norén
2004; Fløttum, Dahl, and Kinn 2006) who have mainly focused on academic communication in
French. But the concept of dialogism has exerted a less systematic influence on linguistic and
discourse analytical scholarship in English and focusing on English, although for instance Martin
and White (2005) rely on it for their notion of ‘engagement’, which they recognize to be informed
by dialogism,and Fairclough (1992: 34; 84) refers to it when discussing his notions of manifest
intertexuality and interdiscursivity (or constitutive intertextuality), for which he declares he is also
indebted to Kristeva (1986) and Authier-Revuz (1982).Dialogism is realized by means of a range
of different linguistic devices, some of which are evidently dialogic, e.g. reported speech (cf.
Fairclough's manifest intertextuality: 1992: 117-123), while others are less manifestly so
(Bres/Nowakowska 2005: 139), i.e. lexicogrammatical clues that signal the presence of two or
more enunciative instances within the same utterance. The most comprehensive categorisation, put
forth by Bres and Novakowska (Bres 1999; Bres/Nowakowska 2005; Nowakowska 2005),
18
includes negation (including ‘renchérissment’: “not only ...but also”; rectification: “... not ...
but...”), concession and opposition, presupposition, interrogation, ie. rhetorical questions, cleft
sentences, echo-utterances, irony, reported speech and autonymical modalisation. Some of these
same discursive traits –speech reportage (or ‘language representations’), presupposition, negation,
irony –figure on Fairclough’s (1992: 117-118) list of indicators of “manifest intertextuality”. In
this paper I will discuss the concept of dialogism, starting from its definition, also considering its
sibling concepts of polyphony and heteroglossia, and show its usefulness as a conceptualisation
to be relied on in discourse analysis, and in particular in the analysis of argumentative texts (e.g.
in legal and political discourse) or texts that are aimed at the dissemination of information or
knowledge from external sources (e.g. news discourse, popularization)
PL4 – The Construction of the European Intellectual: Petrarch in Medieval and Early
Modern English Literature
Friday 3rd September 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Alessandra Petrina, University of Padova, Italy (alessandra.petrina<at>unipd.it)
Chair: Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
Petrarch’s reflections on fame and the legacy of classical tradition prompted the inscription
of poetry (his own, as well as his forebears’ and contemporaries’) within the wider structure of
human history. While keeping faith to Augustine’s view of time and history, he also strove
to comprehend a development of culture that clamoured to be understood in its own terms, beyond
the overarching reference to the divine plan. This sometimes-painful search brought him to be
hailed, in centuries to come, as a proto-humanist writer. As late-medieval English literature
struggled to find its identity, in linguistic and cultural terms, the legacy of Petrarch proved
essential, durable, and complex. The same legacy accompanied the development of English
literature from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. From one generation of poets to the next,
from Chaucer to Lydgate, to Wyatt and Surrey, to Mary Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Anna
Hume, the Petrarchan texts drawn upon and the reactions they generated changed, sometimes
radically, providing a singular instance of translatio studii: translations, rewritings, and parodies of
Petrarchan poetry chart the passage of English writing from the late Middle Ages to the
Renaissance. Petrarch’s enfranchisement from the oppressive classical inheritance offers Chaucer
and the following generations of poets a model on which to build a national literary canon,
accompanying the emergence of English as the language of the nation; the dissemination of his
Italian poetry provides models for the triumphal form and the sonnet. Read in the original Latin
and Italian, or through intermediary translations in French, Petrarch’s works proved an
extraordinary touchstone against which English and Scottish writers could test their poetic
language, their use of literary forms, and their cultural ideology. In this sense Petrarch becomes a
truly European poetic voice, which allows English-speaking writers to find a unique form of
expression.
19
PL5 – D.H. Lawrence’s Italian Rhapsodies
Thursday 2nd September 9.15-10.15
Lecturer:
Adrian
Radu,
Babes-Bolyai
(adrian.d.radu<at>gmail.com)
Chair: Pascale Tollance, Université Lyon 2
University,
Cluj-Napoca,
Romania
The lecture reconsiders three of the writer’s nonfiction writings dedicated to Italy: “Twilight in
Italy”, “Sea and Sardinia” and “Etruscan Places”. Italy was for Lawrence a country he sought not
only for the beneficial effects that its sun and warm climate could have on his own poor health,
but also for the beauty of its spellbinding landscapes untouched by the process of industrialisation,
the temperament and friendliness of its inhabitants, its overwhelming history and flourishing art
and civilisation. What he discovered here was also a materialisation of his concept of élan vital,
the idea of resurrection and immortality of the Etruscans, the Mediterranean type of people that
offered him his typical male portraits and typologies, a totally different way of life. These themes
and a few more will constitute the backbone of this lecture intended to be a multimedia event
dedicated to D.H. Lawrence’s Italy.
PL6 – Aotearoa English: Evidence from the New Zealand Stories Corpus
Tuesday 31st August, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Alexander Onysko, University of Klagenfurt, Austria (Alexander.Onysko<at>aau.at)
Chair: Adam Renwick, Université Lyon 2
Among the Englishes in Aotearoa New Zealand, the variety called Māori English has been subject
to some controversy in linguistic research. While originally defined by Benton (1966: 79) as “a set
of subdialects, originating in the acquisition of English by earlier generations of Maori speakers
and involving semantic, lexical and grammatical features ‘transferred’ from Maori and
standardized in adult speech”, some more recent research has highlighted the fact that Māori
English should be conceived of as a sociolect rather than an ethnolect (cf. Bauer 1994). Holmes
(2005) observes different registers of Māori English depending on colloquial vs. more formal
types of language use –the latter being virtually indistinct from Standard New Zealand English.
Bell argues along similar lines when he states that “differences between varieties tend to be
relative rather than absolute. Few if any features are likely to be unique to Maori English” (2000:
222). At the same time, studies by King (1999) and D’Arcy (2010) emphasize that Māori English
can function as an important means of expressing ethno-cultural identity, thus characterizing
Māori English as an ethnolinguistic repertoire. Departing from previous research, which frequently
focussed on the sounds of Māori English (i.e. its potential phonetic and prosodic features), this talk
will shed new light on the complex picture, highlighting the role of Māori cultural knowledge
expressed in English used in Aotearoa. Based on evidence taken from the New Zealand Stories
Corpus (cf. Onysko & Degani 2017), a collection of small stories told by Māori and non-Māori
New Zealanders, the talk will discuss a range of cultural concepts and their linguistic renderings
that can be regarded as examples of Māoriness in English, i.e. Aotearoa English.
20
PL7 – In the Waiting Room of Emotions: Love Fulfilled or Affects Thwarted
Tuesday 31st August, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: M.S. Suárez Lafuente, University of Oviedo, Spain (lafuente<at>uniovi.es)
Chair: Emmanuelle Peraldo, Université Lyon 3
Emotions are determined by culturally learned attitudes that, when they do not fit our
circumstances, create anxiety and fear. Emotions such as Love are significantly built on
expectations – expectations that keep us in a state full of uneasy questions about ourselves, a
veritable “waiting room of emotions”. Uneasiness only increases the fictional and very subjective
consideration we sustain of the person we decided to love and trust. Literature is full of examples
in which everyday life clashes with love, till time and feelings relocate our affections, if not with
a happy ending at least with a healthy (or unhealthy) beginning. I will draw examples from
contemporary authors such as Alice Munro, Jeffrey Eugenides, Carol Shields and Jane Rogers,
among others.
PL8 – Grammatical and Lexical Innovation in London English. New Linguistic Practices
among Teenagers and Young Adults
Thursday 2nd September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Ignacio Palacios, University
(ignacio.palacios<at>usc.es)
Chair: Cécile Poix, Université Lyon 2
of
Santiago
de
Compostela,
Spain
After a brief introduction on the creation of large cities in Europe and in the rest of the world due
to a number of social and economic reasons, and how this is reflected on language, this lecture will
focus on the main distinctive grammatical and lexical features of the variety of English known as
Multicultural London English (MLE), a new sociolect that has emerged in London in the last few
years as the result of language contact and group second language acquisition within a large
population of young speakers. For this purpose, I will be using corpus data, namely the
Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) and the London English Corpus
(LEC) together with supplementary material extracted from social networks, Twitter in particular.
The second part of the lecture will be concerned with some of the features that have been identified
as characteristic of London teenagers and young adults, such as the overuse of some intensifiers
(really, so, bare, proper, bloody, fucking), a high presence of vague terms, either in the form of
general nouns or placeholders (thingy, stuff), and general extenders (and stuff, or something), a
special quotative system with the occurrence of constructions with be (like),that is+ pronoun, a
high number of vernacular negatives (ain't, 3rd person singular dont, negative concord) and a mode
of expression crowded with familiarisers (man, brother, dude, lad) and taboo or offensive
vocatives (bastard, dick, idiot).The paper will conclude with a number of reflections on language
innovation and change in (London) English in light of the previous findings.
21
PL9 – Narratives of Disposability in Contemporary British Fiction
Wednesday 1st September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Silvia Caporale, University of Alicante, Spain (caporale<at>ua.es)
Chair: Pascale Tollance, Université Lyon 2
In this lecture I will analyze Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009) and John Lanchester’s Capital
(2012). I draw on the notion of disposability (Brad Evans and Henri Giroux 2015, Standing 2011,
Bauman 2004) to delve into the concepts of neoliberal subjectivity and exclusion for the analysis
of the characters that in the novels embody subjectivities shaped by the logic of finance (economic
migrants or asylum seekers). I argue that both works narrate different personifications of
disposability resulting from neoliberal violence. In In the Kitchen and Capital, both Ali
and Lanchester map a dark cartography of neoliberal British society. Both novels picture a society
that is either indifferent to the violence provoked by neoliberalism, or unable to fight it back; the
two works map a journey that slides from an apparently multicultural and opulent society down
into a kind of dantesque social Inferno;
PL10 – Literary Translation Evaluation, Translator-Centredness and Translatorship
Tuesday 31st August, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Titela Vilceanu, University of Craiova, Romania (elavilceanu<at>yahoo.com)
Chair: Samuel Baudry, Université Lyon 2
The question of translation evaluation, and implicitly, of quality management, has been attached
ever increasing importance in translation studies over the past decades (Alvstad and Assis Rosa,
2015; Alvstad et al. 2017; Baker, 2010; Basnett, 2014; Boase-Beier, 2014; Caderra and Walsh,
2017; D’hulst and Gambier, 2018; Gambier and van Doorslaer, 2016; Gentzler, 2017; Halverson,
2014; Hermans, 2007; House, 2014; Kuhiwczak and Littau, 2007; Jansen and Wegener, 2013;
Maitland, 2017; Schäffner, 2000; Snell-Hornby, 2006; Toury, 2012; Tymoczko, 2007; Venuti,
2004, Vîlceanu, 2013, etc.). Nevertheless, it still lacks a comprehensive or unitary theory able to
anticipate or solve all the recurrent problems. Under the circumstances, the lecture focuses on
designing a framework for literary translation evaluation and for boosting the visibility of the
literary translator. The lecture also considers re-translation evaluation and aims to identify the
linguistic and extralinguistic factors accounting for the variability of literary translation. Any
coherent theory of literary translation evaluation should underpin objective criteria, among which
we mention: referential accuracy, grammatical and lexical adequacy, text-type equivalence,
pragmatic compliance (including language variation equivalence) and cultural recontextualisation. Literary translation evaluation and validation should not disregard
translatorship, i.e., aggregating the translator’s competence and ideological affiliation, which
determines his/her interpretation of the literary text seen as a cultural artefact. The question of
preserving the stylistic identity of the source language text (in terms of authorship) becomes
critical; therefore, translatorship and authorship should not be envisaged as two competing notions,
but rather as complementary ones, securing the translation quality and its smooth insertion to the
target language culture and literary system.
22
PL12 – Exploring Sociocultural Change and Language Change in the History of English
Wednesday 1st September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Minna Palander-Collin, University of Helsinki, Finland (minna.palandercollin<at>helsinki.fi)
Chair: Vincent Renner, Université Lyon 2
The proposed lecture focuses on the idea that social changes and changes in language practices
work in tandem, and social processes can be observed in language. The first part of the lecture
explores how this relationship of the linguistic and social has been studied in earlier research. For
example, both philologists and historians (e.g. Hughes 1988, Williams 1958, Wierzbicka 1997,
2006) have established words and conceptual domains as important reflections of societal
developments and cultural values. Linguists have focused on tracing more holistic patterns of
twentieth-century language change as a reflection of broad societal trends such as
colloquialization, Americanization, and democratization (e.g. Leech et al. 2009, Mair 2006).
Further technological advancements in big data like Google Books and tools like Google Ngram
Viewer further encouraged new type of efforts in mining huge amounts of lexical data to find out
about human behaviour and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitalized texts
(cultoromics; e.g. Pechenic et al. 2015).
The second part of the lecture will then present specific research carried out in the project on
Democratization, Mediotization and Language Practices in Britain 1700-1950 (Academy of
Finland 2016-2020). In this project, the relationship of linguistic and sociocultural processes has
been empirically studied in a variety of public texts mediating ideologies and values, identities and
role relationships, such as newspaper texts, parliamentary records, and court proceedings. The
societal process discussed in the talk will be democratization and it will show how by using a
combination of corpus linguistic and socio-pragmatic methods as well as large data and small data,
it is possible to track the interplay of societal and linguistic developments over long periods of
time with an evidence-based approach. The talk will also highlight the role of genres in portraying
and transmitting societal developments in different ways and at a different pace.
PL13 – Actually, there’s More to Pragmatic Markers in Learner Discourse than Meets the
Eye
Friday 3rd September 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Lieven Buysse, KU Leuven, Belgium (lieven.buysse<at>kuleuven.be)
Chair: Jim Walker, Université Lyon 2
Pragmatic markers have demonstrated their capacity to both signal textual relations and grease
relations between interlocutors in interaction, even though these items are grammatically and
semantically optional and do not contribute to the propositional content of an utterance. As a
consequence, native speakers make abundant use of them in order to structure conversations as
well as to build rapport with co-participants. In foreign language classrooms, pragmatics, however,
often features at the bottom of the priorities list. The acquisition of pragmatic markers tends to be
considered a feature of advanced learner language, if it occurs in learner data at all. Interestingly,
learner language is typically contrasted to the learner’s mother tongue, which implies that
differences and similarities in the use of pragmatic markers in the target language can be related
23
to the presence or absence of similar markers in learners’ L1. One way of detecting this type of
(positive or negative) L1 transfer is through a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 2015),
i.e. contrast learner language with similar data in the learners’ L1, on the one hand, and contrast
data from learners of one L1 with that from learners of a different L1, on the other hand. This
approach would appear to be particularly productive with pragmatic markers for which indeed
either a clear cognate or an absolute gap between the target language and the L1 can be detected.
An interesting case in this respect is actually, the English pragmatic marker expressing counterexpectation, which has an obvious counterpart in Dutch (eigenlijk), for which however specific
diverging functions have been suggested (Van Bergen et al., 2011). Both also have a competitor
marker in the same domain, which are again each other’s cognate: in fact and in feite, respectively.
Moreover, French appears to have a cognate for in fact (en fait) but not for actually. All these
observations taken together warrant an analysis that takes both a contrastive interlanguage
approach and a traditional contrastive language perspective within a single study. In this lecture I
will, therefore, compare (i) how learners of English who are native speakers of Dutch use actually
and in fact to how their peers with French L1 as well as (ii) native speakers of English do so. These
data will be supplemented with a contrastive analysis of actually, in fact and their equivalents in
Dutch and French. To this end two corpora will be used: the Louvain International Database of
Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI; Gilquin et al., 2010) for the learner data and the Dutch
Parallel Corpus (DPC; Macken et al., 2011) for the contrastive analysis. Piecing the results of these
different types of analyses together yields an enriched picture of both how actually and in fact are
used by native and non-native speakers alike and how their equivalents in other languages behave,
as well as how the learners’ mother tongue may (positively or negatively) affect their pragmatic
marker use in English.
PL14 – Representations of Space in Contemporary American Crime Fiction
Tuesday 31st August, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer:
Šárka
Bubíková,
University
of
Pardubice,
(sarka.bubikova<at>upce.cz)
Chair: Sophie Chapuis, Université Jean Monnet Saint-Étienne
Czech
Republic
In his 1983 article “Geography as an Art” Donald W. Meining worried over the uncertainty of the
impact of geographers’ studies of literary works among literary critics (in fact, his article was
published by the Royal Geographical Society). However, since then literary theory has
significantly turned its attention to representation of space and landscape in narratives. So far,
theoretical interest in the way literary works depict space has been predominantly devoted to socalled classics or “high” literature, although Douglas R. McManis claimed already several decades
ago that “mystery writing is an abundant source of literary geography.” (319)
In my talk, I would like to present my latest research on the ways space is represented in
contemporary American (ethnic) crime fiction. Combining phenomenological approaches of
Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, 1957) with the categorization of attitudes to landscape as
proposed by Stephen Siddall in Landscape and Literature (2009), as well as employing the concept
of place as literary topos as formulated by Czech scholars Michal Peprník (Topos lesa v americké
literatuře, 2005) and Daniela Hodrová (esp. in Místa s tajemstvím, 1994) I will analyze works of
several American crime fiction writers, such as Tony Hillerman, Aimee and David Thurlo, Dana
Stabenow and Nevada Barr, to show how they variously create textual representations of space
24
and how they employ them in the genre of crime fiction. As Lisa Fletcher has pointed out, there is
“a powerful correspondence between types of setting and types of narratives” (1) and therefore
studying textual representation of space in connection with a particular genre can provide an
interesting insight into our spatial and narrative awareness and imagination.
PL15 – Echoes of the Spatial Turn in Contemporary British Fiction
Thursday 2nd September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Petr Chalupský, Charles University, Faculty of Education, Prague, Czech Republic
(petr.chalupsky<at>pedf.cuni.cz)
Chair: Emilie Walezak, Université Lyon 2
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, literary theory and criticism turned their focus on
representation of space and place, which eventually gained the significance that time and
temporality had enjoyed for centuries. This focal shift, insisting that the spatial properties of the
narrative should not be restricted to mere background setting, emerged from the acknowledgement
that the relationship between human beings and their environment is reciprocal and interactive.
The fact that human beings live in space-time and both of these dimensions considerably determine
our existence and are equally crucial for the formation of our identity opened to theorists a fruitful
field of interest that culminated in what can be called the postmodern “spatial turn”. As a result, a
number of often interdisciplinary approaches investigating literary representations of space and
place, both real and imaginary ones, have been developed since the late 1970s, enhancing literary
studies with findings from other fields such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, cultural
anthropology, ecology and geography, and producing a diversity of such approaches, as can be
demonstrated on the examples of geopoetics, ecocriticism, psychogeography, humanistic
geography and geocriticism. Using these critical practices and their theoretical points of departure
the lecture focuses on varied spatial representations in selected works of contemporary British
fiction writers such as Jim Crace, Simon Mawer, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters, Will Self, Zadie
Smith, Ian McEwan and Ian McGuire.
PL16 – Exploring Phraseology in Learner English Academic Texts
Thursday 2nd September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Markéta Malá, Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic
(Marketa.Mala<at>ff.cuni.cz)
Chair: Philippe Millot, Université Lyon 3
It is now a generally accepted view in linguistics that “the language we use every day is composed
of prefabricated expressions, rather than being strictly compositional” (Gray & Biber 2015: 125,
cf. Ebeling and Hasselgård 2015). From the point of view of language learners, such units are the
key to both comprehension and fluency, as they reduce the processing effort (Nesselhauf 2005).
Since the prefabricated multi-word expressions differ across registers, both in terms of their
structure and their functional load, they may also serve as an indicator of belonging to a particular
discourse community (Hyland 2008).
The lecture focuses on the phraseology of academic written English. The approach
combines corpus-informed contrastive analysis and learner corpus research. It compares texts
25
written by two groups of novice academic writers – L1 English university students and advanced
Czech learners. The analysis relies on two corpora of academic student writing – VESPA-CZ and
BAWE. BAWE comprises L1 university students’ assignments; VESPA-CZ essays written by
Czech advanced learners of English. An additional corpus compiled from papers published in
English academic journals serves as a yardstick against which the students’ essays are compared.
The corpus-driven approach takes frequency lists, keywords and lexical bundles as its starting
points to reveal areas in which phraseology distinguishes native speakers of English from L2
learners on the one hand, and novice writers (whether L1 or L2) from experienced academic writers
on the other.
26
PL17 – Migrating Literatures: Bulgaria in the American Imaginary
Thursday 2nd September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Alexandra Glavanakova, St. Kliment Ohridski, University of Sofia, Bulgaria
(a_glavanakova<at>hotmail.com)
Chair: Sophie Chapuis, Université Jean Monnet Saint-Étienne
One of the most intriguing areas for comparative research in contemporary cultural studies and
world literature(s) (Emily Apter 2013) is the interrelation between cultural identity and the
imagination. This paper aims to focus on the perceptions and representations of Bulgaria in the
American cultural imaginary. To fulfill this goal, I will be looking for critical transatlantic readings
of Bulgaria through American eyes, while examining the following questions: How are conflicts
of identity thematized and represented in imaginary creative outputs, which reflect on the
construction of the ‘West’ and the ‘East,’ of Self and Other, of ‘Europeanness’ (‘Balkanness’) and
‘Americanness’? How is transcultural identity demarcated in the process of mobility between
different communities, which are ethnically, ideologically, and culturally distinct? How do
perceptions of the transatlantic Other aid in defining and constructing American cultural identity?
So far, the U.S. has been studied extensively in relation to Bulgaria by Bulgarian critics
and academics from the period of the Bulgarian Enlightenment to the present day. The focus in
these analyses has been primarily on the reception / perception / representation of America in
Bulgarian cultural production. However, the image of Bulgaria as reflected in American cultural
spaces, though an intriguing topic worthwhile for academic study, has remained so far largely
unexplored, especially regarding recent American cultural productions in the post-1989 and post2007 (when Bulgaria joined the European Union) periods. Three main studies in this field, which
I build on, are Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the
Enlightenment (1994); Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans. [1997] (2009); Ludmilla Kostova
(ed. et. al). Comparisons and Interactions Within/Across Cultures (2012). To these seminal works,
which focus on the larger geopolitical areas of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, inclusive of
Bulgaria, should be added a more recent exploration of the image of Bulgaria in the British,
American and Canadian press (1980-2000): Kristin Dimitrova, Efirni pesni I taini sluzhbi. Obrazat
na Balgariya v britanskata, amerikanskata i anglokanadskata presa prez perioda 1980-2000
(Sofia: Kolibri, 2015).
What interests me are the manifestations of the complexity and hybridity of cultural
interactions with a focus on Bulgaria as a Balkan / East European country, but specifically as
presented from an American point of view, discussed within the theoretical matrix of the
transcultural. The transcultural approach acknowledges the limitations of each culture, alongside
the continuous role of cross-cultural contact. Transcultural dialogues and reflections lead to selftransformation and are just as significant in shaping and reflecting on identity, as is the urge for
self-protection from alien cultural forms (Arianna Dagnino 2015; Mikhail Epstein 2004, 2009;
Mikhail Epstein and Ellen Berry 1999; Wolgang Welsch 1999, 2002). I prefer the term
‘transcultural’ to ‘transnational’ (the latter has been used widely in recent decades by many
Americanists: Amy Kaplan, Rob Kroes, Heinz Ickstadt, Winfried Fluck, among others) to refer to
the interdisciplinary nature of cultural studies at the crossroads of literature and history.
Bulgaria emerges not only as a setting for the action in fictional works written by U.S.
writers, but also as a sub-text rich in implications and references. Bulgarian culture – its history,
mythology, folklore, contemporary development – serve as a point of departure for self-reflection
27
and for reflection on the contemporary processes of transcultural migration, Old World-New
World, East-West, margin-center dynamics, Orientalism and Occidentalism on the Balkans,
migration and expatriation in a post-communist, post 9/11-world. An illuminating illustration of
this tendency in literary exploration are the following novels: Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian.
(2005), Cynthia Morrison Phoel, Cold Snap Bulgaria Stories (2010), Ellis Shuman, Valley of the
Thracians: A Novel of Bulgaria (2013), Ronesa Aveela, Mystical Emona: Soul’s Journey (2014),
Hannah Howe, The Hermit of Hisarya, (2015), Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (2016),
Elizabeth Kostova, The Shadow Land (2017), among others. These can be compared with earlier
publications from the period of the Cold War, such as John Updike’s story “The Bulgarian Poetess”
(1965), and also with books by other Anglophone writers, for example, Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates
of Exchange (1983), Julian Barnes’s The Porcupine (1992), Rana Dasgupta’s Solo (2009), Geoff
Hart’s Bulgaria: Unfinished Business (2015), etc. These texts have also been inclusive of
Bulgarian history, geography, politics, and culture. The analysis will aim to outline the shared
thematic, genre and stylistic features of the explored texts and to provide explanations for the
preferred choices that are established.
PL18 – Marlowe and Ruins
Wednesday 1st September, 9.15-10.15
Lecturer: Efterpi Mitsi, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
(emitsi<at>enl.uoa.gr)
Chair: Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
In Christopher Marlowe’s plays cities are repeatedly sacked and kingdoms ruined. From Troy,
whose ruins appear in Marlowe’s inaugural play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, to Damascus, and
from Malta to Paris, the fascination with ruination is not only an expression of the violence
manifested in his drama but also a worldview; through the lens of ruins, Marlowe confronts
contemporary catastrophes and creates new artistic practices. As Rose Macaulay has argued in The
Pleasure of Ruins, Marlowe, Shakespeare and their contemporaries, inhabiting “a ruined and
ruinous world”, were obsessed with ruins. Yet, unlike most of his contemporaries, Marlowe did
not use the trope of ruins to reflect on loss and preservation, or to express a longing for timelessness
through the immortality of art. Instead, his works focus on the process and performance of
ruination as well as on the compulsion that leads a character to ruin, to “sack and utterly consume
… cities and golden palaces” (2 Tamburlaine, 4.3. 3867-8). Culminating in scenes (or memories)
of siege and images of breaking, burning and slaughtering, such destruction goes beyond the “will
to absolute play” (Greenblatt 1980) and “absolute negation” (Guillory 2014), becoming strangely
creative. Rather than inciting melancholy or nostalgia, Marlowe’s ruins seek to return the world to
an empty stage, proposing a critical ruin discourse. From there, they might invite us to think about
our own material world, strewn with rubble and rubbish and facing environmental ruin.
28
Round Tables
RT1: Literary Journalism and the P/Light of the ‘Lumières’
Monday 30th August, 16.30-18.30
Literary journalism – a genre of nonfiction prose that lies at the conceptual intersection of literature
and journalism – is a useful vehicle to recount and combat certain kinds of trans/national stories.
While its narrative aesthetics may whet universal appetites and pique interests beyond statutory
borders, real and immaterial, its commitment to rigorous journalistic standards firmly situates
literary journalism within a localized milieu. In other words, despite its widespread appeal, in time
as in place, literary journalism is first and foremost a tool to explore, examine and expose the here
and the now. Given the current socio-political climate, where world leaders have repeatedly
espoused one true nationalist narrative and have cast themselves as its rightful protagonist and
conduit to recover a lost or usurped glorious past (e.g., U.S., North Korea, England, Brazil, Russia,
Austria, Hungary …), the proposed roundtable will examine ways in which literary journalism can
inumbrate these self-proclaimed Lumières and shed its own light on how various counter narratives
(political, economic, cultural, etc.) can govern us when such sea changes are underway.
Convenors:
John S. Bak (University of Lorraine, France, john.bak<at>univ-lorraine.fr) & David Abrahamson
(Northwestern University, USA, d-abrahamson<at>northwestern.edu).
Panelists:
Michael Berryhill (Texas Southern University, USA, Michael.Berryhill<at>tsu.edu),
Lisa A. Phillips (SUNY New Paltz, USA, phillipl<at>newpaltz.edu),
Beate Josephi (The University of Sydney, Australia, beate.josephi<at>sydney.edu.au),
Adriënne Ummels (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, a.ummels<at>student.ru.nl),
Christophe Den Tandt (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium,
Christophe.Den.Tandt<at>ulb.ac.be).
RT 2: “We Too”: Female Voices in the Transnational Era of Crisis, Migration and Climate
Change
Thursday 2nd September, 15.30-17.30
This roundtable proposes to adopt a historical-comparative perspective so as to gain a deep insight
into migratory movements that happened in our recent history and contemporary migrations
happening at the present moment, which may have been caused by political and economic crises,
armed conflicts, environmental disasters or other unsettling events. In particular, our aim is to draw
attention to the way these migrations have affected women’s lives and the way female writers and
artists have tried to represent these processes and their consequences in diverse cultural artefacts,
such as film, narrative, poetry and autobiographical works. Therefore, we will explore issues
related to diaspora, feminism, environmentalism, memory and identity from a transnational and
intersectional perspective, attempting to find connections among those cultural texts by women
29
voicing some of the most relevant crises that have configured and are still re-configuring our global
and local identities.
Convenors:
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín & Julia Kuznetski
Panelists:
Chiara Battisti (University of Verona, Italy, chiara.battisti<at>univr.it),
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín (University of Zaragoza, Spain, spellice<at>unizar.es),
Merve Sarikaya-Sen (Baskent University, Turkey, sarikaya<at>baskent.edu.tr),
Julia Kuznetski (University of Tallinn, Estonia, jul<at>tlu.ee),
María Rocío Cobo Piñero, Universidad de Sevilla (Spain, rociocobo<at>gmail.com).
RT 3: Meeting of the Gender Studies Network
Thursday 2nd September, 10.30-12.30
The GSN meeting is meant as a get-together of all ESSE members interested in extending a gender
perspective within and from our association. It will be the fourth in a row since Kosiče. First an
account will be given of what has been done so far (e.g. Internet presence with a Directory of
Members, Gender Studies Gallery, etc.). Special focus will be on the follow-up from Brno
concerning the threats to gender studies in Hungary and other European countries/universities.
Then the floor will be open to all present in order to articulate and discuss proposals for the near
future, such as developing access to the social media, the organizing of seminars and a Gender
Studies Doctoral/Young Researcher Symposium, with the ESSE Conference 2022 on the horizon.
New ideas welcome.
Convenors:
Işil Baş (Istanbul Kültür University, Turkey, isil<at>boun.edu.tr),
Florence Binard (University of Paris, France, fbinard<at>eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr),
Renate Haas (University of Kiel, Germany, haas<at>anglistik.uni-kiel.de),
María Socorro Suárez Lafuente (University of Oviedo, Spain, lafuente<at>uniovi.es).
RT 4: (Un)regulated Bodies in Contemporary Cultural Texts in English
Wednesday 1st September, 17.00-19.00
Taking as a starting point the idea that contemporary advanced capitalist societies regulate certain
(posthuman) bodies by means of different strategies and/or policies, this round table will address
how robots, clones and other posthuman bodies negotiate such imposed regulations and manage
to produce tactics to resist them. For this purpose, we will be looking at contemporary cultural
texts from a feminist perspective in an attempt to detect acts of resistance and rebellion against
oppressive systems that regulate life. Hence, we will discuss the following questions: Who is
responsible for the violent (sometimes destructive), unethical behavior of these regulated bodies?
What are the moral and ethical implications of such actions? Which alternatives are offered to and
by regulated bodies?
30
Convenor:
Rocío Carrasco Carrasco
Panelists:
Rocío Carrasco Carrasco (University of Huelva, Spain, rocio.carrasco<at>dfing.uhu.es),
Carolina Núñez Puente (University of A Coruña, Spain, c.nunez<at>udc.es),
Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia (University of Aveiro, Portugal, msbiscaia<at>ua.pt),
Libe García Zarranz (University of Trondheim, Norway, libe.g.zarranz<at>ntnu.no).
RT 5: Qualitative Approaches to English Historical Data in a Multimodal Perspective
Wednesday 1st September, 14.45-16.45
This panel will discuss state-of-the-art methods in the linguistic investigation of historical texts,
focusing on the contribution that a multimodal perspective can give to the enhancement of
qualitative analyses. Unlike in studies of PDE, in English historical linguistics attention to these
issues is a relatively recent development (e.g., Meurman-Solin & Tyrkkö 2013; Ratia & Suhr
2017). Moreover, there is now increasing interest in defining a reliable methodology meant to
validate the findings of qualitative analyses (e.g., the ICEHL 2018 workshop on “Qualitative
evidence and methodologies in historical linguistics”). Instances of good practice will be presented
so as to encourage further debate.
Convenors:
Maura Ratia & Marina Dossena
Panelists:
Marina Dossena (University of Bergamo, Italy, marina.dossena<at>unibg.it),
Tuomo Hiippala (University of Helsinki, Finland, tuomo.hiippala<at>helsinki.fi),
Maura Ratia (University of Helsinki, Finland, maura.ratia<at>helsinki.fi),
Massimo Sturiale (University of Catania – Ragusa, Italy, msturial<at>unict.it),
Carla Suhr (University of Helsinki, Finland, carla.suhr<at>helsinki.fi).
RT 6: Oscar Wilde in the New Millennium: Assessing Critical Approaches
Tuesday 31st August, 17.00-19.00
The organizers aim to illuminate new directions in Wilde studies within the European context. The
hybrid and polymorphic identity of Wilde has attracted considerable attention over the years, but
academic approaches to such a powerful watershed figure are gradually moving away from the
well-trod paths of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and queer studies. This roundtable will focus
on new contemporary critical perspectives on Wilde, including his connections with popular and
media culture (celebrity and performance studies), religion (spiritualism, occultism), and prison
literature (poignant indicators of this trend are the opening of Reading Prison in 2016 and the
National Trust Reading Gaol Tours).
31
Convenor:
Elisa Bizzotto
Panelists:
Elisa Bizzotto (Iuav University of Venice, Italy, bizzotto<at>iuav.it),
Jane Desmarais (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, J.Desmarais<at>gold.ac.uk),
Laura Giovannelli (University of Pisa, Italy, laura.giovannelli<at>unipi.it),
Katharina Herold (University of Oxford, UK, katharina.herold<at>bnc.ox.ac.uk),
Pierpaolo Martino (University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’, Italy, pierpaolo.martino<at>uniba.it).
32
Seminars
S01: International Perspectives on Learning and Teaching English
Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Katalin Doró (University of Szeged, Hungary, dorokati<at>lit.u-szeged.hu)
František Tůma (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, tuma<at>phil.muni.cz)
Thomas E. Bieri (Nanzan University, Japan, bieri4nanzan<at>gmail.com)
Language teachers continue to face challenges rooted in ongoing developments in education,
technology and society. Along with addressing practical aspects such as matching teaching praxis
to learner needs, using ICT or innovative assessment effectively, or contending with external
requirements, the seminar critically examines current trends in language teaching policies and
theories. The seminar aims to share and discuss EFL and ESL experiences in both local and global
contexts. Case studies, critical and empirical analyses, evaluations, and reviews regarding
developments, innovations, adaptations, and reactions in language education are included.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Tara McIlroy (Rikkyo University, Japan, mcilroy<at>rikkyo.ac.jp)
Metaphors in the Top Global University Project (TGUP): Japanese universities and evolving
language policy
Following the example of Europe, East Asian education contexts continue to internationalize with
projects such as the Top Global University Project (TGUP) in Japan. Initiated in 2014, the TGUP
was designed to develop the global presence of 37 selected universities while increasing their
attractiveness for international students. This presentation is focused on metaphors in TGUP policy
as they relate to implementation by selected participating universities. There is a need for
interpretation of the TGUP during this time of educational change in order to evaluate the success
of the project and look at areas of further development. The aim of the presentation is to show how
internationalization and policy in the TGUP are being expressed by metaphors in various
curriculum and policy documents and then discuss how these may be interpreted. In previous
studies, metaphorical schemata for education have been interpreted to show a path or journey,
construction, or growth and nurture. This presentation will illustrate how metaphors used in the
TGUP website and participating universities reveal that language is being used in ways that may
affect the way that the policy is being understood and delivered. The findings have implications
for program policy and implementation in a variety of contexts.
2.
Thomas E. Bieri (Nanzan University, Japan, bieri4nanzan<at>gmail.com)
Japanese business majors’ virtual exchange styles reactions and preferences
The researcher, who teaches elective Business English courses to undergraduates majoring in
Business Administration in Japan, was asked by their home university to participate in an ongoing
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) virtual exchange project which is being
supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
33
(MEXT). The instructor chose to work with a partner at each of two universities in the USA to do
Basic COIL Japanese-English language exchange between their students during the 2019 academic
year. Each of the partner educators had specific, but divergent, ideas about how and when to
conduct the exchanges. As a result, the instructor saw this as an opportunity to survey students to
understand their general impressions of the virtual exchanges and of each style specifically.
The researcher invited the Japanese Business Administration students participating in the exchange
to respond anonymously to an online qualitative survey conducted in Japanese following each of
the exchange projects. Seventeen students responded to the six open-ended questions on the survey
in May 2019 and sixteen responded to the seven open-ended items on the October 2019 survey.
The additional item on the second survey asked them to state a preference for one of the styles and
explain it. The researcher coded the data to identify any trends and compared the responses. This
presentation will outline the differences in styles and the survey results, indicate how the results
influenced implementation of exchanges in 2020-2021, and note possible pedagogical implications
for others implementing online international exchanges.
3.
Éva Szabó (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, szabo.eva<at>btk.elte.hu)
ICT reconsidered: Observations from a blended course on integrating ICT into teaching
English as a foreign language
Integrating ICT into foreign language teaching has been part of the curriculum on most in-service
teacher training programmes in Hungary for the past decade, as ICT tools are seen as having the
potential for making language learning effective. Yet, before the pandemic in 2020 observations
of trainee teachers’ lessons showed that rather than having a clear function in developing language
skills, ICT tools were often considered no more than simple add-ons to teaching to entertain the
learners. Based on these observations a blended course for trainee teachers of English was designed
at the Centre for Methodology of the Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest,
the main aim of which was to develop trainees’ understanding of how ICT can help to plan lessons
and homework for effective language practice. The course had six 90-minute contact sessions each
focusing on a different area of language development, and six online modules each requiring 90
minutes of individual work from the participants.
However, in March 2020 schools and universities closed due to the pandemic and a whole new
situation arose. With the lockdown being the new ‘normal’ at Hungarian universities in the spring
of 2021, the course was administered as a 100% online one with modified content according to the
perceived needs of EFL teachers teaching essentially online. In order to evaluate the course,
feedback was taken from the 26 course participants with the help of questionnaires and a group
interview. The proposed talk will summarize the findings of the feedback.
4.
Dana Di Pardo Léon-Henri (University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté, France,
danaleonhenri<at>gmail.com)
To boldly go… from a dictogloss study to a machine learning project for language teaching
Valued by employers in our globalized societies, plurilingual communication skills are essential
for international mobility. It is therefore vital to develop pedagogical techniques that encourage
the acquisition of linguistic and cultural skills, since future job candidates who possess these will
be more successful in professional networking.
34
As we boldly venture into the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR), the job market is evolving
rapidly and the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues in our private and professional
lives. Consequently, the job market is even more competitive and many job candidates may
perhaps one day require career conversions. Accelerated language learning, with diagnostic
assessment and evaluation through human and machine interaction could serve as a potential
solution. Two decades of Information Technology (IT) development have yielded a plethora of
pedagogic language tools and resources; however, some argue that these tools remain tedious,
limited, dispersed or partitioned. In contrast, AI offers a single entry point into a world of
technological opportunities for impartial language assessment and diagnostic evaluation.
This presentation proposes to briefly explain how a three-year dictogloss study with third-year
Psychology students evolved into an innovative transversal project which focuses on human
interaction with AI, in order to yield standardized diagnostic assessments through real-time
personalized training of individual language learners.
5.
Teppo Jakonen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland, teppo.jakonen<at>jyu.fi)
Heidi Jauni (Tampere University, Finland, heidi.jauni<at>tuni.fi)
Participating in the English language classroom with a telepresence robot
Videoconferencing is an increasingly common feature of distance learning, not least because of
the COVID pandemic. In this presentation, we report observations from an on-going investigation
of hybrid education in which a telepresence robot is used to facilitate remote participation in ‘faceto-face’ English classrooms at a university. A telepresence robot is a very specific
videoconferencing tool, which differs from many other set-ups in that its user can move the robot
and its camera remotely by means of an online interface. This means that, for example, robotmediated remote students have greater visual control over what they see in the classroom than in
‘regular’ videoconferencing.
In this presentation, we focus on robot-mediated EFL classroom interaction, analysing how remote
students participate in classroom situations where participants need to move in the classroom, such
as when being assigned to groups. Our data are video recordings from various foreign language
classrooms and by using a screen-capture technology on remote students’ computers showing how
they experience the classroom through the robot camera, and how they move the robot in it. We
approach these data from an ethnomethodological/conversation analytic (EMCA) perspective,
with the aim to demonstrate the complex nature of telepresent agency and explore the extent to
which the capability for remote movement can sustain the multimodal nature of human interaction.
We conclude by discussing how the relatively novel telepresence technology might in the future
configure hybrid language teaching environments by making new kinds of interactional
competences and forms of adaptation relevant for teachers and students.
6.
Rossella Latorraca (University of Salerno, Italy, rlatorraca<at>unisa.it)
Improving EFL pronunciation via emulation in e-learning environments
The usage of digital knowledge-transferring methods has increasingly spread at any level of
educational and informal environments, in a wide range of forms and ecologies, from instructional
videos, to screencasts, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), webinars, among others.
Informed by findings from cognitive psychology and neurosciences, linguistic research has
investigated the role played by emulation on Second Language Acquisition. Imitation is the basic
35
process through which humans learn both motor and cognitive activities, including languagerelated skills like speaking. The articulation of speech develops as a result of the processing of
both motor and auditory input, subsequent to perception and preceding actual (or mental) imitation.
Pronunciation features are often overlooked in EFL educational environments, mainly due to time
constraints and to the large size of classes. Drawing on imitation learning, activities can be
implemented in a digital environment to enhance the acquisition of pronunciation competences by
EFL learners, via self-regulated learning, thus tailoring the learning process on the individual’s
unique learning pace and characteristics. This contribution discusses an e-learning course
administered to 262 Italian EFL university students aiming at enhancing English pronunciation
learning and awareness via the implementation of a speech recognition software providing
modeling examples and live feedback. Learners’ performance and their self-evaluations of
performance were gathered via pre- and post-course Likert-scale questionnaires and underwent
quantitative analysis, to investigate learners’ reception and perception of the effectiveness of such
an approach.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
1.
František Tůma (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, tuma<at>phil.muni.cz)
Nicola Fořtová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, fortova<at>phil.muni.cz)
Fantasy vs Reality: A comparison of recommendations for classroom practice and
conversation-analytic findings
Our research project comprised an analysis of how learners and teachers interact in EFL classes.
We video- and audio-recorded 18 EFL lessons (multiple video cameras and voice recorders were
used) in five different upper-secondary schools in Brno (Czech Republic) and used conversation
analysis to uncover the practices used by the teachers and the learners. In this paper we focus on
the step beyond the detailed descriptions of the interactional practices and we ask: how are these
findings relevant to language teachers and teaching? In particular, we focused on literature
intended for teachers (handbooks, journal articles and popular websites) and extracted the passages
on errors and error correction, use of the L1 as well as group- and pair-work. By comparing our
research findings with the considerations and recommendations that we found in the literature, we
identified discrepancies in some of the aforementioned areas, which we will discuss in more detail
by bringing evidence from our data and other studies. We conclude that in some areas the actual
classroom processes are not reflected in the literature and we will show how conversation-analytic
research can help bridge this gap. At the end of our presentation we will briefly outline how
students in teacher education programmes can work with some conversation-analytic techniques
and findings to better understand the complexity of real classroom episodes.
2.
Silvia Kunitz (Karlstad University, Sweden, silvia.kunitz<at>kau.se)
L2 Interactional competence: Instructional materials created by teacher candidates
This paper illustrates pedagogical materials targeting the development of interactional competence
(IC) in EFL classes. The materials were designed by teacher candidates enrolled in a teacher
education program in a Swedish university. Within the field of conversation analysis (CA), IC has
been defined as the ability to produce recognizable social actions in sequentially fitting positions
(Pekarek Doehler, 2019) with a range of linguistic and embodied resources (Markee, 2008). It is
36
thus a crucial ability for both L1 and L2 speakers of a language (Beth & Hutz, 2014). While there
is an increasing body of research on the development of non-instructed L2 IC, research on the
design and effectiveness of CA-informed IC instruction is still fairly scant. Moreover, materials
for IC instruction in the literature (e.g. Carroll, 2011; Olsher, 2011; Wong, 2011) have been
designed predominantly by experienced conversation analysts. The materials presented here, on
the other hand, were designed by teacher candidates at the end of a CA introductory course which
emphasized the importance of teaching L2 IC in the classroom and illustrated a pedagogical
framework that can be used to teach interactional practices. This paper focuses on task sequences
designed by three students who targeted, respectively, active listenership during storytelling, topic
shift management, and phone openings. These materials attest to the feasibility of designing
research-inspired materials for L2-instruction and support the idea of exposing future L2 teachers
to CA findings that can help them identify meaningful learning outcomes.
3.
Chiara Polli (University of Trento, Italy, chiara.polli<at>unitn.it)
English as a medium and outcome of instruction for the University of Trento (Italy)
This paper presents the major findings of a survey on English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI)
on 150 EMI-modules offered at the University of Trento (Italy) in the academic year 2018-19. A
questionnaire was used to investigate faculty members’ self-evaluation as EMI-users as well as
their opinion on institutional and didactic aims, teaching practices, and learning assessment
methods, comparing, when possible, their experience in teaching through L1 and L2. While EMI
has been associated to teaching through English rather than teaching of English, the survey’s
results indicate more complex teaching-learning dynamics which I would call EMOI spiral
movement, in which English is the Medium and the Outcome of Instruction. This movement
consists of three laps: first, English is initially employed as a tool (medium) to reach general goals
at a university level (i.e., to promote innovation and internationalisation); second, English is used
as ESP to achieve subject-specific aims (i.e., to develop students’ ability to learn and use a
specialised language and to improve their professional profile); third, English as a Lingua Franca
fosters the development of linguistic but also intercultural competences, thus mediating the shift
from the local to the global context for both the University and the students. In light of the Covid19 pandemic and the consequent shift to online teaching and learning, this paper also discusses the
results of the 2018-19 questionnaire in connection with the updated data provided by a pilot
investigation on Trento’s EMI-teachers regarding their experience with English-taught classes
delivered by using online platforms.
4.
Katalin Doró (University of Szeged, Hungary, dorokati<at>lit.u-szeged.hu)
The influence of the teacher training program type on trainees’ career plans and views on
language teaching
Teacher education and educational policies may have an influence, possibly strong, on future
teachers’ motivation and attitudes towards teaching. Hungary has undergone various changes in
its teacher education system, the last major turn being a switch from a five-semester Bologna type
MA teacher training built onto a three-year disciplinary BA to an undivided 5 or 6-year teacher
education. Very few studies have evaluated the consequences of these program changes or have
systematically asked students about their career plans. This presentation aims to compare the
teaching related views of 59 Hungarian students in their pre-final, fifth year of studies, enrolled in
37
the two different types of English teaching MA programs. Data were gathered through an English
language essay they wrote in 2017 and 2018 when the two study programs were still running in
parallel. The texts were analyzed qualitatively to detect recurring themes and codes. Data shows
that students in the Bologna type MA provided a more balanced discussion about the pros and cons
of teaching and concerns they had about public education. They had a much stronger and positive
future teacher self. They all expressed a wish to teach in the upcoming years regardless of some
uncertainties, and they hesitated not between teaching or non-teaching, but rather the level of
schooling they would prefer to be involved in, public vs. language schools and private tutoring. In
contrast, students in the long track program focused more on the difficulties in a teaching career
and criticism of the training program.
5.
Andrea Ágnes Reményi (Pazmany Peter Catholic University, Hungary,
remenyi.andrea<at>btk.ppke.hu)
Long-term mobility for public education teachers in the European Union: Policy steps,
research results
Multilingualism, mobility and tighter integration are expected to enhance the success of the
European Union (EU). The mobility of teaching professionals has been emphasised in the EU’s
educational agenda. Still, to this day, no satisfying solution has been found for transnational long
term (5-10 month) mobility of primary/secondary school teachers across EU countries, either
through a centrally organised teacher exchange programme or through decentralised ones. The
European Commission (EC) was planning to introduce such a programme for over a decade, in
two waves (2002-2006, 2010-2013). The Erasmus+ programme (2014-2020) has finally included
long-term teacher mobility, where, instead of a central selection procedure, the partner schools
within a funded project may decide on sending or receiving school staff. The programme, however,
looks less successful than expected.
This presentation overviews related policy making steps by the European Communities / EC. Then
the focus will be on the key results of related research stretching 15 years, falling into three phases:
a large-scale questionnaire-based study about the willingness of foreign language teachers across
the EU to participate in such a programme (N = 6,251), an interview-based study on the perceived
advantages and obstacles of such mobility with Hungarian-L1 English teachers (N = 67), and a
questionnaire and interviews with Erasmus+ project coordinators on why they avoid exploiting the
opportunity of long-term staff mobility (N = 88, N = 3). The presentation aims to explain the failure
of that Erasmus+ programme component, and ends with recommendations on how to proceed.
S02: Borrowings and Loan Translations from English Multi-word Units in other European
Languages
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Ramón Martí Solano (University of Limoges, France, ramon.marti-solano<at>unilim.fr)
José Luis Oncins Martínez (University of Extremadura, Spain, oncins<at>unex.es)
Phraseological borrowings and loan translations from English are a widespread linguistic
phenomenon. which concerns idioms and other multi-word units such as collocations,
conversational formulae, proverbs, slogans, etc. They can be identified and analysed in translated
texts, subtitled and dubbed films, blogs, academic texts and especially in the press. This seminar
38
will focus on corpus-based, state-of-the-art research in one or several European languages. Topics
can include institutionalization, lexicalization, lexico-grammatical adaptation, variant forms,
semantic calques vs native semantic extensions, pragmatic adaptation, frequency of use, usage
according to text types, vernacular idioms vs phraseological calques, borrowings vs loan
translations, calques of phraseological patterns.
1.
Henrik Gottlieb (University of Copenhagen, Denmark, gottlieb<at>hum.ku.dk)
Danish phraseology: Direct vs. indirect Anglicisms
Why do Danes now say skudtogdræbt [shot and killed] when skudt used to be lethal? And when
people say goodbye with a Jegelsker dig [I love you], why do they copy an American construction?
Questions of that nature occupy many observers in Denmark and elsewhere (Peterson & BeersFägersten 2018), and in this presentation I will try to provide some answers.
Based on my data compiled for the international GLAD project (GLAD 2020; Gottlieb
forthcoming), my presentation will investigate a number of English-inspired multi-word units in
Danish, focusing on two sets of questions:
1) Are directly borrowed English stock phrases bona fide Anglicisms, or are they instances of
code-switching? And what types of these ‘intertextual’ phrasemes have been most successful in
Danish?
2) Why are certain English multi-word units turned into loan translations and calques in Danish,
and how do these indirect Anglicisms fare vis-à-vis direct loans – or existing Danish
constructions?
Do they represent new meaning, are they stylistically or pragmatically marked, and may they
replace established Danish phrasemes?
This diachronic study sets out to tackle such questions, departing from usage as documented in
Danish dictionaries, text archives, and corpora – showing developments from the 19th to the 21st
century (Gottlieb 2020). With case stories from Danish phraseology, this presentation focuses on
the scope and ramifications of the influence exerted by English since the first waves of the French
anglomanie (Saugera 2017) hit the Danish shores some two hundred years ago (Sørensen 2003).
2.
Sabine Fiedler (University of Leipzig, Germany, sfiedler<at>uni-leipzig.de)
“Das ist der magic moment beim Risottomachen” – Phraseological borrowings and loan
translations from English in the German language
Phraseological Anglicisms are a widespread linguistic phenomenon (Furiassi et al. 2012, Fiedler
2014). This paper presents the findings of an empirical study on their use in a German TV cooking
show. The phraseological units found in the dataset include direct borrowings, loan translations
(calques) and hybrid constructions, which can be further classified into sentence-like items (e.g.
Ich bin fine [‘I’m fine’]) and word groups (e.g. just in time). A special type, which has the character
of phraseological terms, are English multi-word expressions that denominate dishes (e.g. Surf and
Turf). Phraseological Anglicisms fulfil several discursive functions in the show. First, they are
used as fillers, i.e., the hosts insert set phrases in English to give their speech a more lively, modern
and colloquial flavour. Second, phraseological Anglicisms serve to bridge gaps in the program
where people maybe do not know what to say and how to react. As pre-fabricated constructions
that can be reproduced easily, their use can facilitate communication, and the origin of the
reproduced material does not seem to matter. Third, English constructions are often found in
39
judgements in order to either emphasise favourable assessments or to alleviate negative
evaluations.
3.
Biljana Mišić Ilić (University of Niš, Serbia, bmisicilic<at>gmail.com)
Not my cup of tea or must have: calques and borrowings of English multi-word units in
Serbian
In the prolific literature on linguistic borrowing from English into other languages, phraseological
borrowing seems to remain an understudied area. Attempting to address this topic in relation to
Serbian, this corpus-based study analyzes several multi-word borrowings from English into
Serbian, which occur in oral and written communication and the media, in non-professional use.
The examples include multi-word units must have, all inclusive, doing business lista,
stakleniplafon (‘glass ceiling’), nemabesplatnogručka (‘there’s no free lunch’), nijemojašoljačaja
(‘not my cup of tea’), taken from three e-corpora of contemporary written Serbian, as well as a
personal corpus of contextualized examples from the press.
Following the theoretical and methodological frameworks for the study of phraseological
anglicisms and the pragmatic approach to the study of borrowing (Furiassi, Pulcini & Rodríguez
González 2012; Fiedler 2014, Fiedler 2017; Andersen, Furiassi & Mišić Ilić 2017; Furiassi 2018),
the paper deals both with the formal and functional aspects of the analyzed multi-word anglicisms.
Structurally, they are classified into different syntactic types (compounds, NP collocations,
irreversible coordinated constructions, phrasemes, and sentences), while according to the type of
adaptation process they may be direct borrowings, various types of hybrid borrowings, and indirect
borrowings (loan translations, calques). From the pragmatic perspective, the qualitative analysis
involves the discussion of genre, discourse, cultural and social contexts relevant for the use of
these multi-word anglicisims.
4.
Alicja
Witalisz
(Pedagogical
University
of
Kraków,
Poland,
alicja.witalisz<at>up.krakow.pl)
Multi-word loans in the making: from a loanword to a loan translation and back.
Nativization techniques and speakers' lexical choices
In language contact research, a borderline is usually drawn between loanwords (lexical loans) and
loan translations. Seen as having resulted from divergent borrowing mechanisms: morphemic
importation and morphemic substitution, respectively, the two categories are often studied
separately from each other. This contribution addresses in one study these and other types of
polymorphemic and multi-word contact-induced innovations, and placing them on a decreasing
foreignness scale brings to light the coexistence of different lexical realisations of a single foreign
etymon, i.e. the interchangeable usage of semantically equivalent loan types by the recipient
language speakers. The quartet of language contact outcomes, extending from contact-induced
loanwords to contact-inspired loan creations, is particularly well suited to exploring the decreasing
degree of foreignness of multi-word foreign expressions and the nativization process realised
through lexical substitution. Adopting an onomasiological and usage-based perspective, we
examine, through a corpus-assisted search, authentic communication acts illustrating the recipient
language users' individual choices that vary between zero-nativized loanwords (e.g. the Englishsourced Pol. e-book, Black Friday, think tank) and their partially or completely nativized
synonymous variants (cf. Pol. e-książka, Czarnypiątek, zapleczeintelektualne lit. 'intellectual
40
background', respectively). One of the research questions is whether the coexisting loan types
varying in the degree of foreignness are mere consecutive stages of the expected nativization
process or whether their usage is motivated by some extralinguistic factors. We set out to explore
whether any specific communicative purposes potentially determine the recipient language users'
preference for different nativization techniques reflected in their lexical choices.
S03: Teaching and Learning EFL Grammar
Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Clotilde Castagné-Véziès (Université Lumière Lyon 2, (CeRLA),
clotilde.castagne-vezies<at>univ-lyon2.fr)
Jelena Vujić (University of Belgrade, Serbia, jelenajvujic<at>gmail.com)
Viviana Cortes (Georgia State Univ. USA, vcortes<at>gsu.edu)
France,
In the last decades, the role and place of grammar in language classes has been questioned and
greatly reduced. This seminar aims to explore the place and role of English grammar in the
teaching and learning of English as a foreign language, in secondary schools and at university. The
stress will be laid on grammatical representations and the use of metalanguage, as well as on
explicit grammar-teaching skills, in the perspective of the current CEFR task-based
communicative approach. The seminar will also present new teaching practices and explore
grammatical metacognition through corpus-based studies.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
Subtheme 1: Grammatical representations and metalanguage, 14:45-15:45
1.
Joost Buysschaert (Universiteit Gent, Belgium, joost.buysschaert<at>ugent.be)
Ilse Depraetere (Université de Lille, France, ilse.depraetere<at>univ-lille.fr)
English grammar in higher education: report on a questionnaire
In this presentation, we will report on the views on the teaching of English grammar in higher
education expressed in a survey in which 71 course instructors participated. Our initiative was
inspired by the observation that a course in English grammar is a well-established part of the
curriculum in English programmes in higher education. Yet the specific role of explicit grammar
teaching in the context of language and linguistics programmes in higher education has received
little attention in the research literature.
The aim of our questionnaire was to get a better view on the aims of these courses: do course
instructors and programme directors view them as crucial to enhancing language proficiency or
are they rather conceived of as a fundamental brick in general academic training and/or training in
linguistics?
The questionnaire included questions that probe into the aims of English grammar courses at HE
level and the teaching materials deemed the most relevant to reaching them. Another set of
questions inquired into the kind of metalanguage that students are supposed to acquire, again, with
a view to reaching the course objectives, and the cross-course collaboration in terms of approaches
and terminology used. Apart from giving quantitative overviews with the key findings, we will
also briefly reflect on some of the rich set of comments that the respondents added.
41
2.
Lyndon Higgs (Strasbourg University, France, higgs<at>unistra.fr)
Does grammar still have place in the teaching of English in French secondary schools?
This paper will begin by briefly examining the place that grammar occupies within the training
programmes for French state secondary school teachers of English. It will then go on to examine
how a group of trainee English teachers in the French education system deal with grammar in their
classroom, and more generally what their perceptions and representations of grammar are with
respect to teaching English.
The study is based on a corpus of questionnaires and interviews carried out two years running
(2018-2019 and 2019-2020) during a seminar entitled “English grammar and secondary school
English teaching”, which was part of a second year Master’s programme in teacher training,
leading to certification in the French public school system. One of the seminar’s objectives was to
highlight the links between the theoretical linguistics component of the French national
competitive exam (the “CAPES”), normally needed to enter the second year of the Master’s
program, and the teaching practice that the students were completing, as well as to explore more
generally the role of grammar within the broadly task-based approach to language teaching that is
recommended by the French national authorities.
The participants all completed four questionnaires, each of which explored a different aspect of
their perceptions and representations of grammar. Each questionnaire contained approximately
seven questions incorporating Likert scale responses, followed by the possibility to develop freely
their responses. Semi-structured individual interviews were also conducted.
Although it is inevitably difficult to draw general conclusions from such a small corpus (around
40 participants), this pilot study has allowed for initial insight into the subject, and these findings,
along with some suggestions for improving the teaching and acquisition of grammar in the French
teacher-training system, will be developed during the presentation.
3.
Clotilde Castagné-Véziès (Université Lumière Lyon 2, (CeRLA), France,
clotilde.castagne-vezies<at>univ-lyon2.fr)
« Doing grammar » in an English class in French secondary schools: what does it mean and
what does it represent to trainee English teachers in the French education system?
This study is based on a corpus of questionnaires completed by second-year students of the
Master’s programme in teacher training at Lyon 2, Amiens and Strasbourg universities. The survey
was carried out two years running (2018-2019 and 2019-2020). The same questionnaire was also
completed by experienced English teachers who are currently training for the high-level
Agregation interne certification. Partly based on Josse’s typology of « grammatical moments »
(2018-3, 18), for each cohort the questionnaire explores the participants’ awareness of « doing
grammar » in their English class in secondary schools, as well as their confidence to answer
unexpected questions from their students. It investigates why they might find it difficult and it
inquiries about the teachers’ knowledge of explicit grammar approaches in the action-based
approach to language teaching that is currently recommended by the French Education Board. The
survey includes some questions on the participants’ perception and knowledge of French grammar
and whether they use it when they teach English grammar. This survey study, in which 100
trainee/experienced English teachers participated, is based on a qualitative method, using multiitem scales, as well as a few open-ended questions. The key findings allow for some insight into
teachers’ grammatical representations and attitudes. It also tackles the issue of the use of
42
grammatical metalanguage and terminology and asks whether it is considered by English teachers
as an impediment to the teaching of grammar.
Subtheme 2: Explicit grammar teaching, 15:45-16:45
4.
Jelena Vujić (University of Belgrade, Serbia, jelenajvujic<at>gmail.com)
Tamara Aralica (University of Belgrade, Serbia, vtaralica<at>gmail.com)
How much does explicit grammatical instruction contribute to the overall grammatical
competence in EFL students in Serbia
Despite numerous advocates for communicative approach to EFL teaching (which normally
excludes explicit grammatical instruction), in Serbia, teachers still seem to find a strong foothold
in teaching grammar.
This paper explores the following: 1) how much actual progress in students’ (computing)
grammatical competence is achieved by formal grammatical instruction in English; 2) what comes
out as a final result in those students who ultimately reach C2 level of language knowledge at the
end of their university studies; 3) to what extent the level of grammatical competence contributes
to the overall communicative competence.
For the purpose of answering such questions, a case study was conducted which focused on testing
certain grammatical issues which Serbian EFL students tend to find problematic to acquire
(subjunctives, articles and present perfect, among others) among the following groups of students:
a) secondary-school students with B1-B1+ level of language knowledge, b) college-applicants for
the English Department (B2- level), c) first-year college students with major in English with
B2+/C1- level , and d) third-year college students at the same department (C1/C2 level). Each
group had different number and types of weekly contact hours of formal instruction in English
grammar per year (varying from high-school instruction to additional tutorials to university
courses in descriptive grammar) totaling in two to six years of formal instruction in grammar. The
testing performed in the case study included both elicitation exercises and applied grammar
exercises through translation tasks.
5.
Ljiljana Mihajlović (University of Nis, Serbia, ljiljana.mihajlovic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs)
Error correction exercises in teaching and learning grammar
Due to the long-standing emphasis on achieving communicative competence in English teaching
and learning, the importance of grammar knowledge has gone unrecognized to a considerable
degree even at university level. However, this general trend may not be the best choice in training
future language professionals, because, for them, communicative competence should not be the
only goal of instruction and studying. It is important that they have both implicit and explicit
knowledge of grammar, especially if they intend to work as teachers of EFL, because that will
enable them to, among other things, identify and correct their pupils’ grammar errors, and provide
appropriate explanations, examples and exercises that would remedy the problem. A small-scale
study about students’ competence in error correcting as well as their attitudes towards it was
conducted with third-year students at the English Department at the Faculty of Philosophy,
University of Nis, Serbia. The students did several exercises consisting of individual sentences and
larger contexts, made using the grammar errors those same students had made in the previous two
years. Their competence in error correcting was analyzed and classified with respect to error type,
43
context length, and error incidence. The results show that context length and error incidence have
a significantly greater impact on the number of successfully identified and corrected errors than
error type. They also confirm the hypothesis that error identifying is a skill that needs more
attention than actual error correcting. The attitude questionnaires show that the students consider
error correction a very important skill they should develop further.
6.
Marcela Malá (Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic, marcela.mala<at>tul.cz)
From Conscious to Unconscious Use of Grammar
An important component of communicative competence is communicative language competence
the important part of which is linguistic competence. Within linguistic competence a major role is
played by syntax. According to CEFR the syntax of the language of an educated native speaker is
complex and to a large extent unconscious. With regards to the grammatical accuracy of advanced
EFL learners, they should also maintain grammatical control of complex language. In other words
advanced EFL learners should demonstrate unconscious use of complex grammar as competently
as native speakers. The paper explores the importance of teaching advanced grammar to university
students who study English as their major mainly with reference to non-finite structures which
advanced non-native speakers do not use as frequently as they should (Parrott 2010). The reason
may be that the EFL learners employ the avoidance strategy due to their incomplete or inadequate
knowledge of these structures. The paper uses examples of non-finite structures from student
writing at MA level and also considers the quality of the treatment of non-finite structures in
advanced grammar reference books intended for self-study.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
Subtheme 3: New teaching practices, 17:00-18:00
1.
Cécile Cosculluela (University of Pau, France, cecile.cosculluela<at>univ-pau.fr)
The English Verb Equation, Formulas, and Matrix
This presentation focuses on an original approach to the grammatical study of verb phrases (VP).
A new tool is introduced to aid with the student’s confusion regarding the infinity of forms phrases
can appear to take, which is generally quite an overwhelming issue for learners. This tool has been
successfully used in the classroom as it enhances students’ understanding by uncovering the
essential logic behind verb phrases.
The literature regarding the verb phrase is still evolving. Berland-Delépine’s system of conjugation
is detailed but doesn’t tackle core operations. Depraetere and Langford’s offers a more global
perspective with 8 tenses, which, combined with the progressive aspect, add up to 16 forms.
Larreya and Rivière take a step forward by identifying a VP formula. The new VP system
highlighted here is summed up by the verb equation – a series of six mutually exclusive pairs of
operators we systematically choose from when giving a form to a verb in a simple sentence. This
equation brings to light all possible combinations of operators (or formulas) using a few simple
rules. It shows the logical units at the basis of the whole VP system, thereby making it easily
accessible. The equation is further expanded in an all-encompassing verb matrix (with examples
in active and passive voices, and with a modal) that is a synoptic, didactic tool to master verb forms
– see summary version below. The full version includes key words and diagrams for the invariant
of each operator.
44
2.
Charles-Henri Discry (RECIFES, Université d’Artois, France, chenri.discry<at>univartois.fr)
The Reasonable Degree of Doubt [RDD]
This talk is about the first steps of what is intended to be a large-scale and interdisciplinary research
project on doubting in teaching practices. The aim of the paper is to show how RDD can be instilled
in English as a Foreign Language [EFL] classrooms and the benefits it can yield.
The presentation will contain three parts: a definitional component whereby RDD will be defined,
a theoretical component in which the researchers will try to tie the concept both to philosophy and
to existing research output in education and, finally, a practical component consisting of real
examples when doubting was introduced into the classroom.
The researchers will attempt to show the centrality of doubting and the surprising fact that it has
been undertreated in current educational research. Drawing philosophy into the picture will also
allow a contrast between RDD on the one hand and critical thinking (esprit critique) and
questioning (questionnement) on the other. In order to illustrate the researchers’ point, ‘doubting
moments’ will be provided to the audience to show how it was experienced and experimented by
the Principal Investigator in his 1st-year grammar classes at the University of Artois in France.
After the existence of doubting has been demonstrated, the researchers will try to understand better
how it unfolds and the extent to which RDD can be turned into a teaching relatively easy and
ready-to-be-used tool or method.
3.
Hélène Josse (Sorbonne Nouvelle (PRISMES – SeSyLIA), France, helene.josse<at>univparis3.fr)
Marine Riou (Lumière Lyon 2 (CeRLA), France, marine.riou<at>univ-lyon2.fr)
Playing with Syntax: Can a serious game help university students analyze noun phrases?
In French universities, it is now widely accepted that students majoring in English Studies should
be taught grammar. Questions remain as to what should be taught (linguistic awareness or mastery
of written/oral skills) and how it should be taught. Using an experimental design, our actionresearch addresses the latter issue and explores the impact of a serious game on students’
performance and learning experience in two French universities.
We targeted a module in which students learn to analyze the structure of the noun phrase in
English. 2019/2020 corresponds to the experimental group: the students played a serious game in
class. 2020/2021 corresponds to the control group, the game being replaced with an equivalent but
non-playful activity. We present preliminary quantitative and qualitative results on student
feedback and exam papers. We included three variables:
- Skill 1: identifying the headnoun
- Skill 2: delineating the phrase
- Skill 3: segmenting and labeling pre- and post-modifiers
We considered each skill to be acquired if a student gave the correct answer for at least 5 out of 6
items. Skill 1 was acquired by 93% (203/218) of students, Skill 2 was acquired by 53% (115/218)
of students, and Skill 3 was acquired by 66% (144/218) of students.
We relate these encouraging results to student feedback, arguing that a serious game can sustain
motivation over an extended stretch of time. More generally, games can be an effective alternative
45
when Task-based Learning and Teaching is not an option for developing abstract skills such as
formal syntactic analysis.
Subtheme 4: Grammatical metacognition, 18:00-19:00
4.
Viviana Cortes (Georgia State University, United States, vcortes<at>gsu.edu)
Corpus-based grammar instruction in ESL/EFL teacher training
Teaching English grammar to native speakers of English who are preparing to become ESL/EFL
teachers has been reported to be more challenging than expected. Being educated native speakers
of the language, these teachers-in-training can fluently control grammar in their language use, but
they lack basic knowledge of word classes, grammatical functions, and appropriate metalanguage
for grammatical analysis (Borg, 2006; Williamson &Hardman, 1995). In addition, when preparing
micro-lessons for their training courses, they make extensive use of their own grammar intuition,
which in many cases may be wrong.
This presentation reports a study that analyzed the reactions to corpus-based grammar of a group
of prospective ESL/EFL teachers enrolled in a graduate program in applied linguistics in the
United States. The participants were all native speakers of English who had little or no exposure
to previous formal grammatical training. Data collected from surveys and interviews as well as
these prospective teachers’ grammatical metacognition were analyzed to study their attitudes
towards learning descriptive English grammar before and after they took a grammar course in their
graduate program. The analyses showed that these teachers did not consider grammar important
for their teacher training and that most of their grammar knowledge came from prescriptive rules
learned in grade school. The post-course data revealed that most teachers had learned about the
importance of grammar for their careers as language teaching as well as ways to incorporate
corpus-based grammar into their teaching.
5.
Mari Carmen Campoy-Cubillo (Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain, campoy<at>uji.es)
The potential of English online dictionaries for grammar learning and instruction
Online lexicography has undergone a significant development towards accessibility and the
development of multimodal dictionary affordances. This progress in online lexicographical tools
has not been reflected in the actual use of dictionaries in the classroom. This situation is due to the
lack of e-dictionary skills training both for teachers and students, as well as the scarcity of
appealing materials for e-dictionary use tasks.
This presentation discusses the role of online dictionaries in the teaching of English grammar.
Based on a CEFR approach to dictionary skills (Campoy-Cubillo 2015), it shows how teachers
may take advantage of online dictionaries as part of their students’ language learning resources.
The focus of the presentation will be the description of those dictionary skills that are needed to
locate, understand, interpret, evaluate, record and implement grammatical information contained
in lexicographical tools. The assessment of dictionary digital skills as part of the dictionary skill
training is an important aspect of the proposal. Research on e-dictionaries and their online format
and typography (Lew, Liu, Campoy-Cubillo and Edo-Marzá 2019) should become part of the edictionary training practice and may be conductive to student motivation and learner autonomy
(Zhou and Wei 2018, Elaish et al. 2018) while using e-dictionaries for language learning.
46
12.
Pascale
Manoïlov
(Université
Paris
Nanterre,
pascale.manoilov<at>parisnanterre.fr)
Agnès Leroux (Université Paris Nanterre, France, agleroux<at>parisnanterre.fr)
Expressing the past in English - a secondary school learner’s corpus-based study
France,
Although secondary school L2 learners might represent the largest group of foreign language
learners in developed countries, researchers have so far given very little attention to this type of
population (Collins & Muñoz, 2016), with regards to their grammatical development within the
CEFR task-based approach. The present study explores this issue within the frame of spoken peerinteractions, among 14-year-old French pupils in their fourth year of studying English as a foreign
language. They were video-recorded while performing an information-gap task (Ellis, 2003) and
the interactions were transcribed to analyse their language development.
We focused on the capacity of the learners to refer to past events, and looked more in detail into
the data in order to characterise how reference to the past is construed and constructed by students.
We coded the transcriptions with a semantic oriented set of parameters to outline all the linguistic
markers the learners use when they speak about the past. Our findings suggest a classification from
an exclusive use of adverbials and lexical items interspersed with a few occurrences of 'was', to
their using the preterit, first with irregular and then with regular verbs, according to the levels of
the students.
With this work, we contribute to the sketching of the grammatical abilities of students engaged in
spoken interactions, at a given stage of their learning process. We then discuss these findings in
relation to the French curriculum and gauge their implications for second language research and
teaching in secondary schools.
S04: English for Specialised Purposes & Humour
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30, Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors
Shaeda Isani (University Grenoble-Alpes, France, shaeda.isani<at>gmail.com)
Miguel Ángel Campos-Pardillos (University of Alicante, Spain, ma.campos<at>ua.es)
Katia Peruzzo (University of Trieste, Italy, kperuzzo<at>units.it)
Michel Van der Yeught (Aix-Marseille University, France, michel.vanderyeught<at>univamu.fr)
Despite research on humour in certain ESP disciplines (medical gallows humour, lawyer jokes,
‘headlinese’…), approaches to related lines of enquiry (ESP pedagogy, linguistics, translation
studies, corpus linguistics and fictional representations in specialised environments) remain rare.
Numerous cognitive, social and psychological paths invite research in specialised humour. Yet,
the richest field is probably the insider/outsider theme which permeates specialised communities.
Other lines of enquiry may bear on ethical issues and the correlated notion of acceptability. While
specialised humour is often a means of bonding and stress-reduction, it also breeds sexism,
harassment and even racism in ESP teaching, disciplinary or workplace contexts.
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
1.
Miguel Ángel Campos-Pardillos (University of Alicante, Spain, ma.campos<at>ua.es)
47
‘I wish you a (reasonably) Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year (twelve (12) months
from the date hereof)’: approaching legalese through humour in the ESP classroom
Given the human stakes involved, Law and Medicine appear to leave no room for humour. While
this certainly applies to formal settings (Tsakona 2017), it is not so concerning informal
communicative practices, e.g. “graveyard humour” in Medicine and “gallows humour” in Law. A
salient subject in law-related humour is the professions themselves, as demonstrated by American
lawyer jokes with negative clichés regarding ethics or greed. However, for pedagogical purposes,
jokes based on such clichés may perpetuate negative perceptions of legal professionals (Litovkina
2009). Thus, shifting the focus towards language through a register-based approach helps to
diminish this risk while allowing for meaningful pedagogical input. This paper discusses the role
of language-based humour based on a metapragmatic awareness of legal language (Campos 2016)
in teaching Legal English to highlight expert/lay miscommunication. This approach may be used
at varied degrees of professional specialization: prospective translators or applied languages
students benefit from a “soft” approach to law which facilitates first contact with the subject
domain and helps to overcome resistance towards unknown content; for expert users, legal
language-based humour makes non-English speaking judges and prosecutors learning legal
English aware of similar practices in their own languages and how they may be reproduced (or
avoided). In both cases, humour is a valuable pedagogical tool by preparing linguists and
translators to mediate between experts and lay addressees, and professionals to adapt their legal
register to communicate with the lay public and with other legal professionals whose English skills
are more limited.
2.
Audrey Cartron (Aix Marseille University, France, audrey.cartron<at>univ-amu.fr)
Characterising humour in English for Police Purposes
Police officers sometimes use jokes with outsiders (i.e. members of the public), in order to reduce
tensions when dealing with criminals but also witnesses and sometimes victims (Bayley & Bittner
1984; Rock 2017). However, the most recurring uses of humour occur in peer-to-peer
conversations. Language jokes play an important role in stress reduction and detachment from the
darkest aspects of a both physically and emotionally demanding job (Poteet & Poteet 2000: v).
Humour is a necessary defence mechanism regularly used by police officers in English-speaking
countries, as well as an essential characteristic of police culture and more specifically of the
informal “canteen culture” mostly shaped by operational officers (Davies & Thomas 2003: 683).
Language jokes also create cohesion and reinforce internal complicity and solidarity among
insiders, i.e. members of the specialised community, emphasising the idea that the police are ‘one
big happy family’ (Marra 2013: 180). This paper focuses on the different forms of humour
pervading police language in English. Several features of this specialised humour can be identified.
They include parodying formal police terms with jocular variants, using mordant gallows humour,
self-deprecating jokes, as well as coarse words and expressions. Police humour also raises ethical
questions because of its emphasis on violence, machismo, sexism and racism. Finally, specialised
humour provides an entry point into the specialised community. Hence, it would be both
interesting and entertaining to introduce police language jokes in ESP classrooms, which is the
final aspect addressed by this presentation.
48
3.
Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli (University of Pisa, Italy, belinda.crawford<at>unipi.it)
The Multimodal Expression of Humour in University Lectures: Some Insights for ESP
Humour scholarship is a fertile interdisciplinary field drawing from psychology, sociology, and
linguistic pragmatics to enhance our understanding of how people engage in humour during social
interaction. This multi-faceted nature has stimulated considerable interest among discourse
analysts who have investigated the expression of humour in a variety of communicative situations.
In academic settings, some studies have described the linguistic features of humour found in
lecture discourse (Nesi, 2012; Wang, 2014), highlighting a rich range of functions and
interpersonal meanings. Yet non-verbal cues, such as gesturing, gaze, and prosody, also have an
important role in communicating humorous intention in oral academic discourse (Fortanet Gómez
& Ruiz-Madrid, 2016). The aim of this paper is to explore how university lecturers convey humour
both linguistically and extra-linguistically from the perspective of intersemiotic complementarity.
The analysis is based on video-recordings of lectures and their corresponding transcripts extracted
from an annotated multimodal corpus of video clips designed for use in ESP settings. The
methodological approach integrated corpus software to identify linguistic expressions of humour
with multimodal annotation software to display and analyse co-occurring non-verbal cues. The
results suggest that linguistic and extra-linguistic features have a synergistic relationship in
humorous episodes, which may be grounded in culture-specific meanings and thus potentially
problematic for L2 listeners. The findings can be used to inform teaching strategies for assisting
ESP learners in successfully processing humour as a particularly challenging task for them on both
the cognitive and linguistic levels.
4.
Isabel Espinosa Zaragoza (University of Alicante, Spain, isabel.espinosaatua.es)
Puns in the cosmetic industry: humour as a marketing technique
The constant proliferation of new cosmetic products fostered by current aggressive consumerism
demands for new colour terminology to create brand distinctiveness. This study focuses on the
different mechanisms involved in metalinguistic joke creation in colour names by OPI, a nail
polish brand. By means of a manual compilation of their current permanent and limited-edition
collections retrieved from their webpage (www.opi.com), it is made evident that out of the over
250 nail varnish colours available, almost half exude some sort of play on words. Examples of
tongue-in-cheek colour names (e.g. Blue my mind, Machu Peach-u, I Just Can't Cope-acabana)
are explored to analyse the mechanisms by which ambiguity formation is achieved through
idiomatic expression or phrase modification (e.g. homophony, homography, paronymy,
morphological reanalysis [Balteiro, 2016], morpheme inflation [Seewoester, 2011], etc.) to
determine if their ambiguity is phonological, lexical or syntactic. This study sheds light on the
diverse intentional linguistic distortions and word manipulations utilised as an effective marketing
communication strategy with humorous intent to play with consumers’ expectations. These colour
names are always accompanied by contextual linguistic information in form of a description which
functions both as a cue for the humorous mode of the shade name as well as colour meaning
assistance. Furthermore, the paper discusses if the production of humorous effects positively
impacts brand influence associations, persuasion, approachability image, appeal and
distinctiveness.
49
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Ekaterina Golubkova (Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia, katemg<at>yandex.ru)
Maria Ukhanova (Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia, umhanova<at>mail.ru)
Jokes and Humour in the Digital Environment
Over the last few decades humour has found itself in a new dimension: the internet has welcomed
a new digital era for jokes. While preserving the two key functions of jokes – to build and reinforce
communication and to provide emotional relief – jokes are being converted into multimodal
phenomena operating in the form of memes, virals, mani photos and phanimation and as such
contributing to cyber-humour (Shifman 2007). Our analysis of 600 internet jokes has highlighted
two features to be considered while dealing with ‘digital’ humour. Firstly, the so-called cognitive
dissonance (Festinger 1957) is better, or at least somewhat differently, overcome in internet jokes
due to the following factors: (1) the multimodal nature of internet; (2) weaker psychological
tension (readers can allow themselves more time to overcome cognitive dissonance). This
contributes to the rising popularity of jokes as a type of humorous discourse and accounts for their
‘revival’ in the digital dimension. Secondly, the Construction Grammar approach to the structure
of jokes (Fillmore et al 1988) has revealed the mechanism of creating humorous effect due to the
overlapping of certain lexical-grammatical constructions which contribute to cognitive dissonance
at different levels (lexical, syntactical, phonetical and extralinguistic). In order to decode a joke,
the reader attempts to relieve cognitive tension at all levels simultaneously, otherwise humorous
effect is not achieved.
2.
Laurence Harris (Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France, laurence.harris<at>sorbonnenouvelle.fr)
‘My word is my CDO-squared’: an enquiry into ‘bankspeak’ humour via a diachronic study
of Bank of England Governors’ discourse
The study of humour in the context of financial English yields interesting findings as regards the
culture of specialised communities; it can lead to a better understanding of professional practice
and behaviour. This presentation draws on the theory defined by Michel Van der Yeught (2016)
which views ESP as a specialised variety of English borne through intentionality. It studies humour
in institutional discourse produced in the City of London via a scrutiny of the annual speeches
delivered at Mansion House by Bank of England Governors from 1946 – when the Bank was
nationalised – to today. After highlighting the key role played by humour in UK business
communication (Lewis 2006), we will proceed to analyse the main forms of humour (Gendrel &
Moran 2005) we have come across in our diachronic study of the speeches (irony, parody, selfdeprecation) as well as the purpose of such usage – connection, inclusion, persuasion, facework
(Charaudeau 1995, Brown& Levinson 1987). Humour may provide a key to decoding the rules
and rituals of the financial community (Boussard 2017). Special attention will be paid to puns,
storytelling and metaphors as vehicles of humour and the way gender and political issues have led
to reajustments over time as the audience for the speeches has expanded beyond the confines of
the City. A final investigation of humour aimed at Bank of England discourse over the same period
via the British press, cartoons and an episode from a satirical TV programme (Yes Prime Minister
1987) completes the study.
50
3. Shaeda Isani (University Grenoble Alpes, France, shaeda.isani<at>gmail.com)
Judicial courtroom humour: questions of propriety and prerogative
After presenting the various areas of judicial humour, we examine a sampling of judicial humour
in UK courts and language strategies used. For Oakley & Opeskin, judicial humour “oils the
wheels of justice” (2016: 82) by humanising, demystifying, easing tensions, clarifying... For
Prosser, however, “[T]he bench is not an appropriate place for levity” (in Lebovits 2018: 272). We
examine these stances in the light of locus, event and propriety. We next focus on the notion of
forum, i.e. the addressees of judicial court humour, the inter-professional stakeholders. We
consider concepts of shared discourse, conversational reciprocity and complicity to analyse how
“humour reinforce[s] or reproduce[s] status differentials, authority relations and organisation and
professional hierarchies” (Davis & Anleu, 2018: 15). Confirming the tenet that authority to make
humour depends on hierarchy, we identify the judge as the primary initiator of courtroom humour,
and its use as the prerogative of the Bench. Judicial courtroom humour thus becomes another
indicator of unbalanced professional courtroom interaction. We conclude by showing that though
the most influential professional in court is considered the prosecutor (Davis 2005), in terms of
controlling courtroom interaction, the Bench rules.
4. Larissa Manerko (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, wordfnew<at>mail.ru)
Multimodal playfulness and humour in various kinds of academic discourse
Over the last decades much attention has been paid to academic discourse and its requirements,
instructions and proficiency development. But the norm is changing and academic writing is
becoming less formalized (Hyland, Jiang 2017) associated with multimodality, which is sparkled
by linguistic, sociosemiotic and interactional interests (Halliday 1993). Humour is not usually
acceptable in written academic interaction, but sometimes we come across it even in serious texts.
This paper focuses on multimodal means combined with humour in special knowledge mediation.
Language use is coordinated by language personalities, sometimes conditioned by socio-cultural
setting and pragmatic communicative aims. For their academic and educational purpose, scholars
incorporate multimodal, computer and hypertext technologies in spoken scientific discourse
(conference presentations, TED talks) as well as in written academic discourse (scientific articles).
In oral communication, the scholar combines not only language means to create something new
and attracting attention, but also other semiotic systems to create new possibilities in “the
integrated semiotic system of meaning” (Manerko, Sharapkov 2014: 115). In written discourse the
author uses metaphors to shift the focus of attention in categorizing the newly created concept
from the old one. In the presentation verbal and nonverbal means of academic communication are
analysed through cognitive linguistic methodology, including conceptual blending and conceptual
metaphor. They help to penetrate into knowledge construal of the individual’s creativity in
academic discourse and reveal the semantic content of multimodality means, including cases of
humour and whimsies.
51
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Silvia Molina (Technical University of Madrid, Spain, silvia.molina<at>upm.es)
Funny tales from the Sea: A Cognitive and Multimodal approach
Marine engineers have a reputation for being direct, serious and even dry. However, they do have
a sense of humour too. Humour has traditionally been associated with both affective and cognitive
factors such as incongruity-resolution processes (Giora 1991; Gruner 1997). Linguistic theories of
humour have centred on the incongruity, and the unexpected shift in scripts or twists in
interpretation, which are triggered by ambiguity or contradiction (Attardo 1992). The present paper
examines verbal and visual humour from the perspective of conceptual integration or Blending
(Turner & Fauconnier 1995; Fauconnier 1997). The creation and interpretation of maritime
engineering jokes involve the construction of a blend where the integration of events from two
input spaces yields a cognitive clash. The resolution of the incongruity is reached by mapping back
to these input spaces (Coulson 2002). In this paper, a variety of maritime engineering jokes and
graffiti in English and Spanish is analysed. More specifically, it aims to examine: (1) the extent to
which different humorous examples involving various resources (from the lexical to the discourse
pragmatic) can be reinterpreted as instances of exploitation of ambiguity; (2) the
similarities/differences between English and Spanish engineering jokes from a cognitive
perspective (cultural models, Coulson 2002); and (3) maritime jokes from a multimodal
perspective, how different modes (visual, textual) enrich humorous effects (Jewitt 2009; Kress &
Van Leeuwen 2001; Stamenković, Tasić & Forcevile, 2018).
2.
Katia Peruzzo (University of Trieste, Italy, kperuzzo<at>eunits.it)
Who says that talking about depression isn’t fun? Exploring humour in TED talks on mental
disorder
In 2006, TED started hosting the videos of the now-famous TED talks online. At the outset, TED
talks represented “an innovation within innovation, as they are a new tool of popularisation that
breaches the typical ‘scientist-mediator-audience’ triangularisation, bringing scientists directly
into contact with their audiences” (Scotto di Carlo 2013). In order to disseminate knowledge, TED
talks combine traits of English for Specific Purposes, English for Academic Purposes and
colloquial language. Given their popularity, TED talks eventually became “a new spoken webbased genre” (Scotto di Carlo 2013) or a “new hybrid genre” (Caliendo 2012). This paper presents
a study conducted on a corpus of TED talks delivered in English and related to mental disorder. In
particular, the study focuses on how humour is used to disseminate knowledge about a topic that
is generally perceived, written and spoken about as particularly serious, when not treated as a
taboo. Bearing in mind that in TED talks humour is mainly non-spontaneous and carefully crafted,
the study also aims to show how humorous tones intertwine with storytelling, since in many cases
the speakers draw on their personal experiences with mental illness either as patients or as health
care professionals (or even both), and to explore how humour is deployed as a resource to raise
awareness on mental health and overcome the stigma associated with it.
3.
Birute Ryvityte (Vilnius University, Lithuania, birute.ryvityte<at>flf.vu.lt)
Jokes in the academic world
52
It is generally recognized that ‘the scope and degree of mutual understanding in humor varies
directly with the degree to which the participants share their social backgrounds’ (LarkinGalinanes 2017: 9). The same would be true with regard to professional or occupational humor in
specific domains, for example, academia. The purpose of this study is to conduct a pragmatic
analysis of jokes targeting professors and students by applying the Cooperative Principle and
conversational maxims (Grice 1975). The study aims to identify cases of non-observance of the
conversational maxims (quality, quantity, relevance, manner) in academic jokes, to analyze the
ways of exploiting (e.g., flouting, violating) the maxims and the implicatures generated by such
non-observances as well as the background knowledge needed to make the necessary inferences.
The study draws conclusions from a sample of 200 academic jokes collected from various online
sources. The results suggest that many academic jokes can be classified under the category of
disparagement humour (Zillman 1983: 92) as they play with the negative dispositions toward the
disparaged party, and the positive dispositions toward the disparaging party, depending on who
assumes the role of the joke teller and the audience.
4.
Khetam Shraideh (State University of New York, Binghamton, United States,
kshraid1<at>binghamton.edu)
Ethics of Translating Humor in Politics: Asymmetrical Power Relations
Everyone agrees that humor is more than a form of entertainment or joke-telling; instead, we
understand it as an effective tool to improve our communication and elevate our thinking process,
as claimed by Mel Helitzer and Mark Shatz (2005: 10). In their book Comedy Writing Secrets
(2005), Helitzer and Shatz claim that people prefer to start their speech with a joke or a humorous
scene to earn attention. Humor uses irony, sarcasm, exaggeration and parody to bring very
controversial issues to people. It has been used to critique social, cultural and political practices.
The success of interpreting political humor depends on shared knowledge between the speaker and
the addressee. Specialized humor is recognized as a means of bonding and stress-reduction.
However, unequal power structures (e.g. sexism, sexual harassment and bullying) affect a society
along with its norms and values and conceptualize the perception of humor. Humor in the field of
politics travels badly among cultures and across different linguistic communities due to its
peculiarities; thus, interpreting political humor is a challenging task especially in contexts marked
by asymmetrical power relations. Thus, to produce an ethical translation, a translator should adapt
certain strategies. To do so, a translator’s approach should go in line with either acceptability or
adequacy.
5.
Michel Van der Yeught (Aix Marseille University, France, michel.vanderyeught<at>univamu.fr)
Deciphering insider/outsider humour in specialised languages: the institutional approach
Insider/outsider humour is widespread in specialised communities and is generally conveyed
through specialised language. Although such jokes and puns have regularly been observed and
described, they have rarely, if ever, been analysed in theoretical terms. This presentation aims to
decipher the mechanisms whereby insider/outsider humour operates. It uses the intentional
approach to specialised languages (Van der Yeught 2019) inspired from the theories on social
ontology developed by John Searle, an American philosopher and linguist (1995, 2010). Just like
many components of social reality such as money, marriage and sports clubs, specialised languages
53
are created by collective acceptance through institutional rules that give a function or status to
objects in a given context. Searle gives them the form “X (object) counts as Y (status or function)
in C (context)” (2010: 96–97). Insiders know how these rules create new linguistic realities such
as specialised words and expressions, but outsiders do not: which implies that insiders are aware
of linguistic forms of social reality which remain invisible to outsiders. Humour derived from
resulting situations is mostly based on a “theatrical” form of asymmetric information, and stems
from the contrast produced by two characters placed in the same situation where one is clairvoyant
and the other is blind as regards specialised language realities. The presentation concludes by
underlining that ensuing language games may be used to mock, humiliate, harass and bully
outsiders, a fact learner should be made aware of.
S05: Seminar cancelled
S06: ESP and Professional Domains
Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-18:50, Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-11:45
Co-Convenors:
Fanny Domenec (Sorbonne Université (CeLiSo, EA 7332) / Université Panthéon Assas,
France (CERSA, UMR 7106), fanny.domenec<at>u-paris2.fr)
Cinzia Giglioni (Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy, cinzia.giglioni<at>uniroma1.it)
Philippe Millot (Université de Lyon, France (Lyon 3, CEL, EA 1663),
philippe.millot<at>univ-lyon3.fr)
Recent discussions have highlighted the intersections between professional domains and
discourses and the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (Bhatia and Bremner 2014;
Charret-Del Bove et al. 2017). This seminar invites speakers to contribute to describe and
characterize professional specialization from theoretical and applied linguistic perspectives.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-18:50
1.
Natalie Kübler (University of Paris, France, nkubler<at>eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr)
Claire Kloppmann-Lambert (University of Paris, France, ckloppma<at>eila.univ-parisdiderot.fr)
The diachronic study of genres in architecture: towards a better understanding of recent
evolutions in this professional domain
Genres are types of communicative events that target a specific type of audience or readership and
have specific goals (Swales 1990). Professional genres are shared and recognised by members of
a professional domain, and can be seen as both revelators and triggers of change in this domain.
Diachronic studies of professional genres seek to cover external features such as their aim or the
conditions of their production and reception as well as internal features such as their organisation
in moves (Swales 1990), multimodality (Amare & Manning 2016) and lexico-grammatical
patterns (Gledhill & Kübler 2016).We focus on the genre of projects descriptions, published by
architects and their team to describe and promote their latest work in brochures in 1970-1995
(corpus A) and on their practice’s website in 1995-2020 (corpus B). In the same way as architecture
reviews, where structural, multimodal and linguistic characteristics indicate a recent shift to
slightly more efficient promotion, more interaction and less critical debate, project descriptions
54
are subject to change: we suspect that the recent stabilisation of the genre (in terms of structure,
multimodality and phraseology), the greater use of lexis such as new, different, unique and new
lexico-grammatical patterns such as “Our aim/brief was to create + SN” reveal a context of greater
competition between architectural practices and the acceptance of a new marketing tool such as
websites by architects. Conversely, genres also have an impact on the domain of architecture: the
“migration” of the genre to the net allows the practice to reach everyone easily and more rapidly
and the architect’s core activity of designing projects becomes inseparable from marketing this
work to obtain new commissions.
2.
Anna Re (IULM University, Milan, Italy, anna.re<at>iulm.it)
Genres in “English for the Arts” professional courses
The paper focuses on the attempt to train to art professions undergraduate and graduate students
at IULM University, Milan, Italy. In “English for the arts” classes, students should learn –among
other things– to distinguish and appreciate different genres connected to the context of study and
research (for example, catalog entries, art reviews, art papers, press releases, etc.), and use them
in their writing to become professionals and work in the art field (art galleries, museums, art
magazines, art event organization, etc.). Ken Hyland argues that «today, genre is one of the most
important and influential concepts in literacy education» (1). ESP, English for specific purposes
and Sydney Schools claim that second language learners can take advantage of explicit instruction
in genres: structural patterns, features, style (2).
In my “English for the Arts” classes, genre analysis has been beneficial in the teaching and learning
process. On one hand, studying the regularities of structures that distinguish one type of text from
another helps expand English teaching beyond a general language knowledge: the process of
composition, text content, abstract grammar, and course books. Instructors can ground their classes
in the texts and in a target context by using a number of authentic texts. On the other, students
learn to identify and create the organizational and lexico–patterns of particular genres, styles of
various texts and how texts function in certain contexts.
The “romance” between English and art is recent, but has taken hold relentlessly. English is not
only the language of business and economics: it is the world’s language, and therefore also the
language of art. Those who study the Arts must know English. More to the point, they must be
familiar with the sub–language of English for the arts.
3.
Caroline Peynaud (Grenoble Alpes University, France, caroline.peynaud<at>univgrenoble-alpes.fr)
Is press discourse a multi-specialized discourse?
Press discourse being aimed at the general public, with a view to popularize scientific or technical
issues, it is often considered general discourse, with no particular specialization. As popularization
discourse, however, it conveys knowledge produced by specialized communities and the
associated terminology. It could thus be argued that press discourse is specialized, even with a low
degree of specialization, in the multiple domains of the topics it deals with. Nevertheless, the press
is also a complex domain with a history, traditions, values and complex production operations. As
such, it is likely to produce a discourse that reflects this cultural specialisation. The question this
paper aims at answering is whether press discourse reflects the specialisation of a professional
domain and, if it is the case, what specialised professional domain(s) it belongs to.
55
To analyse this question, three corpora will be compared. The first one is a press corpus taken from
the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and dealing with COVID-19. The second one is
specialised in the domain of health since it is composed of WHO reports dealing with COVID-19.
The third one is taken from the journalism professional magazine Quill. Terminology associated
to the pandemic will be analysed in the three corpora, as well as some aspects of phraseology,
especially co-occurrence and explanatory phrases, so as to understand which of the two
comparison corpora the press corpus is closer to and what professional domain it might be
considered specialized in.
4.
Olga Denti (University of Cagliari, Italy, odenti<at>unica.it)
Knowledge dissemination and popularisation strategies in financial news
Narratives have always been relevant to economic fluctuations, rationalising current actions, such
as spending and investing, inspiring and linking activities to important values and needs (Shiller
2017). In the past, as well as today, controversial political and economic situations are considered
to have been the results of the popular narratives of their own times.
The present study will analyse and compare a corpus of articles from The Financial Times and one
from The Times, in the years 2008-2019, selected around the keyword bail*-in. The bail-in is a
tool introduced by a EU Directive to underpin an effective resolution regime for financial
institutions. This Directive’s resolutions and effects had a great press and media coverage,
influencing investors’ behaviour.
In particular, this paper will tackle the concepts of popularisation and knowledge dissemination
(Brand 2007; Calsamiglia 2003; Garzone 2006; Gotti 2008; Kermas-Christiansen 2013; Mattiello
2014; Salvi-Bowker 2015), focusing, on the one hand, on how financial discourse is intertwined
with non-verbal elements and news discourse in the two corpora, and, on the other hand, on how
the outcome is perceived and understood by the non-expert reader, within the framework of
financial discourse, discourse analysis and corpus analysis (Bamford 1998; Sinclair 1991, 2004;
Facchinetti 1992; Bondi 1998, 2017; Biber et al. 1998; Hunston & Thompson 2003; Wilson 2003;
Bhatia 2008; Crawford Camiciottoli 2010, 2014; Van Eemeren 2010; Denti & Fodde 2013).
Therefore, the two corpora will be compared on the basis of their textual form, sentence subjects,
grammatical voice, verb choices, modality, hedging, rhetorical structure, as well as metaphors,
narratives, expressive functions, and so on (Kermas & Christiansen 2013).
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-11:45
1.
Lucie Malá (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, luckasmile<at>yahoo.co.uk)
The Language of Mathematics from the Perspective of Distributional Phraseology
It is now widely recognised and has been repeatedly shown (Hyland 2004, 2008; Gray 2015) that
professional academic writing differs considerably between individual disciplines. Detailed
description of the language use within a given specialisation is an invaluable source for university
courses of English for specific purposes. However, mathematical texts in general, and
mathematical research articles in particular, are underrepresented in research into phraseology of
scientific texts, making the teaching of English for mathematicians a challenging task.
The present paper focuses on the distributional phraseology of mathematical texts. Using corpusdriven methodology, it demonstrates identification and constructional description of key elements
56
of mathematical research articles, which can be seen as the basic building blocks of this genre. The
starting point for this description is the extraction of grammatical keywords, a method promoted
by Groom (2010) or Gledhill (2000), from a corpus compiled specifically for this study.
Fifteen grammatical keywords have been extracted, namely let, we, then, if, where, etc. Since these
do not feature in similarly obtained keyword lists for history and literature journal papers (Groom,
2007), they are likely characteristic of the mathematical texts. A careful analysis of concordance
lines is carried out for these keywords. Each of the words participates in one construction at least.
The word then, for instance, participates in seven different constructions, such as logical then,
temporal then, and hypothetical conditional then. We give a detailed description of these
constructions and their discipline-specific functions, and suggest their organisation into local
networks.
2.
Marie-Hélène Fries (Grenoble Alpes University, France, marie-helene.fries<at>univgrenoble-alpes.fr)
Are professional domains soluble in certifications? A case study on CLES C1
Researchers in specialized varieties of English and ESP have been gradually broadening their
scope of study, from macro-domains such as science and technology (Swales 1990), medicine
(Gotti and Salager-Meyer 2006), law (Bhatia, Candlin and Engberg 2008) and economics (Resche
2013) to professional groups, for instance journalists (Peynaud 2013), mountain guides (Wozniak
2011) or think tankers (Gaillard 2019). During that time, certifications have been developed either
in general English (Cambridge main suite) or in wide professional areas such as business (TOEIC)
or academia (IELTS, TOEFL), which do not really match students’ needs in ESP. In order to bridge
this gap, efforts have been made to develop local skill validation schemes (Fries 2009, Millot
2017). However, a few “niche” specialized certifications have also been created, for example ILEC
for law (until 2016), or STandem for medicine (Charpy &Carnet 2014). CLES1 C1 (certificate for
language skills at the C1 level, in French higher education) stands out as a semi-specialised
certification based on scenarios, taking into account both the professional setting of expertise (the
students’ roles) and specific fields in large macro-domains (arts and humanities, economics and
law, science and technology), as the backdrop of the scenarios. CLES C1 certification has been
studied so far in terms of pragmatics and oral interactions (Rouveyrol 2012). The purpose of this
presentation is to look at CLES C1 from the perspective of professional domains and evaluate the
effect of its semi-specialized background on written performance, in a case study involving 13
Master’s students in process engineering.
3.
Walter Giordano (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy,
Walter.giordano<at>unina.it)
Sara Corrizzato (Università di Verona, Italy, Sara.corrizzato<at>univr.it)
Linguistic and discursive strategies in promoting “Made in Italy” on international markets:
storytelling in the spotlight
“Made in Italy” can be said to be one of the most recognized brands worldwide. The promotion
of Italian products on international markets, then, implies not only the communication of
commercial features but some cultural background as well. Communication strategies are therefore
crucial in building Italian country-brand image on foreign markets.
1
Certificat de compétences en langues de l’enseignement supérieur
57
This study investigates in the communication of “made in Italy” products, focusing in particular
on storytelling techniques and on multimodality. Thus, our research questions are: what are the
main linguistic strategies used in the promotion of Italian products abroad? Does storytelling help
convey positive effects, like “country of origin effect”, corporate knowledge and local culture?
The literature background we have drawn on refers to (among others) promotional discourse and
strategies (Bhatia 2005, Xiong & Li 2020), communication and persuasive strategies on foreign
markets (Corrizzato 2018; Di ferrante, Giordano, Pizziconi 2015), storytelling techniques (Kilic
& Okan 2020) and multimodality (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006). The corpus we have studies
consists of the “About us” sections of 25 Italian companies’ websites, operating in industries of
traditional and typical niche craftsmanship (fashion, accessories, food, etc.). The texts were
analysed both from a (quantitative and qualitative) linguistic and discursive point of view to detect
the strategies used. The multimodal analysis has also allowed to complete the picture of these
companies’ strategic communication, sketching out a communication framework where
storytelling is not only a very commonly used technique, but also a lean and comprehensive tool
to convey local culture, corporate knowledge and brand image.
4.
Sergio Pizziconi (Università per Stranieri di Siena, Italy, sergio.pizziconi<at>unistrasi.it)
Laura Di Ferrante (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy, laura.diferrante<at>uniroma1.it)
Manipulating climate change discourse: how airlines re-present topic and data
Discourse on environmental sustainability has been often linked to aviation whose technology and
communication strategies strongly impact climate change debate (among others Goodman 2009,
Gössling & Peeters 2007, Hupe 2001, Upham et al. 2003, Walker & Cook 2009).
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is the United Nations’ body that aims to
implement global standards in civil air transportation. After 2010’s ICAO Assembly resolution
A37-19 (ICAO A37-19), airlines started to include in their documents to stakeholders discussions
about their environmental impact beyond the issues of noise abatement and local air quality to
encompass more global themes.
The discourse of six airlines about environmental protection has been analyzed on the basis of two
subsets of features: textual-semantic features include terms of comparison, hypernyms, hyponyms,
meronyms, numerical data format; pragmatic features include presuppositions, and entailments.
The results of the analysis uncover how airlines’ business and linguistic strategies are aimed to
transfer responsibility and commitment onto passengers and governmental bodies, to present data
in a way greener than it really is, and to water the topic down with commitment in other areas of
Corporate Social Responsibility.
5.
Francesca Vaccarelli (University of Teramo, Italy, fvaccarelli<at>unite.it)
Migration Flows and Human Rights Protection: An Insight into EU and International
Glossaries
One of the central issues faced by single EU Member States, EU institutions as well as international
organizations over the last decades is migration management, which is directly linked to human
rights protection. This matter has several repercussions on various spheres – foremost at social,
political, economic, legal level – and poses numerous terminological questions to professionals
dealing with migration from different points of view: for example, how can we define
‘documented’ or ‘regular’ migrants compared to ‘undocumented’ or ‘irregular’ migrants? What is
58
a ‘migration flow’ or a ‘migrant stock’? What is the difference between ‘migration’, ‘emigration’
and ‘immigration’?
Some of the organizations most involved in home affairs, such as the European Migration
Network1 or the International Organization for Migration2 have published useful glossaries to cope
with these terminological dilemmas, to reduce the vagueness or ambiguity of definitions related to
so delicate topics and, eventually, to provide translators with practical tools to refer to. The aim of
this research is twofold: to carry out diachronic analysis of these online glossaries compared to
previous lists of migration terms drafted by EU or international bodies and to examine, under a
lexical perspective, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), the firstever UN global agreement on a common approach to international migration in all its dimensions.
The latter part of research is intended to verify if potential new terms might be added to the already
existing EMN and IOM glossaries, with the final purpose, in a prospective study, of drawing up
an updated and expanded glossary.
S07: English for Specific Purposes: What Theoretical Frameworks for What Teaching and
Research Outcomes?
Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Shona Whyte (Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, BCL, France, shona.whyte<at>univcotedazur.fr)
Cédric Sarré (Sorbonne Université, CeLiSo, France, cedric.sarre<at>sorbonneuniversite.fr)
Barbora
Chovancova,
Masaryk
University
Brno,
Czech
Republic,
barbora.chovancova<at>law.muni.cz)
Patrizia Anesa (University of Bergamo, Italy, patrizia.anesa<at>unibg.it)
English for Specific Purposes has historically been a practitioner-driven field, with its research
anchored in applied linguistics. ESP thus concerns the language strand of the conference, as
opposed to literature or culture. In many European universities, however, ESP courses are taught
by teachers with a background in literary or cultural studies. This seminar asks those involved in
research into the teaching and learning of ESP to reflect on the theories which inform their work.
Such theories may relate to the ESP content discipline, to different areas of applied linguistics
(e.g., corpus linguistics and specialised translation, teacher education, English Medium Instruction
for internationalisation), or to other branches of education and the humanities.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
Barbora Chovancova (Masaryk University Language Centre, Brno, Czech Republic,
barbora.chovancova<at>law.muni.cz)
Action Research in Action: Personal Research and Team Swap Shops
Even though the term action research was coined as early as the 1940s, its implementation in the
teaching of languages has been gathering momentum only in the last decades and has recently
become a part of the repertoire of tools used in everyday working lives of many dedicated teachers.
1
2
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/content/about-emn-0_en
https://www.iom.int/
59
Action research is popular because it helps solve immediate problems through cycles of observing,
reflecting and acting (McIntosh 2010). Moreover, when done in cooperation with colleagues, it
promotes further reflection and teamwork and can have implications for collaborative action
research involving academics (Burns 1999). When shared among different teams, action research
results can inspire other teachers to implement relevant aspects in their own contexts, and so foster
further professional development through informal and non-institutional means (cf. Chen 2000).
This presentation seeks to illustrate how action research can combine aspects of exploratory
practice (Allwright 2003) in teaching practice in the context of legal ESP, providing several
practical examples of how action research can contribute towards student autonomy. The teaching
intervention involves undergraduate students of law working on topics outside the classroom with
the goal of preparing to role-play a mediation situation between Czech lawyers and Englishspeaking clients in class with their peers. In addition, the talk shows how action research sharing
sessions can trigger change through forming further relevant research questions. It is suggested
that it is highly effective to hold action research swap shops at staff training events in order to help
promote personal professional development and crosspollination of ideas across different fields of
ESP.
2.
Dacia Dressen-Hammouda (Université Clermont-Auvergne, France, ACTé (Activité,
connaissance, transmission, éducation), dacia.hammouda<at>uca.fr)
A framework for teaching about indexicality in specialized discourse
Helping students become successful communicators in English requires implementing a pedagogy
that includes long-term engagement with the subject-matter, disciplinary culture and genres used
in specific fields of study, in addition to register, grammar and lexis. One successful pedagogy to
address such concerns is the genre-based approach. Using corpus analysis, it targets the particular
genres used in specific contexts (cover letters, reports, research articles) for teaching purposes.
The approach, however, could be constructively expanded by also teaching students about the
implicit cultural and contextual inferences made by community members via implicit markers —
hard to discern and complicated to learn. Not recognizing them can lead to multiple forms of
exclusion, including the struggle to master the expected forms of oral and written communication
in undergraduate and graduate programs, or obstacles to publishing internationally. While the
genre approach has allowed for significant progress in identifying salient features of academic,
scientific, technical and professional genres, today we lack insight into the implicit, ‘indexical’
nature of situated communication. Indexicality is defined as the semiotic forms (verbal, visual,
perceptual, gestural) that allow insiders to infer shared meaning. It gives rise to the “local
knowledge” (Geertz, 1973) that anchors and organizes practice within communities (Blommaert,
2010; Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Dressen-Hammouda, 2014; Ochs, 1992).
The paper begins by briefly reviewing relevant theory before describing a framework for indexical
analysis (Dressen-Hammouda, 2019). While the framework can be used to structure research in
ESP (Dressen-Hammouda, 2014), it also has interesting pedagogical applications. Its involvement
in the construction of a Master’s program in technical communication, and targeted teaching
outcomes, will be described.
3.
Tracy Bloor (AMU Aix-Marseille Université, France, CREAD (Centre de Recherche sur
l’Éducation, les Apprentissages et la Didactique), tracy.bloor<at>univ-amu.fr)
Joint Action Theory in Didactics notions of jargon and thought style: exploring the organic
60
relationship between language and practice
In ESP language can be seen to be organically linked to the practice in which it is embedded
(Collins, 2011) and can usefully be examined from the theoretical perspective of the Joint Action
Theory of Didactics (JATD). This approach draws on Wittgenstein's (2009) definition of word
meaning as "its use in the language” within a language game, a culture or “a form of life.” JATD
views language as composed of language games within forms of life which produce certain thought
styles (Sensevy, 2019; Fleck, 1935/2008) together with an associated jargon (Sensevy et al. 2019).
Jargon can thus be understood as a system of expressions specific to a given cultural practice; it
both produces and is produced by that same cultural practice and its accompanying thought style
(Sensevy et al. 2019).
To explore the implications of such a conception of language for ESP didactics, this paper presents
an analysis of a teaching-learning sequence based on jargon and thought style. The sequence was
designed to generate a form of life in physics, based on the concept of uncertainty in measurement,
where students explore the jargon and thought style intrinsic to this aspect of experimental science
(Bloor & Gruson, 2019; Bloor, 2019). Analysis of classroom interactions follows the JATD
clinical approach, showing language learning to be part of a process of expressing and assimilating
the thought style of a practicing physicist.
Implications for both the analysis and design of other ESP language learning didactic environments
are considered in conclusion.
4.
Inesa Sahakyan (University of Grenoble Alpes, France, ILCEA4, inesa.sahakyan<at>univgrenoble-alpes.fr)
Towards embodied learning of ESP: multimodal perspectives on ESP teaching and research
Human communication has always been multimodal by nature but it is only with recent
technological developments that this multimodality has been brought to light. No doubt this is why
there is a common misconception of multimodality as being synonymous with digitality. Thus, for
instance, when it comes to education, multimodality is equated with technology-based learning.
The present study endeavours to explore multimodality in a wider sense, referring to
“communicative artefacts and processes which combine various sign systems (modes) and whose
production and reception calls upon the communicators to semantically and formally interrelate
all sign repertoires present” (Stöckl 2004: 9). Indeed, although multimodality theory was
developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), Prior (2005) argues its focus on artefacts rather than
practices is rather problematic. In line with Prior’s view, the present study addresses multimodality
in a broader sense. Despite its key role in workplace communication, ‘multimodality seems to have
remained a somewhat peripheral area of ESP research’ (Prior, 2013: 520).
This conceptual paper highlights the need to rethink ESP research and teaching from a multimodal
perspective. Drawing on the analysis of communicative practices specific to workplace
communication within the context of international trade, the paper examines learning activities
which engage learners in situated meaning-making practices such as serious games.
The objective is to contribute to the development of paradigms which can help to design
multimodal pedagogical resources and practices. The paper aims to support a better understanding
of multimodality and the ways in which it can be integrated into ESP teaching and learning.
5.
Patrizia Anesa (University of Bergamo, Italy, patrizia.anesa<at>unibg.it)
61
Evolving Paradigms in LSP Teacher Training: The TRAILs Project
Teacher effectiveness has rapidly become of major consideration in the education policy agenda.
However, the lack of qualified LSP teachers affects vocational education and training institutions
in European contexts and beyond. Theoretical works have shown concern on the issue but very
limited experimental research has been conducted into the analysis of LSP teacher needs (e.g.,
Alexander, 2007; Campion, 2016; Basturkmen & Bocanegra-Valle, 2018).
The TRAILs (LSP Teacher Training Summer School) project was launched in 2018 with the
objective of designing, testing, and assessing innovative LSP teacher-training programmes. The
project takes into account Korthagen et al.’s (2006) theoretical framework, especially as regards
the idea that learning about teaching involves continuously conflicting demands. Thus, the project
stems from the assumption that quality teaching in LSP can be achieved by investigating not only
the learner’s needs but also the demands expressed by the teachers involved. This constitutes a
paradigmatic shift from a one-dimensional approach (focusing almost exclusively on students) to
a multidimensional perspective, which aims to respond to teacher needs as well. The TRAILs
Summer School will take place in Zagreb in September 2020.
Given the nature of the project, which draws considerably on the emic view of LSP teaching
offered by practitioners, the findings derive from multiple perspectives and are determined by the
diversity of experiences from different local contexts. This study shows that this approach can,
ultimately, contribute to the development of more appropriate teacher-training programmes which
consider teachers’ own needs and motivations, especially in the light of the complexity of their
occupational identity.
6.
Aude Labetoulle (Cnam Paris – Foap, France, aude.labetoulle<at>lecnam.net)
Tools to analyse, set up and evaluate LANSOD training courses
This talk focuses on two tools which can be useful to teachers, course designers and evaluators
when setting up and evaluating language courses in higher education. The analytical framework is
a synthetic table which groups questions deemed relevant to analyse a language training course.
The questions are focused on the context in which the course is set (at European, national and
institutional levels), on learner characteristics (e.g. autonomy and motivation, professional needs
in English), on teacher characteristics (e.g. training, skills and knowledge), as well as on the
objectives of the language class, to name but a few. The dashboard aims at designing and
evaluating a course; the objectives of the language course are aligned with relevant means to reach
those goals, as well as with assessment tools to evaluate the efficiency of the course. These two
tools draw from various disciplines and sub-disciplines: English for Specific purposes, needs
analysis, second language acquisition theories, as well as instructional design. The framework and
dashboard were initially created to design and evaluate an English course for undergraduate
musicology students in Lille (France) between 2016 and 2018 and it is argued they could be used
more widely in LANSOD settings (LANguages for Students of Other Disciplines) to design and
evaluate language courses adapted to the learning context and the needs of the learners.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Shona Whyte (Université Côte d’Azur, France, shona.whyte<at>univ-cotedazur.fr)
62
Rebecca Franklin-Landi (Université Côte d’Azur, France, Rebecca.FRANKLINLANDI<at>univ-cotedazur.fr)
Never the first time on the patient! L2 English in medical simulation training
ESP teaching relies on identifying a fruitful intersection between disciplinary content and second
language (L2) learning to find ways to develop L2 competence relevant to the needs of the target
professional community. One such intersection in the domain of Medical English concerns the use
of simulation to train medical professionals, and task-based language teaching (TBLT) in language
education. In each case learners prepare a given scenario invoking real-life contexts, role-play
relevant behaviours drawing on existing competences, and then receive feedback on their
performance.
The theory underpinning this approach involves situated cognition or learning (Brown, Collins &
Duguid 1989, Lave & Wenger 1991) which suggests that conceptual knowledge cannot be
successfully abstracted from contexts of use, and is instead more effectively developed in situ.
Hence medical professionals in high-risk situations learn and practice more effectively via medical
simulation, as do language learners in real-world tasks which focus on meaningful outcomes rather
than linguistic accuracy (Ellis, Skehan, Li, Shintani & Lambert 2019).
The present pilot study involves third-year students at a French teaching hospital in a biomedical
simulation in L2 English. Medical scenarios involved non-French speaking patients and family
members played by English students, and simulations and debriefing sessions were recorded for
analysis. Initial research involves a) the identification of a typical move sequence for the evaluation
of L2 performance and b) recommendations for the subsequent development of ESP materials.
2.
Paola Clara Leotta (University of Catania, Department of Educational Sciences, Italy,
pcleotta<at>unict.it)
Giuseppina Di Gregorio (University of Catania, Department of Educational Sciences, Italy,
giuseppina.digregorio<at>unict.it)
Enhancing Students’ Motivation through Vocabulary Learning: from Corpora Theory to
ESP Classrooms Practice
Recent ESP research has favoured vocabulary-based investigation (Fortanet-Gomez & Räisänen
2008) leading to new interest in corpus linguistics applied to language teaching. Corpora studies
allow the determination of learning priorities in a specific sector, according to frequency and use
(McCarten 2007). ESP also commonly reveals problems of teacher disciplinary knowledge, lack
of pedagogical resources, heterogeneous classes and learner motivation. In this study, we ask
whether translation can offer a useful solution. Translation is generally considered "part of more
general teaching methodologies, mostly as a check on what has been acquired, sometimes as an
exploration of the differences between language systems" (Pym & Malmkjaer 2013). In this study,
we ask whether corpus-informed translation activities can also improve student motivation in
terms of the L2 ideal self as described in Self-determination Theory (Dörnyei 2009).
In this study, we propose a multimodal corpus based on a contrastive analysis of specialised
English and Italian vocabulary as the basis for ESP translation activities. In the Department of
Educational Sciences of the University of Catania, we created a corpus to foster classroom
translation activities in degree courses, by collecting traditional academic texts in the main sectors
of educational sciences (e.g., psychology, didactics), as well as podcasts, TEDX speeches, and
movies. Participants include first and third-year students in degree courses in Psychology,
63
Tourism, and Educational Science and data were collected via questionnaires and interviews.
Preliminary findings indicate a slight improvement in students’ learning even over a short
timespan, accompanied by other changes in terms of motivation.
3.
Kate Brantley (University of Lille, France, mary-katherine.brantley<at>univ-lille.fr)
How discourse communities do things with words: Linking ESP research with research in
instructional pragmatics
The field of English for Specific Purposes does not rely on a single theoretical framework; rather,
it is enriched by a variety of approaches to the study of discourse, such as genre analysis and corpus
linguistics. Interestingly, although the field of pragmatics is one major field which deals with
discourse, explicit links between pragmatics and ESP are relatively rare (Tarone, 2005). In this
presentation we will discuss the implications of linking ESP instruction with the field of
instructional pragmatics, a burgeoning domain in which pedagogists are conducting compelling
research articulated around the questions: What does it mean to communicate effectively, and how
can students be taught to do so (Culpeper, Mackey and Taguchi, 2018; Ifantidou, 2014;
McConachy, 2017; van Compernolle, 2014)? We will argue that with its embrace of dynamic
views of the notion of context (Ifantidou, 2014: 29; Kasper and Ross, 2013: 4), pragmatics offers
particularly valuable perspectives in a world where professional communication is rapidly
evolving. Following our theoretical introduction, we will look at a variety of pragmatics-based
teaching methodologies which involve helping students associate linguistic forms with the
meanings that they can be used to create, and finally we will give an example of how a pragmatics
perspective has enlightened the ESP approach employed in one classroom composed of students
with heterogeneous needs at the University of Lille.
4.
Ana Laura Vega Umaña (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris 3, France,
vega.analaura<at>gmail.com)
Dealing with “in-class subject knowledge dilemmas” in the ESP classroom: a qualitative
study into ESP teacher cognition and practice
This paper reports on a qualitative study which explores how ESP teachers incorporate disciplinespecific content into their lessons and tackle “in-class subject knowledge dilemmas” (ISKD, Wu
& Badger 2009). Drawing on teacher cognition research (Borg 2003, 2006), the ISKD approach
investigates ESP teachers' “relative lack of familiarity with the subject knowledge” by analyzing
situations perceived as destabilizing by teachers to identify face-saving strategies via both
avoidance and risk-taking behaviour, both rooted in L1 (Chinese) cultural norms (Wu & Badger
2009) and perhaps also in traditional views of teacher-learner role dynamics (Hall 2013).
The present study builds on this research by identifying sources of ISKD in other ESP contexts,
this time in French higher education. It involved classroom observations, stimulated recall
interviews, and semi-structured interviews with three ESP teachers working with business and
science students. The observation stage explored teachers’ methods and classroom practices, and
the place and role of subject knowledge in their lessons, while interviews elicited participants’
personal cognitions about ESP teaching. Stimulated recall, using video footage from observed
lessons, allowed insights into decision and meaning-making processes involved in teaching.
Analysis shows teachers using similar avoidance and risk-taking tactics to Wu and Badger (2009)
but also greater willingness to voice uncertainty and to position themselves discursively as non-
64
experts (or as solely language experts) in classroom interactions involving disciplinary knowledge,
allowing the students to play the expert role and inversing traditional teacher-learner roles. Though
small in scale, the study offers insights for ESP teacher education by illustrating different strategies
used to cope with ISKD situations.
5.
Monica
Fierro
Porto
(Université
Paris
Descartes,
Paris,
France,
monicafierroporto<at>gmail.com)
Lily Schofield (Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France, lilycschofield<at>gmail.com)
The theoretical framework behind an online ESP Economics course based on students’
informal practices and cinematic fiction
Innovative practices in ESP are often practitioner-driven and examine learners’ encounters with
specific genres in their everyday lives. Teachers should focus on students’ informal practices and
create links with more formal course contents, as both forms of language learning can nurture each
other within a complex dynamic system (Sockett 2013, Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008).
Since viewing movies and series in English is a popular activity among students, it seems pertinent
to base current ESP courses on students’ known informal practices and explore the use of
Profession-based Fiction (series or movies set in relevant professional contexts) as an ESP teaching
resource (Chapon 2015). An online format also relates to students’ informal practices in English
and encourages student interaction and mediation (Council of Europe 2018).
This presentation reports students’ learning outcomes over three years (2017-2020) on an online
English course at Université Paris Descartes, based on nine 2-hour units over one semester. The
course is based on short extracts from the film “The Big Short”, set during the financial crash of
2008 and involves 300 first year Economics students.
Data includes online questionnaires to students both pre- and post-intervention. Results indicate
positive attitudes to teaching and learning outcomes, and appreciation of the asynchronous format,
fostering both learner autonomy and collaboration. Profession-based Fiction is also deemed an
appropriate and relevant resource for students’ specific needs. The presentation concludes with
implications for the wider field of ESP teaching and learning research which could inform
practitioners regarding both acquisition and learning of languages and language education more
generally.
6.
Craig Hamilton (FLSH University of Haute Alsace, France, craig.hamilton<at>uha.fr)
How Theory and Practice Can Drive Scientific Writing Courses in English
We seem to be in a golden age for scientific writing instruction in English. Around the world, more
and more universities are offering English writing courses to PhD students in scientific disciplines.
These courses respond to demands that those PhD students must publish, or submit for publication,
at least one journal article in English on their topic before graduation. Getting these students ready
to publish is the main learning outcome. As I explain in my brief presentation, reaching that
outcome effectively may require at least three things spelled out in What Works in Writing
Instruction (Dean 2010). First, while the journal article is an old genre (Gross 1996), many students
need explicit knowledge of the genre to write successfully. To give students that knowledge, many
scientific writing teachers rely on the work of the applied linguist John Swales, whose landmark
book, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (1990), was recently the subject
of a special issue of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (September 2015). Analyzing
65
steps in other papers before writing drafts that contain those steps can help students learn. Second,
to improve their style in English, many students benefit from doing the types of tasks provided by
Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb in Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (2010). Diagnosing
problems with English style in other papers first helps students later improve the style in their own
papers. Finally, because scientific writing is often collaborative, peer-review and feedback are
essential for improvements to occur after revision. In sum, this brief presentation shows how
theories from applied linguistics and composition can influence learning outcomes in scientific
writing courses in English.
S08: Recent Advances in the Study of the Information Structure of Discourse
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30 and 15:30-17:30
Co-convenors:
Libuše Dušková (Charles University, Czech Republic, libuse.duskova<at>ff.cuni.cz)
Jana Chamonikolasová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, chamonik<at>phil.muni.cz)
Renáta
Gregová
(Pavol
Jozef
Šafárik
University,
Slovak
Republic,
renata.gregova<at>upjs.sk)
The seminar presents recent advances in the field, focusing on the relationship between the textual
level and devices serving the indication of information structure, between intonation and
information structure in speech, especially with respect to instances of disagreement, and on
further elaboration of the distinction between presentation sentences and sentences ascribing
quality. Both monolingual and contrastive treatments are included. Research material is drawn
from written and spoken texts, making use of computer corpora where applicable to the treatment
of the subject matter. Elaboration of other points related to information structure of discourse, as
well as other approaches enlarging this field of study are welcome.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Martin Adam (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, adam<at>ped.muni.cz)
Irena
Headlandová
Kalischová
(Masaryk
University,
Czech
Republic,
kalischova<at>mail.muni.cz)
English verbo-nominal structures Be + Prepositional Phrase: FSP at hand and in action
In the framework of the theory of functional sentence perspective, if something is said about a
context-dependent subject, the sentence implements the Quality Scale. Under favourable
conditions, however, the occurrence of a context-independent subject in the same kind of structure
may lead to a presentational configuration (Presentation Scale). The proposed corpus-based paper
looks at English clauses featuring verbo-nominal predications that follow the pattern Be +
Prepositional Phrase (such as BE AT STAKE, BE ON THE MOVE, BE IN FULL SWING, BE
AT HAND, BE IN ACTION, BE AT RISK, BE IN SIGHT) in terms of their presentational
potential. Taking into account their syntactic, textual and information structure, the analysis strives
to determine whether – and under which circumstances – the predicates employed in such
sentences express existence/appearance on the scene. For the purposes of analysis, the Be + PrepP
structures extracted from the British National Corpus (and processed by the SketchEngine corpus
tool) will be classified and assessed within several categories.
66
2.
Libuše Dušková (Charles University, Czech Republic, libuse.duskova<at>ff.cuni.cz)
A textual view of correspondence between given: theme and new: rheme
The paper investigates the degree and conditions of correspondence between givenness/theme and
newness/rheme within the theoretical framework of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP)
developed by Jan Firbas and his followers. This conception is briefly compared with the theory of
Topic Focus Articulation (TFA) elaborated by Hajičová and Sgall. The correspondence / noncorrespondence is examined on examples drawn from texts in which the three constitutive FSP
functions theme – transition – rheme are determined by the interplay of all FSP factors: context,
semantics, linearity and intonation in speech. The themes and rhemes are first classified according
to their complexity into simple, composed of one member, and complex, comprising two or more
members. Complex themes and rhemes are further classed according to whether they have
homogeneous or heterogeneous composition. In all these points the realization forms of the listed
themes and rhemes are examined with a view to the presence / absence of explicit indicators of
context dependence / independence, e.g. anaphoric determiners in the case of givenness and firstmention indefinite or zero articles in the case of newness. As regards the semantic factor, both
lexical semantics and the dynamic semantic functions of the FSP function carriers are taken into
account. The aim of the analysis is to find out to what extent givenness / newness is indicated by
formal devices.
3.
Jana Chamonikolasová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, chamonik<at>phil.muni.cz)
Identifying the Rheme
According to the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective developed by Jan Firbas, the Rheme
represents the most dynamic communicative unit within the communicative field of a sentence.
The Rheme pushes communication further by introducing a new piece of information, which is
further developed in the subsequent communication. In Firbas’s theory of FSP, the analysis of
different degrees of communicative dynamism of communicative units and the recognition of the
Rheme is based on contextual, semantic, syntactic, and prosodic criteria.
The present paper investigates how Rheme is recognized by people unequipped with theoretical
interpretation tools. It is based on the results of a set of experiments in which groups of respondents
with no previous knowledge of the FSP theory analyzed short text passages. In one set of passages,
the respondents were asked to predict the placement of the most prominent accent in each sentence;
in another set of passages, they were asked to gradually delete communicatively non-prominent
elements and to reduce each sentence to a single undeletable communicative unit, i.e. the Rheme.
The study relates the degree of successfulness of the respondents’ interpretation to the contextual,
syntactic, and semantic relations within the analyzed sentences and to the semantic and
morphological properties of the communicative units performing the function of the Rheme.
4.
Jiří Lukl (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, lukl<at>mail.muni.cz)
Degrees of referential importance: Intuitive, lexicogrammatical, and text frequency
approaches
A continuing interest of the author of the present contribution has been Wallace Chafe’s view of
referents in the flow of communication constituting a hierarchical system of importance of at least
three ranks: primary, secondary, and trivial (Chafe, 1994, pp. 88–91). Chafe first attempts a
67
method of ranking of referents based on lexicogrammar (pp. 88–89) but ultimately suggests that
the most reliable method is one where referent importance is directly proportional to their text
frequency. He also points to an article by Wright & Givón (1987), where referential importance is
based on intuitive evaluations of four independent judges.
All three approaches are taken up in the present study. In it, several simple assumptions are made
concerning the approaches. In the text frequency approach, it is assumed that the more frequent a
referent is, the more important it is. In the lexicogrammar approach, two assumptions are made,
namely, that a) more important referents tend to occupy more prominent syntactic positions, such
as the subject; and b) more important referents tend to be encoded with uniquely identifying
referring expressions. These assumptions are then compared with intuitive judgements of 20
different people, whose task was to rank-order referents based on their perceived importance. The
result of this comparison is a more refined and robust scale of referential importance, one that can
be further tested and expanded by incorporating other variables, such as salience and recipients’
(assumed) background knowledge. The study is based on an analysis of five corpora, each
containing approximately 1,850 words.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Gaiane Muradian (Yerevan State University, Armenia, g.murad<at>ysu.am)
Multimodal Devices of Information in Modern Discourse (on the materials of Armenian
Velvet Revolution 2018)
Information – in its most basic sense the transmission and reception of messages between the
addresser and addressee, the generation of certain meaning, and a powerful source in modern
society – is a multidimensional semiotic system which today, along with traditional oral and
written textual modes and discourse structures, is realized through numerous other media and
devices, among them live-streaming and text messaging as well as pictures, graphic design,
cartoons colors, music, scenes/actions, etc. The collection of these modes or elements, contributes
to how multimodal tools and specially structured discourse forms affect different rhetorical
situations increasing the audience’s reception of information, idea or concept. Hence, the present
paper aims at outlining the different modes of multidisciplinary information tactics with a focus
on the complex nature of language/discourse/text and other multimodal information practices in
terms of the aural, spatial and visual resources or modes used to compose the message of the 2018
Armenian Velvet Revolution. The case study shows how masterfully the various devices of
discourse were used to convey information and impact the public at large.
2.
Renata Pípalová (Charles University, Czech Republic, renata.pipalova<at>pedf.cuni.cz)
Enhancing coherence in Academic discourse: On the role of keywords in encoding themes of
higher textual units
Following a recent study which examined the distribution of keyword items (tokens) across
individual sections of Research Articles and subsequently scrutinized their FSP roles at several
levels (viz. at main clause, subordinate clause, and phrase levels, see Pípalová 2018), the present
paper focuses on the role of keywords in constructing the themes of higher text units
(Hyperthemes). More specifically, it investigates the role keywords take in the thematic build-up
of academic paragraphs and paragraph groups. The paper employs the methodology correlating U-
68
themes (i.e., utterance level themes) and P-themes (Paragraph themes), designed by Daneš (1994,
5) and elaborated on by Pípalová (2005, 2008). Established on a specialized corpus of recent
linguistic Research Articles drawn from prominent peer-reviewed international journals, the paper
strives to uncover the leading tendencies which assert themselves in the thematic build-up of three
distinct sections of Research Articles, viz. Abstracts, Introductions and Conclusions. Firstly, the
sections are scrutinized with respect to the thematic build-up of their paragraphs and paragraph
groups. Secondly, attention is paid to the role of keywords in encoding these higher themes
(Hyperthemes). The paper strives to balance quantitative and qualitative considerations. The
results of the paper should enhance the current research into FSP and may have practical impact
on Academic writing courses.
3.
Leona Rohrauer (Metropolitan University, Czech Republic, leona.rohrauer<at>mup.cz)
Information structure in disinformative texts: FSP in fake news
The present paper aims at exploring the relation between information structure and disinformation.
After specifying the term fake news, we will focus on the results of analysing information structure
in such texts. The analysis will be performed within the framework of Functional Sentence
Perspective (FSP), an acknowledged analytical tool for information structure description. Three
items of news from the Breitbart news portal, a recognized fake news source, will be scrutinised
as regards the rheme carriers and the theme carriers in each sentence. Thematic and rhematic tracks
will be identified. The carriers of the theme and rheme as well as the thematic and rhematic tracks
will serve as points of comparison with three items of news extracted from renowned serious news
portal BBC.com. The same procedure of analysing will be performed in the three items of serious
news featuring the same issues as those extracted from Breitbart news portal. In the next step we
will look at differences and similarities between the two sets of results, i.e. the theme and rheme
carriers and tracks extracted from the so-called fake news texts and from the serious news texts.
As we purposefully target articles featuring the same subject matter (the contrast being in the
ethical approach to truth-contents), we can expect hyper-themes identical in both types of texts. A
more detailed FSP analysis may bring interesting results regarding the information structure in
both types of texts.
4.
Vladislav Smolka (University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic, smolka<at>pf.jcu.cz)
Prosodic and non-prosodic FSP characteristics of modifying adjectives and adverbs
From a syntactic point of view, adjectives and adverbs are commonly used as modifiers of nouns
and verbs, respectively. It has been pointed out (e.g. Chládková, 1979, Svoboda, 1989) that the
relationship between a premodifying adjective and the head of a NP is similar to that holding
between a verb and a manner adjunct complementing it. Accordingly, in the theory of FSP, both
modifying adjectives and adverbs are traditionally interpreted as elements exceeding their
respective nouns and verbs in the degree of communicative dynamism.
S09: Contrastive Approaches to Lexis and Grammar
Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Naděžda Kudrnáčová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, kudrnada<at>phil.muni.cz)
69
Michaela
Martinková
(Palacký
University,
Czech
Republic,
michaela.martinkova<at>upol.cz)
Ada Böhmerová (Comenius University, Slovakia, adela.bohmerova<at>uniba.sk)
The conference seminar offers contributions to contrastive linguistic research, involving English
as one of the languages compared. The papers are empirically or cognitively oriented and address
a broad range of topics covering lexicology, morphology, semantics, syntax-semantics interface,
pragmatics and sociopragmatics. The papers make links between contrastive linguistic research
and corpus linguistics, translation studies, cultural studies, language teaching and second language
acquisition.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Sara Gesuato (University of Padua, Italy, sara.gesuato<at>unipd.it)
Elisabetta Pavan (University of Padua, Italy, elisabetta.pavan.1<at>unipd.it)
Pragmatic skills across L1 and L2 writing: Student email requests to faculty
Studies on SL/FL pragmatic skills describe L2 discourse as ineffective/inappropriate against the
L1 norm. Instead, L1 discourse is considered adequate because produced by competent speakers
sharing expectations about interactional norms. But communicative expertise is shaped by
socialisation practices and its degree of refinement cannot be taken for granted also in the L1.
We thus explored whether comparable L1 and L2 texts exhibit inadequacies, of what kind are and
how frequently. We examined email discourse, which concerns native and L2 speakers alike
(Murphy, Poyatos Matas 2009), and which has recently raised researchers’ interest (e.g. AlcónSoler 2015, Biesenbach-Lucas 2016, Chen 2006, Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011, Garrote &
Ainciburu 2020, Codina-Espurz & Salazar Campillo 2019). 60 EFL learners, Italian university
students, were involved. Through two Written Discourse Completion Tasks, we elicited from each
two requestive email messages to faculty, one in English L2 and one in Italian L1, which we
analysed qualitatively in terms of content, form, strategies and contextual relevance (e.g. amount
of information, legitimacy, clarity, politeness).
Both the L1 and the L2 texts presented pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic inaccuracies, partly
shared. We argue that native speaker competence is not a fully reliable predictor of effective
communication and that both in L1 and in L2 language education, students should be alerted to
the key determinants of communicative acceptability (i.e. addressee-friendliness, face
enhancement), which affect how they are perceived and responded to (Hartford, Bardovi-Harlig
1996).
2.
Ljiljana Janković (University of Niš, Serbia, ljiljana.jankovic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs)
Translating literary texts from English to Serbian: Contrastive approach
Contrastive linguistics presupposes a systematic analysis of differences and similarities between
two or more languages. Translation studies constitute a field of contrastive linguistics since
translation from one language to another undoubtedly involves contrasting and comparing of two
languages. Some scholars believe that translated texts demonstrate linguistic patterns that
systematically distinguish them from non-translated texts in the same language (Baroni &
Bernardini 2006; Volansky et al. 2015; Zanettin 2013), which supports the idea that translated
70
language is a kind of “third code” (Frawley 2000 [1984]). However, translation has been defined
as both a process and product by linguistic literature. Translation as a process transfers the meaning
from one language to another, simultaneously accounting for the textual, grammatical and
pragmatic features of the source text. The empirical research presented in this paper was conducted
with the fourth-year students at the English Department at the Faculty of Philosophy, University
of Nis, Serbia. Literary texts translated from English to Serbian were analysed in order to prove
that, despite various linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints, a balance between the style and
form and the achievement of accuracy may be attained in the translation process. The analysis of
the students’ translations demonstrates that the best results are gained by concentrating on the
aesthetic values of the source text and by considering the substance of the text, as well as its sense
and the message. The paper also considers the fact that in translating into the mother tongue
(Serbian), the (English) text to be translated poses a problem of analysis – the translator has to
analyse the text to comprehend the implicit and explicit shades of its meaning.
3.
Eleonora Fois (University of Cagliari, Italy, eleonora.fois<at>unica.it)
EFL for translator training: New perspectives in teaching language as a means
The growing importance of translation as an academic discipline makes research on translator
training increasingly prominent. However, there seems to be a void concerning a pivotal aspect,
that is, language teaching for translator training (Herrero 2015). The learning the foreign language
needs to be tailored to building translator competence, which remains the ultimate goal (Oster
2008): the sole use of language coursebooks for general purposes, although possible, is not
recommendable (Herrero 2015), but corpora could provide a valid integration.
In translation teaching, the two major complementary approaches involving corpora and corpus
technology focus on a competent use of corpora in the translation process (Zanettin Bernardini,
Stewart 2000, 2). What still needs to be fully analysed is the application of corpora in language
teaching for translator training.
Corpora, which stand midway between translation and language learning, might suit the needs of
language teaching for translator training for three main reasons. Firstly, corpora favour a
contrastive study of languages, necessary for trainees to separate both languages in contact,
improve awareness and avoid interference. Secondly, corpora help to develop competences in the
foreign language while introducing the features of a wide range of real texts (e.g. specialized texts)
which will become crucial for the future profession. Thirdly, corpora allow for the study of the
language in use, essential when translating into the L2.
This contribution will then explore the applications of corpora in EFL classroom activities for
translator training with a particular focus on grammar and lexis. The methodological framework
adopted will be drawn from well-known scholarly works on translator competence (Schäffner and
Adab 2000; Hurtado Albir 2017), as well as on the most contemporary approaches to foreign
language teaching (Ellis 2003; Richards 2006; Ellis, et al. 2019).
71
4.
Akiko Nagano (Tohoku University, Japan, nagano.9<at>u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp)
Masaharu Shimada (University of Tsukuba, Japan,
shimada.masaharu.fu<at>u.tsukuba.ac.jp)
Contrastive approach to dvandva compounding in language contact
Contrastive linguistics and contact linguistics are closely related fields, but their connection is not
explicitly spelled out in the literature. This talk presents a contrastive linguistics-based analysis of
dvandva compounding in so-called Japanese English.
Dvandva is a type of coordinate compound which names an entity made up of the whole of the
two entities named by the two conjunct items (Bauer 2008). This type is rare in English and other
Indo-European languages, while productive in Japanese and other Asian languages (Arcodia et al.
2010). Consider the formal contrast between (Eng.) husband and wife and (Jp.) fu-fu (lit.
husband-wife) ‘husband and wife.’ English uses a syndetic form to name an entity made up of two
entities, while Japanese uses a dvandva, i.e. asyndetic coordination to name the same entity.
Based on this cross-linguistic difference, we pay attention to the fact that there are two types of
dvandva-like formations in Japanese English. In the first type, English loanwords are coordinated
asyndetically, producing dvandva formations of the same type as fu-fu. In the second type, the
English coordinator and connects two native Japanese proper names as a name of the duo made
up of the two persons in question. For instance, (Jp.) Daisuke ando Hanako (lit. D and H) is a
name of a Japanese double-act group. We argue that the second type, which is more recent, mirrors
the syndetic word-level coordination in English and has emerged under the increasing global
influence of this language.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
5.
Michaela
Martinková
(Palacký
University,
Olomouc,
Czech
michaela.martinkova<at>upol.cz)
Boundary-crossing events in English and Czech: The case of motion-into
Republic,
Motion is a crucial concept, directly linked to pre-linguistic bodily experience. Still, languages
vary in the way they code it. Since Talmy (1991), the most frequently studied difference is the
coding of Path: in V-languages on the verb root, in S-languages on the Satellite (see e.g. Talmy
2000, Slobin 2004). Less attention, however, has been paid to the differences between languages
from the same typological group (e.g. Hijazo-Gascón and Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013, Kopecka
2010). Our aim is to compare the way boundary-crossing events are expressed in two S-languages,
English and Czech. We present the results of two corpus studies, both of which rely on sub-corpora
created within the parallel multilingual corpus InterCorp (Čermák and Rosen 2012). The first
study, which compares frequencies of Czech motion verbs prefixed by the satellite v- [in] in
original Czech texts and in translations from English, does not reveal any statistically significant
difference, suggesting a high degree of similarity between the two S-languages. If, however,
English and Czech correspondences with the Spanish Path verb entrar [move-into] are compared,
differences stand out: Czech is more Manner salient than English (92 % and 15.6 % are Manner
verbs, respectively), in 19 % English has deictic verbs (come or bring), while Czech has only one
(pojď [come in]); in addition, there are 12.6 % of verbs with the directional prefix při-, which not
72
always correspond to the English deictic verbs. The results show the importance of corpus
triangulation (Malamatidou 2018) in contrastive linguistics research.
6.
Naděžda
Kudrnáčová
(Masaryk
University,
Brno,
Czech
Republic,
kudrnada<at>phil.muni.cz)
Walking in English and Czech: Degrees of manner salience and the event construal
The paper focuses on differences in manner salience between the walking verbs in English and
Czech, namely, the verbs go and walk and their nearest Czech equivalents, the verbs jít and kráčet.
More specifically, it focuses on consequences that the differences have for the construal of the
motion event in a goal-directed situation and for the position of the event in a broader situational
frame. The paper also considers ensuing implications for the narrative. In order to better contrast
their semantics, the verbs are studied in comparable goal-directed situations employing the to- and
toward(s)- path phrases involving the same type of goal. The analysis is based on the material
retrieved from the InterCorp, a synchronic parallel translation corpus. The verbs walk and kráčet,
encoding the physical pattern of the movement, allow for vividness of presentation (Slobin 2005).
They segment the movement into discrete quanta (Kudrnáčová 2019), which, at an event level,
represent distinct spatio-temporal phases. Attention is more or less equally distributed between the
movement and its spatial goal. In the verb go, reference to the body is weakened. Segmentation
into quanta is backgrounded, the goal of the movement thus receives prominence. The movement
is presented as a means to an end, i.e. as forming part of a broader chain of events. In the narrative,
this opens the possibility to create expectation or tension. The verb jít is intermediate between go
and walk.
7.
Vladimir Ž. Jovanović (University of Niš, Serbia, vladimirz.jovanovic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs)
English and Serbian complex inchoative verbs: A construction morphology approach
This research aims at investigating the comparative qualities of derivative verbs in two
typologically different languages such as English and Serbian. Although English as an analytic
language largely expresses the non-durative ingressive aspect (Binnick, 1991; Dahl, 2006) with
simple verbs and/or grammatical constructions, it has the capacity to form derived inchoative
verbs, e.g. the verbs to soften, to purify or to discolour. The structural and semantic qualities of
these verbs will be considered within the Construction Grammar framework (Fried and Ostman,
2004; Goldberg, 2006) or more specifically as word formation schemas within Construction
Morphology (Booij, 2010a, 2010b, 2013). The starting assumption is that the inchoative aspect
can be expressed by complex verbs in both languages (Cf. Serb. poleteti ‘to start flying’) but the
constructional idioms would be different. Even in the few cases of derived inchoative verb
formation in English, the number of morphemes involved per verb may be surpassed by other
languages, irrespective of the identity of the meanings conveyed. The hypothesis to be proved is
that Serbian formation patterns require a larger number and more diversified elements to account
for the same verb semantics than the English ones do. Moreover, as opposed to English, Serbian
inchoative aspect may be of importance to the process of prefixal-sourced inflection, rather than
that of derivation. Along with the problem of which semantic features have to be encoded in the
base so that ingressiveness can be marked by an affix, the research will attend to the issues of
prototypical inchoative verbs.
73
S10: Discourse Analysis of Natural Disaster News in the Media of English-speaking
Countries
Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00, Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Jasmina Đorđević (University of Niš, Serbia, jasmina.djordjevic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs)
Bledar Toska (University of Vlora, Albania, bledartoska<at>yahoo.co.uk)
This seminar invites scholarly driven investigations based on comparative and/or contrastive
studies aimed at exploring discourse presenting natural disasters in the media of English-speaking
countries. Based on linguistic evidence and analytical analysis, contributions are expected to
highlight new paradigms of research and provide insights into discourse presenting natural
disasters and how they are displayed or represented by the media in the USA, the UK, Canada and
Australia (including linguistic devices, discursive strategies, constructions and transformations,
ideological polarizations, etc.), thereby shaping ideological stances and the social, political and
cultural identity of the public exposed to them.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Jasmina Đorđević (University of Niš, Serbia, jasmina.djordjevic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs)
Sell the story of suffering: Sociocognitive discourse structures in natural disaster news in
English
The presentation of suffering as a consequence of natural disasters in the media should follow the
principles of an impartial and humane approach to reporting. However, news agencies frequently
violate these principles in the attempt to increase readership, especially when the news are about
issues that are “out of sight”, thus “out of mind”. Based on Van Dijk’s theory of Sociocognitive
Discourse Studies and Chouliaraki’s theory on the mediation of suffering, this research explores
how sociocognitive discourse structures are employed to attract readers’ attention and sell the story
no matter what even when the news is to orientate a Western spectator towards the suffering of
‘Others’ who belong to the same category of the economically and politically strong world. The
corpus compiled for this research consists of news representations of the Australian bushfire
2019/2020 in the Canadian daily paper The Globe and Mail. By identifying sociocognitive
discourse structures that clearly reflect a mediated representation of distant suffering, this research
will demonstrate that news agencies will try to overcome the “out-of-sight-out-of-mind”
phenomenon even in cases when economic and political power relations are equal. In other words,
news agencies will resort to whatever resource possible, even violate the core principles of
journalism just to sell their story.
2.
Bledar Toska (University of Vlora, Albania, bledartoska<at>yahoo.co.uk):
Remarks about objectivity and transitivity in earthquake newspaper reports
The primary purpose of this research is to discuss issues related to objectivity representation in
online UK newspaper articles reporting on the Albania earthquake in November 2019. Based on
Halliday’s transitivity theory (1985), this qualitative study also seeks to tentatively investigate
meaning creation and interpretation through the structural organization of text and discourse at
their local and global levels in order to foreground objectivity reporting. Extracted empirical
74
linguistic data allow a detailed analysis of how earthquake reporting is shaped and perceived in
text and discourse and how it is construed or established in material, mental, relational, verbal,
behavioural and existential processes in this case study. Various illustrations instantiated in the
second part of the paper, for instance, support the initial hypothesis that material processes
outnumber the mental ones by far, in which case, the personal voice of the writer is more
subordinate to the reader’s in dialogical processes for the events’ representation. In this regard,
objective and factual evidence for earthquake newspaper reports is conveyed by means of
linguistic means supported by real data which show commitment to objectivity in the abovementioned case study. Some limitations and suggestions for further research are highlighted in the
final part of the research.
3.
Tatjana Đurović (University of Belgrade, Serbia, t.djurovic<at>sbb.rs)
Nadežda Silaški (University of Belgrade, Serbia, nadezdasilaski<at>gmail.com)
Exploring the power of the natural disaster metaphor in news discourse
Within the theoretical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005,
2019; Musolff, 2004, 2006, 2016) our paper looks at how the natural disaster metaphor employed
in various types of media discourse exhibits its remarkable capacity to not only communicate
complex phenomena and their frequently extreme consequences in a more comprehensible manner
but also reveal and shape ideological stances. Drawing on the data gathered from various British
and American online news media (The Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN, The Economist...)
and using the somewhat adapted Pragglejaz (2007) metaphor identification procedure, we explore
the use of this metaphor in order to show how its meanings are constructed in news discourse and
how they are conveyed to the metaphor recipients. More specifically, we analyse and discuss the
examples of the natural disaster metaphor used to conceptualise different economic, social and
political processes (economic crises, Brexit, immigration). Our main aim is to provide insights into
how the natural disaster metaphor used in news discourse reveals its both ideological and rhetorical
roles and its power to frame a certain topic in a desired way. This stems from its two main
characteristics – first, its ability to highlight the allegedly uncontrollable nature of an event, and
second, its power to mask the agency – the doer of the action, both serving the purpose of holding
force majeure responsible for the severe consequences of important events.
4.
Jovanka Lazarevska-Stojčevska (“Ss Cyril and Methodius” University, North Macedonia,
jovanka<at>ukim.edu.mk)
A linguistic analysis of reports on natural disasters in the news
The paper is focused on the language of news in the media of English-speaking countries (UK,
USA, Australia, etc.) that inform or express their stance in regard to natural disasters. A linguistic
analysis has been performed of news headlines and lead paragraphs from selected media describing
natural disasters with the aim to determine which linguistic tools are used, which lexical and
grammatical choices are made in order to transfer certain information, how emotions are expressed
and what perspective is taken in order to present the news and to influence the public. Headlines
and lead paragraphs have been chosen for the linguistic analysis because journalists tend to create
interesting and attractive headlines and lead paragraphs in order to be informative and to attract
the attention and interests of readers. They tend to use a range of lexical items paying particular
attention to a careful and deliberate choice of vocabulary especially adjectives, verbs and nouns in
75
order to intensify the described events. They also use linguistic tools such as metaphor and
metonymy to extend the meaning of already existing words, on the one hand, and hyperboles, on
the other, in order to influence or to manipulate the audience. A qualitative approach will be
applied in analysing the news media language and will be based on the following strategies for
linguistic analyses: lexical analysis, naming and reference, and the choice of rhetorical tropes.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Irina Petrovska (University “St Kliment Ohridski”, North Macedonia,
irina.petrovska<at>yahoo.com)
A comparative linguistic description of lexemes in media discourse presenting natural
disasters
Climate changes and the constant emergence of disasters around the world have their own impact
on the language used by the media presenting natural disasters. Media use language in their own
way. For instance, the written media use language in order to project their assumed readers’ speech,
advertising language applies specific linguistic devices, radio reporters use specialized language
constructions – all with the final aim to construct their own images and their relationships to an
unknown and unseen audience. In this paper the initiatives of cross-linguistic analyses of specific
terminology formations are presented. The corpus consists of lexemes excerpted from natural
disaster news in the media of English-speaking countries compared to their Macedonian
translatable equivalents. The vocabularies of two languages are at the same time very diverse and
very similar. On the one hand, there are important semantic differences even between cognates in
relatively closely related languages; on the other hand, there are great similarities between
languages at a more fundamental level even when the languages are genetically and geographically
highly separated. The contrastive analysis of the language of media discourse presenting natural
disasters will provide valuable conclusions as newspapers, news reports and internet sources in
general have an influential role in the popularization of derived lexemes and neologisms while
institutionalizing and lexicalizing nonce-formations.
2.
Bisera Kostadinovska-Stojčevska (University “St Kliment Ohridski”, North Macedonia,
k_bisera<at>yahoo.com)
The cognitive effect of images used in Australian media reports: The case of Australian
bushfires
News shape comprehension, influence perceptions, convictions and views regarding prevailing
events and matters as well as transmit knowledge and interpretation. Having in mind the fact that
images are being processed at an alarming speed, it might be understandable where the saying “a
picture is worth a thousand words” comes from. When we see a picture, we analyse it within a few
seconds and understand the meaning and scenario immediately. The human brain is able to
recognize a familiar object within 100 milliseconds. People tend to recognize familiar faces within
380 milliseconds. The Australian bushfires are the latest example of a natural disaster with an
effect not just on nature itself but also on all aspects of everyday life. The media inevitably have
followed this phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to explore a different approach to analysing
televised news by analysing the images published together with the text. Pictures add a visual
report on the devastating effect of the bushfires, their worldwide spreading and the multifold
76
meaning behind them. The news analysed here have been compiled from Australian outlets from
the beginning of the outbreak to the culmination of the bushfires that caused the worldwide cry for
help. The cognitive effect of the pictures being used in the news will be “measured” based on the
number of shares and re-usage of those pictures at the brink of the donation cycle.
3.
Andreea Bratu (University of Craiova, Romania, abratu<at>yahoo.com)
‘A very hot war’ – Discourse strategies and rhetoric devices in Australian bushfire media
reports
The coverage of natural disasters in the media is bound to produce emotional responses in readers
(ranging from compassion to concern), responses that are guided by means of linguistic devices
and discursive strategies aiming to enhance the impact of the news. This presentation makes a
contrastive analysis of the ways in which English language newspapers (the online editions of The
Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian, the international edition) elicit emotion by using
strategies and rhetorical figures to report and comment on the bushfires that have recently ravaged
the Antipodes. Using Halliday’s framework, the analysis of the articles will also focus on the
interpersonal role of language and on the voices used to create the desired impact on the audience.
In order to obtain the aimed effect, the articles use quotes from experts (local authorities,
politicians, police and firefighters’ representatives, weather reporters) and local residents, thus
creating a complex (objective and subjective) image of the situation and of the short- and longterm effects of the fires. The results of the analysis will show that, while generally structured so as
to create dramatic tension and elicit negative emotions, at times reports on natural disasters aim to
arouse the readers’ positive responses and reconsideration of their social role and cultural identity.
4.
Nikola Tatar (University of Niš, Serbia, nikola.tatar<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs)
The strategy of legitimation in news on the earthquake in Puerto Rico
The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to answer what the purpose of the
discourse strategy of legitimation (Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999; Van Leeuwen, 2013) is in the
corpus comprised of natural disaster news about the earthquake in Puerto Rico from the
international online editions of The Guardian (subcorpus UKG) and The New York Times
(subcorpus USNYT). On the other hand, the paper analyses, compares and contrasts the two
subcorpora to examine how frequently the strategy of legitimation is employed in disaster news
articles in the above-mentioned online issues during the period of seven days, starting from the
day the ruinous seismic activity was first recorded (from 7th January to 14th January, 2020).
Furthermore, we will try to identify and provide instances referring to four essential categories
within the strategy of legitimation: (1) authorization, (2) moral evaluation, (3) rationalization, and
(4) mythopoesis (Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999; Van Leeuwen, 2013). Once set this way, the
paper will not only be of a quantitative character as it will question the extent to which legitimation
is used in the corpus, but also of a qualitative character as it will present the analysis of the
recognised strategy.
5.
Irena Skëndo (University of Rome, Italy, irena_skendo<at>yahoo.gr)
Metaphorical representation of fire in newspaper articles
77
Over the last years our planet has been exposed to various major catastrophic natural disasters
which have had a significant effect on the social life and people themselves. In this paper, I would
like to focus on the Australian fire disasters represented by the written media in English-speaking
countries. The motivation for the choice of this country lies in the fact that this current phenomenon
of fires rose global interest in the media due to its scale and global environmental effect. The
newspapers which will be taken for consideration are The Guardian, The Age, The Daily
Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald and The New York Times. Based on a qualitative analysis,
this paper will explore the metaphoric representation of the bushfires in the compiled newspaper
discourse. The main metaphoric themes discerned are BLOOD, MONSTER, ATOMIC BOMB,
SEA OF FLAMES. The use of figurative language and repeated patterns of metaphorical usage is
of interest for newspaper analysis since it is often used in intangible and even insidious ways in
persuasive arguments. The results show that metaphors are widely used in shaping news reports
about significant wildfires and that their use affects the way people reason and perceive the
phenomenon and their relation to it. Just as is the case with many other features of language,
metaphors bond people in a joint state of meaning creation.
S11: Stance and Identity in Discourses
Wednesday 1st September, 14.45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Juana I. Marín-Arrese (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, juana<at>filol.ucm.es)
Jolanta Šinkūnienė (Vilnius University, Lithuania, jolanta.sinkuniene<at>flf.vu.lt)
Over the past decades, stance has been conceived as the expression of attitude or evaluation, of
epistemic support for a proposition, or the way we construct subject positions in the discourse
(Biber & Finegan 1989; Hunston& Thompson 2000; Martin & White 2005; DuBois 2007; MarínArrese 2011; Gray & Biber 2012). However, few studies have investigated the link between stance
and identity (Ochs 1993; Jaffe 2009). This seminar aims to focus on the ways stance contributes
to identity construction in discourses. We invite papers on stance and identity in academic,
newspaper, professional and political discourse. Cross-linguistic studies are also welcome.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
Jolanta Šinkūnienė (Vilnius University, Lithuania, jolanta.sinkuniene<at>flf.vu.lt)
I want to argue that ...': Stance, identity and personal pronouns in research writing
Over the past few decades there has been an increasing interest in writer's stance in academic
discourse and the ways it influences and shapes academic rhetoric from cross-disciplinary and
cross-linguistic perspectives (Fløttum et al. 2006, Hyland & Sancho Guida 2012, Lorés-Sanz 2011,
inter alia). Less research, however, attempted to link explicitly stance expression and negotiation
of identity in academic discourse.
The focus of this paper is on personal pronoun use as a way to express stance and identity in
research writing. The study is based on research articles written by British and Lithuanian literary
scholars in their native languages, as well as on literature BA papers written in English by
Lithuanian students majoring in English Philology at Vilnius University. The use of personal
pronouns I and we is investigated employing the typology of identities proposed by Tang and John
78
(1999) as well as the classification of semantic referent types of we suggested by Vladimirou
(2007).
The results show that British literary scholars frequently resort to I and we as the means to express
stance and manifest identity in research writing, whereas Lithuanian novice and experienced
researchers do this to a much smaller extent. The types of identities projected are also different
across the three sub-corpora. These findings suggest that there are substantial differences in
personal pronoun use in research writing, and that these differences may be resulting from cultural
factors, genre constraints and the level of expertise of the writer.
2.
Greta
Maslauskienė
(Vilnius
University,
Vilnius,
Lithuania,
greta.maslauskiene<at>flf.vu.lt)
Stance and identity across disciplines in spoken Lithuanian academic discourse: the use of
personal pronouns
A great deal of research done on academic discourse during the last few decades has revealed that
the way authors/speakers project their stance is among the most critical factors determining the
acceptance of one’s argument in distinct disciplinary communities (Hyland 2005). The
construction of academic discourse, previously regarded as impersonal and detached from the
reader, is now seen as “persuasive endeavor” as speakers/authors frequently use various linguistic
devices, such as personal pronouns, to project stance towards their argument and, simultaneously,
construct authorial identities embedded in specific disciplinary contexts (ibid.).
Being the most explicit markers of stance and engagement in academic discourse, pronouns have
attracted by far the most scholarly attention in the investigation of interactivity in academic
discourse (Hyland 2005; Fortanet-Gómez 2006; Okamura 2009; etc.). The use of the first-person
pronouns to project stance and construct authorial identities has been proven to be disciplinedependent in studies scrutinizing written academic communication (Vassileva 1998; Šinkūnienė
2010, inter alia). Less research, however, attempted to link stance expression and negotiation of
identity in regard to the discipline in spoken academic communication.
Even though there is some research done on the way authors project their stance and interact with
addressee(s) in spoken academic discourse in English, as well as across English and Spanish, there
is no such study done based on Lithuanian spoken empirical data. The focus of this research is on
the use of Lithuanian first-person pronouns across interactive Lithuanian university lectures on
medicine, social sciences and humanities. The method employed in the study is corpus-based
quantitative and qualitative analysis.
3.
Giuliana
Diani
(University
of
Modena
giuliana.diani<at>unimore.it)
Self-mention and authorial stance in law blogs
and
Reggio
Emilia,
Italy,
This paper focuses on the relatively new web genre of law blogs also called “blawgs” (Garzone
2014: 167). As research has shown (Caron 2006; Garzone 2014; Tessuto 2015; Anesa 2018), law
blogs are proving an attractive vehicle among legal scholars for “expressing their position and
acknowledge their readers in the presentation and discussion of research-focused issues within the
scholarly discipline” (Tessuto 2015: 85). The paper combines corpus and discourse-analytic
perspectives with the aim of identifying patterns of self-mention and authorial stance (Cherry
1988; Hyland 2001, 2005) in blogs commenting on legal case judgements. The analysis is carried
79
out on a corpus of blog posts written by legal scholars and published on American and British law
websites dedicated to commentary on law court judgements. Results will be discussed in the light
of the personal/existential dimension of law blogs (Garzone 2014), as a new digital tool for the
dissemination of academic legal knowledge.
4.
Geneviève Bordet (Université Paris Diderot Paris 7, France, gbordet<at>eila.univ-parisdiderot.fr)
Taking a stance to build one’s voice: deixis in abstracts
In the last 30 years, the overwhelming mass of academic publications has made selecting
appropriate references more and more difficult for the researcher. One of the consequences is that
it is not now sufficient for the writer to prove the coherence and the relevance of his/her research.
To attract the reader, the writer must also build a convincing personality so that his/her audience
is persuaded of his/her authority in the field. This authority is of course built through an adequate
demonstration and argumentation. It is also increasingly based on the author’s ability to create a
specific identity, stance and voice. Consequently these three concepts have been the focus of major
interest in the fields of ESP and academic writing research. To better understand how a young
researcher takes a stance so as to build a specific identity, this study will set the focus on a
contrastive corpus composed of PhD theses abstracts and research articles’ abstracts. We will
compare publications, in English, from writers based in a Francophone and an Anglophone
context, in anthropology and astrophysics. Combining discourse analysis at text level and a corpus
approach at discursive level, we will investigate the part played by deixis in the identity created
by the writer. More specifically, we compare the strategic choices made by beginners (PhD writers)
and the more experienced authors of research articles, as to their representation of research,
between two opposite and complementary poles: narration of a process and presentation of
research as a product.
5.
Jacqueline Aiello (Università degli Studi di di Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy,
jacqueline.aiello<at>unife.it)
(De)Constructing sociopolitical identities: an analysis of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stances
Since becoming the youngest Congresswoman in American history, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(AOC) has become a magnetic, polarizing figure in the US political landscape. Defined by Time
magazine as “America’s lightning rod”, AOC has ignited profuse discussion and even debate that
may begin at her political platform but often brings into play facets of her identity, including her
gender, age, race, and class. This paper delves into the discursively constructed attribution,
positioning, and negotiation of AOC’s multifaceted sociopolitical identity and examines the
mechanisms by which she positions herself and is positioned by others (Bucholtz& Hall, 2004) in
the content she has produced (her interviews, social media posts) and in opposition coverage.
Drawing on Du Bois’ (2007) definition of stance as “a public act […] through which social actors
simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other
subjects” (p. 163), the present paper analyzes how the stances AOC has taken have been received
and interpreted by her supporters and opponents, and it explores the relationship among AOC’s
stancetaking, her multifaceted sociopolitical identity, and her political ascent. In so doing, it aims
to provide insight into the discursive realization of the modern political persona and the
predominant role of agency, identity, and stance in contemporary political discourse.
80
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Juana I. Marín-Arrese (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, juana<at>filol.ucm.es)
Stance, legitimation strategies and identity construction in political discourse. A contrastive
case study of epistemicity and effectivity in discourse
This paper explores the use of epistemic, effective and evaluative stance expressions as
legitimation strategies and in identity construction in political discourse. The paper examines the
joint deployment of epistemic and effective stance expressions, for purposes of legitimation of
knowledge and of action goals in discourse (Chilton 2004; Marín-Arrese 2011, 2015). Stance
resources may be said to index speaker/writers’ positionings and identity in the discourse (Biber
and Finegan 1989; Thompson and Hunston 2000; Englebretson 2007; Marín-Arrese, 2009, 2011;
Jaffe 2009; Simaki et al. 2018; Marín-Arrese & Hidalgo 2019). Bucholtz and Hall (2005) view
identity as a sociocultural phenomenon, intersubjectively produced and constituted discursively,
and point out that identities may be linguistically indexed through specific stances. Similarly,
Johnstone (2007) argues that recurrent stancetaking moves or patterns of moves may emerge as an
interpersonal identity.
The paper addresses the role of stance expressions as legitimation and (de)legitimation strategies
and their contribution to identity construction in the: (a) variation in the deployment of epistemic
stance markers in relation to the variables of gender, political ideology and specific language
(English vs. Spanish); (b) variation in the deployment of effective stance markers in relation to the
same variables. The paper presents results of a contrastive corpus study on the discourse stance of
key political actors from the Conservative and Labour parties (UK), and from the Partido Popular
(PP) and PSOE parties (Spain).
2.
Laura
Hidalgo
Downing
(Universidad
Autónoma
de
Madrid,
laura.hidalgo<at>uam.es)
Stance and dialogicity in Bush and Obama’s farewell addresses to the nation
Spain,
It has been argued that the style of US president Barack Obama is characterized by its dialogic
nature and by the ability to incorporate other voices in the discourse. The present article explores
how specific choices of stance markers contribute to the dialogic nature of Barack Obama’s style
in his farewell address to the nation in comparison to the farewell address delivered by president
George W. Bush. The relation between dialogicity and stance is analyzed on three related
dimensions: (1) the choice of stance markers, (2) the stance-taking acts of positioning associated
to these choices and (3) the interactional style as political persona that emerges in relation to the
previous features. The analysis of the stance markers shows that Obama’s farewell address is
characterized by an overall higher frequency and broader variety of stance markers; a frequent use
of markers of directivity within effective stance and a very high frequency of negation in
contrastive and non-contrastive structures. This configuration of stance choices reveals that
Obama’s farewell address is characterized by a dialogic interactional style which actively involves
and guides the audience, inviting them to align with the positions expressed in the discourse.
81
3.
Elena Domínguez Romero (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain,
elenadominguez<at>filol.ucm.es)
Marta Carretero (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, mcarrete<at>filol.ucm.es)
Victoria Martín de la Rosa (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain,
mvmartin<at>filol.ucm.es)
The construction of ideological identity through the expression of epistemic stance in English
and Spanish newspaper opinion articles
This paper focuses on one subtype of stance, namely the epistemic, which includes those linguistic
devices used to provide justificatory support for the proposition (Marín-Arrese 2011a, 2011b,
Boye 2012). Epistemic stance comprises the two categories that constitute the general domain of
epistemicity: epistemic modality and evidentiality (Chafe & Nichols 1986; Willett 1988;
Aikhenvald 2004; Wiemer and Stathi 2010; Boye 2012; Marín-Arrese 2013; inter alia).
The paper sets forth an English-Spanish contrastive analysis of epistemic stance carried out on a
corpus comprising opinion articles extracted from four quality papers, two British and two
Spanish, differing in language and ideological orientation: The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph,
El País and ABC. The analysis will be carried out by means of an annotation system and its
corresponding tagset, based on three main categories, evidentiality, epistemic modality and
factivity, each divided into subtypes considering factors such as mode of access to the evidence
and degree of explicitness of the conceptualizer of the justificatory support (cf. Marín-Arrese 2015,
2016, 2017).
We expect results to shed light on the contribution of expressions of epistemic stance to the
construction of ideological identity in English and Spanish newspaper opinion articles, based on
linguistic and ideological similarities and/or differences.
4.
Maria Freddi (University of Pavia, Italy, maria.freddi<at>unipv.it)
Corpus study of stance and identity in science blogs
The paper reports on research conducted on interaction in science blogs written by scientists. In
particular, it explores how the expression of writer’s stance is involved in defining blogs as
personal discourse, spaces for self-expression as well as relationship building (among others,
Hoffman 2012) and to be perceived as “real and un-mediated” (Miller and Shepherd 2004).
Drawing from Hyland 2005 and Myers’ 2010 qualitative analysis of stance in blogs, a quantitative
study is presented here based on a small corpus (ca. 400500 words between posts and comments)
consisting of four different blogs written by individual researchers and/or professional scientists
working in a variety of fields ranging from medicine and genomics to physics and geology. Stancemarking devices are analysed, such as clauses of thinking, speaking or wishing in the first person
(I think) and adverbials (As far as I’m concerned, in my view), and results compared to another
small corpus (ca. 400,900 words) of so-called ‘institutional’ science blogs, i.e. blogs representative
of official institutions or popular magazines such as PLOS-Public Library of Science
(https://blogs.plos.org/plos/). The comparison shows that while in individual blogs stance-marking
devices directly contribute to constructing the blogger’s identity and own voice, in institutional
blogs this function is less present and overridden by the informative nature of their discourse.
The author wishes to acknowledge the support of PRIN 2015TJ8ZAS, a national research project
on “Knowledge Dissemination across media in English: continuity and change in discourse
strategies, ideologies, and epistemologies”.
82
5.
Jana Pelclová (Masaryk University/Masarykova univerzita, Czech Republic,
pelclova<at>phil.muni.cz)
Sometimes, life can be a little…overwhelming. Stance-taking markers indexing maternal
identity in the advertising discourse
Mothers in advertising represent ideal parental figures who can handle any type of problem that
can threaten their impeccable households. They often feature in a problem-solution pattern adverts
(Simpson 2001) in which they can eliminate or solve the problem thanks to the product promoted.
Not only have these perfect advertising mothers become a normative in the advertising discourse,
but they have also established the concept of maternal identity that is seen as an imperative when
targeting at mothers in any stage of motherhood – from new mothers to elderly ones. Even though
there are sociological and psychological studies that analyse the impact these mothers have on the
real ones in the real world (e.g. Lee 2008 or Sheehan and Bowcher 2017), there is no linguistic
research that would focus on how the perfect mothers’ stance is communicated. Therefore, the
objective of this paper is to study how the maternal identity in a selected audiovisual commercials
for a whole range of family-related products is indexed by stance-taking markers. The paper
considers doubt, affect and evaluation as key stance aspects in a problem-solution adverts and
assumes that these three aspects can be expressed by various semiotic modes that help to construct
a perfect mother. The paper thus uses Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) social semiotic framework
to investigate how doubt, affect and evaluation are conveyed in verbal and non-verbal units to
communicate the maternal identity in a problem-solution adverts.
S12: Dictionaries: Ideologies and Norm
Wednesday 1st September 2021, 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Charlotte Brewer (University of Oxford, UK, charlotte.brewer<at>hertford.ox.ac.uk)
Linda Pillière (Aix-Marseille Université, France, linda.pilliere<at>univ-amu.fr)
Wilfrid Andrieu (Aix-Marseille Université, France, wilfrid.andrieu<at>univ-amu.fr)
Long considered by language-users to be factual authorities on usage, dictionaries have been
influential in establishing the standard variety of a language. This seminar will explore the norms
that have influenced dictionary-writing of all kinds (monolingual, bilingual, in book and online)
and investigate the covert ideology underlying many dictionary entries.
1.
Stephen Turton (Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom,
stephen.turton<at>ell.ox.ac.uk)
The sex talk: defining the outer limits of intercourse in English dictionaries
This paper contributes to a growing body of research investigating the discursive construction of
gender and sexuality in dictionaries through the lens of queer theory. The paper helps to elucidate
the ways in which dictionaries, vested as they are with linguistic authority by everyday users as
well as state institutions, codify particular sets of linguistic ideologies as the objective ‘facts’ of a
language, even when alternative facts are available. Taking as its starting point two seemingly
unconnected incidents — an unpublished letter from the British sexologist Marie Stopes to the
editors of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1926, and an American criminal trial that hinged on
83
the gendered meaning of sexual intercourse in 2017 — this paper explores how heteronormativity
and phallocentrism continue to shape contemporary dictionary definitions of sex and sexual
intercourse. Combining Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer theorizing of ignorance with Phil
Benson’s anticolonial model of the centre/periphery in lexicography, the paper analyses the
anxieties that motivate the privileging of heteronormative intercourse over all other forms of sexual
activity in standard dictionaries. It concludes by highlighting the sociolinguistic limitations
inherent to descriptivist, corpus-based lexicography when it comes to representing speakers whose
sexual identities and practices — and thus their linguistic usage — diverge from the dominant
discourses encoded by dictionaries.
2.
Jean-Louis Duchet (Université de Poitiers, France, jean-louis.duchet<at>univ-poitiers.fr)
Nicolas
Trapateau
(Université
de
Nice
Sophia
Antipolis,
France,
nicolas.trapateau<at>univ-cotedazur.fr)
Orthoepic dictionaries of the 18th c.: ideologies, rules and norms
In the 18th c. treatises, dictionary introductions, prosodial grammars and observations added to
dictionary entries offer a rich corpus of descriptive and prescriptive discourse on English
pronunciation. There are formal rules based on an implicit or explicit theory of syllable structure
(Buchanan and Walker disagree as to whether a lax or tense [i] should be used in open syllables
like the third syllable of infinity), or on the analogy drawn from morphological classes or stress
patterns (ˈodorous is stressed on the first syllable, like most other adjectives in -ous, in spite of the
Latin rule which some would prefer to place stress on the second syllable with its long ō).
There are also sociolinguistic norms based on social values attached to vowel qualities or stress
patterns and to the authority enjoyed by words in French, Italian or Latin known to learned and
influential people.
Both these norms and formal rules reflect several ideologies as to how ‘rational’ or ‘decent’ the
language should be, which this paper means to identify.
One of the ideologies is the undisputed principle that usage should prevail, but it raises further
dispute as to which usage should be preferred, a situation familiar in the 20th c. when empirical
descriptions, either qualitative (J. Windsor Lewis) or quantitative (J. C. Wells), have
counterbalanced the Jones-Gimson norm.
3.
Adam Wilson (Université de Lorraine/IDEA, France, adam.wilson<at>univ-lorraine.fr),
Language Ideologies and Sociolinguistic Norms in Tourist Phrasebooks and Glossaries
Though perhaps rarely considered as such, tourist phrasebooks and glossaries constitute a specific
form of dictionary. They are reference books in which words (and phrases) are listed with their
corresponding definitions or translations and accompanied by notes referring to pronunciation
and/or usage. However, while dictionaries may often be considered by speakers as factual
authorities on language, tourist glossaries are usually seen, and used, by the layperson as explicitly
prescriptive directives as to how language should be employed.
It could be argued then that such texts constitute a particularly interesting case for studying the
role of ideologies and norms in linguistic reference works. This communication aims to explore
these dynamics through the analysis of a selection of phrasebooks and glossaries aimed at both
tourists and tourism professionals.
84
The studied texts are shown to be influenced by, and play a key role in elaborating, certain
sociocultural and sociolinguistic norms, ideologies and practices of global tourism in two main
ways.
Firstly, phrasebooks and glossaries contribute to the elaboration of social identities in the context
of tourism. The language prescribed in these works not only consolidates the roles of the “tourist”
and the “local” in tourist interactions, it also ensures that such exchanges remain limited and
superficial (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010).
Secondly, the books are shown to be a vehicle for language ideologies that position English as the
uncontested global lingua franca of tourism. Furthermore, most of the phrasebooks studied frame
(standard) British or American English as the only legitimate varieties, thereby reinforcing
standard language norms and ideologies (Lippi-Green, 1997).
In conclusion, the concrete knock-on effects of these ideological and normative dynamics are
explored.
4.
Milica Mihaljević (Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics,
mmihalj<at>ihjj.hr)
Lana Hudeček (Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics,
lhudecek<at>ihjj.hr)
Normative and Pragmatic Notes in the Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnik
Croatia,
Croatia,
Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnikis a four-year project. The project began on 1stMarch 2017 and
ended on 28thFebruary 2021. The Mrežnik project aims at creating a free, monolingual, easily
searchable, hypertext, online dictionary of the Croatian standard language. It consists of three
modules: the module for school children, the module for non-native speakers of Croatian, and the
module for adult native speakers. The normative nature of Mrežnik is apparent in the following: 1.
The selection of entry words, 2. The accentuation of entry words, 3. The selection of forms in the
grammatical block, 4. The selection of examples, 5. Giving linguistic advice, 6. the use of stylistic
labels for non-standard entries. This presentation will focus on normative and pragmatic
information given in all three modules. In the module for adult native speakers normative and
pragmatic notes have special fields while in the modules for school children and non-native
speakers this information is given in the same field. Normative notes appear when language advice
can be given to the user, e.g. how to avoid frequent mistakes, how to differentiate between the
meaning of paronimes, how to avoid using pleonasms. Pragmatic information is given to inform
the user when to use a certain word or phrase; e.g. when and where to use one the greetings bog
and bok, when to use vi and when to use ti and when to write vi and ti with the capital letter.
S13: Intralingual Translation: Rewriting for New Contexts and Readers
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30, Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Özlem Berk Albachten (Boğaziçi University, Turkey, ozlem.berk<at>boun.edu.tr)
Linda Pillière (Aix-Marseille Université, France, linda.pilliere<at>univ-amu.fr)
This interdisciplinary seminar on intralingual translation (Jakobson 1959) explores the ways in
which texts are rewritten and adapted for new contexts and readers from a variety of perspectives.
The role of ideological norms in intralingual translation and theoretical and methodological issues
will be investigated, while other papers focus on the sociohistorical context that requires
85
modernizing a text, such as religious or classical texts (diachronic intralingual translation), on the
rewriting for a new readership, such as adapting scientific texts for the lay reader (diaphasic
intralingual translation) or on the translation of different varieties of English (dialectal intralingual
translation).
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
1.
Aleksandra
Ożarowska
(University
of
Warsaw,
Poland,
ozarowska.aleksandra<at>gmail.com)
The Old, the New and the Modernised – Intralingual Translation in Operatic Surtitles
Translation has been a significant element of opera performances since the beginning of this genre
and nowadays surtitles are an important part of all modern opera houses as well. Recently surtitles
have also started assuming another role: in the biggest opera houses the trend of staging operatic
productions in a modernised fashion is becoming more and more popular, and such productions
usually need a modern translation, which would preserve their coherence and lend new meaning.
Surtitles accompanying modernised opera productions are, in fact, often examples of intralingual
translation, as they are rewritten and adjusted versions of earlier interlingual translations prepared
for traditional productions. According to André Lefevre, both intra- and interlingual translations
are instances of rewriting, which frequently leads to manipulation; moreover, translators create
specific images of specific texts, and, subsequently, very often manipulate them. Thus, operatic
surtitles also create certain images of libretti and audiences read texts rewritten by surtitlers. The
level of adjusting translations to particular productions varies, and sometimes the original version
of the translation does not have much in common with the rewritten version.
In my research I focused on surtitles presented to the audiences in the major opera houses, i.e.
Metropolitan Opera House, Royal Opera House and Bayerische Staatsoper. Comparing the
original libretti with the surtitles, I noticed that the surtitles accompanying their non-standard
productions are often manipulated, and skilful choice of words or sentences affect the
interpretation of both individual operas and whole operatic industry.
2.
Monica Katiboğlu (Bilgi University, Turkey, monica.katiboglu<at>bilgi.edu.tr)
Intralingual Translation and Linguistic Hospitality: The Case of Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil’s Mai
ve Siyah (‘Blue and Black’)
This paper examines Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil’s 1938 intralingual translation of his seminal novel Mai
ve Siyah (“Blue and Black,” 1896-97), which was occasioned by the Turkish script and language
reforms that intentionally caused a linguistic schism in order to divorce the Turkish nation from
its Ottoman past and forge a “purified” national language. Through a comparative analysis of the
Ottoman Turkish and the modern Turkish versions, I demonstrate that, in defiance of enforced
national forgetting, Halit Ziya’s intralingual translation is a project, above all, of preserving the
trace of a radical heterogeneity that constitutes the original novel’s language (itself part and parcel
of the history of linguistic modernization). His project of remembering gestures toward a kind of
“linguistic hospitality,” not between discrete languages as Paul Ricoeur posits, but between the
historical layers within the same language. It is in this way that intralingual translation can
86
understood as an instrument of resistance to epistemological violence that takes place on the terrain
of language.
3.
Vitana Kostadinova (University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, vitana.kostadinova<at>gmail.com)
Post-Romantic Translations of Frankenstein
Drawing upon Jakobson’s understanding of intralingual translation with reference to signs in the
same language (1959: 233), this paper recalls Schleirmacher’s observation that we often translate
for ourselves from our own language when the speaker “possesses a different frame of mind or
feeling” (Lefevere 1992: 142), and incorporates Iser’s interdisciplinary broadening of horizons
when he discusses the translation of culture (Iser 1994, 1996), in order to propose that
interpretations are translations of the original text.
The rise of the Frankenstein myth in the nineteenth century is an interpretive variation on Mary
Shelley’s novel and I would like to argue that the use of the Frankenstein metaphor in the Englishlanguage press is a form of intralingual translation. In 1837 the *Morning Post* reporter in
Liverpool wrote about “the school of Frankenstein” with reference to an academic conference: the
incentive was a rumour about the artificial creation of people in a lab (*Morning Post* 1837: 3).
In 1838 two different publications made use of the “political Frankenstein” phrase (*Devizes and
Wiltshire Gazette* 1838; *London Dispatch * 1838: 5). The latter was a column on Parliamentary
life, which elaborated on a ministerial appointment that did not have the desired effect – the
commentator labelled this “the creation of a political Frankenstein”, uncontrolled and threatening.
The *London Dispatch * usage is an early example of the interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Creature
as a monster named after his maker. The diverging meanings of the metaphor in the two examples
illustrate two different intralingual translations of the myth.
4.
Ida Klitgård (Roskilde University, Denmark, idak<at>ruc.dk)
“Critical parents against plaster”: The MMR vaccination drama as satirical pastiche
Health communication aims at promoting health information in order to enhance the level of health
in society. But this vision was seriously challenged in 1998 when Dr Andrew Wakefield published
findings that linked the childhood MMR vaccination with the development of autism (1998). His
results have later been retracted, but some parents still distrust childhood vaccinations (DeStefano
and Shimabukuro 2019).
If scientific evidence to the contrary is not convincing enough, other means of communication may
be called for. And this is where satire comes in. The purpose of satire is to expose, by way of
ridicule, the ailments of society and to confront the public misconceptions (Ermida 2012: 191).
Thus, satirical takes on this scandal may serve as knowledge education of the public. My paper
addresses this issue with special attention to the discourse of satire: As a kind of intralingual
translation of science results into a new kind of discourse where fact and fiction are blended and
blurred, satire might cure readers of their sick apprehensions as it were.
This paper will perform discourse analyses of a spoof article of this case in the Danish news
satirical website Rokokoposten where the hysteria is presented as politically correct parents’ absurd
fear of exposing their children to plaster in case of bone fracture (2015). The analytical method is
based on Jakobson’s communication model (1960), Raskin’s ground-breaking linguistic model of
humour (1985; Attardo and Raskin 1991) together with Ermida’s (2012) and Simpson’s (2003)
analyses of the discourse of satire.
87
In conclusion, this project sheds new light on the little recognized issue of the news satirist as a
health “knowledge broker” in the vast spectrum of open science (Nisbet and Fahy 2017: 3).
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1. Marina Kulinich (Samara State University of Social Sciences and Education, Russia,
marina-kulinich<at>yandex.ru)
Intralingual translation in various types of discourse
The paper will briefly outline the following types of intra-lingual translation.
1. Diachronic intralingual translation is discussed by comparing modern prosaic versions of
Beowulf and Canterbury Tales with their prototype texts; analyzing Classics compressed, where
some of the most complicated and wordy works of English literature are being compressed into
the speedwriting of text messages, to help students get acquainted with classics.
2. Intra-lingual translation across registers is demonstrated on the basis of expert texts made
accessible to the public. The examples are popular scientific texts, including books like A Short
History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, sites like Complicated Scientific Ideas Explained
Simply by means of 1,000 most commonly used words; For Dummies series (reference books for
readers new to the various topics covered). 3. Intralingual translation across styles and tonality
includes parodies, humorous reworkings of history such as English History Made Brief, Irreverent,
and Pleasurable.
Methods and means in these translations will be more closely examined following the ideas of
Umberto Eco who extended Jakobson’s intralingual translation to continuum of synonyms,
definitions, paraphrasing, rendering, commentaries, etc. Cultural aspects and social demands on
the above-mentioned types of translation/interpretation are also touched upon.
2.
Deniz
Malaymar
(PhD
candidate,
Boğaziçi
University,
Turkey,
denizmalaymar<at>hotmail.com)
Intralingual translation for the sake of comprehensibility: The ‘doctored’ patient
information leaflets (PILs) in Turkish
The present study focuses on the production process of patient information leaflets (PILs) in
Turkish and the application of intralingual translation as the ‘easily comprehensible’ rewordings
of Turkish PILs. This study sets out to explore the legal and regulatory framework governing
medicinal products for human use in Turkey, which makes the production of Turkish PILs an
obligation. In this study, both the interviews conducted with the directors of various
pharmaceutical companies and the comparative analysis between Turkish and English PILs
demonstrate that translated Turkish PILs are intralingually rendered by healthcare professionals in
an easily understandable manner to the lay audience. This study, therefore, suggests that these
‘doctored’ PILs, produced for the purpose of being ‘easily comprehensible’, can be defined as
intralingual translations. Last but not least, this study explores the way Turkish PILs have been
(re-)presented and (re-)contextualized in/by the Turkish media through a problematization of the
discourse(s) formed by the reviewers in order to shed light on the general approach towards intraand interlingual translation in Turkey.
88
3. Yekaterina Yakovenko (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Russia, yakovenko_k<at>rambler.ru)
Forwards… to Old English (Intralingual Translation from Modern English into Old English
and Revitalizing Old English Vocabulary)
In spite of the fact that Anglo-Saxon culture was destroyed nearly a thousand years ago, its
elements – as well as Old English – still remain very attractive, hence numerous attempts to restore
it at least in a restricted usage. The present paper focuses on cases of intralingual translation and
attempts of revitalizing Old English vocabulary observed in 1) William Barnes’ grammar (1854)
(his coinages, built in accordance with Old English word-formation patterns and, partly, Ælfric’s
terms, include such words as speech-craft “grammar”, truth-mood “the Indicative Mood”, deedword “verb”, etc.); 2) occasional word-formation on the basis of Germanic roots carried out by the
society “The English Mood” calling for adversary word-formation on the basis of native stems and
affixes (tung for “language”, lifelore for “biology”, sourstuff for “oxygen”, etc.); 3) poetic
translations from Modern English into Old English undertaken by ‘The English Companions” – a
non-commercial organization promoting interest for the Anglo-Saxon England, its culture,
historical events, and Old English. Such manifestations of both language purism and restoration
of an extinct language are not seldom, but they are certainly unable to affect Modern English.
4. Manuel Moreno Tova (University of Tartu, Estonia, manuel.moreno.tovar<at>ut.ee)
Integrating Intralingual Translation for Language Learners: A Functionalist Description
Intralingual translation has been conceptualized in the disciplinary matrix of Translation Studies
by means of a number of different models that go well beyond Jakobson’s classic tripartite division
of translation (1959/2012). Often-cited examples of these definitional and typological efforts can
be found in the works of Toury (1986), Eco (2001), Petrilli (2003) and Zethsen (2009). While
some of these models are certainly more inclusive than others (such as Zethsen’s description,
where intralingual phenomena can be instigated by several parameters at the same time), none of
them seem to accommodate each and every type of intralingual translation. For instance, classic
literary works abridged for language learners, most commonly known as graded readers, prove to
be difficult to categorize.
In this paper, I will adopt a functionalist approach informed by skopos theory (Vermeer 1996) and
the concept of user-centered translation (Suojanen, Koskinen and Tuominen, 2015). This will
allow me to describe the abovementioned abridgements and to integrate them into Translation
Studies as a form of intralingual translation for language learners. Then, I will discuss how
accounting for aspects related to language learning impacts the discipline as a whole. Here, the
notion of “language proficiency” will be problematized as a framework and set against that of
“accessibility”. Finally, I will posit that, compared with interlingual translations, intralingual
translations seem to be more flexible in terms of their skopoi (with a greater tendency to produce
heterofunctional and intergeneric translations) and their users (which may include learners and
non-learners).
89
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Paola Baseotto (Insubria University, Italy, paola.baseotto<at>uninsubria.it)
The Political, Ideological and Cultural Impact of Retranslations of the Bible in Early Stuart
England
Translations, retranslations and adaptations of the Bible in vernacular languages are central to
studies of the cultural, political and social impact of translation. The new version of the biblical
text and the adaptation of the paratextual apparatus to new theological and political circumstances
in early seventeenth-century England is a very interesting case study.
My paper focuses on the King James Bible of 1611. I discuss how the paratextual apparatus
(especially prologues, prefaces, dedications, marginal notes) of successive translations of the Bible
in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods is expressive of the specific orientation of highly selfconscious translators such as Coverdale or Cranmer. The rich paratext of the King James Bible,
the new translation of the Bible promoted by King James who disliked the Calvinistic theological,
political and social orientation of the lengthy notes in the margins of the immensely popular and
widely circulated Geneva Bible, is worth close analysis. King James’ fifteen rules for this retranslation of the Bible with precise indications regarding the translation of theologically and
politically sensitive terms and references to the necessity to keep marginal notes to a minimum
evoke the discourse of translation as a powerful ideological weapon. The eleven-page preface
(“The Translators to the Reader”) shows the translators’ awareness of their crucial role in shaping
linguistic and more broadly cultural systems.
2.
Marta Gómez Martínez (University of Cantabria, Spain, marta.gomezm<at>unican.es)
Carmen Quijada Díaz (University of Oviedo, Spain, quijadacarmen<at>uniovi.es)
Rewriting a British medical dictionary for the North American audience in the 19th century
Little did Richard D. Hoblyn know about the extent of his work when he wrote his medical
dictionary in the 19th century. A few years after it was first published in London in 1835, a second
edition of A Dictionary of Terms used in Medicine and the Collateral Sciences was released in
1844; this is the one which, one year later, became the source for the first American Edition (1845),
printed in Philadelphia and revised by Isaac Hays, Editor of the American Journal of the Medical
Sciences.
When comparing the 2nd London edition and the 1st American edition, we need to bear in mind
that the latter is, by no means, an adaptation of a scientific text for the lay reader, but a revision of
the British text to suit the needs of the American practitioners. Hence, the American edition
includes more than seven hundred additions, being them of different sorts: firstly, more than five
hundred new headwords; around a hundred sub-lemmas which are, in some occasions, the result
of derivational processes; a few cross references; and, last but not least, some definitions have been
adapted to reflect the American reality, for instance, names of plants or types of measurements in
prescriptions or pills.
Thus, this paper will focus on analyzing both, the microstructure and the macrostructure, to
determine the ways in which this dictionary was rewritten and adapted for the new context and
readers across the pond.
3.
Linda Pillière (Aix-Marseille Université, France, linda.pilliere<at>univ-amu.fr)
90
Özlem Berk Albachten (Bogazici University, Turkey, ozlem.berk<at>boun.edu.tr)
Intralingual Translation: The Story so Far
In his seminal essay, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, Jakobson defines three types of
translation: interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic. However, in so far as he refers to
interlingual translation as translation proper Jakobson seems to give undue weight to that
particular variety and translation studies have tended to continue this focus on interlingual
translation to the detriment of the other two varieties (Mossop 1998; Schubert 2005), with some
scholars considering that intralingual translation has no place in translation studies: “the qualitative
difference between ‘interlingual’ and ‘intralingual’ translation is so great that it makes a nonsense
of the concept of translation” (Newmark 1991:561). However, as Baker (1998) remarks, in the
preface to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, “intralingual translation is not such
a minor issue as the existing literature on translation might suggest”.
Since Baker wrote these words, there has been a growing interest in intralingual translation, with
the publication of articles on adapting medical texts for a lay reader (Hill-Madsen 2014; Zethsen
2007), on modernising the language of an original text such as the Bible (Zethsen 2007) or
Shakespeare (Delabastita 2016) , on investigating the discrepancies between audio dialogue and
corresponding subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (McIntyre and Lugea 2015) and on
intralingual translation as revealing translational and ideological norms (Berk Albachten 2012;
Pillière 2018).
This paper will investigate some of the more recent developments in intralingual translation and
consider the implications for translation studies.
S14: English as a Foreign Language for Students with Special Educational Needs – Strategies
and Challenges
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30, Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-convenors:
Ewa Domagała-Zyśk (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, Centre for
Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing, ewadom<at>kul.pl)
Jitka Sedláčková (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, Department of English and
American Studies, jitkasedlackova<at>mail.muni.cz)
A space for sharing of linguists interested in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to
learners with special educational needs (SEN). Today in our inclusive communities these persons
participate in mainstream education on a par with their peers. This creates significant chances and
new scientific problems and methodological challenges. The purpose of the seminar is to share
research results and ideas about the following: 1. Conceptual representations for words in English
in individuals with sensory or cognitive challenges; 2. Teaching and learning strategies to enhance
motivation and language performance; 3. Teacher training for EFL in inclusive classrooms; 4. Role
of oral communication and sign languages in EFL classes for the D/deaf.
91
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
1.
Ewa Domagała-Zyśk (Centre for Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing, John Paul II
Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, ewadom<at>kul.pl)
Teacher training for EFL for deaf and hard of hearing students
Deaf and hard of hearing students have been learning EFL in some countries regularly for at least
two decades. Starting from disbelief and methodological mistakes we have come through more
and more sophisticated programs to the present day (cf. https://www.kul.pl/english-for-deaf-andhard-of-hearing,art_74431.html).
It becomes clear that we have reached the point of the necessity to involve not only a narrow group
of specialists – but majority of mainstream teachers to be able to teach DHH students. The
presentation aims at scaffolding the aims, objectives and methods for teacher training initiatives
for involving regular English teachers into surgoglottodidactics. Results of reflexive narratives of
30 English teacher training program students are analysed to show possible challenges and
expectations.
2.
Edit H. Kontra (Department of English Language and Literature, J. Selye University,
Komarno, ehkontra<at>gmail.com)
The English language learning experiences and beliefs of Austrian Deaf students in higher
education
This presentation reports on the individual characteristics and the English language learning
experiences of four higher education students in Austria. The data were collected via individual
interviews as part of a wider international project involving four participants from Austria, the
Czech Republic and Hungary each. Although the interviews primarily focused on language
learning experiences, beliefs, strategies, and motivation, the students were also asked about what
role they attributed to the use of sign languages in the teaching and learning of English. Data
collection took place on the premises of the students’ university in November 2018. The interviews
were made completely barrier-free and followed a semi-structured interview guide, which ensured
that each participant expressed their opinion about issues of central importance for the research,
but that they also had a chance to discuss individual challenges and topics that they considered
important. By taking a close look at the four individual cases we can get an insider’s perspective
and a deep understanding of what it entails to learn a foreign language one does not hear or does
not hear well in an Austrian context, and come up with implications for teachers of English, their
trainers, ELT methodologists and policy makers. The research results highlight the importance of
learning experiences gained in primary and secondary education as well as the need for strategy
training and for well trained teachers who are capable of catering for the needs of this very special
group.
92
3.
Jitka Sedláčková (Department of English and American Studies, Masaryk University,
Brno, Czech Republic, jitkasedlackova<at>mail.muni.cz)
Lenka Tóthová (Support Centre for Students with Special Needs, Masaryk University,
Brno, Czech Republic, tothova<at>teiresias.muni.cz)
Surveying Learning Styles of English Language Learners with Hearing Loss: A Case of Four
Students
Due to their sensory dispositions, deaf and hard of hearing (HOH) learners are often simply
assumed to be visual learners. However, individual differences in learning foreign languages apply
to all learners regardless of their hearing status. In the present paper, we discuss the possibility of
testing differences in learning styles in language learning of HOH learners. A group of four
university students with various degrees of hearing loss had their learning styles tested with a
specially modified version of Learning Style Survey (Cohen, Oxford & Chi, 2006). The first part
of the presentation discusses the modifications to the test required for HOH learners. These include
not only the obvious questions related to physical senses but also those discussing learning
situations and processing information. In the second part, the test results for a particular case study
are introduced. The survey results of four HOH university students in many areas contradict
conventional expectations. Interestingly it has been found that the differences in learning styles in
the group of respondents do not follow the distinction of the level of hearing loss and/or language
preferences.
4.
María
Castelló
Fabregat
(Universitat
Jaume
I,
Castellon,
castellofabregatmaria<at>gmail.com)
A lexicographic approach to understanding functional diversity terms
Spain,
One of the most important aspects of student inclusion in the area of special educational needs
(SEN) is to ensure that teacher training students are aware not only of different educational needs,
but also of the perception that society and other students have of SEN students and their abilities.
This study presents an innovative approach to teacher beliefs and attitudes towards functional
diversity (FD) since it uses an applied linguistics area of research (lexicography) to work on
important FD concepts. Teacher training students will develop a critical reflection on FD
terminology that will empower them as linguists making them aware of the importance of defining
and understanding terms and ideas.
The report of our findings will show how students develop their lexicographic and conceptual
competence regarding FD terms. Our methodology is task-based and sequenced in the following
steps that students will perform: 1) define keywords in FD, 2) critically analyse the content of FD
terms in a number of lexicographical resources, 3) elaborate their own definition for FD terms with
the experience gained from the first two steps and the reading of selected excerpts dealing with
these FD keywords, 4) work with metaphoric phrases related to the words ‘blind’ and ‘deaf’ as
everyday expressions focussing on connotation, and 5) answer a short questionnaire to reflect on
and analyse what students learnt in this task. This study will thus present student’s perception on
functional diversity and how their understanding changed throughout the practice developed in the
study.
93
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Anna Podlewska (Medical University, Lublin, Poland, Centre for Education of Deaf and
Hard of Hearing, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, podla<at>autograf.pl)
Ewa Domagała-Zyśk (Centre for Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing, John Paul II
Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, ewadom<at>kul.pl)
Strategies of oral communication of deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) non-native English
users
The purpose of the presentation is to analyse and recognise the value of oral communication
strategies in English as a foreign language (EFL) of deaf and hard of hard-of-hearing (D/HH)
students. The presentation is based on an action research case study concerning oral
communication strategies of this group of students. The results demonstrate that when they
communicate orally in the target foreign language, D/HH students use the same verbal, nonverbal,
linguistic, and non-linguistic stimuli as their hearing peers, alongside certain characteristic
communication strategies. The presentation relates these students’ employment of various
communication strategies to their greater autonomy, and emphasizes the need to identify and
promote effective communication strategies during EFL classes for the D/HH.
2.
Dr. Katharina Urbann (Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Special Education and
Rehabilitation, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany, katharina.urbann<at>uni-koeln.de)
Kristin Schlenzig (Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Special Education and
Rehabilitation, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany, k.schlenzig<at>uni-koeln.de)
Melanie Kellner (Secondary School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Essen, Germany,
kellner<at>rwb-essen.de)
Inga Gintzel (Secondary School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Essen, Germany,
i.bauer<at>rwb-essen.de)
German research group Sign Language in the Foreign Language Classroom - Aims and
research projects included in the newly founded research group “SiLC”
What is necessary for bimodal-bilingual students to learn a foreign language successfully? Existing
reports from the field indicate a great diversity in the implementation of foreign language teaching
to signing students in Germany. There is a lack of comprehensive research providing an empirical
basis for teaching methodology in the bimodal-bilingual foreign language classroom. Furthermore,
well-founded guidelines for the training of teachers in this field need to be developed and
implemented. The presentation introduces the SiLC research group and the focal points it
addresses. These include codeswitching in the foreign language classroom of signing students,
using contact signs in the d/Deaf classroom and surveying the connection between written English
and its German, German sign or American sign translations.
3.
Anna Nabiałek (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, annanab<at>amu.edu.pl)
Marta Rudnicka (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, martar<at>amu.edu.pl)
Supportive attitude and human factor
Teaching English to students of special needs is associated with facing various challenges and
requires incorporating innovative strategies to deal with them.
94
The aim of this presentation is to demonstrate the problems that are present in teaching English to
students with special educational needs with a particular reference to assessment of individual
student's performance and motivation that is one of the most important factors which influence the
outcome of learning as well as the whole process of learning. This presentation aims to offer
possible solutions to these problems focusing on the use of formative assessment and some
innovative strategies based on FRIS model referring to students' Thinking Styles that are believed
to provide help to solve some of the problems that appear in the learning / teaching process.
FRIS methodology is based on the knowledge of how we perceive, process and react to information
and thus it describes the way we solve problems. The term Thinking Styles refers to our mind's
habits – it has an influence on the way we communicate, make decisions and react in a variety of
situations. Moreover, the authors of the paper would like to pay attention to how crucial is raising
motivation of the students, providing them with a supportive attitude and incorporating a human
factor while working with them.
4.
Beata Gulati (Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, Poland,
beatagulati<at>gmail.com)
The role of technology in teaching English to Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students at
university level.
The author of this article has been teaching English to Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students for the
past 15 years. Visualising methods play the most important role in her work. Among them the PPTs
are one of the most successful ways of sharing students’ knowledge. Presentations help the students
put forward their interests and hence help them socialise with others. There is a peer support and
peer correction mode involved. Teaching through presentations covers all four skills; listening by
watching and “listening” to hand shapes and finger spelling, speaking in English or signing,
writing and reading. The present study examines the effects of PowerPoint presentations on
students’ writing and reading skills. The author analyses 50 PPT presentations prepared by her
students through the method of Interactive Writing. Students are involved in an experience
expanding their language competence through media while at the same time focusing their
attention on the details of writing and reading in a foreign language.
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Kata Csizér (Department of English Applied Linguistics, Eötvös University, Budapest,
Hungary, weinkata<at>yahoo.com)
Foreign language learning motivation of D/deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students in
higher education: Lessons from a cluster analytical study
The aim of this presentation is to map the foreign language learning motivation of D/deaf and
hard-of-hearing (DHH) students in higher education. The rationale of this research stems from the
fact that special needs students are increasingly prone to demotivational influences (Csizér, Kontra
& Piniel, 2015) and, therefore, it is highly important to understand their unique motivational
dispositions. The theoretical background comes from contemporary motivational theories
(Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015) as well as from earlier studies with DHH learners (Kontra, 2012; Kontráné
Hegybíró, Csizér & Piniel, 2015). In order to achieve the aim of the study, a standardized and
barrier-free questionnaire was developed and administered in Austria, Hungary and the Czech
95
Republic (N=50). Based on cluster analysis, three groups of learners could be identified with the
majority of DHH students having high motivation with some incongruence: their instrumental
motivation obtaining lower results than their general motivation. In addition, only three scales
proved to be significantly different across the motivational groups: intercultural contact, milieu
and the use of the internet. Hence, we can conclude that even the highly motivated DHH students
might have lower instrumental motivation and less support from their milieu. Moreover, they
might have difficulties using language learning strategies to enhance the efficiency of the learning
process. Consequently, teachers working with DHH foreign language learners should put more
emphasis on not only teaching the language but also teaching how to learn it. By strengthening
instrumental motivation, teachers can help Deaf students to establish long term engagement and
motivation.
2.
Claudney Maria de Oliveira e Silva (Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil,
claudneyoliveira<at>ufg.br)
Teaching strategies and collaborative principles for deaf students learning English for
Specific Purposes (ESP)
This research is a qualitative case study with ethnographic principles. It focuses on investigate and
analyse what strategies taken by the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teacher in an inclusive
classroom with deaf and hearing students turned out to be favorable to the deaf teaching process
and it also aims to present the collaborative principles that subsidisized the learning process of
these students. The research took place in one discipline in a major English Course at Universidade
Federal de Goiás – Brazil. The data were collected through video and audio recording, field notes,
teacher’s diary, teacher’s explanatory notes and interviews and were analyzed according to the
tenets of sociocultural theory and collaborative learning. Data analysis shows that some teaching
strategies that are very effective for hearing students prove to be not so efficient for the deaf
students and, likewise, effective strategies for deaf students are unnecessary for hearing students.
The results also show that deaf students have very little interaction with hearing students since
most listeners do not know libras. Among the deaf, however, the interaction was intense and
provided them with strategies to overcome, in a collaborative way and through the use of
scaffoldings, the difficulties they faced in the process of learning ESP.
3.
Michaela Sojková Šamalová (Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of
Education, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, michaela.samalova<at>seznam.cz)
Ailsa Marion Randall (Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of
Education, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, ailsamarionrandall<at>gmail.com)
Online materials for the support of pupils with special educational needs in the English
classroom
Studying a foreign language always represents a certain challenge for learners, but for pupils
suffering from dyslexia, the challenge is immeasurably higher. Dyslexic students learn best in
inclusive classrooms where their special educational needs are catered for, and in most European
countries, dyslexic learners are educated in integrated classes with learners with no special or
different learning needs. Unfortunately, they frequently do not get the aid and assistance they
require. Despite teachers´ efforts to cater for learners´ specific needs, many educators lack training
96
and awareness of how to work with this particular group of pupils and they frequently also face
lack of teaching materials.
This session will present a bank of materials aimed at dyslexic learners, which can however be
used by all pupils aged 10 to 15 who are learning English or German. To support not only dyslexic
learners but also their teachers, the project ENGaGE aims to provide an engaging and inclusive
approach to learning with an English and German digital task bank which contains grammar and
vocabulary that have been specifically designed for learners’ special needs. The ENGaGE task
bank is a flexible supplementary language teaching resource which can be used alongside regular
teaching materials.
4.
Nuzha Moritz (University of Strasbourg, France, moritz<at>unistra.fr)
Prosodic variability in Deaf and hard of hearing students’ speech production
Deaf and hard of hearing speech deviate from normal speech in both segmental and suprasegmental
aspects. Prosodic or suprasegmental features involve stress, intonation, rhythm and voice quality.
Prosody is said to be the most difficult part in learning a foreign language. For instance, incorrect
stress placement is considered as a significant issue encountered by deaf and hard of hearing
(D/HH) students learning English as a foreign. Poor rhythm and inappropriate intonation contours
could also be detrimental to speech intelligibility. This qualitative study is a modest contribution
to highlight some prosodic errors in the production of hearing-impaired students. We will first
show through acoustic analysis the shifting of word stress and the inappropriate intonation contour
in the production of D/HH, then we will suggest some class remedial exercises based on the verbotonal method using musical cards, nursery rhyme, songs...to improve D/HH students’ speech
intelligibility on the prosodic level.
S15: Phraseology and Business Terminology: the Points of Crossing
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30 and 15:30- 17:30
Co-Convenors:
Tatiana Fedulenkova (Vladimir State University, Russia, fedulenkova<at>list.ru)
Ludmila Liashchova (Minsk State Linguistic University, Republic of Belarus,
lescheva09<at>gmail.com)
We often come across such phraseological units (PUs) as 'Ocham's razor', 'nest egg', 'sleeping
beauty', 'small dragons' which appear to function as units of business terminology. Papers on
business terminology of idiomatic character are welcome to the Seminar. Items for discussion:
- structural, semantic and contextual approaches to business PU-terms;
- types, classifications, and LSP applications of terms of idiomatic character;
- metaphor and metonymy as basic mechanisms of meaning transformation of the PU
prototypical word combination;
- characteristics of dictionary entries and definitions of PU-terms and their pragmatic value;
- traditions and innovations in teaching business phraseology at universities.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Hanna Zhukava (Minsk State Linguistic University, Minsk, Republic of Belarus,
anna.lyumi<at>mail.ru)
97
Idiomatization of constructions with the preposition in
One of the most frequent English spatial prepositions is the preposition in denoting the relations
of inclusion, i.e. the relations of insertion of the localized object within the localizing one. As a
rule, a larger object plays the role of the localizing one, while a smaller object tends to be the one
which is localized. In a sentence the localized object is placed to the left of the preposition filling
in its left valency, and the localizing object is put to the right of it: I’ve got the keys in my pocket.
Semantic studies of the nominal parts that make up the left and the right context of the preposition
in show that in some cases a smaller object happens to be in the right position: There were boys in
baseball caps. The interrelation of the objects in such expressions is usually described as spatial.
However, we argue that the preposition here does not denote the location of the localized object:
the meaning of the prepositional construction is quasi-spatial. It was proved that such kind of
relation arises due to the idiomatization of the prepositional construction when encoding its inner
form: the position to the right of the preposition is occupied by the object which is paid special
attention to, which is more communicatively important.
Business English phraseology with the preposition needs particular specifying: be in
communication with, be in the red, in the black, etc.
2.
Aleksandra Malysheva (Humanitarian Institute of Vladimir State University, Russia,
sasha.malysheva<at>list.ru)
Sofia Volkova (Humanitarian Institute of Vladimir State University, Russia,
sv.sofi12<at>gmail.com)
Definitions in specifying domains in English business phraseology
Analysis of domains is the urgent issue in business phraseology. To find out the PU-term domains,
the method of definitions was used. The study of Oxford Business English Dictionary for learners
of English (Parkinson, Noble 2005) reveals a number of domains embracing business terms of
phraseological nature under their umbrella. In the course of structural and semantic analysis we
found out the following domains: Accounting, Banking, Commerce, Economics, Finance,
Insurance, Law, Marketing, Property, Stock Exchange, Trade, Technology, Transport, etc. Among
them the most representative are the following ones:
a) Finance: cheap money – money easily available on loan and at low rate of interest; angel
investor– a private person who invests their own money in a project <…>;
b) Commerce: dump bin – a large box placed in a shop to hold goods, especially those at a reduced
price; to be under the hammer – to be sold at an auction;
c) Insurance: blanket cover – a form of insurance that covers all items insured against all losses
or accidents; act of God – an unexpected or unavoidable event <…> mentioned in some insurance
contracts as a cause of loss or damage;
d) Marketing: business gift – a small item that a company gives free to people in order to advertise
itself; WOW factor – the ability of a product to make people feel surprised and impressed when
they see/ use it for the first time;
The analysis shows that 4% of the set phrases given in the dictionary under study belong to the
sphere of phraseology.
3.
Alexandra Ivanova (Vladimir State University, Russia, sandralikeis54<at>gmail.com)
Semantic transference in phraseological terms
98
The problem of componential meaning transference is of special importance in the research of
business terms of phraseological character as they play a great role in the professional competence.
For our research, A.V. Kunin’s ideas on differentiation of phraseology and phraseomatics
appeared to be of particular importance. Relying upon those, we managed to find out two groups
of PU-terms in the bulk of the terminology of phraseological character. They are as follows:
1) full componential meaning transference: third party – someone other than the maker of a
machine and the end user; white hat – someone who is in favor of computer security and has
some expertise in the field; back door – an alternate way of entering a computer system; back
end – the part of a computer system not directly interacting with the user; boat anchor (slang)
– obsolete, useless machine; thin client – a computer terminal with some computational power
built in; etc.
2) partial componential meaning transference: rich text – text that contains codes identifying
italics, boldface, and other special effects; root directory – the main directory of a disk,
containing files and/or subdirectories; active color – the color currently selected (in a painting
or drawing program); active window – the window currently in use, the one in which the user
is typing, drawing, or making menu choices; alpha channel – a channel that defines a
selection; etc.
The research reveals different mechanisms of the PU-term semantic transformations, such as
metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, litotes, etc.
4.
Lilya Udalova (Vladimir State University, Russia, lilya.udalova<at>gmail.com)
Semantic analysis of phraseology in J. Downes’ Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms
The study of finance and investment phraseology as well as other kinds of business phraseology
is of great importance both in different spheres of business communication and with modern
linguo-didactics and teaching ESP. To study the structure of the extracted PU-Terms, we appeal
to the works of modern paternal and foreign linguists T. Fedulenkova, R. Gläser).
The paper is targeted at analysis of finance and investment terms of phraseological character fixed
in J. Downes’ Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms (2010). The analyzed dictionary
appears to be one of largest and the most substantial and reliable dictionaries of its kind. It
embraces more than 5000 terms defined and explained on its pages.
The main body of the dictionary consists of two-component terms of phraseological nature, i.e. of
set combination of words which have undergone a kind of semantic transference of components
and function as terms in the fields of finance and investment.
By means of the semantic analysis, we are enabled to single out the two-component PU-terms
which may be subdivided into two large groups:
1)
those with full shift of component meaning, e.g.: cook the books – to falsify the financial
statements of a company intentionally; dogs of the dow – strategy of buying the 10 high-yielding
stocks in the dowjones industrial average; etc.
2)
those with partial shift of component meaning, e.g.: dirty stock – stock that fails to meet
the requirements for good delivery; cash cow – business that generates a continuing flow of cash;
etc.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
99
1.
Marina Guseva (Vladimir State University, Russia, marina-guseva-2002<at>mail.ru)
Sofia Lytkina (Vladimir State University, Russia, other0world0op<at>gmail.com):
Basic structural patterns in phraseology of Business English terms
The subject of our research is the componential structure of frequent syntactic patterns of PUterms fixed in John C. Rigdon’s Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms. The structural
analysis of the Dictionary entries results in the following frequent syntactic patterns of PU-terms:
1)
N + N: image sequence ~ a consecutive series of images created from consecutive video
frames, job object ~ a system-level structure that allows processes to be grouped together and
managed as a single unit, etc.;
2)
Adj + N + N: acceptable use policy ~ a statement issued by an online service that indicates
what activities users may or may not engage in while logged into the service (p. 19), absolute
pointing device (n) ~ a mechanical or physical pointing device whose location is associated with
the position of the on-screen cursor, etc.;
3)
Ptc + N: federated table ~ a table that contains data that is distributed by the federation;
captured traffic ~ the network traffic that is saved to be later examined and analyzed, etc.;
4)
Ptc + N + N: exploded pie chart ~ a pie chart that displays the contribution of each value
to a total while emphasizing individual values, by showing each slice of the pie as pulled out,
mirrored media set ~ a media set that contains two to four identical copies (mirrors) of each media
family, etc.;
The nearest prospect of the research is seen in the study of the mechanisms of semantic transfer in
the PU-terms prototypes.
2.
Anastasiya Valueva (Humanitarian Institute of Vladimir State University, Russia,
valueva.nastya231<at>mail.ru)
Alisa Skotnikova (Humanitarian Institute of Vladimir State University, Russia,
alisa.skotnikova<at>gmail.com):
BE-terms in banking phraseology of English
The paper is aimed at the study and analysis of two-component banking English phraseology fixed
in the Barron’s Dictionary of Banking Terms (2006). The extraction of the language units from
the Dictionary was made on the basis of the method of phraseological identification that was
proposed by Alexander V. Kunin and developed by his disciples (Fedulenkova 2012). In fact,
componential analysis is one of the main trends in the study of phraseology today as well as
lingual-didactic approach to terms of phraseological character.
The analysis shows that the main body of the dictionary includes two-component terms of
phraseological character that are usually employed in substantive functions. The phraseological
terms under study may be subdivided into two groups:
a) phraseological terms characterized by partial meaning transference of components:
balloon payment, exotic currency, hot card, gold certificate, sinking fund, shell branch, sheriff`s
sale, blanket lien, junk bond, loan shark, phantom income, reward card, samurai bond, seed
money, warm card, wash sale, worn currency, etc.
b) phraseological terms characterized by full meaning transference of components:
camels rating, safe harbor, sight draft, Wednesday scramble, window dressing, big bang, bear
squeeze, mezzanine bracket, nest egg, long hedge, net worth, dirty float, butterfly spread, lift a leg,
lock box, reverse swap, red herring, boiler plate, etc.
100
The nearest prospect of the research consists in the analysis of dictionary definitions that serve to
differentiate the types of meaning transference in the components of the phraseological terms
under study.
3.
Liudmila Liashchova (Minsk State Linguistic University, Republic of Belarus,
lescheva09<at>gmail.com)
Phraseology in Business English
Business English two-word phraseological units (PhUs) refer mostly to professional sociolects of
management, commerce and finance. Like other PhUs in everyday conversational English, they
are marked as colloquial and are used to amplify the message and its influence upon the partner,
to alive the conversation, and to create a friendly atmosphere.
The PhUs under study designate specific features of business (red tape) or people in business (a
clock watcher). Most of them are metaphorical and non-motivated (phraseological fusions, in
terms of V.V. Vinogradov’s terminology): awalking paper ‘a notice of being fired’. The meaning
of many of them may be calculated on the basis of common sense and general knowledge because
they are metaphorical but partially motivated (phraseological unities): bottom line ‘the total profit
or losses’.
Etymologically Business English PhUs are traced back to free word groups that underwent through
semantic processes of narrowing and specialization and became lexicalized: a sleeping partner
‘someone who is involved with a business, typically through financial investment, shares in its
risks and rewards but does not participate in its day-to-day management’. Some special human
activities like sport are also important sources for them: ball-parkpricing ‘a rough numerical
approximation of the value of something’ from ballpark ‘a baseball stadium or field’.
Functionally Business English PhUsare mostly noun equivalents. Structurally they are either
nominal with two nominal bases or adjectival nominal. Yet verbal equivalent PhUs based on the
verbal-nominal pattern may also take place there: to cut corners ‘to finish the report on time’.
4.
Tatiana Fedulenkova (Vladimir State University, Russia, fedulenkova<at>list.ru)
Teaching Types of Semantic Transference in Business English Terms
Business English vocabulary is abundant in phraseological units, i.e. word combinations that are
ambiguous in meaning and, consequently, not at all easy for primary comprehension. That is
because their meaning does not lie on the surface, it is not evident. The students see the words of
the combination as well as the meaning of its every separate word, but they do not see the meaning
of the whole word combination because it has undergone semantic transference:
a) full, or complete, semantic transference: nest egg – an amount of money that you save to use
later, especially when you have stopped working; marketing myopia – a failure to define an
organization’s purpose in terms of its function from the consumer’s point of view, etc.
b) partial semantic transference: fancy goods – small attractive objects that are sold as gifts or
souvenirs; perishable goods – goods, such as food products that must be used within a short period
of time, etc.
Partial semantic transference is characteristic of patterned collocations that usually have a twoelement componential structure, and many of them appear to be economic terms, e.g.: red goods
– (economics) goods, such as food, that consumers use quickly after buying them and that produce
101
a low profit; wet goods – (economics) goods that are in liquid form; hard goods – (economics)
goods bought by people for their own use that they expect to last for a long time).
The paper deals with description of effective methods of teaching BE-terms having phraseological
nature to L2 students.
S16: Seminar cancelled
S17: Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Approaches to Biblical Phraseology
Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30, Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Zoia Adamia (Tshum-Abkhazian Academy of Science, Tbilisi, Georgia,
a.zoia777<at>gmail.com)
Tatiana Fedulenkova (Vladimir State University, Russia, fedulenkova<at>list.ru)
The seminar will focus on new theoretical perspectives and the latest developments in Biblical
phraseology, including:
a) the studies of stylistic or instantial usage of biblical phraseological units in fiction,
b) the issues of tradition vs creativity in the use of biblicisms in media discourse,
b) cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research of biblical proverbs (Man shall not leave by bread
alone – Der Mensch lebt nich vom Brot allein – Människan skall inte bara leva av bröd – etc.).
Discussions of paradigmatic relations of biblical phraseology (synonymical, antonymical, hyperohyponymical) in the system of the language, as well as a cross-linguistic approach, are welcome.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Olga Abakumova (Orel State University named after I.S. Turgenev, Russia, abakumovaob<at>mail.ru)
Maria Gordievskaya (Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov,
margord<at>mail.ru)
Biblical Proverbs and their analogues in English and Russian: cross-cultural approach and
translation
The paper deals with problems of semantics and pragmatics of proverbs that have Biblical origin.
Though taken from the same source they possess both universal and national specific features that
reveal themselves in context. Proverbs are defined here as phraseological units with the structure
of a sentence possessing deductive function and expressing norms of social behavior according to
the ‘naïve logic’, that are usually used in speech as tactical means to achieve the communicative
aim of the speaker. Borrowings are gradually adopted into the phraseological fund of the language
and serve to express cultural norms of behavior and some peculiar traits of the national character.
Proverbs represent the ethnic culture and history in short, clear and figurative form, help to
penetrate into the worldview of the nation and the mentality of the people. In translation
interpreters should try to preserve their national colour: image, emotional and evaluative shades of
meaning. The analysis of contexts shows different deontic norms fixed in the semantics of proverbs
of the Bible origin: Eng.: Live by the sword, die by the sword; Rus.: Взявшиемеч –
мечомпогибнут; Lat.: Quigladioferit, gladioperit. In Russian culture the variant:
«Ктосмечомкнампридёт, отмечаипогибнет» is used, that means a warning to the enemies. In
102
English culture the proverb encourages rational evaluation and utilitarian approach to peaceful
way of life.
2.
Vladimir Karasik (Pushkin
vkarasik<at>yandex.ru):
Enigmatic proverbial phraseology
State
Russian
Language
Institute,
Russia,
Proverbs are used to express some important observation of life in order to advise somebody what
should be done in a particular situation. However, in course of time some situations turn to be
obscure or proverbs lose certain elements due to phonetic (rhythmic) reasons, and thus turn to be
enigmatic: A miss is as good as a mile, originally – a miss in an inch is as good as a miss in a mile.
A list of enigmatic proverbs was compiled and presented to university students studying English
as L2 and were asked for interpretations of such texts. The interpretations were usually wrong in
different ways, i.e.: 1) ideological stencils, or stereotypes build on preliminary provisions: Wealth
makes wit waver, meaning ‘when people have many advantageous offers they are at a loss which
to take’; wrong interpretations were critical assessments of wealth in general which makes people
avoid any risk; 2) subjective allusions or explanations ignoring the given keys for interpretation:
Pride feels no cold, spoken about young women, who went with their shoulders bare in compliance
with the fashion; wrong interpretations vary, e.g. proud people lose their human qualities, they
behave as if they have hearts made of stone; 3) interpreting the sentence as a joke or ironical
statement: They that burn you for a witch loses all the coals, which is explained in the dictionary
as ‘Nobody will take you for a conjuror’, while students take it for a specific jocular compliment
for a lady.
3.
Elena Ryzhkina (Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia, phraseologinya<at>mail.ru)
On biblical heritage in English and Russian phraseology: dynamism VS conservatism
The study proceeds from the assumption that phraseology is as liable to variation and historical
change as any other subsystem of language. In all times, idioms and proverbs have displayed much
creativity in their functioning—ranging from minor modifications of their structure or/and
meaning to the creation of nonce-phrases. However, the dynamism of phraseology is finely
balanced against a certain degree of conservatism that prevents the system from self-destruction.
Biblical phraseology is no exception: Biblicisms, too, appear to be subject to variability within the
limits set by the language norm. For example, English biblical idioms and proverbs engage in
typically English forms of structural modification and derivation: green pastures → greener
pastures; Can the leopard change its spots? → The leopard cannot/can’t/doesn’t change its spots.
→ [not]to change one’s spots; flesh and blood → It’s more than flesh and blood can stand, flesh
and blood under the skin etc; road to Damascus → a sort of road-to-Damascus conversion).
The study looks into the structural and semantic patterns of modification common in English and
Russian biblical phraseology respectively.
In terms of methodology, the paper rests on the phraseology concepts elaborated by A. V. Kunin
and V. N. Teliya.
The study shows that creativity in phraseology has a systematic quality. Its overall dynamism and
particular forms are regimented by the language norm and comply with the patterns that are
specific to the given linguistic culture.
103
4.
Victoria Kleimenova (The Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St-Petersburg,
Russia, victoria.kleimenova<at>yandex.ru)
Idiomatic productivity in modern communication: metaphor and conceptual blending
Idioms are a part of the lexicon and they enjoy both semantic and structural stability in ways similar
to words (vocabulary units) and consequently they are used in communication as readymade
chunks of the language. However, idiomatic meaning is often figurative and thus the speaker is
often tempted to substitute one element of the phraseological unit by a different word to coin a
new image.
I believe there is an interesting correlation between the stability of the idiom and the pragmatic
result of its metaphorical decomposition. The proposed hypothesis is that metaphorical substitution
of individual components in frozen non-transparent idioms gives birth to a brighter, more eyecompelling and semantically enriched image than the same operation with flexible semitransparent expressions. The reader is able to decipher the transformed idiom because their mind
completes the process of conceptual integration. The traditional language chunk and the new
element are both perceived as input spaces and the interpreter becomes aware of the blend.
The theoretical background of the paper is conceptual blending theory by Fauconnier and Turner,
and Gibbs’s ideas about semantic and structural peculiarities of phraseological units.
The paper provides semantic analysis of phraseological blends (decomposed idioms) used in
modern English texts and focuses on their pragmatic effect.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Anna Bakina (Orel State University, Russia, heart-anna<at>yandex.ru)
Variability in the English phraseological units of biblical origin
The theoretical basis of the research is the phraseological concept initiated by Alexander V. Kunin.
A number of methods are employed in the study of biblical phraseology, namely: the method of
the phraseological identification of phraseology, the method of the structural, componential and
variability analysis of phraseology, the method of the quantitative analysis and the method of the
phraseological description.
The selection of the language material for the research was made out of the reliable explanatory
phraseological dictionaries: 1) the bilingual “English-Russian phraseological dictionary” by
Alexander V. Kunin, 2) the monolingual explanatory dictionary of phrasal verbs by R. Courtney
‘Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs’, 3) the monolingual explanatory dictionary of idioms by
A. P. Cowie, R. Mackin and I. R. McCaig ‘Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English.
Vol. 2: Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms’.
As a result of the research, a set of main types of variants in the analyzed phraseological units
come to light: pure variants, i.e. verbal variants of phraseological units, mixed variants, i.e.
substantive-quantitative variants, adjectival-quantitative variants, and a number of verbalquantitative variants of phraseological units. The conclusion consists in that both simple, and
complex variability of component structure of the studied phraseology has no noticeable impact
on the meaning of a phraseological unit, keeping up its identity.
2.
Zoia Adamia Tshum-Abkhazian (Academy of Science, Georgia, a.zoia777<at>gmail.com)
104
Similarities and Differences in Biblical Phrases and Expressions (on the example of
“Russian-Slavonic Dictionary of Biblical Winged Expressions and Aphorisms with
Correspondences in German, Roman, Armenian and Georgian”)
The paper refers to experiences in compiling a multi-lingual comparative phraseological
dictionary. The dictionary was compiled with the participation of 20 phraseologists from 18
countries: “Russian-Slavic Dictionary of Biblical Winged Expressions and Aphorisms with
Correlations in German, Romanesque, Armenian and Georgian” under the general editorship of
Prof. V. M. Mokienko.
The 130 most famous in modern Russian winged expressions and aphorisms from, or derived on
the basis of the Bible, and their correspondences in the following languages have been studied and
described in this work: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian,
Ukrainian, Croatian, Croatian, English, French, German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Armenian, and
Georgian, e.g.:
In Russian: глас вопию́щего в пусты́не.
In English: a voice [crying] in the wilderness; a [lone] voice in the wilderness.
In Georgian: ხმამღაღადებლისაუდაბნოსაშინა.
In Polish: głos wołającego na pustyni.
In Czech: hlas volajícího na pouńti.
The correspondences are also found in other languages.
The purpose of this dictionary is linguistic description of Russian-language bibliographies,
comparison with similar units in different languages. The objective is to show their similarities
and differences. The comparative, stylistic and historical-etymological analysis of biblical phrases
was done. The result: Students who have worked with this dictionary already know the etymology,
meanings and competently use the Bible both in written and oral speech, which is confirmed by
our social and linguistic survey of students.
3.
Tatiana Basova (Vladimir State University, Russia, tanyatako<at>gmail.com)
The comparative analysis of English-Japanese idioms with the component ‘guts’/‘harawata’
Somatic components that belong to the anthropomorphic code of culture are some of the most
widespread kinds of components in the phraseological fund of any language. They include names
of the body parts (eyes, hands, mouth, etc.) as well as of the internal organs (heart, liver, brain,
etc.). English and Japanese contain a wide range of such phraseological units, however, due to
entirely different cultural and extralinguistic specificities, the PUs with these components differ in
a number of respects. The article analyzes the role of the somatic component ‘guts’/’harawata’ and
its meaning in Japanese and English nominative and communicative phraseological units. Its
linguocultural and semantic aspects are investigated in the paper. The main methods applied in the
research are the method of phraseological identification created by A. V. Kunin; variational
method developed by V. L. Arkhangelskiy based on studying both constant and varying PU
components; linguocultural approach created by M. L. Kovshova; comparative-typological
method by V. D. Arakin. Commentary is widely used to describe the linguocultural aspects of the
PUs and analyze them within the codes of culture that are the key elements of the linguocultural
theory. Finally, the article provides an overview of the isomorphic and allomorphic features of the
phraseological units with the chosen somatic component in English and Japanese.
105
S18: Developing Genre- and Discipline-Specific Standards in Academic Writing?
Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30, Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Josef Schmied (Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, josef.schmied<at>phil.tuchemnitz.de)
Marina Bondi (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy, marina.bondi<at>unimore.it)
Olga
Dontcheva
Navratilova
(Masaryk
University,
Czech
Republic,
navratilova<at>ped.muni.cz)
María Carmen Pérez-Llantada Auria (Universidad Zaragoza, Spain, llantada<at>unizar.es)
Many young scholars complain that Academic Writing conventions are getting “harder and
harder”. This seminar tries to follow the development of conventions over the last 30 years in all
genres (like conference presentations, journal articles, BA/MA/PhD theses, etc. and related
reviews or reports) in as many different European (English) departments and universities as
possible. Empirical studies may include corpus- or discourse analyses of metalanguage usage
(hedging/boosting, modality, reader/listener address, etc.), argumentative structures, research
questions/hypotheses, cohesion/coherence, referencing, evidence in the form of examples, tables,
figures, etc. The convenors welcome contributions from all sub-disciplines (linguistics, literature,
methodology, cultural/area studies, digital humanities, etc.) and hope to establish a comparative
state-of-the-art evaluation, which can also provide guidelines for postgraduate seminars, summer
schools or on-line teaching.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Josef Schmied (Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, josef.schmied<at>phil.tuchemnitz.de)
Marina
Ivanova
(Chemnitz
University
of
Technology,
Germany,
marina.ivanova<at>phil.tu-chemnitz.de)
Academic Writing Conventions in English MA Theses before and after Bologna: Global
Rhetorical Structures and Stance in Sub-Disciplines at a German University
This presentation discusses the principles of academic writing with special reference to MA theses.
It sees theses as the central genre that introduces students to independent academic writing and
thinking and the first step towards an academic writing career in research journals, for instance. It
argues that scientific writing conventions are spreading from natural and social sciences into
English studies and its sub-disciplines linguistics, literature, (teaching) methodology, cultural/area
studies, etc. A small empirical case study compares 20 MA theses written at our university after
the introduction of the Bologna structure (2011-19) with 20 Magister theses written before (200010). Major variables are global rhetorical structures adopted (from issue/research problem and
literature review to conclusions, limitations, and suggestions for further studies; (cf. Bondi, Diani,
Nocella below), and the expression of personal evaluation through metalanguage in these sections
(cf. Dontcheva-Navratilova below). The focus is on an underresearched variable: that-complement
clauses (e.g., argue that, claim that) and their functions indicating authorial stance. A corpuslinguistic analysis reveals interesting differences between the English sub-disciplines. The
findings of the study suggest that they follow similar trends, but to a different degree. Recent
changes are largely teaching-induced and show the increasing dominance of Anglo-American
106
models in teaching and publishing. A final empirical comparison with other universities suggests
that these trends do not only apply to Germany, but also to African and Chinese universities, for
instance.
2.
Radmila Palinkašević (Preschool Teacher Training College, Vrsac, Serbia,
palinkasevic<at>gmail.com)
Jelena Prtljaga (Preschool Teacher Training College, Vrsac, Teacher Education Faculty,
University of Belgrade, Serbia, jpivan<at>sezampro.rs)
Analysis of lexical bundles of non-native writers in academic English: examples from
educational sciences
It is easy to notice a well written academic text in the English language. However, to write one is
extremely difficult for a non-native writer, striving for fluency, socio-culturally appropriate
language and confidence, leading to acceptance into the academic community. Formulaic language
contributes to demonstrating membership in a specific discourse community. This paper focuses
on lexical bundles which are multi word sequences that recur frequently and are distributed widely
across different texts. Linguistic bundles vary in academic disciplines and registers, they vary in
the writing of native and non-native speakers and are a key way of shaping text meaning and
contributing to our sense of distinctiveness. The analysis of lexical bundles contributes to the
understanding of certain academic registers. This article explores the usage of lexical bundles used
by non-native speakers in academic English in the field of education. Two corpora of about half a
million words (approximately 100 texts in English) are compiled for the purpose of the current
study, the first consisting of scholarly articles, in the field of education, written by education
professionals who are native speakers of English and the second one consisting of scholarly articles
written by education professionals who are native speakers of Serbian. Having identified fourword lexical bundles occurring in the corpus, functional and structural classification was carried
out. This paper aims to explore the following questions: Are there any differences in the amount
of four-word lexical bundles used by native speakers of English and native speakers of Serbian
writing in English in the field of education? Which lexical bundles are shared by these two groups
and which occur only in one of the respective groups? Are there any structural and functional
differences between the use of four-word lexical bundles by native speakers of English and native
speakers of Serbian writing in English? Based on the results of previous studies in this area it is
hypothesized that in the same structural and functional categories different examples of lexical
bundles are used by native and non-native speakers.
3.
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic,
navratilova<at>ped.muni.cz)
Czech English-medium linguistics journals’ academic writing conventions: Continuity and
change over the last 30 years
This paper studies the development of academic writing conventions as represented by research
articles written by Czech linguists published in two national English-medium journals (Brno
Studies in English, published by Masaryk University, and Linguistica Pragensia, published by
Charles University) over the time span of the last 30 years. The investigation is carried out on a
small corpus of 20 single-authored research articles – ten representing the period 1990-1995 and
ten representing the period 2014-2019. The corpus-based analysis draws of the genre analysis
107
framework to explore the possible changes in rhetorical structure, citations use and personal
structures for writer and reader reference. The purpose of this comparative diachronic analysis is
not only to identify the markers of continuity and change, but also to consider the factors
influencing the development of the academic writing conventions reflected by the journals. The
findings of the study suggest that among the possible reasons for the changes observed may be the
topics under research and methods used, the spectrum of authors publishing in the journals, the
adoption of an open-access policy and the dominance of the English academic writing conventions
in modern academia.
4.
Marina Bondi (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy, mbondi<at>unimore.it)
Jessica Jane Nocella (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy,
jessicajane.nocella<at>unimore.it)
Italian English-medium linguistics journals’ academic writing conventions: Continuity and
change over the last 30 years
This paper is a parallel study to Dontcheva-Navratilova and studies the development of academic
writing conventions as represented by research articles written by Italian scholars in English
linguistics published in the official journal of the Italian association of Anglicists (Textus) over the
time span of the last 30 years. The study is based on a small corpus of 20 single-authored research
articles – ten representing the period 1990-1995 and ten representing the period 2014-2019. The
corpus-based analysis draws on genre analysis to explore the possible changes in the wording of
titles, rhetorical structure, statement of purpose, research questions or hypothesis formulation,
citations use and personal structures for writer and reader reference. The purpose of this
comparative diachronic analysis is not only to identify the markers of continuity and change, but
also to consider the factors influencing the development of the academic writing conventions
reflected by the journals. Special attention is paid to methodology and the dominance of the
English academic writing conventions in modern academia. Comparison with DontchevaNavratilova’s study will also highlight convergences and divergences that may help explore these
factors.
Slot 2: Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
1. Željka Babić (University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
zeljka.babic<at>flf.unibl.org)
In pursuit for novel practices in academic thesis writing: Does changing the language call for
changing the approach?
The change from the traditional to Bologna system has brought an important novelty in the
academic practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Namely, previously all the theses, BA, MPhil/MSc
and PhD ones, had to be written in the official language of the country, which inevitably lead to
the instruction in academic writing which followed the norms of Serbo-Croatian/Serbian. The new
system nowadays allows for the use of a foreign language as the thesis language, thus enabling
students to choose the means of presentation.
This presentation aims at offering an analysis of MA theses defended at the Faculty of Philology’s
English Department (University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina). The corpus consists of
twelve theses (4 from linguistics, 4 from literature, 4 from ELT) whose authors, native Serbian
108
speakers who did not have any previous formal training in academic English and/or thesis writing,
opted for using English as a writing medium. The aim is to research on the communicative
strategies used for increasing or reducing the force of statements whose occurrence in texts is
regarded as a direct influence/transfer from L1, whether they are the overt use of boosting/hedging
or topicalisation/movement. The L1 writing guidelines prescribe very specific use of both of these,
so it is viable to hypothesise that the texts in L2 will follow them disregarding the requirements of
the academic writing in English, thus generating cohesive or coherent deficits.
2. Krystyna Warchał (University of Silesia, Poland, krystyna.warchal<at>us.edu.pl)
Concluding sections over 30 years of research writing: A case study
Part of a larger project focused on the development of academic identity, this paper proposes an
individual perspective on the evolution of genre standards by looking into a collection of academic
texts published throughout 30 years of an active research career by a scholar whose main field is
applied psycholinguistics, and whose main language of publication is English, her second language
in terms of the order of acquisition. The material for this study is limited to monograph chapters
and journal articles (to the exclusion of monographs and the unpublished PhD thesis;
approximately 122,000 running words); it comprises 28 texts published in the years 1990–2019,
all of them in English and single-authored, beginning with early, pre-doctoral publications, through
post-doctoral degree texts, to full professorship contributions. For the purpose of the analysis, the
corpus is divided into three time-frames corresponding to stages in the academic career of the
author: the novice stage (NS; PhD degree 1993), the mature stage (MS; post-doctoral degree 2005),
and the expert stage (ES; full professorship 2013), with the last two, much more prolific than the
NS, additionally subdivided. The analysis focuses on the concluding sections (about 14,000
running words). More specifically, it looks into the relative prominence of concluding moves (the
restatement of the research problem, the summary of the main results, the significance of the
results, and further implications) across the three time-frames and the possible changes in the use
of first-person pronouns and epistemic markers in texts representing the three stages of academic
career. It is hypothesised that texts originating in the later stages will give more prominence to the
significance of the results and their further implications in the concluding sections than the early
publications, thus engaging with the field, the readers, and the results obtained by other researchers
to a greater extent. It is also expected that they will contain more references to the author and more
epistemic markers than the early texts. Apart from documenting the development of genre
competence, the results may be indicative of an evolution of expectations the readers have of the
final text section.
3.
Olga Oparina (Lomonosov Moscow State University, The Russian Presidential Academy
of National Economy and Public Administration, Russia, oloparina<at>yandex.ru)
Peculiarities of Academic Articles in Internet: Leaving Strict Conventions or Striving to
Adapt to Modern Challenges
Academic discourse deals with knowledge acquisition and relates to logical way of presenting
information, formality and impersonality. There are certain conventions and academic discourse
genres with strictly specified settings. However, an author tries to make the material easier for
comprehension to involve an addressee in the sphere of the research and to stimulate for its further
study. Some tendency of knowledge presentation can be observed in modern Internet journals
109
proclaiming the slogan: "Academic rigor, journalistic flair". Nowadays Internet has become the
space for academic communication and knowledge mediation connecting people with various
background(s), degree of research involvement and academic proficiency. The key research
questions being explored now are how the genre of newsletter article adjusts to the new
circumstances, whether the structure and material organization is changing, what the principles
of knowledge organization are. The results of the research are based on the articles on Philosophy
from newsletters, total amount of articles is 52: 25 in Russian/English (the newsletter published
in Russian Federation and has Internet version) and 27 in English (Internet version of International
newsletter). The analyzed newsletters published the materials written only by the authors being
"currently employed as a researcher or academic with a university or research institution". The
focus of the research is on the structure of the text (whether it corresponds to the stated standards)
and the principles of information selection and organization, i.e. mechanisms of knowledge
presentation (creating "cross-zones" consisting of key elements from various disciplines and fields
of life). The peculiarities of such publications within the framework of the stated conception and
conventional standards are considered. The results seem to be unexpected concerning the common
principles of knowledge shaping in academic discourse. Such peculiarity of modern articles can
be explained by editing policy and the desire to make high science and humanities close to life.
S19: The Discursive Management of Conflict in Interpersonal Interactions
Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00, Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Jan Chovanec (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, chovanec<at>phil.muni.cz)
Roberta Facchinetti (University of Verona, Italy, roberta.facchinetti<at>univr.it)
The panel seeks to address diverse conflict-related phenomena such as disagreements, arguments,
quarrels and other kinds of communicative disunities and antagonistic interactions including
bullying, trolling and hate speech. We look for contributions preferably addressing these aspects
in various kinds of technology-mediated communication, with data coming from public media
(such as talk shows, online reader comments, discussion forums) as well as social media (e.g.
Facebook, Instagram) and, possibly, also other domains. The papers are expected to engage the
issues from the perspectives of (media) discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and interactional
pragmatics, discussing synchronic and potentially also diachronic aspects of conflict-based and
conflict-related interactions in relation to such concepts as face, impoliteness, aggression,
categorization, etc.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
1.
Valeria Franceschi (University of Verona, Italy, valeria.franceschi<at>univr.it)
Alignment and disalignment in the EU: (dis)agreement in international European
Committee debates
European Union (EU) institutions are highly multilingual environments where international
communication is often high stakes and goal-oriented, as they produce and define policies and
regulations applied to all member states. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) “have the
possibility to speak, listen, read and write in their own language and, in fact, in any of the EU's
official languages” (European Parliament website), and indeed, codeswitching is common in EU
110
interactions (Wodak et al. 2012); however, the dominant language appears to be English, used in
this case in its lingua franca role. This paper aims at exploring how agreements and disagreements
are conveyed in such international institutional contexts through the qualitative analysis of debates
in publicly available recorded meetings of the European Parliament Committee on the
Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. Two meetings from two different parliamentary
terms (2019-2024 and 2014-2019) will be analyzed. The study will adopt a political discourse
analysis approach, focusing especially on the use of politeness and management of Face
Threatening Acts (Brown and Levinson 1987) in English turns, and drawing on studies on
politeness in interaction (Sifianou 2019) and conversation analysis techniques (Markee 2000; Ten
Have 1999). Special attention will also be paid to the international use of English and language
choice, following Wodak et al.’s suggestion that English is often employed in conflictual episodes
(Wodak et al. 2012).
2.
Viviana Gaballo (University of Macerata, Italy, viviana.gaballo<at>unimc.it)
One country, two systems: A corpus-based, critical discourse analysis of Hong Kong protests
This paper rests on a definition of conflict as a struggle between two or more interdependent
parties, who have or perceive incompatible goals (Putnam, 2006). The reference to both actual and
perceived goal incompatibility suggests that conflict is not strictly about objective circumstances
so much as subjective definitions and desires. Most often, authors distinguish instrumental,
relational, and identity goals, which refer respectively to concern over a specific problem, the
nature of the relationship, and self-presentation or “face” (Canary & Lakey, 2006).
In order to explore this concept further, discourse analysis is applied to a specific corpus of texts:
Quora, a platform (with 200 million monthly users) where users can pose questions and others can
answer. It is neither a blog nor a forum, but simply a website where questions are asked and
answered by Internet users, either factually, or in the form of opinions. The exchange of opinions
about debated issues – in this case Hong Kong anti-extradition protests (2019) – provides useful
content for the thorough analysis of competing views about the conflict between Hong Kong
protesters and mainland China supporters.
In addition to discussing the synchronic aspects of the conflict-related interactions above in terms
of face, aggression, (de)legitimation among other concepts, also a diachronic perspective is
introduced with the comparison between interactions about the recent Hong Kong anti-extradition
protests (Summer 2019) and the previous Hong Kong Protests and Umbrella Movement (Fall
2014).
3.
Roberta Facchinetti (University of Verona, Italy, roberta.facchinetti<at>univr.it)
Sara Corrizzato (University of Verona, Italy, sara.corrizzato<at>univr.it)
Silvia Cavalieri (University of Verona, Italy, silvia.cavalieri<at>univr.it)
The language of diplomacy in media interviews: building a cross-cultural corpus
The language of diplomacy is generally dealt with in the official documents that result from
bilateral/multilateral meetings, particularly with reference to the difficulties posed by textual
interpretation. Yet the training of diplomats involves first and foremost the development of
competence in spoken discourse and on aspects of diplomatic language including nuance, extralinguistic signalling, and understatement.
111
Bearing this in mind, the present paper will illustrate a project currently under way at the
University of Verona which is aimed at the compilation of a corpus of interviews whereby
diplomats from different geographical areas of the world are interviewed by journalists.
The interviews focus on a variety of topics: Politics, Law and International Affairs,
Economy/finance, Education, Environment, Culture/society/life, Sports, Health/medicare, and
Other.
The paper will illustrate the state of the art in corpus development along with the issues involved
in its compilation, like the selection of interviews and their tagging in order to identify
interpersonal/intercultural communicative patterns. Special attention will be dedicated to
identifying possible conflict-related situations occurring during turn-taking, such as
disagreements, arguments, quarrels and other kinds of communicative disunities and antagonistic
interactions emerging in the interviews.
4.
Anna Rewiś-Łętkowska (Krosno State College, Poland, a.letkowska<at>gmail.com)
From the conceptual to the communicative - the case of the CRYSTAL metaphor in Polish
political commentaries and online comments
The paper proposes to apply Steen’s (2008, 2010, 2011) three-dimensional model of metaphor, i.e.
metaphor in language, thought, and communication, to the analysis of the CRYSTAL metaphor,
which was recurrent in the Polish political discourse between September and December 2019.
Used in an interview by a representative of the ruling party as the highly entrenched metaphorical
expression kryształowy człowiek ('a crystal person'), it was supposed to emphasise the moral
excellence of a controversial nominee for President of the Supreme Chamber of Control, who was
a member of the same party and who was strongly criticised by the opposition. The study contrasts
this non-deliberate use of kryształowy człowiek ('a crystal person') with the deliberate metaphors
used in political commentaries and online comments, which exploit the available possibilities of
the same conceptual structure of MORAL PURITY IS CLEANLINESS (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:
307). They invite the addressee to look at the subject from a different angle, which often brings
about a humorous effect. The first aim of the research is to examine the metaphors as tools for
accomplishing specific communicative goals and to identify the functions they perform in given
contexts. The methodology applied also draws on the concept of activated metaphoricity (Müller
2008), discusses the ways in which activation of the ‘dormant’ conceptual structure is achieved in
particular metaphorical expressions.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Władysław Chłopicki (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, chlopicki<at>gmail.com)
Hate speech in Polish social media among social polarization and political conflict
This talk will deal with the entire range of negative commentary on Polish social media in the year
2020 – the year of growing political conflict, ahead of Presidential elections of May 2020. The
study includes comments left on news websites of both left-wing and conservative media referring
to particular news as well as comments to political news left by users of Facebook. In the analysis
it is postulated that the negativity involved runs from rare polite disagreements to much more
common flaming with all kind of stages in between. The claim is that hate speech, also referred to
as Socially Unacceptable Discourse (SUD), must involve negative (hostile) comments (putdowns)
112
referring to the target belonging to a negatively perceived social, ethnic or demographic group or
possessing a negatively perceived social characteristic. The call for violence or discrimination is a
feature that is often present but not essential as are inappropriate comments including vulgarity or
obscenity. The colloquial speech, non-standard spelling, emojis etc used in the comments are not
necessarily essential or defining features of SUD (although they are common). The reasonably
politely expressed disagreement (rare as it is) cannot be classified as hate speech or SUD.
2.
Jan Chovanec (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, chovanec<at>phil.muni.cz)
Negotiating hate speech in online comments: Between affirmation and dissent
The presentation addresses the interactional construction of hate speech in internet discussion
forums, with the aim of uncovering some of the strategies whereby users negotiate verbally
offensive behaviour. While there has been substantial research into the forms of hate speech and
offensive behaviour in the context of political and media discourse, where the negative language
targets various groups of ‘others’ (e.g. ethnic minorities, immigrants and other ‘outgroups’), much
less attention has been paid to the interactional dynamics of the debate between the users
themselves, particularly where some conflict of opinions arises.
Based on data from English and Czech online news forums, the talk maps the users’
interactions between different levels of comments, i.e. the first-order comments (which react to
news articles and tend to contain some elements of hate speech and negatively opinionated
commentary) and second-order comments (which react to the previous comments as follow-ups).
The data indicate that while first-order commenters, due to setting the tone of the
discussion, could be seen as opinion leaders within the micro-community of the online users, the
second-order commenters need to negotiate the interpersonal space along a cline ranging from
affirmation to difference. The presentation suggests that contrary to the general perception of
online commenting as a ‘social bubble’, there is a surprising amount of conflict and dissent taking
many different forms.
3.
Giulia Adriana Pennisi (University of Palermo and University of London, Italy and United
Kingdom, pennisigiulia<at>gmail.com)
Mediating potentially ‘inflammatory’ circumstances: re-framing the discourse surrounding
conflict situations
Recent theoretical developments in postmodern social theory and social constructionist movement
in the social sciences and humanities have provided the field of alternative dispute resolution and
the mediation process with a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts. These
developments are organized around the ‘narrative approach’ which helps to see how the language
we use to describe and understand our conflicts are operative in constructing an image in our minds
of the conflict itself.
Generally speaking, words are slippery and they need to be used with extreme care when carrying
messages, ideas and proposals between parties. This is all the more evident in mediation process
as language has to be neutral and mediators should avoid expressions directing parties. The
narrator and the audience assign praise and blame to the actors for the actions involved. The ways
in which this is done include the use of linguistic devices of mood, factivity and causativity,
evaluative lexicon, the insertion/omission of events and the ideological framework within which
events are viewed. In this respect, events that have entered into the speaker's biography are
113
emotionally and socially evaluated, and so transformed from raw experience. By re-framing the
discourses surrounding the conflict situation in a corpus of transcribed texts of narrative mediation
conversations (Family Mediation, Employment Mediation, and Conflict Resolution in Health
Care), the analysis looks at the possible alternative narratives that might been opened up or closed
off by the position(s) established in the storylines that are privileged in each person’s accounts.
S20: Man utanbordes wisdom ondlarehieder on londsohte – Relations between England and
the Continent in the Middle Ages
Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30 and Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Judith Kaup (Independent scholar, Germany, judithkaup<at>yahoo.com)
Elise Louviot (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, elise.louviot<at>univreims.fr)
Annina Seiler (Universität Zürich, Switzerland, annina.seiler<at>es.uzh.ch)
This seminar brings together papers exploring various aspects of contact and interchange between
England and the Continent. The first part examines the circulation of saintly legends and pilgrims
into and out of England across the whole medieval period until the time of the Reformation. The
second part of the session focuses on the transfer of learning and social practices across various
domains, including the exercise of royal power, the ideals of chivalry, natural science and
literature. The seminar shows a relationship marked by interchanges on personal, religious,
political, and cultural levels, belying notions of insular isolation.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Christine Rauer (University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, cr30<at>st-andrews.ac.uk)
Spatial Deixis in Insular and Continental Martyrologies
Martyrologies conventionally cover a very wide geographical range in their references to saints’
cults. The furthest ranges of Christendom are mapped in terms of saintly travel, and martyrdom is
invariably assigned to named places and specified burial locations. One aspect which has not
received much attention in the study of this genre is how the authors of martyrologies position
themselves in this hagiographical universe. Where do they see the centre of their activities, and to
what extent is this centering made explicit? Particularly the author of the ninth-century Old English
Martyrology seems to emphasise in a number of instances the contrast between England and the
Continent in his saintly universe by using deictic demonstratives. This paper will attempt to
contextualise this and other martyrological authors in their spatial deixis.
2.
Simon Thomson (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany, thomson<at>hhu.de)
An unbounded saint? The persistence of Saint Christopher’s border crossings in early
medieval western Europe
The early medieval Saint Christopher was a giant cynocephalus: a dog-headed man with burning
eyes who spoke no language and ate only humans. Coming originally from modern Syria, his story
was popular across western Europe, with dozens of local variations. And such a wide-ranging,
constantly changing existence is entirely appropriate to the saint’s nature: Cynocephali are the
114
marginal figures of medieval Europe par excellence. In Christopher’s Passio, this liminal role is
emphasised, with the saint seen by a woman outside the city gates, shouting through windows, and
enveloped by a cloud from God. His final prayer seeks to break the boundaries of embodiment and
time, reaching into the reader’s own world. He is the stranger at the gate, the Other that threatens
to cross into our space and to transform it.
The spread and development of Christopher’s story makes it clear that relations between England
and the Continent in the early medieval period were too tight to study one tradition without the
other. The only certainly English copy of the Latin text is now in Paris, and English influence is
clearly visible in the Bavarian, western German, and Flemish recensions. The background to the
text in England is Irish, most closely parallel to the Spanish recension and probably descended
directly from a lost Greek text; but also Italian via northern France. Studying Christopher’s story
thus requires scholarship that crosses borders and reveals the interconnected, networked nature of
early medieval western Europe.
3.
Wiesje Emons-Nijenhuis (Independent scholar, Netherlands, emons<at>box.nl)
From vita to exemplum, the South English Legendary adaptation of the Legenda Aurea
‘Petronilla’
There was no vernacular prose version of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (LgA) in England
until the 15th century, which saw the appearance of the GilteLegende, an adaptation of Jean de
Vignay’s 14th-century La Légende Dorée, followed by Caxton’s Golden Legend in 1483. Instead,
a few decades after its introduction on the Continent, a substantial number of LgA legends were
incorporated into the collections of saints’ lives that came to be known as the South English
Legendary (SEL) (first manuscript late 13th/early 14th century) and the Scottish Legendary (late
14th century). Of these two the SEL was by far the most popular.
The LgA legends in the SEL are adaptations rather than translations. This is caused firstly by SEL’s
form, septenary couplets, but also because the author(s) often felt free to use the LgA material to
suit their own, often didactic, purposes. A good example of this is the legend of Petronilla, turned
into an exemplum as part of a moralising sermon. This paper will concentrate on how this
conversion, unique to SEL, was effectuated.
4.
Monica Oanca (University of Bucharest, Romania, monica.oanca<at>lls.unibuc.ro)
Margery Kempe’s pilgrimages on the continent: a quest for approval or a formative
experience
Medieval conventions restricted women’s movement and behaviour and idealised feminine
immovability and unobtrusiveness. Contrary to these well-established principles, Margery Kempe
was both peripatetic and loud, while constantly trying to gain acceptance of her manner of living.
Aware of the peculiarity of her conduct, Margery asked for validation from local clerics and
recognised holy persons, like Julian of Norwich, but also expanded her search for the confirmation
of her vocation on the continent, trying to become part of the tradition of continental saints like
Bridget of Sweden or Marie of Oignies.
The author intends to assess whether Margery’s convictions were strengthened when she found
out more about these female saints, or if they were altered. Traveling in general and pilgrimage in
particular has always had formative qualities; in so much that they defined and even changed a
pilgrim’s identity. While living in Rome, Margery Kempe developed a deeper understanding of
115
human sufferance, and her behaviour towards the poor was different than in Lynn. The aim of this
paper is to give a broader context to Margery Kempe’s exploits and also to analyse to what extent
her travels brought about a change in her attitude.
5.
Anja Müller-Wood (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, wood<at>unimainz.de)
Reformed Englishmen and -women on the Continent: How not to seek wisdom abroad
The Reformation presented an important contact zone between England and continental Europe.
Reformation ideas entered England virtually, in print, and concretely, through the influential
continental reformers teaching at the country’s universities in the early sixteenth century; in turn,
Englishmen and –women encountered these ideas when living or travelling on the continent –
voluntarily or when forced into exile during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. One account
of the history of the English Reformation has it that the experience of exile radicalised the English
church. Exiles returning to England brought with them a much more pronounced Protestantism
than the one they had taken abroad. More recently, religious historians have drawn attention to
exiles’ confessional self-identity before the experience of exile and their concomitant resistance to
the influences to which they were exposed on the continent.
The community of Protestant exiles living in Frankfurt/Main from 1554-59 presents a case in point.
Surviving documents by members of that group reveal the efforts of these exiles to dissociate
themselves from the German Protestant context. Rather than a formative influence, that context
presented a battlefield on which specifically English intraconfessional disputes were fought. The
example of the Marian exiles in Frankfurt not only reveals a recognisable lack of interest in
external input in spiritual matters, it also indicates that for many exiles the idea of a national,
English religion that needed to be defended against outside influences was already in place.
Slot 2: Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Olivier Simonin (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France, osimonin<at>gmail.com)
References to the Company of the Star and other continental orders of chivalry in Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight
This paper will explore references to continental orders of chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, linking story and history. Critics have highlighted allusions to the Order of the Garter,
including the significant last line, Gawain’s green belt worn as a baldric which is taken up as an
insigne by the Round Table knights, and the figure of Henry of Lancaster (/Grosmont), a founder
member of the Order, who wrote a penitential treatise used as a source in some passages.
Although Boulton (and Cook) noted that The Castilian Order of the Band served as an inspiration
for the Order of the Garter, which is presumably acknowledged by the adoption of a band of bright
green by Arthur’s knights, other references to orders of chivalry have not yet been brought to light.
As a rival order to the Garter, Jean II of France founded the Company of the Star in 1352, under
the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is its badge that Gawain first appears to wear on his
shield as he sets off for his adventure, although the five-pointed-star device itself or the lady’s lace
may also be meant to evoke the Southern Italian Company of the Knot, or the Order of the Buckle
with its five-pointed collar symbol.
116
All those orders were founded between 1330 and 1355 and it is not unlikely that the Gawain poet
plays with their symbols to extoll English chivalry and its insular order at the expense of French
and Capetian rivals.
2.
Olga Timofeeva (Universität Zürich, Switzerland, olga.timofeeva<at>es.uzh.ch)
Royal chancery on the move, or what the Norman scribes learnt in England
Traditionally, we look at the Norman Conquest and its aftermath in such terms as ‘influence’ and
‘borrowing’. These terms describe both the sociopolitical change and cultural dominance of the
new regime that were brought about by the events of 1066. In language, this turning point is
regarded as most devastating in the domain of lexis and orthography. The extent and dimensions
of this influence have been re-examined on many occasions (Benskin 1982, Clark 1992, Kornexl
& Lenker 2012, Lenker 2014, etc.), and it seems evident today that collaborating in various
linguistics practices was far more common than previously thought (Crick 2011, 2018). Moreover,
one domain where the influence appears to have spread in the opposite direction is that of royal
bureaucracy in land administration (Bates 1995, Sharpe 2003, Hagger 2009). In this paper, I
explore linguistic practices associated with this field, i.e. the sustainability of Anglo-Saxon
bureaucratic conventions after the Norman Conquest. While it is known that the concept of a
centralised writing office was imported from England to Normandy, I look at the more minute
details of its peregrinations on the Continent, as reflected in the templates and terminology
employed in Norman-Latin writs and writ-charters (edited by Bates 1995). It emerges that the
Norman scribes not only learnt vernacular terminology from their English colleagues, but that
together they lay a foundation for the royal chancery that would go on using Anglo-Saxon
templates into the modern period.
3.
Annina Seiler (Universität Zürich, Switzerland, annina.seiler<at>es.uzh.ch)
Ad pittatia glosularum recurrens, or, Did Walahfrid Strabo understand Old English?”
In the first half of the ninth century, the Carolingian monk and scholar Walahfrid Strabo compiled
a commentary on the biblical book of Leviticus. In his preface, Walahfrid claims to rely heavily
on the teachings of his master Hrabanus Maurus with whom he studied when he was in Fulda from
827 to 829. However, a close look at Walahfrid’s commentary reveals that general information on
the animals under discussion is based on Pliny’s Natural History as well as on other sources.
Furthermore, Walahfrid includes vernacular translations of some of the birds and animals from
Leviticus in his commentary, which display unmistakably Old English traits. The source of these
vernacular forms is a small Anglo-Saxon glossary of names of animals from Leviticus. This
glossary can be traced back to the school of Theodore and Hadrian in Canterbury in the late seventh
century; it must have crossed the Channel in the course of the Anglo-Saxon mission on the
Continent at some point during the eighth century. The paper explores the background of this
linguistic encounter and analyses how a glossary facilitated cultural exchange between AngloSaxon England and East Francia. In particular, it investigates in how far Walahfrid, a native
speaker of Old High German, would have understood written Old English.
4.
Omar Khalaf (University of Insubria, Como, Italy, omar.hashem<at>uninsubria.it)
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, and the English Relationship with the Continent in the Late
Middle Ages
117
This paper aims at investigating the European cultural networks that shaped the intellectual life of
Anthony Woodville, second Earl Rivers (1440ca.-1483). A learned man, a prolific translator and
the first patron of William Caxton in England, Rivers’s whole existence was marked by continuous
exchanges with the Continent which forged his literary activity. His mother, Jacquetta of
Luxemburg, was the widow of the Duke of Bedford, governor of France at the end of the Hundred
Years war. She owned the Harley manuscript containing the autograph works by Christine de
Pisan, from which Rivers got the source for his Moral Proverbs. After the Yorkist breakout in
1461 he followed his brother-in-law Edward IV in Bruges, where he first met Caxton. Some years
later, he challenged one of the most famous jousters of those times, the Bastard of Burgundy,
addressing him in a letter expressing chivalric ideals of those times. In 1473, while on a pilgrimage
to Santiago, one of his companions handed him a copy of the Ditz moraulx des philosophes, the
French translation of a text that enjoyed huge success in medieval Europe, and which the Earl
resolved to turn into English and make available through Caxton’s press.
These are just few examples of the literary outcomes Rivers was able to reach thanks to his foreign
connections and which, as I shall try to demonstrate, proved to be extremely fruitful not only for
Rivers as a man of letters, but also for the whole late-medieval English cultural context.
S21: From Cottonopolis to the Ville Lumière of Silk: Factories, Fibres and Frameworks of
Victorian Textiles
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Fabienne Moine (Université Paris Est Créteil, France, fabienne.moine<at>u-pec.fr)
Michael
Sanders
(Manchester
University,
United
Kingdom,
Michael.Sanders<at>manchester.ac.uk)
A follow-up to the “The Finer Threads” session at the 2016 Galway ESSE conference, this session
seeks to extend ongoing research by mapping the many channels through which textile and textual
exchanges circulated in Europe in the nineteenth century. Our session aims to explore the tensions
between the textile industry as a site of modernisation, technological innovation and economic
opportunity, and a site of working-class resistance against exploitation or “white slavery”. It also
examines the impact of textile production beyond the factory by providing narratives and subject
matter (objects, machines and artefacts) for the literary and visual arts. Historical, literary or
aesthetic approaches are welcome and interdisciplinary approaches to the subject are strongly
encouraged.
1.
Rachel Dickinson (Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom,
R.Dickinson<at>mmu.ac.uk)
Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France,
laurence.roussillon-constanty<at>univ-pau.fr)
Of Ruskin, Cottonopolis and Silk: A Cosmopolitan Vision?
Victorian Polymath John Ruskin (1819-1900) travelled through Lyons on a number of occasions.
He first encountered the city as a boy in 1833, when his father’s diary recorded ‘The Museum has
some good pictures & antiques. The Work on Silk & Gold in the Looms at Lyons is very fine –
rich strong elegant & beyond Beauvais or Gobelins in splendid effect.’ This had a lasting impact
118
on Ruskin; the beauty of the silk patterns of Lyons crops up later as he offers an idealised vision
of labour and aesthetics, which uses Lyons and Paris juxtaposed with Manchester/Cottonopolis
and Spittalfields to consider both national taste and aesthetic appreciation. Moreover, national taste
expands to include and celebrate national character, but simultaneously offers a vision where the
local – whether individual resident, village, town, city or nation – must coexist with and learn from
its neighbours. For Ruskin, this has implications for the workers and the purchasers. The ideas he
puts across offer an early model of ethical consumerism which flows from the individual – both
as producer and consumer – to the global. This paper traces Ruskin’s ideas with particular focus
on industrialised textile production in Britain and France which are contrasted in Ruskin’s oeuvre
to offer a textured vision, offering apparently antagonistic yet complementary representations.
Jane Weiss (Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York, United
States, weissj<at>bway.net)
‘Earned by My Own Exertions”: Interwoven Ideals among Lowell Mill Girls and Lyon’s
Canuses
2.
In 1845, a Lowell Offering contributor composed a reminiscence on scraps in a patchwork quilt:
“Here is a piece of the first dress which was ever earned by my own exertions! What a feeling of
exultation, of self-dependence, of self-reliance, was created by this effort. What expansion of
mind! – what awakening of dormant powers! [...] I might now select the richest silk without that
honest heart-felt joy.” The trope of imported silk as a signifier of idle luxury appeared frequently
in narratives casting New England’s textile mills as icons of American exceptionalism, yet the
narrator of “The Patchwork Quilt” might have recognized the values and aspirations of her
contemporaries engaged in producing the “richest silk” in Lyon, France. The author may even
have encountered an 1835 novel, La Révolte de Lyon en 1834, ou la Fille du Prolétaire,
dramatizing the Canuses, the women silk workers of Croix-Rousse. Historians have not fully
reckoned with the contribution of the women to Lyon’s proud Canut history, which has typically
been gendered male. In fact, the canuses constituted nearly half of the workforce in the 1830s and
1840s, performing nearly all tasks in producing silk. Although they did not typically live away
from their families, as the Lowell system “mill girls” did, they evinced similar pride in their earning
ability and self-determination. My presentation will explore the intersections between the Lowell
mill girls and the Canuses, including the parallels among the Canut uprising and the Lowell turnout of 1834.
Fabienne Moine (Université Paris Est Créteil, France, fabienne.moine<at>u-pec.fr)
Deference or resistance? Paternalism, cultural practices and poetry in British textile mills
(1840-1860)
3.
The growth of textile manufactures in the 1840s and 1850s led to the emergence of new forms of
factory-based cultural events, contributing to mitigating the harsh effects of industrialisation and
aiming at smoothing the industrial relations. While recent studies have explored what Victorian
workers did outside work, they have neglected the celebrations of social events on the workplace
and overlooked the importance of these events to reinforce social cohesion. These bonding events
are useful to explore the practices and meanings of paternalism in large textile mills. The first part
will contribute to the historiography of paternalism “from below “and will analyse the workers’
deference to the social order of the factory. The second part will be about the large social events
119
organised in some large textile mills in the hands of some captains of industry turned
philanthropists, Titus Salt and Samuel Courtauld among others; but the focus will be on workers’
productions with an artistic character performed during special occasions such as celebrations of
a paternalist employer, factory outings or festivals. The last part will be dedicated to the study of
women’s poems. For some of them the manufactures provided them with the visibility,
respectability and public acknowledgement they were deprived of. Besides these poems may also
be read as forms of renegotiation of, and sometimes resistance to, the male-centred forms of
paternalism. The encomiastic poetry of Ellen Johnston is a case in point when one wonders whether
poem recitations mean deference or resistance to industrial capitalism.
Michael
Sanders
(University
of
Manchester,
United
Kingdom,
Michael.Sanders<at>manchester.ac.uk)
'Fine' Art in the Factory: Piecing Pictures and Words together in the cartoons of Sam Fitton.
4.
Sam Fitton (1868-1923) started work in the spinning-rooms aged 10. He worked as a doffer, a
piecer, and a weaver until ill-health forced him out of the factory in 1903. He then embarked on a
career as a cartoonist, writer and entertainer. This paper explores a number of cartoons produced
by Fitton for the Cotton Factory Times between 1907 and 1911. It focuses on those cartoons which
depict various aspects of the textile production process or which interpret the lives of textile
workers in the light of those same processes. The paper explores the various ways in which textile
production is both literally and metaphorically figured in Fitton's cartoons as a site of complex and
variegated emotional, social and political interactions. In particular, it argues that Fitton’s cartoons
articulate the ‘practical consciousness’ (Raymond Williams) of the Lancashire factory proletariat
during the late Victorian/early Edwardian period. Gareth Steadman Jones argued that workingclass culture of this period is best understood as offering a ‘culture of consolation’. This paper
argues that Fitton’s cartoons reveal a more complicated culture – one which is decidedly nondeferential and anti-paternalist but not necessarily hostile to the factory owner, a culture which
offers and celebrates ‘resistance’ as well as consolation.
Laurence Petit (Université de Montpellier 3, France, laurence.petit<at>univ-montp3.fr)
Weaving the Pattern of Life: Texts, Textile, and Social Fabric in A.S. Byatt’s Peacock & Vine
5.
In her latest 2016 book Peacock & Vine: Fortuny and Morris in life and at work, contemporary
British novelist A.S. Byatt brings together, in essay form, the lives and crafts of two artists “of
genius and extraordinary energy” (6): fashion designer Mariano Fortuny, who was born in Spain
in 1871 and died in Venice in 1949; and 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite textile designer William
Morris, leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. Byatt explores and extolls the versatility
of both men, who were respectively “couturier”, painter, photographer, and engraver for the one;
and wall-paper and textile designer, poet, painter, publisher, and socialist activist for the other.
While musing on their professional and personal lives, Byatt insists on both artists’ engagement
with the notions of “craft” and “labour”, to be understood in the dual sense of “hand labour” and
“social, or even socialist, labour”. Drawing from Emilie Walezak’s inspiring article “Peacock and
Vine by A. S. Byatt: An Auctorbiography” (Ebc, 58, 2020), as well as from Byatt’s fictional and
non-fictional work, this paper will account for the fascinating way in which the author, in typical
Byattian – or, should we say, Arachnean – fashion, uses the central motif of textile to weave into
her text not just the actual patterns elaborated by both artists in their respective crafts, but also, at
120
a larger level, and through a clever display of texts and images – verbal quotations, paintings,
photographs, drawings, and printing types – the patterns of their respective lives as well as her
own. Textile and textual exchanges are thus craftily spun together in a book that highlights A.S.
Byatt’s both aesthetic and political concerns for the pattern of life as much as for its social fabric.
S22: Sounds Victorian: Acoustic Experience in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00, Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-convenors:
Dr Béatrice Laurent (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France, beatrice.laurent<at>ubordeaux-montaigne.fr)
Dr habil Anna Kérchy (University of Szeged, Hungary, akerchy<at>ieas-szeged.hu)
As a sequel to the successful 2018 ESSE panels on Victorian Voices and Noises, which examined
the production of sound in nineteenth-century Britain, this seminar purposes to explore the field
of auditory sensations. Victorian literature of fiction and non-fiction helps readers, scholars, and
film-directors of period movies recreate historicised soundscapes. But how were environmental
acoustics processed in the nineteenth century? And how were soundscapes designed, both
individually and collectively, as perceptual constructs? Can the analysis of literary/ artistic
representations of sounds and silences help us understand how Victorians were hearing things ?
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00: Gothic Sounds
1.
Lucie Ratail (Université Lyon 3, France, lucie.ratail1<at>univ-lyon3.fr)
Gothic Sounds and the Foreshadowing of Victorian Soundscapes
Pre-Victorian Britain, as a transitory period from the Enlightenment to the Age of Industrialisation,
is emblematic of the shift in sound patterns which occurred previous to the Victorian Age. Gothic
novelists’ focus not only on natural sounds, but also on human rhythmic and sound patterns is
undeniable and testifies to a growing interest in auditory elements in the evolution of society and
artistic concerns. Traditionally ending in 1820 with the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer, the
main period of the gothic novel precedes the Victorian Era, while foreshadowing its concerns,
notably through the questioning of sounds’ impact on people’s movements and mental health, as
well as through the re-definition of such ideas as “noise” and “sound”. Manipulating the reader’s
emotions and interpretation through the evocation of gothic horror, novelists used sound as one of
the key features in the creation of a gothic atmosphere. This atmosphere tends to be associated
with the Victorian period, despite its being embedded in another time span, showing the impact of
industrial sounds (among others) as a key element of the nineteenth century as a whole. The aim
of this paper will therefore be to study to what extent pre-Victorian gothic novels’ sound patterns
may be considered as early manifestations of the later Victorian soundscape. A first part will be
devoted to the analysis of sound patterns in key gothic novels of the period, showing the
importance of sound, noise and silence in the evocation of a gothic atmosphere. The second part
will comment on the influence of such sound patterns on people’s understanding and “picturing”
of the Victorian soundscape.
2.
Maria Parrino (Ca’Foscari University Venice, Italy, Maria.parrino<at>unive.it)
121
“His voice trembled along every nerve in my body and turned me hot and cold alternately.”
Auditory sensations in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Count Fosco is a man with a number of outstanding
traits: obese, eloquent, and – contrary to expectations – a foreigner very much in command of the
English language. As Marian admits, “I had never supposed it possible that any foreigner could
have spoken English as he speaks it.” To her surprise, there are even times when Fosco’s accent is
so British that it sounds authentic. The Italian count is the foreigner who “passes” for a native. Yet,
the foreigner who speaks the language like a native is disconcerting, it is as if he has trespassed
and needs to be put back in his place. Fosco, the conjuror, the juggler who plays with his mice, the
man who chirrups with his birds and sings opera songs, camouflages and distinguishes himself by
means of the “secret gentleness” of his voice. On the other hand, the English spoken by Pesca –
the professor from the University of Padua who teaches Italian to an English family – sounds like
a “shrill foreign parody” of the standard language. Although Pesca struggles to turn himself into
an Englishman by grotesquely adopting native colloquial expressions and sounds, he is the
character who (by speaking Italian) offers Walter Hartright the important clue which proves
Fosco’s criminal plotting. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the foreign characters’
oral/aural features have agency in the narrative either by seducing the listener or revealing
authentic and artificial identity.
3.
Elena Glotova (Umeå University, Sweden, elena.glotova<at>gmail.com)
Sonic Ambiguity in Edith Nesbit’s “From the Dead”: Identity and Transgression
Soundscapes of rooms differ according to the sonic composition of neighboring spaces, the time
of day and season, the behavior of their owners and visitors, and their permeability. Victorian
Gothic dangerous rooms contain an eerie sense of connectivity that simultaneously attracts the
subject to the privacy of the place and instigates fear with an imminent presence of “otherness”.
There is a continuity between the place and the rhythms of the body, aligned with the permeability
of the place and the body by acoustic influence.
This paper discusses a short story “From the Dead” (1893) by a Victorian writer Edith Nesbit and
inquires into the relationship between sound, space and identity. Drawing on soundscape theory
(M. Schafer) and gender studies, I examine the way sonic ambiguity within the setting of a room
reflects the destabilization of identity in crisis. A brief presentation of Nesbit as a writer of Gothic
fiction is followed by a discussion of the patterns of correspondence with a short story by Edgar
Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). Nesbit’s appropriation of certain elements from Poe
presents sound as a shared intertext, and is insightful in terms of the acoustic composition in the
text. The study moves on to the discussion of voice as representing the protagonists’ identity in
crisis. The sonic qualities of abjection and the vocal response pertain to the renegotiation of power
relations and the reconfiguration of the place.
4.
Anna Kérchy (University of Szeged, Hungary, akerchy<at>ieas-szeged.hu)
Vera Kérchy (University of Szeged, Hungary, kerchyv<at>gmail.com)
Snarls, Moans, and Cackles. The Sound of Mad Laughter in Victorian Literature and its
Contemporary Cinematic Adaptations
122
We tend to associate Victorian Britain with “stiff upper lips,” however, the corporeal, psychic,
affective experience of laughter preoccupied Victorian literary imagination and scientific
investigations; it served as an instrument of socio-political commentaries, a ground of aesthetic
programmes, and a fundamental formative force of contemporaneous subjectivities. As Louise Lee
put it, “never before had laughter been so interrogated, measured, weighed up, and probed:
monkeys tickled, smiles electrified, babies watched and annotated; and practical jokes recorded,
between dogs, children and philosophers. Laughter theorizing had become a new national
obsession to rival fern-collecting and fossil-hunting.” Darwin’s, Bergson’s and Freud’s research
on laughter scrutinized the evolutionary, psychological, and philosophical complexity of this
apparently simple physical reaction, highlighting that very often laughter has little to do with comic
humour. Our presentation analyses literary representations of ambiguous, uncanny, terrifying
laughters including Mr Hyde’s “snarling aloud into a savage laugh,” Bertha Mason’s “tragic,
preternatural, and mirthless,” “moaning” “demonic laughter,” and the Cheshire Cat’s nonsensical
grin that devours his physical form along with rational logic. We shall argue that the laughter
bursting out of bodies and narratives embodies anxieties related to gender/sexual, racial, class,
species differences. These acoustic eruptions of radical otherness terrify by disrupting stable
structures of self, sanity, and signification. Yet they also provoke a sublime pleasure (pleasurable
thrills) of the text, and eventually prove to be therapeutical by staging the collective trauma of the
era’s epistemological crisis rooted in social, scientific, artistic transformations. We also explore
how posterity reinterprets these strange laughters, and how the complex implications of their
sounds are enhanced by cinematic technology’s implementation of the acoustic uncanny.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30: Sounds in Mid-Victorian Literature
1.
Francesca Orestano (University of Milan, Italy, francesca.orestano<at>unimi.it)
The isle is full of noises: sound as signifier in Dickens’s fiction
My proposal dwells on the acoustic experience when implemented within the verbal context, not
only from the viewpoint of effect theory, which implies a dialogic relationship between the source
of sound and its reception, but also from the viewpoint of its performative use within Victorian
fiction, and beyond. Dickens used sounds and the acoustic environment to heighten the effect of
narration, at a time when London cries were part of popular culture and were described and
illustrated. Sounds in Dickens, moreover, are not ancillary but they often warn, anticipate and
precede what the text is going to narrate. I shall describe sounds according to their sources, quality,
effect. Dickens’s representation of London noises, music and cries, suggests at once order and
convulsion, a kind of baroque experience, in which a thousand instruments and voices are heard.
This effect of discordia concors is expertly used in several Dickensian novels. The early XXth c.
avant-garde artist Luigi Russolo would consecrate the use of noise-making machines in his
manifesto The Art of Noises (1913); cacophony, including a Victorian soundscape in which noises
and voices compete to fill the aural space, would be used by Virginia Woolf in her novels set in
Victorian times.
2.
Huber
Irmtraud
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Irmtraud.Huber<at>anglistik.uni-muenchen.de)
Inhuman Sounds: Machines in Victorian Poetry
München,
Germany,
123
One of the key changes to Victorian soundscapes was the increasing presence of machine sounds
and rhythms. With the growth of the railway system in particular, machine sounds left the confines
of factory walls to intrude on ever more remote parts of British life. They quickly became a readily
available auditory symbol of a process of modernisation and radical change. It is not surprising
that a heated contemporary debate about the ability of poetry to address the present coalesced
particularly on the question whether steam engines could and should be the stuff of poetry.
Representations of steam powered machines in Victorian poetry were thus always to some degree
programmatic.
In this paper, however, I suggest that the representation of machines like railways poses a formal
challenge to metrical language which goes beyond the question of whether they are an appropriate
topic for poetry. Machines themselves are eminently metrical; they impose a steady monotonous
beat on the humans who engage with them. Representations of machines in verse therefore almost
inevitably suggest a double mimesis, on a semantic as well as on a formal level. As I demonstrate
with reference to poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and other, less familiar poets, machine rhythms proved alluring, but also challenged poets to resist
their monotonous steady beat.
3.
Björn Sundmark (University of Malmö, Sweden, bjorn.sundmark<at>mah.se)
Street Cries and Mad Calculations: Sound and Sense in Lewis Carroll’s A Tangled Tale
In the tenth “Knot” of Lewis Carroll’s A Tangled Tale (serialized 1880-1885) two ladies – Clara
and her “eccentric” aunt, “Mad Mathesis” – encounter a large number of war invalids. Clara is
saddened by their situation, while her aunt only sees them as arithmetically “curious” and asks:
“what percentage do you suppose must have lost all four—a leg, an arm, an eye, and an ear?” But
before Mad Mathesis has provided the necessary data to make a calculation possible, a street
vendor interrupts the two ladies and offers to sell them “Chelsea Buns”. More efficiently than the
pitiful sight of mutilated invalids, the nonsensical intrusion of food and sound re-humanizes the
situation for the reader. In terms of the lesson in logical thinking, the Knot is supposed to deliver,
the street cries of “Chelsea buns!” could be seen as ephemeral and descriptive. Yet the cry has
given its name to the Knot although it has nothing to do with the calculation, and the text provides
a unique musical transcription of the cry. Hence, the “Chelsea Buns” are charged with significance.
My reading of Carroll’s fiction, exemplified by this short story – but referencing many other
instances of his work as well – draws on the theoretical work by Walter Ong (on orality) and Julia
Kristeva (on voice). I suggest, tentatively, that Carroll’s use of music and nonsense anchors and
embodies his writing/storytelling in human, lived, resounding experience.
4.
Manuela D’Amore (University of Catania, Italy, m.damore<at>unict.it)
Being “excluded from the world of sound”: Deafness, Invalidism and Resilience in Harriet
Martineau’s “Hybrid” Prose (1834-1855)
Centred on the Victorian intellectual Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), this paper will show how she
lived her condition as a deaf person and an “invalid”. Detailed information about her memories of
the “world of sound” ‒ also her love for music – can be found in her “hybrid” prose. Blending
different genres and text forms, Letter to the Deaf (1834) and her two-volume Autobiography
(1855-1877) are clear on her determination to use her personal experience to promote social change
(D’Amore 2020 in press). In fact, she never wanted to be explicit about audiometric test sessions
124
or painful treatments, and even claimed that she was happy because her “trumpet” “[made] the
sound anything but disagreeable” (Martineau 1834: 266): despite her traditional positions in the
pedagogical debate between signers and oralists (Esmail 2013: 75-80), her intellectual and civic
engagement finally lead to a complete re-discussion of the Victorian cult of invalidism. An eclectic
and prolific writer, Harriet Martineau still deserves our attention. Most of her writings are rooted
in the opposition between “sound” and “silence”, “quiet” and “noise” (Martineau 1834: 266),
which shows why she always fought for a social recognition of deafness. From this point of view,
Letter to the Deaf in particular can be considered a symbol of her “hunger and thirst after all sounds
that [she could] obtain” (268), as well as a powerful challenge to social prejudice and traditional
medical practices.
Slot 3: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45: Traces and Resonances of Victorian
Soundscapes
1.
Larisa Kocic-Zambo (University of Szeged, Hungary, larisa<at>ieas-szeged.hu)
The Wedding of Sound and Sense: The Victorian Reception of Milton’s Melodious Noise
The Romantics’ preoccupation with Milton is a well-documented literary phenomenon which
serves to highlight the lack of similar engagement among the Victorians. But as Erik Gray argues
in Milton and the Victorians, by mid-19th century, Milton’s Paradise Lost has become “inherently
so familiar as to escape mention” (2009, 25). Relying on Picker’s notions of Victorian England as
an auscultative age, I wish to further Grey’s argument by amplifying the Victorian penchant for
aural reading and, hence, their fine-tuned attention to the sonority of Milton’s verse (Raleigh,
Todd, Himes). Unlike the Romantics, the Victorians were not smitten by the character of Satan or
the theme of rebellion. What caught their ears was Milton’s skill to wed sound and sense, and what
they struggled with – a struggle I will no doubt participate in – was their own inability to voice
and explain “this marvel of beauty.”
2.
Michelle Witen (University of Flensburg, Germany, michelle.witen<at>uni-flensburg.de)
The Soundscape of Absolute Music in Du Maurier’s Trilby
This paper examines the musical soundscape depicted in Du Maurier’s Trilby, demonstrating that
an exploration of La Svengali’s choice of repertoire and the resulting fictionalized musical reviews
of her performance, reveals a nuanced portrait that epitomizes fin-de-siècle literary engagement
with the wider cultural discourse surrounding the changing attitudes towards musical form. This
paper will outline the constructs of musical form and the responses of composers and critics alike
in 19th-century reviews that were published concurrently with La Svengali’s fictionalized
performance. It will also examine the progression of Trilby’s musical repertoire — from
unaccompanied folk song, to art song, to absolute music (pure, instrumental music) — to show Du
Maurier’s satirical twist on the rising conflict between non-referential (“absolute music”) and
referential music (“program music”) that was currently being waged in musical reviews of the
time. Similarly, though the critical responses to Trilby’s singing are largely fictional, Du Maurier
references and satirizes actual composers and reviewers, such as Théophile Gautier, Hector
Berlioz, and Richard Wagner, each of whom are aesthetically important in the on-going debate
about the value of pure music. By examining Trilby from the underexplored musicological and
125
musicohistorical lenses of absolute and program music, one can see the perceptual construct that
informs Du Maurier’s 1894 Victorian retrospective of the soundscape of Paris in the 1860s.
3.
Anne Harley (Scripps College, CA, United States, aharley<at>scrippscollege.edu)
Andrea Zittlau (University of Rostock, Germany, andrea.zittlau<at>uni-rostock.de)
Jenny Lind. The Vocal Traces of a Nineteenth-Century Super Star
In September 1850, the celebrated Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, better known as the Swedish
Nightingale, arrived in the United States for what would become her last major engagement and
musical tour. Born in 1820, Lind became a major celebrity in the 1840s, touring international
concert halls. Critics focused on her celebrity status instead of describing her vocal performances.
Her success was clearly built on an advertising machine that climaxed with Phineas Taylor Barnum
who managed her American tour. Musical scholar Francisca Vella tried to understand Lind’s voice
through images and the media description of it in the context of the celebrity craze – a concept she
calls mediatization.
In our presentation, we will consider the music written for Lind, as well as 19th-century methods
of voice training, and hope to gain an understanding of the sound she produced. It is not an attempt
to recreate Lind’s voice but to mark its absence by “audiolizing” the genres it produced. The issue
here is not only the exceptionalism of her voice (if that was the case indeed), but more so the
musical genres and vocal methods that grew around it. Her voice then becomes just as much the
voice of the masses, a model for sing-along sessions, as much as it is unreachable. We will try to
trace this phenomenon and hope to be able to use her example to illustrate the popular soundscapes
of the 19th century that indeed produced the desire to record them.
4.
Rosario Arias (University of Málaga, Spain, rarias<at>uma.es)
Soundscapes and Affective Resonance in (Neo-)Victorianism
According to Yannis Hamilakis, sound “was seen as a bodily faculty imbued with materiality…and
it had a direct material impact on the bodies of the receivers” (27) in the past. This has been amply
demonstrated by critics performing a kind of “acoustic archaeology” on the silent voices and
records of the distant past, to explore the “sound effects and the acoustic properties of sites and
objects, or architectural complexes” (Hamilakis 93). If we pay attention to sensorial modalities in
Victorian culture, this approach allows us to investigate the social effects of sensorial
engagements, and to establish an ongoing dialogue between past and present. In turn, in adopting
a sensorial approach to re-visit the Victorian past (in neo-Victorianism), we strive to understand
better “the formal diversity of the material world, and connect it to sensorial experience and to
memory” (Hamilakis 200). As a result, this is not merely the representation of the (Victorian) past,
but “an evocation of its presence, its palpable, living materiality, its flesh” (Hamilakis 199). Sound
and voice have been invoked in neo-Victorian criticism since its beginning, and we have utilised
the notion of the author as medium: for example, the medium’s ability to communicate with the
dead has been used as metaphor for the dialogue between past and present, and the author
functioning as a medium partaking of the world of the dead and world of the living, thus connecting
and embodying the disembodied voices of the dead. However, my interest here lies not only in the
voices of the dead, but also in other sound-related phenomena that feature in neo-Victorian novels
so as to illustrate that neo-Victorianism impinges on the Victorian duality
materiality/immateriality, embodiment/disembodiment, including acoustics. Moreover, I would
126
like to argue that the paradoxical nature of the movement is predicated upon the ambivalent nature
of the notion of noise, and that, in a way, neo-Victorianism functions as a noise in that it interrupts
our present, and acquires a productive value, following Michel Serres. Therefore, in this paper I
will consider neo-Victorianism as a noise, and I will discuss soundscapes and affective sensoriality
in a selection of texts. Lastly, I will argue that a framework of sensoriality, through the evocation
of sound, voice and noise, helps us interrogate our interaction with the non-human, and makes us
think what it is like to be human today.
S23: Brexit and National Identities in the United Kingdom
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30, Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Dr. Stéphanie Bory, Université Lyon 3, France, stephanie.bory<at>univ-lyon3.fr
Pr. Gilles Leydier, Université de Toulon, France, leydier<at>univ-tln.fr
The 2016 Brexit referendum has put in evidence the divisions within the British multinational
state: Scotland and Northern Ireland voted “Remain”, while England and Wales chose to “leave”
Europe. And the following negotiations between the UK government and the EU have contributed
to revive the problematics of the territorial governance of the UK, by addressing issues like the
Irish border, the future of devolution or the prospect of Scottish independence. This seminar will
focus on the differences of perceptions of the European issue within the national components of
the UK, and discuss how the Brexit process is also challenging the idea of Britishness, undermining
the British union and reshaping territorial politics in the UK.
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30: Brexit and the British Union
1.
Gilles Leydier (Université de Toulon, France, leydier<at>univ-tln.fr)
Brexit and national identities in the United Kingdom
The 2016 Brexit referendum has put in evidence the divisions within the British multinational and
asymmetric state: Scotland and Northern Ireland voted “Remain”, while England and Wales chose
to “leave” Europe. And the following negotiations between the UK government and the EU have
contributed to revive the problematics of the territorial governance of the UK, by addressing issues
like the Irish border, the future of devolution or the prospect of Scottish independence. The last
UK general elections have confirmed the growing Scottish divergence and the potential
emancipation from the British framework in some parts of the ‘celtic’ periphery as well as the role
played by the Brexit issue in the process. This seminar will focus on the differences of perceptions
of the European issue within the national components of the UK, and discuss how the Brexit
process is also challenging the idea of Britishness, undermining the British union and reshaping
territorial politics in the UK.
Keywords: Brexit, Britishness, British Union, European integration, identity nationalisms,
territorial politics
2.
Niaz Pernon (Université Montpellier 3, France, niaz.pernon<at>univ-montp3.fr)
British identities and the 2016 Brexit referendum
127
The 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union has not only
become an academic research field1. It has also revealed British historians’ and political scientists’
involvement as social actors taking a proactive part in the debates about their country’s status in
Europe2 . In this context, Brexiters have been said to convey a certain type of British identity
revolving around English values. This paper supports the claim that referendum campaigning
leaflets being intended for wide distribution to persuade the electorate about a message, several
types of national identity were highlighted in order to maintain or cut off the British relationship
to the European Union. Furthermore, the arguments used generated international identities that did
not resonate with the phrase “Brexiters’ Little England VS Remainers’ Global Britain”.
Based on a variety of campaigning leaflets produced by professional, political or economic
organisations in 2016, the paper will address three interrelated points assessing identity markers
cropping up in the discourses, values given to the nations making up the United Kingdom and
images promoting a new place for these national components.
Keywords: Brexit, 2016 referendum, leaflets, organisations, British identities
3.
Alma-Pierre Bonnet (Sciences Po Lyon, France, almapierre.bonnet<at>sciencespo-lyon.fr)
Theresa May and the question of the British union in the run-up to the first meaningful vote
On 13 November 2018, following 20 months of intense negotiations, a Brexit deal (the Brexit
withdrawal agreement) was finally reached between the United Kingdom (UK) and the European
Union. The next step for Theresa May was to persuade Parliament to ratify the deal. This was the
so-called “meaningful vote” that Parliament managed to secure in December 2017 3 . Initially
scheduled to be held on 11 December 2018, May postponed the vote until 15 January to have more
time to convince wavering MPs. When the vote finally took place, the government was heavily
defeated.
As the Brexit result revealed deep political fractures between the different parts of the United
Kingdom, one of Theresa May’s first tasks was to maintain the unity of her country. The safeguard
of the union was indeed high on May’s agenda, as she made very clear during her first speech as
prime minister when she reminded people that the actual name of her party was the Conservative
and Unionist Party. This is what this paper will examine. Through an analysis of her political
declarations from 14 November 2018 to 14 January 2019, we will see how she tackled the issue
of union. This paper therefore aims to study May’s idea of Britishness and to analyze just how
detrimental Brexit has been to the very notion of union within the UK.
4.
Youssef Ferdjani (Université de Toulon, France, youssef.ferdjani<at>univ-tln.fr)
Brexit and the emergence of a new English identity
National identities change slowly but because of Brexit they are undergoing dramatic changes in
the United Kingdom. This is particularly true for the English national identity. The report “Brexit
and public opinion 2019” by the UK in a Changing Europe shows how Brexit is viewed by British
1
See, for instance, Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, Rule Britannia, Brexit and the End of Empire (London:
Biteback Publishing, 2019) or Pauline Schnapper and Emmanuelle Avril, Où va le Royaume-Uni? Le Brexit et après
(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2019).
2
Andrew Knapp, “Historians for Britain in Europe: A Personal History,” Histoire@Politique, no. 31 (janvier-avril
2017).
3
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/13/tory-brexit-rebels-inflict-major-defeat-on-theresa-may
128
citizens. Among those who describe themselves as English, not British, there is strong support, not
only for Brexit, but for “hard” Brexit. As a matter of fact, one of the consequences of the
referendum result is that it has reinforced a feeling of national belonging among English citizens.
They have the impression that their identity is threatened by several factors: inequalities linked to
devolution, the cost and terms of EU membership and above all the scale and impact of
immigration. As a matter of fact, the leave campaign and the pro-Brexit press were focused on
immigration and one of their main arguments was that the country had to tighten border controls.
This reshaping of the English national identity is also linked to a context in which the elites and
the media are not trusted any more, a context favourable to populist leaders. The impact of Brexit
on national identities in the United Kingdom is tremendous: since it reveals the vacuity of British
identity, it may hasten Irish unification and Scottish separation. The final resolution of an identity
crisis is the emergence of a new identity. With Brexit, we see the formation of a new English
identity which is nationalist, anti-EU and which regards foreigners as a threat.
5.
Didier Revest (Université de Nice, France, revest<at>unice.fr)
The more things change, the more they stay the same – The struggle for independence on the
British periphery in a post-Brexit context
Recent polling suggests that the electoral ground has shifted in Scotland: Brexit seems to be having
an impact on the political behaviour of some who voted to remain in the Union in September 2014,
so much so that SNP members and supporters now believe independence is at last within touching
distance. Even number-cruncher John Curtice, who, up until recently, cautioned against reading
too much into a possible link between the two issues, agrees.
As for Wales, though a leave-nation by a margin of some 5 percent, it has also seen a proindependence surge if, that is, Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist party, are to be believed.
However, isn’t it a fact that the SNP were talking about holding a second independence referendum
as early as late 2014 and again in the wake of the Brexit vote, in mid-2016, when by definition few
pro-Union Scots had already changed their mind? Not only this, but as evidenced by the Brexit
‘saga’, it may well be that referendums – although they are fundamentally democratic exercises –
raise more (thorny) questions than they answer. Besides, there is the small problem of what to say
to Scottish voters about (to take but one example) the future (post-independence) relationship with
the EU and what the cost of it might be.
Finally, Welsh Nationalists are probably in a quandary about what to say to their own fellowcitizens should a referendum on independence be organized in Wales: how could membership of
the EU, a central plank of their agenda, possibly be a vote-winner in a rather pro-leave Principality?
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30: Brexit and the Celtic Fringe
Subtheme 1: Welsh politics
1.
Carys Lewis (Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France, carys.lewis<at>univ-brest.fr)
Wales, Europe, the World – In That Order: The Role of Social Media in the Movement for
Welsh Independence
Ever since the result of the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the majority vote to leave the EU
registered in Wales, commentators have been keen to offer an analysis of the result. One of the
aftermaths, in the form of a loosely-structured, youth-driven movement in support of Welsh
129
independence, caught many off their guard. Closer inspection, however, might suggest that
satisfaction levels with devolution in Wales could well explain both events: that the Welsh ‘Leave’
vote was an expression of anger at the inability of the Welsh Assembly government to offset the
worst effects of Tory-imposed austerity; and that, for those in favour of breaking away from
Westminster, this very fact is proof that the devolution settlement is no longer in the best interests
of the people of Wales.
The present paper seeks to focus on the role of social media in the structuring of the Welsh
independence movement. A brief overview of the main online sites and Twitter accounts will be
given as well as the salient events that have taken place in Wales since 2016 in support of the
independence movement. The paper will endeavour to examine questions of identity in a digital
age, by investigating whether the nascent Welsh independence movement is reflective of an
‘imagined community’ or whether, in the words of Charles Taylor, the ‘expressive individualism’
inherent to the culture of social media can be seen as a way to find and live out a new Welsh
identity that leaving the EU will inevitably trigger.
Subtheme 2: Scottish politics
2.
Fiona Simpkins (Université Lyon 2, France, fionasimpkins<at>gmail.com)
Brexit and territorial governance in Scotland
The results of the 1997 referendum on devolution to Scotland left no doubts as to why Donald
Dewar, one of the leading architects of the Scottish Parliament and later First Minister of Scotland,
declared it « the settled will of the Scottish people ». The large majority of Scottish voters
favourable to the creation of a Scottish Parliament and the record turnout to the referendum were
perhaps not only the result of a now widespread belief in Scotland that the British constitution was
in need of reform but also of more profound political and societal changes affecting the governance
of Scotland. The increasingly centralized British state now sat uncomfortably with Scotland’s
tradition of shared and divided sovereignty.
Since its creation in 1999, the Scottish Parliament has fully functioned as Scotland’s national
political arena with a considerable legislative output better suited to the economic and social needs
of the country, at times diverging considerably from the legislative agenda of the UK Government.
Although the devolution settlement established by the Scotland Act 1998 gave considerable
powers to the Scottish Parliament, there have been consistent calls to extend these during the last
twenty years and the institution was gradually able to acquire more powers, notably fiscal powers,
with the Scotland Acts of 2012 and 2016.
However, the current Brexit process presents a certain number of challenges to the devolution
settlement in Scotland.
3.
Mariia Mayer (Université de Haute Alsace, France, mariia.mayer<at>uha.fr)
Unionism in the context of Brexit: the case of the Scottish Conservative Party
What appears from the 2019 general election results is that the Brexit issue seems closer to be
sorted out than ever before. However, the Scottish population sees Britain’s membership of the
European Union differently from the rest of the UK as the SNP won a landslide majority in
December, the party whose main political promise was to hold a second independence referendum
in case of Brexit. It is quite often assumed that those who vote for the SNP would vote in favour
of Scottish independence. With relatively few exceptions, existing research on Scottish politics
130
today focuses on Scottish nationalism and the SNP’s attempts to break the Union. By contrast,
researchers tend to neglect the Unionist cause in Scotland as embodied by the Scottish
Conservative Party. This paper aims to fill this gap by analysing the political discourse of this party
as expressed in its 2019 general election manifesto to demonstrate how Britishness and
Scottishness are made to match and how British state identity takes precedence over the collective
identity of the European Union. It will consider recent opinion polls on Scottish independence by
YouGov, Ipsos Mori, Panelbase and Survation. This will help to assess the way public opinion on
Scottish independence has changed since the 2016 Brexit referendum and explain the results of
the 2019 general election in Scotland where the Scottish Conservative Party lost many of its seats,
presumably as a result of protest voting.
Subtheme 3: Irish politics
4.
Nolwenn
Rousvoal
(Université
Paris
3
nolwenn.rousvoal<at>laposte.net)
Saving the Union, the rise of a “connected Britishness”?
Sorbonne
Nouvelle,
France,
Identifying as “British” in 21st-century Britain might take on a wide range of meanings depending
on where one was born or lives, or depending on which minority one belongs to. Past studies have
shown that, for instance, Unionism and Britishness tend to overlap in Northern Ireland and
Scotland. Being British in Scotland implicitly implies being a unionist, committed or not. This is
even more potent in Northern Ireland, where citizens still vote along ethnical lines. However in
England, “Unionism” as such has been largely missing in the discourse on Britishness since the
partition of Ireland which put an end to the “Irish Question”. However, this state of affairs might
be challenged by the current political and constitutional crisis that the United Kingdom has been
experiencing since the Brexit referendum.
The erosion of “Britishness” was predicted as soon as the 1970s when nationalist movements
became more vocal in Wales and Scotland, coinciding with the loss of Britain’s imperial status,
deindustrialisation, the Cold War and the creation of what would become the European Union,
sparking a discussion on the new role of the UK on the international stage. From that point of view,
and given that Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to Remain in the EU, the Brexit referendum
might be seen as the ultimate crisis of Britishness, threatening the territorial integrity of the Union.
However, if one is to define national identities as constructs, then Britishness has been
characterized by its adaptability and flexibility. Different attempts at redefining Britishness have
emerged following devolution. It remains to be seen however if these different attempts at
redefining Britishness are connected, and whether or not a discourse on what could be called a
pan-Unionism or a definition of Britishness common to all regions of the UK could eventually be
discerned.
131
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45: Brexit and culture
Subtheme 1: Brexit and national identity in speech
1.
Denis Jamet (Université Lyon 3, France, denis.jamet<at>univ-lyon3.fr)
Pauline Rodet (Université Lyon 3, France, pauline.rodet<at>univ-lyon3.fr)
How is Brexit linguistically constructed by Cameron, May and Johnson?
The relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union has never been an easy
ride. The EU membership has been the source of many disagreements within the United Kingdom;
it unveiled fractures between the various member states as well as deep political divisions,
especially amongst the Conservative Party. Brexit did nothing but add salt on these open wounds.
These divisions are still visible today when looking at the last three Prime Ministers, David
Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. Political ideologies are mainly expressed through the
use of language and rhetoric, and discourse tells a lot about the way speakers conceptualise the
world they live in. Hence, divergent points of view can be perceived through divergent rhetorical
styles depending on the audience that is addressed to. Accordingly, by resorting to a cognitive,
discourse-based approach, our talk will aim to uncover the perception of Brexit by the last three
Prime Ministers by analysing 45 speeches delivered from 2012 to 2019. We will carry out
linguistic analyses, and more specifically lexicometric analyses in order to study the lexical
frequencies in the speeches delivered by each Prime Minister to highlight their differences
depending on whether the speech is targeted at a British audience or at members of the EU. In
addition, we will analyse the way Brexit is linguistically conceived by focusing on the semantic /
notional domains the three Prime Ministers mostly resort to. This will allow us to shed light on the
linguistic differences between the three Prime Ministers according to the targeted audience, and
the way Brexit is undermining the union of the Conservative Party and dividing the British political
sphere.
2.
Mariana
S.
Sargsyan
(Yerevan
State
University,
Armenia,
mariana.sargsyan80<at>gmail.com)
Evgenina V. Zimina (Kostroma State University, Russia, ezimina<at>rambler.ru)
Redefinitions of Britain and Britishness in Media Texts
The years of 2014 – 2019 have become a turbulent period in British political life. The 2014 Scottish
Independence and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union Membership Referendums were the
two major events that have shaped the current political landscape of the UK. The mainstream
newspapers of England and Scotland have been inundated with headlines on the two events
resulting in significant shifts in the language and the culture of media discourse. Both politicians
and common newspaper readers have become more aggressive – the former in public and
parliamentary speeches, the latter – in comments in social media and newspapers. The political
uncertainty shifted the tone from neutral or sarcastic towards the political opponent to openly
threatening and violent. The techniques used by newspapers and politicians as well as the choice
of vocabulary have turned the media discourse into a battlefield. The political processes along with
the qualitative change of the media discourse have significantly contributed to the redefinition of
the notions of Britishness, identity and independence.
By drawing parallels between the English and Scottish press coverage, the paper seeks to study
the effects of the political processes on the language and culture of media discourse. Based on the
132
achieved results, we aim to gauge to what extent the notions of Britishness, identity and
independence have been central amid the heated political processes and in what ways these notions
have been manipulated by media and politicians. The analysis enables to draw conclusions about
the transformations the notions have undergone in recent years.
3.
Anita
Naciscione
(Latvian
Academy
naciscione.anita<at>gmail.com)
Make Britain Great Again, Past & Present
of
Culture,
Riga,
Latvia,
This paper is an attempt to examine how Brexit started and how the idea of greatness emerged.
Actually, Brexit did not start, it was always there. Churchill wrote in 1930, “We are with Europe,
but not of it. We are linked but not comprised”. This idea seems to have settled in the British
minds. It finally came to the fore in the UK Referendum 2016: leavers won it by 51.9% to 48.15
in favour of Brexit. The idea of supremacy over other nations is deep rooted in British
subconsciousness, also called British exceptionalism (Tilford 2017). The idea of Britain’s
greatness has been upheld by political leaders, e.g. Thatcher’s agenda of 1950, Farage’s campaign
since 2016, May’s vision of global Britain (2016), and Johnson’s pledge “to make our great United
Kingdom” the greatest place in the world (2019).
Each aspect of Britain has its own history, leaving footprints in identity, language and way of
thinking. I will highlight changes in official English terms as a reflection of the dwindling historical
greatness: the British Empire>The British Commonwealth (1931); The British Commonwealth >
The Commonwealth (1953); Great Britain >Britain (as the short name for the UK).
Analysis of Brexit discourses allows me to provide insight into sustained creative use of metaphor
as a reflection of the painful and tortuous processes since 2016, e.g. marriage and divorce, a leap
in the dark, to eat one’s cake and have it, cherry picking, the clock is ticking, to kick the can down
the road.
4.
Mark Olholm Eaton (Aarhus University, Denmark, engme<at>cc.au.dk)
“If big brother England votes to leave the European Union we will be treated like upstart
children”. A family abuse metaphor in Brexit-influenced Scottish nationalist discourse
This paper summarizes the results of a study examining the inter-play between metaphor, irony,
and nationalist discourses in the communication and intentional reinterpretation of a United
Kingdom family of nations (UK-FON) metaphorical slogan in the UK Parliament. Through a
software-assisted corpus analysis drawing on recent work by Ølholm Eaton (2019) on the
competitive communication of a ‘Commonwealth family of nations’ metaphorical slogan, and
Musolff (2017) on the ironic reinterpretation of a “Britain at the heart of Europe” metaphor, it will
be demonstrated: first, how inter-related Scottish independence and Brexit debates have triggered
an increase in the deployment of the UK-FON metaphor, particularly among Scottish National
Party (SNP) speakers; second, how competition for control over the metaphor’s meaning has led
to its bifurcation into two contrasting variants (i.e. an initial Conservative affirmative/positive one
framing the UK-FON as unified, equal, beneficent, expansive, and historically-rooted, followed
by an ironic SNP hypocritical/abusive variant framing it as unequal, coercive, and disrespectful);
and third, how the SNP communication of the ironically reinterpreted hypocritical/abusive variant
contributes rhetorical weight to the expression of Scottish nationalist grievances, objectives, and
perspectives of belonging in the UK and Europe. Rather than the typical use of family-based
133
metaphors as a means of promoting positive and harmonious relationships, this study thus
illustrates how they can also be communicated in the service of discord and division – in this case,
specifically, in the denunciation of abusive treatment the SNP claims Scotland experiences as part
of the UK.
S24: Identifying and Representing Domestic Violence between Partners in European
Countries (18th-21st centuries)
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
Co-Convenors:
Claire Charlot (Professor of British Studies, Sorbonne Université (Lettres), Institute of
English and American Studies, Paris, France, clairecharlot.sorbonne<at>gmail.com)
Sylvie Lausberg (Historian and psychoanalyst, Director of the Department of Research and
Strategy of the Centre d’Action Laïque, Brussels, Belgium, Sylvie.Lausberg<at>laicite.net)
Largely ignored before the 1970s, domestic violence between partners suddenly emerged across
many European countries as a “social problem”, leading various groups (in the legal, political,
charity, artistic, philosophical fields…) to lead inquiries, publish results, and eventually take
action. The seminar will address the tools used to identify this social problem and will reflect on
the construction of an object of inquiry from its inception to the many forms its representations
might take. The framework of Cultural and Area Studies will provide an opportunity for
transdisciplinary and transnational studies.
1.
Sylvie
Lausberg
(Centre
d’Action
Laïque,
Brussels,
Belgium,
Sylvie.Lausberg<at>laicite.net)
Sarah Malcom and Marguerite Japy Steinheil1: a comparison illustrating institutional and
cultural violence towards women in England in the 18th century and at the turn of the 20th
century
Through the case studies of two emblematic women, one French and one English, in the 18th and
the 20th centuries, we shall examine how their representations in institutional discourses and their
translations into art forms concurred to the creation and spread of the stereotype of the deviant,
criminal female. The main research hypothesis will be how the institutional legitimization of
violence against women influenced the perception and minimization of interpersonal
manifestations of that violence.
The first case concerns 20-year-old Sarah Malcolm, hanged in Fleet Street (London), in 1733,
despite having always claimed her innocence. William Hogarth had made an engraving and an oil
painting of her in prison, inspired by modern ethical concerns. Hogarth used her case to impress
upon the people the fear of the death penalty.
The second case deals with Marguerite Japy-Steinheil. An ex-mistress of French president Félix
Faure, she had been accused of killing both her husband and her mother in 1908. The accused
incurred the death penalty but at the end, as she was obviously innocent, her trial proceedings
revolved around her reputation as a lying, frivolous, and loose woman, not that of a murderer. In
popular literature, but also in so called scientific papers, she has remained emblematic of the
"femme fatale", a venal, criminal woman, historical facts being wilfully distorted.
134
This paper will highlight the representation of the fallen woman and the complicity of the judiciary
for which the collective and moralising aim superseded the life of the accused who was known to
be innocent.
2.
Cansu Çakmak Özgürel (TED University, Ankara, Turkey, cansu.ozgurel<at>tedu.edu.tr)
The White Family: Reading the Root of the Violence in the English Hearth
Being one of the most prolific authors of contemporary British novel, Maggie Gee (1948- ) deals
with sundry socio-economic and socio-cultural issues in her novels. Her fiction is influenced what
happens in the society and she reflects her concern over the issues she explores. In a similar vein,
in The White Family (2002), a condition-of-England novel, Gee investigates violence, racism,
xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia through the minds and deeds of the members of the
eponymous White family in the fictitious town, Hillesden Rise. While she deals with varied aspects
and issues of multicultural society of Britain, she also questions identity and belonging,
represented quite problematic in the novel. Creating a wide spectrum of characters for diversity
and heterogeneity, Gee advances her search “for the roots of xenophobic hatred and violence in
the English hearth” (Jaggi, “Too Close” n.p.). Breaking the homogenised classification of the white
people, the novel functions as a kaleidoscope of these issues reflected on the dysfunctional family
of Alfred White, as it is possible to uncover the relation between domestic violence and racism in
the family. From this standpoint, this paper sets out to claim that The White Family could be read
as an investigation of violence and hatred in the microcosmic unity that is family and it functions
as a gateway to perpetuate themselves in the macrocosm and vice versa. Hence, each character
contributes to the problematic portrayal of condition-of-England through their struggle with the
contemporaneous issues.
3.
Louisa Perreau (Sorbonne Université (Lettres), HDEA, Paris,
louisa.perreau<at>gmail.com)
Withstanding Closed Doors: a case study of the Domestic Abuse Bill 2017-19
France,
Two million people are victims of domestic abuse every year, two-thirds of whom are women, and
more than one in ten of all offences recorded by the police are domestic abuse related, a huge,
costly, and devastating social and economic flaw.
In 2017 the Conservative Party was returned to power with a manifesto commitment to introduce
a landmark bill to transform the judicial system and give wider powers to statutory agencies
towards domestic violence. But the Brexit question shortened the life of Theresa May’s
Government thereby causing the Domestic Abuse Bill (2017) to be dropped and the new Prime
Minister, Boris Johnson, to call for a new general election.
Along with the new no-fault divorce, the December 2019 Queen’s Speechincluded a commitment
to reintroduce the Domestic Abuse legislation.
The bill would ‘help transform the response to domestic abuse, to prevent offending, protect
victims and ensure they have the support they need’, a first ever statutory definition meaning that
the harm caused was not just physical or sexual, but could also involve emotional or economic
abuse, and controlling behaviour. The bill would also ratify the 2011 Istanbul Convention, a panEuropean convention tackling violence against women.
Yet, some campaigners warned that the bill did not do enough to tackle cuts, affecting refuges for
domestic abuse victims or life-saving services. This paper will examine the reasons for government
135
legislation on a question which has been seen as a “social problem”1 since the 1970s, and assess
whether the proposed measures are enough to counteract the effect of “abuse as a pattern” in
Britain today.
4.
Erzsébet Barát (Director of TNT, Gender Studies Research Group, University of Szeged,
Institute of English and American Studies, Szeged, Hungary – zsazsa<at>lit.u-szeged.hu)
Domestic Violence as Hysterical Reaction of Gender Craze: a case study in the hostile context
of right-wing populist political discourse in contemporary Hungary.
In my presentation I would like to look at the efforts made by women NGOs to keep domestic
violence on the agenda. This reflection is of immediate relevance in a political system that is hostile
to any (legal) document that should mention ‘gender’ as a category of analysis. The actual example
is going to be the most recent homicide that eventually pushed the (young female) minister of
justice (appointed in June 2019) to revisit her hostile evaluation of feminist organizations efforts
to make the Hungarian government to ratify the Istanbul Convention (2011) and their concern over
the dramatic increase in reported cases of violence as ‘hysteria’. I want to reflect on the emergence
of this discourse of hysteria in relation to domestic violence and other forms of sexual violence
with a focus on the ways it discredits and silences ‘gender’. As a corollary to that, I want to explore
if and how much the choice to self-silencing ‘gender’ by NGOs (and academics) is a useful
strategy. I will argue that calling the criticism of violence hysteria is a form of hate-speech that is
part of the European right-wing populist discourse that tries to deny the political relevance of
(domestic) violence against women and through that, indirectly, the value of women’s actual life.
S25: Assertiveness and Diffidence in Scottish Culture
Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Jean Berton (Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France, jam.berton<at>wanadoo.fr)
Lesley Graham (University of Bordeaux, France, lesley.graham<at>u-bordeaux.fr)
Milena Kalicanin (University of Nis, Serbia, mkostic76<at>gmail.com)
This seminar will explore the various ways in which assertiveness or diffidence have been manifest
in works produced in Scotland and/or by Scots from the Enlightenment to the 21st Century. These
include the creation of un/assertive fictional characters, the deployment of significant historical
figures and events, the use or avoidance of Scots and Gaelic, the foregrounding of diversity, the
highlighting or dissembling of political intent etc. The seminar also aims to examine the ways in
which these productions may have reflected or modulated the self-assertiveness of the nation itself,
boosting or tempering its sense of identity and of its place in the world.
1.
Lauren, Brancaz-McCartan (Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, France, lauren.brancazmccartan<at>univ-smb.fr)
A dual vision of Scotland? A comparative analysis of the Scotland is Now and the Great
Britain campaigns
Scotland is Now, Scotland’s latest advertising campaign launched in April 2018 by VisitScotland
with the help of the Scottish Government, has arguably become one of the most effective vehicles
for expressing Scottish distinctiveness. Through the concept of nation branding, Scotland has
136
asserted itself as a modern, inclusive, innovative, and independent-minded nation. The campaign
addresses tourists, students, businesses, and investors alike to persuade and convince them that
Scotland is the place to be in spite of the Brexit turmoil. 1 How does Scotland is Now’s
construction of the Scottish identity compare with Scotland’s portrayal by the Great Britain
campaign, whose purpose is to showcase the United Kingdom as a whole? 2 Moreover, has the
place occupied by Scotland changed since the launch of the Great brand in late 2011 by former
PM David Cameron? This paper will analyse the elements of the Scottish identity which have been
put forward in a similar way by both Scotland is Now and Great Britain, the aspects on which the
two advertising campaigns have decided to diverge, and their respective perceptions of Scotland’s
place in the UK, the EU, and the world. The ultimate objective of this paper will be to determine
how the tools of nation branding have been used to reflect Scotland’s assertiveness as a nation and
as an integral part of the UK.
2.
Jean Berton (Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France, jam.berton<at>wanadoo.fr)
Multilingualism as a key feature of Scottish Culture
In the wake of the Hundred Years War, England decided to abandon the use of the French language
and develop the English language, which led the Scots to abandon the name of Inglis for their
language used in southern and eastern Scotland, and call it Scottis, eventually reduced to Scots.
Throughout the Tudor times, the English language endeavoured to supersede the Scots language;
and later James VI and I took measures to erase the Gaelic language. The Union of Parliaments in
1707 amplified the efforts to eradicate Scotland’s native languages.
Following WWI, Scotland initiated her Renaissance leading to the revival of the Scots language,
and with the post WWII international reaction to the dreadful loss of languages worldwide, the
situation of Scottish Gaelic was brought under study.
The failed 1979 referendum ironically favoured the assertion of the native languages of Scotland
— Scots and Gaelic. When the Parliament of Scotland re-opened on July 1st, 1999, bilingualism
(English and Gaelic) became a fact. And in April 2005 Scottish Gaelic was acknowledged an
official language of the nation while Scots unofficially remained a national language. However,
the SNP governments have repeatedly stated that Scotland is a multilingual nation.
While highlighting the resurgence of Scottish Gaelic in the 1980s and 1990s, this paper will tackle
the upholding of multilingualism (Gaelic, Scots, English) in Scotland as both a way of asserting
and advertising Scottish culture and of defying the unfailing monolingualism of Britain.
3.
Marie Hologa (TU Dortmund University, Germany, marie.hologa<at>tu-dortmund.de)
Assertiveness and/or Diffidence? Scottish Colonial Amnesia in Joseph Knight
Although himself largely absent from the novel, the titular character of James Robertson's 2003
historical novel Joseph Knight displays both notions of assertiveness and diffidence in his
development from a young enslaved boy on the sugar plantations of Jamaica to the selfemancipated miner of Dundee several decades later.
In my talk, I would like to show how with this novel Robertson has taken up “the striking
proportions of [Scotland’s postcolonial] ‘amnesia’” (see Robinson and Sassi) and ultimately
succeeds in “uncover[ing] the memory of Scottish entanglement in the Caribbean and
destabilis[ing] national platitudes of liberty” (see Morris). This deconstructive strategy is
expressive of Scotland’s own contemporary struggle for national identity and the need to face and
137
re-negotiate its past and present roles in the British Union. It is therefore important to acknowledge
the complexity of Scotland as both coloniser and (semi-)colonised nation by taking into account
other factors of identity such as ethnicity and class.
4.
Milena Kalicanin (University of Nis, Serbia, mkostic76<at>gmail.com)
Personal vs. Political in James Robertson’s Republics of the Mind (2012)
The paper focuses on the investigation of the personal/political binary in James Robertson’s
collection of short stories, Republics of the Mind (2012). The first part of the paper discusses
assertiveness and diffidence as personal traits and explores a myriad of Robertson’s (un)assertive
fictional characters from diverse stories of this collection (“Screen Lives”, “What Love is”,
“Pretending to Sleep”, “Opportunities”). These stories depict the lives of contemporary Scotsmen,
caught in the firm grip of globalization and consumerism. Individual quests for meaning mostly
prove to be futile, which consequently leads to the lack of self-esteem and self-knowledge as a
dominant personal feature of Robertson’s fellow countrymen. In the second part of the paper,
special attention is paid to “Republic of the Mind” in which Robertson portrays how personal
identity queries mirror contemporary political issues. The author explores the ways in which
personal diffidence influences Scottish national identity and thus unfortunately molds Scottish
political domain. Finally, the last segment of the paper is dedicated to “MacTaggard’s Shed”, a
future autocratic dystopia that is interpreted as Robertson’s warning to his compatriots – political
change demands stepping out of the sphere of self-doubt and indecisiveness and requires
resolution, defiance and stamina. The theoretical framework of the paper relies on the critical
insights of Anderson, Smith, Divine and McCrone, as well as numerous contemporary journalist
accounts by Scottish political analysts. Key words: personal, political, assertiveness, diffidence,
personal identity, national identity.
S26: Cities in Scotland: Cultural Heritage and Nation Identity
Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Clarisse Godard Desmarest (University of Picardie Jules Verne/Institut Universitaire de
France, France, clarisse.godarddesmarest<at>u-picardie.fr)
Nora Pleßke (University of Magdeburg, Germany, nora.plesske<at>ovgu.de)
This panel intends to reflect on Scotland’s cultural heritage as an important national asset with a
focus on cities. Instead of the country’s natural heritage, which is often favoured in analyses of
Scotland’s past, we would like to assess its particularly urban heritage, and how it relates to issues
of national identity. Our seminar on Scotland’s urban heritage features contributions on urban
development, architecture, monuments, art, public memory, tourism as well as literature and film.
138
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Esther Mijers (University of Edinburgh, UK, e.mijers<at>ed.ac.uk)
Cities Outside Scotland: The Urban Heritage of the Scottish Communities Abroad
This paper looks at the urban experience of the early modern Scottish ‘diaspora’, namely those
Scots who spent a significant amount of time on the Continent, either voluntarily or forced by
circumstance, using the Scottish Staple at Veere in the Dutch Republic, as a case study.
Over the last decades, the historiography of the Scots abroad has received significant interest. The
so-called International Turn now informs much of early modern Scottish historiography beyond
‘Scottish diaspora-studies’. Moreover, new models and modes of studying Scottish migration –
network theory, Global and Atlantic history, coastal history etc – have emerged from this as a
result. The next pertinent question is how we relate the experiences of those Scots abroad and their
migrant communities to Scottish history at home. Their urban heritage is one obvious gap which
needs closing. This paper proposes to have a first look at this, discussing the continental experience
and connecting it to the urban experience in Scotland. Its focus is on the Dutch provinces in the
16th and 17th centuries. These were arguably the most urbanised parts of Europe, and they were
also a magnet for Scots, from a very diverse set of backgrounds and for a variety of reasons. This
paper concentrates on the small town of Veere, home to the Scottish Staple, for its enormous
importance for Scotland’s trade as well as the political, diplomatic, social, religious, intellectual
and cultural connections that resulted from this, with the Continent. By presenting Veere as both
an urban centre as well as a hub for exchange, this paper will shed some first and much needed
light on the question what exactly Scots learned in an urban setting outside their own country and
what it contributed to Scotland’s own urban landscape.
2.
Anne-Marie
Akehurst
(University
of
York,
United
Kingdom,
annmarieakehurst<at>icloud.com)
Anatomising ‘Athens’: Architecture, Medicine, and Writing in Early Modern Edinburgh
Martin Willis’s recent research demonstrates Edinburgh’s national and international reputation
was partly constructed through Victorian travellers’ accounts of its medical pre-eminence. This
paper argues that identity built on much earlier foundations. Early Modern urban identity was an
emergent property of a shared intellectualised genealogy of place, reinforced by imagined
engagement with the past. Distinctively, cosmopolitan Edinburgh was shaped between lieux de
mémoire and lieux de savoirs. From C17, unique circumstances enabled the flourishing of medical
science from a secular, pragmatic, empirical approach to knowledge production, in a culture of
writing and publication, with a two-way relation to Europe.
Edinburgh Old Town’s unique topography concentrated occupation leaving only restricted
building space. In Southside, scientific and medical buildings were developed in proximity:
colleges, anatomy theatres, libraries, specimen collections, physic gardens, and Adam’s Frenchinfluenced Royal Infirmary brought them together. Despite professional disputes (Dingwall,
1995), this embryonic medical campus facilitated interdisciplinary empirical study. As in Leyden,
medical research, conducted through autopsy, performed by internationally-networked anatomists,
in theatres based on Italian models, showcased innovative approaches developed locally. Anatomy
underpinned the burgeoning surgical profession, increasingly required for commerce and Empirebuilding. Epistemic interdisciplinarity was embodied in Royal College of Physicians founders:
139
physician, botanist, and geographer Robert Sibbald, and Alexander Pitcairne, who championed the
iatromechanical theory of physiology. Pitcairne’s Solutio problematis de historicis (1688)
endorsed Harvey’s theory of blood circulation rather than that of the Ancient Greeks. Indeed, from
1726, the Medical School’s scientific training, sometimes in English not Latin, attracted foreign
students; its diaspora published internationally.
3.
John Lowrey (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, j.lowrey<at>ed.ac.uk)
Edinburgh’s Political Martyrs’ Monument: Reconciling Civic and National Identities
The democratising ideals coming to Britain from Revolutionary France horrified the British
establishment, which quickly set up its defences, seeking at all costs to prevent the ‘menace’ of
democracy. It was the obvious attractiveness of such ideas which prompted alarm; attacks on the
privileged elites were made by people such as Thomas Muir of Huntershill (1765-99), who was
also questioning the union with England. In 1793, as leader of the Scottish Reformers, Muir was
found guilty of sedition and transported to Botany Bay. A half-century later, the political
environment had transformed and he and some of his fellow political martyrs of the movement
were commemorated by a vast obelisk in Edinburgh’s Old Calton Burial Ground. It was designed
by Thomas Hamilton (1784-1858), one of Scotland’s most talented architects, famous as the
architect of the internationally-acclaimed Royal High School of 1825. This paper considers the
monument in the context of Edinburgh attitudes of the 1840s, when the Reform Act of 1832 had
widened the electorate and when commemoration of Scottish ‘heroes’ on lofty columns had
become normalised, and it examines why the metropolitan capital, Edinburgh, was considered the
appropriate location for the monument although Muir himself was from the rural West.
4.
James
Legard
(Simpson
&
Brown
Architects,
United
Kingdom,
jameslegard<at>icloud.com)
Restoring the ‘Georgian House’: Architecture, Politics and Identity in 1970s Edinburgh
The National Trust for Scotland’s restoration of 7 Charlotte Square as a museum of the Georgian
New Town was both more and less than an exemplary restoration of a townhouse at the centre of
Robert Adam's great neoclassical urban set piece. It was conceived and executed in 1972-5, a
moment pregnant with significance for Scotland’s—and the United Kingdom’s—political and
cultural identity. Lord Kilbrandon’s Commission on the Constitution was about to report and was
widely expected to usher in dramatic changes to the relationship between Scotland and the wider
Union. At the same time negotiations for the UK’s entry into the then European Community were
on the point of bearing fruit. Completion of the restoration was, moreover, timed to coincide with
European Architectural Heritage Year and with the UK’s first European referendum. This paper
will set the creation of the ‘Georgian House’ in this exceptional context, exploring how it became
the vehicle for a distinctive vision of Scotland’s past and future, and then setting out the
consequences—and the many compromises to good practice—that resulted from this unavowed
but omnipresent agenda. In particular, it will show how the National Trust for Scotland’s leaders—
almost all drawn from the country’s well-connected social elite—sought to make use of the
prestige of eighteenth-century taste and cultural achievement to carve out a new place for
Scotland’s cultural and spiritual heritage, and, perhaps no less importantly, for themselves, in a
rapidly changing world.
140
5.
Kirsty Hassard (V&A Dundee, United Kingdom, kirsty.hassard<at>vandadundee.org)
V&A Dundee and Cultural Institutions: The Role of Museums in Culture Led Regeneration
This paper will examine V&A Dundee, and the role of the museum in culture led regeneration of
the city. It will set the museum in the context of the importance of the framework of existing
cultural institutions in Dundee and the significance of collaboration between the institutions in
moving towards culture led regeneration.
The main objectives of the museum are to be an international centre of design, to present
the brilliance of Scottish creativity and the best of design from around the world. The museum
provides a place of inspiration, discovery and learning through its mission to enrich lives through
design. Alongside this is the public perception of V&A Dundee which has been shaped by the
publicity which surrounded it in its opening year. The museum is promoted as the centrepiece of
the city’s one-billion-pound waterfront regeneration, prompting comparisons to the Bilbao effect.
This paper will examine the main objectives of the museum alongside its perception as a driver of
culture led regeneration.
Context is important to this study, in examining other case studies within the UK in which
museums have been viewed as integral to culture led regeneration, such as Liverpool and
Manchester.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Murray
Pittock
(University
of
Glasgow,
murray.pittock<at>glasgow.ac.uk)
Edinburgh and the Art Market in the First Age of Enlightenment
United
Kingdom,
This paper explores the significance of and mutual relationships between the Scottish capital and
the art markets and practice of the Netherlands and the Italian states in the 1660-1750 period,
beginning with an examination of the centrality of Dutch art in the formation of Edinburgh’s early
art market and late seventeenth-century architecture, as well as offering some consideration of the
importance of landscapes and still life to the later development of Scottish painting. The paper
concludes with an examination of both the political and artistic implications of the shift to Italy in
the progress of both art and the art market after 1719, considering the reasons for this, its nature
and persistence, and the long-term implications for Scottish art practice.
2.
Lisa Mason (National Museums Scotland, United Kingdom, l.mason<at>nms.ac.uk)
Nomadic Murals: Architectural Tapestry in Post-War Scotland
This paper will explore interior design, architecture, and Scottish identity in an urban context by
focussing of the output of the Dovecot Studios in the decades following the Second World War.
Dovecot Studios is a tapestry studio based in Edinburgh, which was founded by the 4th Marquis of
Bute in 1912. In 1947 the company became a commercial enterprise, which led to a fundamental
shift in working practices and patronage.
Post-war economic recovery, coupled with the subsequent building boom, and changing attitudes
to public art led to a series of important architectural tapestry commissions. In contrast to the
Dovecot’s original impetus (to provide tapestries for country houses owned by the Bute family)
141
these post-war projects were commissioned for corporate spaces, museums, civic buildings and
religious institutions in urban centres.
This paper will examine how the Dovecot sought to express Scottish identity through the medium
of tapestry by examining case studies of tapestries commissioned for specific interiors in Scottish
cities. The Dovecot company archive at Mount Stuart will also be used to investigate the
company’s shifting economic model.
3.
Angela Bartie (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, angela.bartie<at>ed.ac.uk)
Maydays to Mayfests: Cultural Politics and the Popular Arts in Glasgow, c.1983-1990
Mayfest, Glasgow’s annual festivals of popular culture (1983-97), was a Scottish Trades Union
Congress (STUC) initiative intended to increase availability and access to the arts amongst the
working-class population of Glasgow. Set against the backdrop of deindustrialization, public
funding cuts under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government and deprivation
in large parts of the city, the community-level Mayfests committees that sprung up demonstrated
the value of widening access to culture across the city. Running from 1983 to 1997, these annual
festivals were funded by a partnership between major trade unions and the local authority, Glasgow
District Council, as well as the wider regional council, Strathclyde Regional Council, and the state
funded arts body, the Scottish Arts Council (SAC).
However, by 1986, Mayfest had begun to compete with the Edinburgh Festivals, separating the
community productions from the ‘main event’ – provoking allegations that it had become a twotier festival – and changing its name from ‘Glasgow’s Festival of Popular Theatre and Music’ to
‘Mayfest – Glasgow’s International Festival’. This paper draws upon the records of Mayfest, held
in the STUC Archives, alongside Glasgow and Strathclyde council and SAC records, as well as
press reports and magazine articles. It seeks to use these festivals as a ‘lens’ to explore debates
about access, inclusion and participation in arts festivals for the working-class populations of the
cities in which they take place.
4.
Kirsten
Carter
McKee
(University
of
Edinburgh,
Kirsten.McKee<at>ed.ac.uk)
Notions of National Identity within the Scotland’s Urban Realm
United
Kingdom,
Notions of national identity within the Scotland’s urban realm have changed over the last few
decades to incorporate a more political, rather than cultural, reading of national identity. This has
manifested in considerations of Scottish connections within wider global diasporas, Scots roles
within contemporaneous political constructs, and how Scots have been involved in communities
away from home, as well as the impact of these global networks back on Scottish soil.
However, while discourses in history surrounding Scotland’s role in Empire have expanded in
political and economic terms over the last few years, narratives on our built environment still tend
to focus on enlightenment innovation without taking into account the agency that Scotland had in
perpetuating and reinforcing Colonialism and Empire, and how this has shaped the built form –
both in Scotland, and abroad. This not only continues national narratives surrounding notions of
agency in Scottish cultural outputs, but also “ignores the historical reality of long-established
Black communities and the centuries-long impact of migration on Scotland” through a lack of
discourse in how Scotland’s role in empire has influenced the built form we experience today.
142
This paper will consider how broader engagement with the impact of Empire and colonialism on
Scotland’s built environment can provide a more inclusive narrative surrounding Scotland’s
heritage and national identity.
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
1.
Irmina Wawrzyczek (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland,
irmina<at>hektor.umcs.lublin.pl)
The Discursive Construction of Scottish Towns as Wellness Retreats in On-Line Tourism
Promotion Texts 2019-20
Tourism management and promotion have long been the areas of most dynamic and interesting
identity making and unmaking processes. Tourist destinations compete on the market by
promoting their place identities constructed in response to the changing needs and tastes of tourism
consumers. The trend that recently has taken centre stage in tourism industry is the pursuit of
wellness. Consequently, today’s travel industry stakeholders engage in wellness-oriented
promotion to successfully find place within this demanding and fluctuating market segment.
The proposed paper, located at the intersection of Media and Tourism Studies, is a reflection on
the cultural identity of Scottish towns as emerging from their on-line promotion as tourist
destinations in the 2019-20 season. It is argued that Scotland’s tangible and intangible urban
cultural heritage is currently promoted as generating hedonistic, existential and spiritual
experiences leading to an optimal state of individual well-being. The material under scrutiny
involves official and independent tourism websites of six Scottish cities and 8 towns available
online in the years 2019-20. Treated as cultural texts, they will be analysed as evidence of the
emergence of yet another commodified version of Scotland’s regional identity as well-being
paradise. The notion of place identity is understood here as “a combination of selected physical
attributes of a destination with a system of meanings and values attached to them by means of
carefully planned discursive operations” (Garzone 2009: 30-31). Multimodal discourse analysis
will be employed to demonstrate the prevalence of wellness discourse both in the verbal and the
visual parts of the researched webpages.
2.
James Loxley (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, james.loxley<at>ed.ac.uk)
Tara
Thomson
(Edinburgh
Napier
University,
United
Kingdom,
t.thomson2<at>napier.ac.uk)
Narrative and National Identity: A Literature House for Edinburgh
This paper draws on collaborative research and literary heritage work between the UNESCO City
of Literature Trust and researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier.
Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust was established in 2004, the first city to receive such
a designation. For its first decade, the Edinburgh City of Literature Trust sought to support,
coordinate and promote the activities of writers, readers, libraries and publishers throughout the
city and to build international links. Having undertaken this role very successfully, the Trust is
now undertaking the “Netherbow Project” in collaboration with this paper’s authors, aiming at
establishing a “literary quarter” on the Royal Mile to give literary activities a permanent physical
presence for the benefit of residents and visitors. In partial fulfilment of this aim, and working with
143
its partners, the Trust is repurposing John Knox House as a “Literature House” as a focus for
Scottish writing.
The Literature House will represent Edinburgh and Scotland’s literary story, and thus raises
questions around the broader role of the site, the Trust, and the researchers in national identity
construction. Rather than inventing a national literary history, as it were, we are asking how we
might imagine a Scottish future and identity through urban literary heritage, and to what ends? In
what contemporary ways might the Literature House invite that future? To what extent is the
Literature House curation driven by national policy and the concerns of contemporary Scottish
politics? As we reflect on these questions in our paper, we look back to the culture- and nationbuilding impulses of the early 20th century Scottish Literary Renaissance, a movement that was
notably anti-urban, deeming representations of Scottish identity their most authentic when located
outside of Scotland’s urban centres. We will ask what we have learned from the political projects
of 20th century authors/critics like Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, and how the Literature
House as a contemporary urban site might construct national identity in different ways from those
of the modernist period.
3.
Florence Dujarric (Supméca – Institut Supérieur de Mécanique de Paris, France,
florence_dujarric<at>yahoo.fr)
The City in Iain Rankin’s Novels
Twenty-two novels and almost thirty years into his series about Detective Inspector John Rebus,
Ian Rankin is still exploring the vast crime scene that is the city of Edinburgh. The series seemed
to have come to an end in 2007 when the protagonist retired, but now Rebus is back, along with
his nemesis Cafferty, and he is “here to stay”.
The novels are set in Scotland, a country where culture and geopolitical borders don’t overlap, a
nation undergoing a process of devolution, always teetering on the verge of independence. The
detective treads on unstable political ground, and there is no status quo either when it comes to
societal borders. The ethics and entitlement of policemen and rulers are regularly called into
question, and the borders between law enforcement and crime blur in a grapple for control of the
city.
Rebus relentlessly wanders, drives, drifts, tails and chases suspects through the city. In each novel,
the narrative visits a number of referential locations and draws on their specific social issues to
feed the plot, slowly building a psychogeography of crime. However, piecing a map together
remains a work in progress, and the geography of Edinburgh remains incomplete and shifting.
And yet, the ongoing process of accounting for Edinburgh’s topography and psychogeography has
slowly created a city that is sometimes more real than the extradiegetic city. Rankin’s fiction seeps
into the real city through literary tourism: Rankin’s readers can be seen wandering, book in hand,
along the city streets, chasing the shadows of fiction. Rankin’s extensive series has managed to
create a true national heritage from which other novelists draw to create their own works, mirroring
and completing the ever-changing map.
144
4.
Deividas Zibalas (Vilnius University, Lithuania, deividaszib<at>gmail.com)
Edinburgh on Screen: Rethinking Scottish National Identity in Danny Boyle’s T2
Trainspotting
Popular culture has played a significant role in shaping the perception of Scottish national identity.
Images of Scotland have been particularly prominent in films (Edensor 1997) where readily
recognisable tropes of misty mountains, kilts, and men ready to defend their homeland have been
typically drawn upon. National identity is a multifaceted concept, but it can primarily be
interpreted in spatial terms, and nowhere else does it become as manifest as in the city with its
monuments that stimulate a sense of ‘common heritage’ and ‘cultural kinship’ (Smith 1991: 17).
However, national identity is not something permanent or stable, but it is rather an ongoing
‘project’ in constant need of reassertion (Smith 2010). This means that the urban environment,
and, consequently, the projection of national identity is open to different interpretations, and
Danny Boyle’s film T2Trainspotting (2017), a sequel to the iconic Trainspotting (1996), seems to
offer an alternative view on what it means to be Scottish, focusing not on the typical monuments
of Edinburgh, although they do appear in the film, but rather on the less well-known areas of the
city. More specifically, to use Edward Soja’s (1996) conception of space, to a large extent based
on Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) The Production of Space, the film draws upon the periphery as a source
of radical reinvention and reinterpretation. Danny Boyle focuses on the people in the periphery
and their struggles to forge a place of their own, an alternative identity.
S27: The World of Publishing
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Wolfgang
Görtschacher
(University
of
Salzburg,
Austria,
Wolfgang.Goertschacher<at>sbg.ac.at)
David Malcolm (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland,
dmalcolm.pl<at>gmail.com)
The world of publishing involves various people and institutions, among them writers, agents,
publishers, editors, librarians, organisers of literature festivals and reading series, directors of
literature centres, booksellers, librarians, administrators of literary prizes, writing schools, books
and journals (and their electronic versions), websites, blogs, etc. Tradition and innovation have
always marked the publishing world. We welcome papers focusing on any of the previously listed
people and institutions as well as all relevant and related issues from the world of publishing. We
welcome proposals that go beyond the English-language publishing scene and may relate to any
historical period.
1.
Dietmar Böhnke (Leipzig University, dboehnke<at>uni-leipzig.de)
Nineteenth-Century Innovation in Transnational Publishing: Bernhard Tauchnitz and the
Tauchnitz Edition
In 1841, Bernhard Tauchnitz started one of the most successful publishing ventures of the
nineteenth century when he initiated his Collection of British Authors (better known as Tauchnitz
Edition) in Leipzig, Germany. For almost a century, this series published mainly contemporary
novels in English for the sale on the Continent, in a cheap but high-quality form of the early
145
paperback, directed especially at the emerging mass market of railway passengers. By the 1930s,
the list included over 5,000 volumes by British and American writers and allegedly sold a total of
40m copies. Tauchnitz pioneered copyright payments to his authors before this was legally
regulated. He cultivated close friendships with several of them, including Charles Dickens (who
sent his eldest son to Leipzig for two years in the 1850s). What is more, the Tauchnitz volumes
were often published simultaneously with the English and American originals, and in some cases
even preceded them. In this paper, I will briefly sketch the history of the Tauchnitz Edition, and
then focus on some of the innovative aspects of this publisher, such as the copyright issue, the
transnational network of publication and distribution, and the new ‘paperback’ format (including
twentieth-century innovations such as colour-marking of different genres and series). As a
corollary, I will reflect on the position of Leipzig as one of the European hubs of the book trade
and publishing culture in the nineteenth century.
2.
Elisa Bolchi (University of Ferrara, Italy, elisa.bolchi<at>unife.it)
Publishing for Outsiders. Virginia Woolf in French and Italian feminist presses: a
comparison through archival documentation.
Virginia Woolf played a fundamental role in the feminist publishing of the Nineteen-seventies in
Europe. In 1975, for instance, thanks to the newborn publisher La Tartaruga, that opened its
catalogue with Three Guineas, Italian readers could finally read the first Italian translation of
Woolf’s essay, which had remained the last book-length work by her still to be translated and that
came to be seen as a milestone for the development of feminist thought because it considered, for
first time, women’s exclusion from history not as an impediment but as an opportunity. In France,
the essay was published by Editions des femmes in 1977, translated by Viviane Forrester, author
of a monograph on Woolf published in 1973. Thanks to unpublished archival documents and
editorial letters between The Hogarth Press and the French and Italian feminist publishers, my
paper will present a comparison between La Tartaruga and Les éditions des femmes in their
approach to the publication of Woolf. I aim to trace the background of the publication of her works
by the two presses and underline similarities and differences in their editorial plans and in the
importance each press gave to the figure of the British writer for the development of a more
inclusive feminist thought, which helped women to realize themselves as women and to “make
themselves known to society as women, by remaining faithful to their female essence” (Russel R.,
The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, 1997).
3.
Bill Blick (Assistant Professor, Queensborough Community College of the City of New
York, United States, wblick<at>qcc.cuny.edu)
The Relevance and Influence of Samizdat, Yesterday and Today
Martin Machovec writing for Poetics Today, as part of special issue, “Publish and Perish: Samizdat
and Underground Cultural Practices in the Soviet Bloc.” defines the term, “samizdat,” as the
following: “Samizdat, now widespread, denotes the unofficial dissemination of any variety of text
(book, magazine, leaflet, etc.) within “totalitarian” political systems, especially those after World
War II. Such publishing, though often not explicitly forbidden by law, was always punishable
through the misuse of a variety of laws under various pretexts.” Samizdat is a testament to the
power and influence of words and publishing. Every writer writes to be read, but those who wrote
under totalitarian regimes risked life and limb for their words and ideas. This paper will explore
146
the various manifestations, influence, and relevance of samizdat all over the world. Following the
writers, their fates, and the actual publications, this paper will illuminate the essential role of
freedom of speech and press in the lives of the citizens who lived through that period and its
continued relevance today. By focusing on the evolution, publication, and dissemination of these
materials, this presentation endeavors to illuminate the power of the printed word, and how it can
give power to the voiceless and weak, and a tool of liberation for freedom under the direst of
circumstances.
4.
David Malcolm (SWPS University of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Warsaw,
Poland, dmalcolm.pl<at>gmail.com)
Short Stories in a Codicological Context: Some Theory, Some Examples
It has long been argued (Pratt 1994, Beetham 1989, Ardis 2008, Malcolm 2012, Pong 2019) that
the context – journal, magazine, periodical – in which a short story is published has implications
for the reading of that text. The codicological environment, the internal dialogics, and the blurred
boundaries inevitable in periodical publication, which almost always brings a short story into
contact with other fiction, other articles, visual material, and advertisements, have offered scholars
of fiction and publishing possibilities of looking closely at an often-neglected aspect of the
meaning and uses of short fiction. This paper considers two examples of the interaction of short
fiction and publishing environment: that of Lionel Johnson’s “Mors Ianua Vitae,” published in the
short-lived journal The Albemarle, II.3 (September 1892), and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “The
Revolt at Brocéliande,” published in The New Yorker (10 September 1973).
5.
Wolfgang
Görtschacher
(University
of
Salzburg,
Austria,
Wolfgang.Goertschacher<at>sbg.ac.at)
Poetry Publishing: From Periodical Research to Poetry Salzburg Review and Poetry Salzburg
2018 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of my work as editor of Poetry Salzburg Review and it
is more than thirty years since I started to get interested and involved in the sphere of the small
press. James Hogg initiated the tradition of verse publication at the University of Salzburg in the
early 1980s and, until his retirement in the late 1990s, published hundreds of volumes of poetry
and related academic works. The first poets he published were William Oxley, Peter Russell and
Anthony Johnson. His list of writers included, among others, John Gurney, Brian Merrikin Hill,
James Kirkup, and Edward Lowbury. This paper offers a critical evaluation of the history, the
position and prestige that Poetry Salzburg, the magazine, and the poets associated with them, have
acquired since the early 1980s.
S28: Spaces in Transit: Literary and Cultural Responses to Mnemonic Landscapes
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Lourdes López-Ropero (University of Alicante, Spain, lourdes.lopez<at>ua.es)
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (University of Warsaw, Poland, m.a.sokolowskaparyz<at>uw.edu.pl)
In Present Pasts (2003), Andreas Huyssen claims that “one of the most interesting cultural
phenomenon of our day is the way in which memory and temporality have invaded spaces … that
147
seemed among the most stable and fixed: cities, monuments, architecture, and sculpture … we
have come to read cities and buildings as palimpsests of space, monuments as transformable and
transitory, and sculpture as subject to the vicissitudes of time (7). Inspired by the work of Huyssen,
James Young, Bertrand Westphal and Robert Tally among others, this seminar aims to look at
issues of memory and spatialization. By space in transit we refer to the dynamic and malleable
nature of space, which becomes apparent in configurations linked to collective memories about
the past, subjected as they are to ongoing negotiations and interpretations (e.g.: monuments,
memorials, architecture, ruins, topographic features, spatial objects). Can inter-medial
representations of space contribute to illuminate the complex dynamics of memory? Do literary
and cultural artefacts have the potential to function as sites of memory themselves, in the absence
or failure of material sites? Our particular focus is on literary and cultural representations of space
associated with collective memories, but the seminar also considers explorations of memory and
space from a broader perspective.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom,
ARice<at>uclan.ac.uk)
Black Identities, Memorialisation and Landscapes as Monuments: Jade Montserrat’s
Making Homespace in Alien Geographies
This presentation discusses the historical black presence in Britain and Ireland through an analysis
of the work of contemporary Scarborough-born artist Jade Montserrat. Montserrat uses video art,
performances and beautiful watercolours to investigate her identity as a Black Briton born in a
rural area. By doing this she creates memorial landscapes that create new artistic meanings which
are unique in a British context. The presentation discusses the way her works speak to a nonMetropolitan version of Black British history, one that finds black presence in such rural and nonstandard locales. In a work like Clay (2015), an elegiac and haunting ten-minute film, she performs
an act of recovery of black lives marginalized and forgotten in this landscape, digging into the
earth to construct a grave-like pit as a ritualized guerrilla memorialization that works against
melancholic forgetfulness. The paper will discuss the way her work is in the tradition of Black
women artists from 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid to the photographer Ingrid Pollard.
Her work will be discussed in the context of black history stretching back to Roman times and
including emphasis on black agency rather than victimhood. It will utilise research on black
148
runaways to highlight a hidden black history of resistance in surprising places. It will finally
analyse her latest installations which imbricate us all in this widened black history.
2.
Monika Szuba (University of Gdańsk, Poland, monika.szuba<at>ug.edu.pl)
‘Acts of communal memory’: Landscape and Place-Names in Alec Finlay’s Gathering
Exploring relationships between the landscape, memory and language, Alec Finlay demonstrates
that sense-making is a dynamic process which occurs constantly on location. His work takes the
form of mappings based on phenomenological experience, blending elements of literary, cultural
and historical survey of space, his place writing and sited projects thus becoming moveable maps
focused on “place-awareness”, to use Finlay’s term. A mapping of the Highland landscape in
poems, essays, photographs and maps, Gathering (2018) is a guide to the Cairngorms, the first
region of Scotland to be depopulated by the clearances that caused disruption of traditional life
and dispossession of land, erasing the Gaelic language, culture and structures which had been in
place for hundreds of years. As a result of this erasure, contemporary Ordnance Survey maps of
Scotland contain many incorrect Gaelic place-names, an error which Adam Watson’s book The
Place Names of Upper Deeside (1984) first attempted to correct. In an ecopoetic account of the
region, Finlay’s Gathering expands Watson’s project, unearthing the long-forgotten place-names
which constitute “acts of communal memory” and imagining the landscape as it once may have
been. The paper aims to examine the ways in which Alec Finlay’s work entwines topography,
toponyms and temporality. It will explore how spatial transformations are represented through
various media employed by Finlay in his artistic interventions thus demonstrating the manner in
which space is shaped through memories of historical trauma which lives in the land.
3.
Lorraine Kerslake (University of Alicante, Spain, kerslake<at>ua.es)
In Search of Lost Time: Poetic Space, Environment and Memory in Remains of Elmet.
Remains of Elmet (1979) was written as a poetic sequence in response to Fay Godwin’s black and
white photographs of the Calder Valley landscape of Ted Hughes’s childhood. The poems evoke
the decline of industry and ruined remains of the buildings in the land tracing its history from the
ancient Celtic kingdom of Elmet to the renamed Calder Valley in the present where the poet grew
up. The collection reads largely as a product of rewriting geographical memory as much as
considering the influences of the Industrial Revolution and war experience in the Yorkshire
environment. Drawing on Lawrence Buell’s notion of environment in relation to the social
production of place-making as a culturally inflected process in which nature and culture must be
seen as a mutuality rather than as separable domains (2005: 2), together with humanist geographer
Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of topophilia, which can be defined as “the affective bond between people
and place or setting” (1974: 4), this paper looks at the powerful link that exists between the memory
of the poet’s Yorkshire childhood world and his own imaginative universe together with his
inherent sense of place as a response to the environment. By drawing on the themes of place,
environment and memory I will show how the poems reveal and reshape landscape in ways that
149
promote an understanding of external nature in relation to human culture and as an attempt to
rethink how we inhabit the earth, enacting a kind of ecological recovery and regeneration of nature.
4.
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (University of Warsaw, Poland,
paryz<at>uw.edu.pl)
Memorializing (Representations of) Space: Simon Armitage’s Still
m.a.sokolowska-
Simon Armitage’s Still (2016) comprises a series of poems as “word shadows” cast upon selected
photographic images of the Somme ‘space’ of the Great War. Armitage’s conceptual strategy
effectively transcends the theoretical borderlines of ekphrasis and the photographic/verbal overlay,
offering a thought-provoking metonymical memorialization of the Battle of the Somme by means
of memorializing its visual ‘spatial’ representations. The focus of the discussion will be the
epistemological and affective tensions invoked by setting together the seemingly defamiliarizing
aerial images and post-memory poetic writings of the Great War within the contexts of both
“cultural memory’ (Jan Assmann) and the distinction between the processes of memorialization
versus monumentalization (Arthur Danto). Armitage’s commemorative poetic/photographic
volume is, in itself, a testimony to the (inevitable) process of historical distancing in result of which
literary representations of the past take as their referent not the past itself but its “sites of memory”
(Pierre Nora).
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
Julia
Wiedemann
(Catholic
University
of
Eichstätt-Ingolstadt,
Julia.Wiedemann<at>ku.de)
‘Small kingdom as a spark’: Wessex and the Negotiation of Englishness
Germany
According to Pierre Nora, the interplay of memory and space (what he termed lieux de mémoire)
is an essential factor in the creation of collective identities (Realms of Memory: Rethinking the
French Past, 1996). This triad of space, memory and identity plays an important role in the creation
of “Wessex”. While Wessex was one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the early Middle Ages, it
was during the 19th century that this area became an epitome of ‘Englishness’ (as opposed to
‘Britishness’). Although Wessex as a historical space already played a role in 18th-century
writings, it is mainly due to Thomas Hardy that Wessex turned into a space, which combines
memory and identity-formation. Using Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the production of space (The
Production of Space, 1974), the paper will show that Hardy’s invention of Wessex led to a creation
of a real place “Wessex” and spatial practices connected to this region. By referring to E.M.
Forster’s short story The Machine Stops (1909), the proposed paper will furthermore demonstrate
that the vision of a rural Wessex could also be used in order to counterbalance technical progress.
2. Svetlana Strinyuk (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia,
strinuk<at>mail.ru)
Contested Spaces in the Troubles Novels: Visual and Verbal Identity in Anglo-Irish
Literature of the 1990s
The Troubles novels constitute a massive layer of contemporary Anglo-Irish literature. They vary
in genre, mode, politics but what unites them all is attention to collective trauma shown in all the
150
complexity and multimodality which a work of art can offer. Deliberate attention to
conceptualizing space of division might be explained by the fact that space lies at the heart of the
construction of national identity, communal solidarity and community turmoil. Since space in
Northern Ireland used to be a contested category broadly discussed in public discourse, it is clear
that transforming physical space into an aesthetic category in works of art (books, films, painting,
plays) is unavoidable. The paper examines how identity is represented through space in AngloIrish literature of the Troubles in the context of multimodal public discourse. A detailed analysis
of three of the Troubles novels gives a picture of place conceptualized visually and verbally. It
functions as a recognizable landscape and identity marker creating the historical background of
the novels. It also performs communicative functions: community solidarity and unification are
represented in the novels through visual and verbal means of identity. In case of identity cognition
of the other community, they are seen as indicators of a potential threat.
3.
Nevin Faden Gürbüz (Heidelberg University, Germany, nevingrbz<at>gmail.com)
Urban Space of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul
The city is one of the most significant components of modern life in the contemporary world. The
concept of reconstruction, representation and transformation of urban space can be readily
observed in the novels of the late-20th century and the early 21st century in Turkey and Europe.
Nobel laureate Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, in novels such as My Name Is Red (1998), Istanbul:
Memories and the City (2003), or The Museum of Innocence (2008), portrays Istanbul in terms of
history, society, political and cultural ways. Today, Pamuk’s Istanbul can be considered as if it
were Dickens’s London, Joyce’s Dublin and Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg. One of Pamuk’s recent
novels, A Strangeness in My Mind (2014) focuses on a truly special and at the same time extremely
ordinary character, Mevlut’s story of individual memories, while the novel presents the
reconstruction of urban space and transformation of the city, Istanbul, which experiences the
industrial revolution, natural disasters, and the influences of modernity in the course of time. This
paper aims to study the reconstruction of urban space in Orhan Pamuk’s novel A Strangeness in
My Mind, drawing on insights from geocriticism.
4.
Caroline Perret (University of Westminster, United Kingdom, caroperret<at>hotmail.com)
Screening Memory on Walls: Berlin, Dubrovnik and Belfast
My paper will focus on three case studies of the spatialization of walls as memorials. Firstly, it
will analyse the transformation of the Berlin Wall into a global heritage industry, with the use of
different sites: the open-air East Side Gallery, a series of murals directly painted on a remnant of
the Berlin Wall, and the Berlin Wall Memorial, which has preserved a strip of the border
fortifications, exemplifying the former German division. Secondly, I will examine the City Walls
of Dubrovnik which are considered a symbol of Croatian defence during the 1991 Croatian War
of Independence against the Serbian-Montenegrin aggression and one of the instances used by the
Homeland War Museum to demonstrate the impact of the war on cultural monuments. Thirdly,
my paper will look at the Peace Walls in Belfast which, despite the end of the Troubles, still divide
the capital of Northern Ireland, division which is emphasized by the political murals of which they
are the support. I will also explore how their range of subject matter has developed drastically in
recent years, encompassing the memorialization of different forms of political struggles
worldwide. Within the specificity of the German, Croatian and Irish economic and political
151
context, I will discuss the contrast between two interpretative modes of memory: the one by a
tourism industry which capitalizes on the internationally very attractive on the one side; and
commemorative practices which address and convey more local, painful memories as well as the
victims’ perspectives.
Slot 3: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Liani Lochner (Université Laval, Canada, liani.lochner<at>lit.ulaval.ca)
Reading Monuments: Memorial Encounters in the Works of Zoë Wicomb
The work of the South African author Zoë Wicomb offers a model for the reading of literature
from a minority culture that recognizes its representations as a literary production of alternate
histories, identities, and spaces that challenge and expand the historical archive. Informed by
Derek Attridge’s thinking on the event of reading as an encounter with alterity, this paper argues
that in novels such as Playing in the Light and October, and the short stories collected in The One
That Got Away, Wicomb stages a particularly literary engagement with the monument—including
sculptures, photographs, and memorial gardens—as aesthetic objects and spaces. Significantly,
women in her works often find themselves at a site of commemoration after a journey that involves
the crossing of literal and metaphorical borders between races and cultures. In an aesthetic
encounter with these testaments to history, Wicomb’s deliberately female characters are
confronted with an experience of otherness that forges a space for the recognition—within
themselves and, through her literature, within the nation’s memory—of those stories, individuals,
and cultures occluded from or silenced by the official archive.
2.
Teresa Martínez-Quiles (University of Alicante, Spain, mariateresa.martinez<at>ua.es)
Statues in Transit: Commemorating Women's History in Public Space through Frances
Presley's “Female Figures”
Frances Presley's poetic series “Female Figures” (Lines of Sight, 2009) emerges as a reaction to
the scarcity of female monuments in public spaces. By focusing on the statues of three female
historical figures, the author draws our attention to the need to publicly commemorate women in
an attempt to revert their traditional historical invisibility. Also, following James Young’s
predicament in The Texture of Memory (1993), Presley challenges the presumed notion that
monuments are immutable through space and time. Instead, she presents them as malleable figures
that are subject to the ongoing interpretations of viewers, or writers. Presley’s own response to the
statues of Julian of Norwich (2000), an English anchorite of the Middle Ages, Queen Anne (1719),
a British monarch, and Margaret Thatcher (2007), contributes to a dynamic and dialogical vision
of space and the collective memory built around these women. By placing them against a textual
and spatial background in her poems, Presley not only questions the statues' original social
purpose, but she also manages to shed light on certain historical narratives that have paradoxically
undergone a process of cultural amnesia through the construction of the memory site. Finally, I
will point at how Presley’s reinterpretation reveals a clear breach between the memory of Julian
of Norwich and Queen Anne on the one hand, and the figure of Margaret Thatcher on the other.
While the first two women are portrayed in a more humane and complex light, Presley’s more
152
confrontational representation of the latter reveals a private and collective ‘wound’ that still
surrounds the memory of this historical figure.
3.
Laura
Gimeno-Pahissa
(Autonomous
University
of
Barcelona,
Spain,
laura.gp77<at>gmail.com)
‘Americans Got the View, the French got the Wine and We Got the Ruins’: Post-war
Hamburg as a Space in Transit in Rhidian Brook’s The Aftermath
Based on his own grandfather's experiences in post-war Hamburg, Rhidian Brook's The
Aftermath (2013) narrates the story of Colonel Lewis Morgan, who supervises the process of
rebuilding and 'denazificating' the city, as well as the stories of those who surround him: his wife,
son, and the Luberts, the German family they share a house with. The Morgans are allocated under
the same roof as the Luberts and, by virtue of such an arrangement, the German family's home
becomes a site of contention between victors and losers, a place where the international conflict is
(re)enacted within the domestic sphere. Those four walls become a space of transit between war
and peace, life and death, forgiveness and reconciliation. Brook also uses the broader context of
the city to discuss the drama of war and its destructive power. Architectural devastation becomes
a mirror of the moral and psychological damage inflicted upon the losing side. As Bevan (2007)
claims, shattered buildings are a tool of cultural and moral annihilation, not simply 'collateral
damage'. Devastated heritage implies an immediate destruction of the enemy's morale and cultural
memory. Therefore, The Aftermath explores the landscape of devastation and its connection to the
geographical (i.e. the city) and the emotional spheres (i.e. the Luberts and the Morgans). This paper
focuses on how Brook represents the actual city of Hamburg and the Luberts family home as both
casualties of the war. It will emphasize the connections between the significance of
cultural/architectural heritage and the emotional memory of the characters.
4.
Sara Mousazadeh (York University, Canada, sara.mousazadeh<at>gmail.com)
(Non) Spaces of Memory in Contemporary Iran
The creation of a unified state identity is based on the ability of a state to produce an illusory image
of a harmonized whole as a nation. Modern national consciousness therefore is built on the
assertion of an imposed homogeneity and sameness of space and time of the entire people
belonging to a nation. The idea of “hetrochronicity” (Bakhtin’s relative time and space) inversely
underscores our subjective experience of time and space as situated in specific context and
“histories of social relationships.
The crisis of legitimacy in Iran in the past decade has moved the state’s ideology toward a more
systematic manipulation of the history of the 1979 revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq to
reinforce a sense of unity and belonging in the present. The official landscape of memory culture
in Iran, therefore, is monolithically organized to unify the public sensibilities around the state’s
sanctioned pasts and a renewed sense of legitimation. Going against the grain of this false historymaking, I look into how particular treatments of spatiality in a number of cinematic and literary
texts foreground previously unrecognized “relations between the private dreaming self and the
public space of production and history”. Reading Alreza Gholami’s novella Divar (2016) and
Ahmad Mahmoud’s novel The Scorched Earth (1982) with Walter Benjamin’s idea of space as
“the unconscious retention of a posture of struggle and defense”, I show how space in these works
is mobilized against the homogenized and totalizing articulations of the past.
153
5.
Laura
Janeth
McKinley
(York
laurajanethmckinley<at>gmail.com)
Commemorating Contested Colonial Landscapes
University,
United
Kingdom,
In 2017, Canada celebrated the sesquicentennial anniversary of its confederation. As part of the
commemorative festivities, the Canadian government made access to National Parks, historic sites
and marine conservation areas free for the year. The Canada 150 Discovery Parks Pass invited
Canadians to recall what it means to be Canadian through the commemorative viewing and spatial
transit of places said to “represent the very best of what Canada has to offer” and that “tell stories
of who we are” (Parks Canada 2017). Yet the parks are also sites of forced removals of Indigenous
nations, marked by and through the dispossessive violence of white settler colonialism which
depends upon the attempted erasure and forgetting of Indigenous presence (Wolfe 2006). I read
the Parks Pass as a spatial material cultural artifact productive of collective memories and
forgetfulness of the past and national identity in the present. Drawing on the work of Critical Race
scholars and Indigenous artist Rebecca Belmore’s (2017) aesthetic intervention Wave Sound, I
argue the pass consolidates a white possessive subjectivity that justifies ongoing colonial land
appropriation. In contradistinction, Belmore’s sculptural objects, which were installed in four
National Parks, asked visitors to listen to, rather than view and transit through, the land, and thus
contained the conditions of possibility for piercing white possessive subjectivity at the moment of
its consolidation and remembering otherwise.
S29: The Perception and Representation of Plants in Early Modern England (1550-1700)
Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Anna
Maria
Cimitile
(Università
L’Orientale,
Napoli,
Italy,
annamariacimitile<at>tiscali.it)
Jean-Jacques Chardin (Université de Strasbourg, France, chardin<at>unistra.fr)
Laurent Curelly (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse, France, laurent.curelly<at>uha.fr)
“To interrogate plants means to understand what it means to be in the world” (Coccia, Life of
Plants, 2016). How did early modern philosophers and artists perceive their natural environment?
Was the perception of plants conditioned by ideological and theological discourses or was it also
shaped by individuals’ senses and emotions? Did the relationship between man and plants
challenge the centrality of man’s position in the world? These questions invite reconsideration of
the significance of the body in the building of the individual and the vision of selfhood as an
environmentally constructed entity. Eco-critical approaches to early modern representations of
plants may also question contemporary aesthetic categorisations and norms.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
Danièle Berton (Université Clermont-Auvergne, France, daniele.berton<at>wanadoo.fr)
‘A medlar with a plum tree’… in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy
In The Atheist’s Tragedy’s opening scene of the fourth act, the description of Soquette’s
needlework can be regarded as a 17th-century Flemish-like painting. On stage, in the two
observers’ comments about the piece of embroidery, the changing angles of approach and
154
perspectives make it both look and sound like a still-life through very naturalistic precise closeups typical of the genre, and a larger landscape similar to many oils on canvas of the period. The
dramatic verbal reproduction, in whole and in part, duplicates the textile representation of a natural
locus. Its aesthetic depiction and deciphering, concluded by a moral, paradoxically sketches and
over-exposes the symbolic meanings of vegetals and animals to emphasize the hide-and-seek
sexual dimension of the game the characters are improvising. Double entendre barely conceals the
anthropomorphic recentering of the conversation justifying the characters’ lusty plans. Their
distortion of the eco-centrist ideology serves their immorality. The teasing flirtatious characters
highlight the interconnection they see between the different forms of life that compose the natural
world that was embroidered, also perceived as a complex and ‘harmonious’ whole. They use it as
a model to incite human beings to respect the laws of nature the tapestry is meant to mirror and
teach. In his tragedy, satirist Tourneur embedded an ironical subversion of the concept Andy Fisher
defined centuries later by reckoning that to contemplate the beauty of the world, to think it as an
entity and to harmonise human behaviours with the laws of nature are the pillars of the eco-centric
vision.
2.
Meriel Cordier (Université Clermont Auvergne, France, meriel.cordier<at>uca.fr)
‘Through the Power of Herbs and Words’: Containing the Female-Vegetal Body in John
Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess”
My examination of John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (1608) focuses on the literary
conflation of women and the vegetal world: as is often the case in early modern English literature,
Fletcher’s female characters are closely associated with various botanical specimens. The
rhetorical transformation of female bodies into plants, through the recurring theme of Ovidian
metamorphoses (Dryope, Daphne, Narcissus), as well as the prominent topos of the virginal
enclosed garden, engender linguistic representations of a hybrid female-vegetal body.
This erosion of interspecies boundaries can be analysed as resistance to patriarchal containment:
the characters’ absorption into the plant realm constitutes an escape from heterosexual male desire.
The chaste Clorin displays the “hidden skill” of horticultural power: to no one else are the
properties of plants disclosed, as the secret of female generation becomes, in her virtuous hands,
that of natural creation. Plants themselves seem to resist reification: they are ubiquitous, harmful
or beneficial, and have life-or-death influence over the human body.
Through the exploration of this hybridity, the play illustrates the anxiety surrounding the
permeability of the female body. The early modern tension between the desire to contain and the
desire to penetrate women’s bodies reaches a breaking point when personified by the lovelorn
Thenot, torn between his lust for the “unbruised” grass of Clorin’s metaphorical garden and the
recognition that his trespassing would ruin the very object of his desire. Simultaneously, the
female-vegetal hybrid and the repeated use of herbal balms and remedies suggest an interrelation
between the human body and its nonhuman surroundings: in a world where nature is as close as
one’s own skin, humans and their environment can no longer be viewed as distinct.
155
3.
Hanna
Blondel
(The
Ukrainian
Shakespeare
Centre,
anna150479blondel<at>gmail.com)
The Plant World as a Body in Shakespeare’s Poem Venus And Adonis
Ukraine,
The author aims to highlight the significance of flora for constructing the corporeality concept in
Venus and Adonis by W.Shakespeare.
This poem where the Bard of Avon while preserving the frame of the antique myth simultaneously
creates a new plot, has proved to be an impressive sumptuous collection of Renaissance ideas
including the vision of corporeality. This is evidenced, for example, by the rehabilitation of
sensuality, which was inescapably viewed in the Middle Ages as the real source of sin. W.
Shakespeare also imparts a panoramic image to a naked human body, emancipating it from a
medieval stereotype of being “a tomb of the soul” and thus giving it the status of the essentially
positive natural phenomenon. Aestheticization of sexuality and carnal love, as well as poetization
of carnal desires and bodily practices, clearly come out throughout the poem.
A great role in the representation of the corporeality concept in this poem belongs to the language
of flora. A large number of the names of plants are the constituents of the body metaphors used by
the English Renaissance poet specifically to refer to beautiful body forms during the artistic
reproduction of erotic scenes. These body metaphors contribute to the creation of the so-called
verbal eroticism which not only enchants with a masterly description of the protagonists’ physical
nature faculties, but also shapes in the reader's mind a positive perception of love passion. Finally,
it proves that the erotic-bodily manifestation, which was strongly disapproved on the pages of
literary works in the Middle Ages, can serve as a source of creative inspiration and an object of
artistic attention.
4.
Anna
Maria
Cimitile
(Università
annamariacimitile<at>tiscali.it)
The Politics of Plant Thinking in Shakespeare
L’Orientale,
Napoli,
Italy,
Moving from a reflection on the growing interdisciplinary interest in the vegetal life as a model
for inhabiting the earth and as a possible new starting point for a reappraisal of the human, and
considering the extent to which recent critical work on the topic may intersect or be relevant for
literary studies, the paper looks to the use of plants in Shakespearean drama. In the plays the
vegetal world is at times referred to to present a sympathetic nature, a backdrop to the actions and
mood of the characters; or, it is sometimes used to describe aspects of human life, either by way
of parallels between the vegetal and the human realms, or through a figurative use of plant life and
plant parts (‘our king, is dead. / Why grow the branches now the root is wither’d?’, Richard III).
The idea of there existing correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm, and between one
realm and the other (‘blood […] may be resembled to those waters which are carried by brooks
and rivers […]’, Walter Raleigh), naturally helped the literary imagination; but it is also possible
to argue for a political use of the vegetal realm in early modern literary texts. The paper looks to
the use of ‘gillyvors’ in The Winter’s Tale and to the political imports of the discourse of
hybridization it conveys. How has Shakespearean criticism, especially overtly politically
committed criticism, related with ‘nature’s bastards’ and the exchange between Perdita and
Polixenes in the play? What does the exchange reveal about ‘plant thinking’ in Shakespeare?
156
5.
Fabrice Schultz (Université de Strasbourg, France, fabrice.schultz<at>uha.fr)
‘The bloomes of martyrdom’: Flowers and Wounds in Richard Crashaw’s poetry
In the first stanza of the “Sospetto d’Herode,” Crashaw’s translation of Marino’s poem on the
biblical story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, the poetic voice refers to the “thousand sweet
Babes” torn “from their Mothers Breasts” as “the bloomes of martyrdom,” a floral metaphor which
does not occur in Marino’s original.
Flowers are conventionally imbued with spiritual meaning in Christian texts and Crashaw’s poetic
association of flowers and wounds is notably reminiscent of Francis de Sales’s writings. Indeed,
the Bishop of Geneva repeatedly depicted martyrdom and mystical experiences with botanical
metaphors. However, the vivid sensuousness Crashaw endows flowers with raises the question of
their aptness to portray states of heightened devotion and to be invested with spiritual symbolism.
We contend that the association of flowers and wounds in Crashaw’s sacred poetry sheds light on
a piety that emphasises the importance of the senses and of corporality to reach God. Adopting a
formalist and historicist perspective we will investigate the sensuousness of flowers that facilitates
their metaphorical assimilation with the human body. We will also see that the visually evocative
association of flowers and wounds pertains to a process of transformation and brings together
opposites to eroticise death in a way which is highly suggestive of the writings of catholic mystics.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Pierre Lurbe (Sorbonne Université, France, pierrelurbe<at>gmail.com)
The perception and representation of plants in Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665)
At the end of the entry of his diary for 21 January 1665, Samuel Pepys gives the first known
account of a reader's response to Robert Hooke's Micrographia, which had just been
published : "Before I went to bed I sat up till two o'clock in my chamber reading of Mr. Hooke's
Microscopicall Observations, the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life". It is little
wonder that the book made such a deep impression on Pepys : Micrographia had achieved for the
infinitely small what Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius had done for the infinitely distant in
1610. Although much of the fame of Micrographia rests on the descriptions and eerily precise
drawings of insects, Hooke had devoted a number of his observations to the world of vegetables
and plants : from the texture of cork, to the structure of moss, Hooke showed his readers and
viewers, in both word and image, the world of plants as it had never been seen or experienced
before. This paper will explore this dimension of Hooke's work, with particular emphasis on the
theological underpinning of this representation of plants, and the way it tallied with a view of
nature as a great whole whose laws straddled the realms of the animate and inanimate.
2.
Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, France, millerblaise.am<at>wanadoo.fr )
Anne Bacon Drury’s Herbal, or the Government of the Soul
Anne Bacon Drury belonged to a family that had particular interest in plants and sought to develop
horticultural enterprises. Her uncle, the statesman and natural philosopher Francis Bacon, is known
by garden historians for his essay « On Gardens » and for his agency in designing innovative
gardens that might reflect his more general hopes for a « conquest of the works of Nature ». Her
157
brother, Nathaniel Bacon, the first English amateur painter of note, was also an early advocate of
horticulture who was dedicated to growing new exotic plants in his own garden and spent time in
the Low Countries pursuing both of these arts. Lady Anne, as woman, has left us with almost no
testimony of her own knowledge of plants, though, as many an educated gentlewoman, she would
have been instructed in the properties of plants. This paper will focus on the one object that says
something about her appreciation and use of plants – the painted cabinet she commissioned or
painted herself for her home in Hawstead. The painted wainscoting brings together over 40 panels
inspired from a variety of European emblem books and 15 panels of various plants and herbs,
whose meaning has not been fully elicited. By comparing these fine vegetal depictions with the
rest of the impresa panels, as well as a number of contemporary herbals and her uncle’s and
brother’s writings on horticulture, this paper aims to unravel part of the hidden message of Anne
Drury Bacon’s silent herbal and show how it was intended to serve as a meditative tool that could
“govern” her soul.
3.
Hyunyoung Cho (George Mason University, Korea, hcho23<at>gmu.edu)
‘I was but an inverted tree’: plants and human agency in Andrew Marvell’s poetry
Focusing on esthetic appropriations of plants, I propose to analyze varying modes of interactions
with the plants experienced by human subjects in Andrew Marvell’s poetry. In “The picture of
Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” the poet imagines that the young girl “tames / The wilder
flowers, gives them names” (5); she endows an order on the surrounding natural world and has the
potential to “reform the errors of the spring” (27), creating an earthly paradise. In contrast to this
governing agency over plants imagined of a little girl, the poetic persona of “The Appleton House”
imagines himself to be at the receiving end at the heightened moment of his interactions with the
plants of the forest. In a striking inversion, the agency is assigned to a plant: it is “ivy” that “licks,
and clasps, and curls, and hales” the poet who dreams an immersion in the natural world. Between
these two opposing esthetic appropriations of plants can be placed other myriad human-plant
encounters of Marvell’s poetry. My paper aims to classify and situate the main threads of them in
relation to ideological discourses of the seventeenth century. Particularly, I will be interested in
moments of excess that seem to defy a clean fit with the prevailing discourses of the time and
consider their implications for our present ecocritical concerns. In that process, I hope to engage
with Prawdzik’s critique of presentist ecocriticism in his recent article of Andrew Marvell.
4.
Pierre Le Duff (Université de Strasbourg, France, pleduff<at>unistra.fr)
‘But a tust of Morning Grasse, / Both greene, and wither’d, ere the day-light passe’: Early
modern proto-environmentalism in George Wither’s works
“What our Forefathers planted, we destroy
Nay, all Mens labours, living heretofore,
And all our owne, we lavishly imploy
To serve our present Lusts; and, for no more”.
These lines appear in the subscriptio to emblem I-35 in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes
(1635), the picture of which shows a man planting a tree, surrounded by the Latin motto
“POSTERITATI” (“For posterity”). Although the poem briefly touches on the general allegorical
significance of the motif, it mainly laments the “Havocke and the Spoyle” that, it claims, results
from the unchecked and greedy exploitation of the English countryside. Wither, whose writings
158
during and after the Civil War are frequently associated with movements such as English
Republicanism and even the Levellers, thus contributes to a strand of proto-ecocriticism that has
already been identified in the works of some of his contemporaries, such as Drayton, Milton, and
Marvell. A profound attachment to the natural world, both in its physical reality and in its
allegorical implications, is notable throughout Wither’s long list of works which span half a
century of tumultuous English history. This paper shall take Wither’s emblem as a starting point
to explore how his views on the environment may have guided his writings as a Spenserian pastoral
poet, as a Satirist, as an emblem writer, and later as a Republican Pamphleteer.
S30: Cosmopolitans and Strangers: Literature, Culture and Conviviality in and beyond the
West
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30 and Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Isabel Carrera Suarez (University of Oviedo, Spain, icarrera<at>uniovi.es)
Ananya
Jahanara
Kabir
(King’s
College
London,
United
Kingdom,
ananya.kabir<at>kcl.ac.uk)
Recent discussions of (neo)cosmopolitanism (Gunew 2017, Mignolo 2002; Delanty 2012)
consider the cosmopolitan subject more likely to be found in the cross-cultural migrant, refugee or
‘stranger’ than in privileged movers, thus redefining the historical concept while effecting a
critique of globalization. Such theories aim to engage ethically and sustainably with cultures from
a planetary perspective (Spivak, Gilroy, Cheah). This seminar explores whether today the ‘migrant
condition’— and its multiple structures of belonging, questioning nationalisms and
globalizations— may constitute the basis for a cosmopolitan world-view, and that world literatures
are world-making activities which can resist and counteract exclusionary discourses.
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
1.
Cristina Riaño Alonso (University of Oviedo, Spain, rianocristina<at>uniovi.es)
The Racialized Stranger as a Cosmopolitan Subject: An Exploration of Tendai Huchu’s The
Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician (2015)
This paper delves into the discussion that views the stranger as a cosmopolitan subject by focusing
on Tendai Huchu’s novel The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician (2015). In this multilayered narrative, we follow the stories of three Zimbabwean immigrants in the capital city of
Scotland: The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. Through the Magistrate’s
interactions with his daughter’s white family-in-law, I will discuss the ambivalent capacity of the
encounter with the Other to constitute a site for the production of the racialized stranger (Ahmed
2000), as well as being endowed with potential to facilitate cosmopolitan transformation (Delanty
2012). Although the characters come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they all share a
common struggle to re-evaluate their identity in the new neoliberal capitalist context in which they
find themselves in Edinburgh. Drawing from spatial, time and affect theories, I will focus on the
emotional mapping of the city, exploring the potential of walking the city as both a mechanism to
reconcile identity conflicts, connecting Edinburgh and its culture with memories from the culture
in Zimbabwe; and a way of occupying and re-inhabiting the space, following Sara Ahmed’s
159
conceptualisation of “homing devices” (2006). Finally, I will interrogate to what extent this novel
contributes to Cheah’s conception of world-literature (2012).
2.
Carla Martínez del Barrio ( University of Oviedo, Spain, martinezbcarla<at>uniovi.es)
Mediated Representations of the Stranger in Refugee Tales (2016, 2017, 2019)
By focusing on the portrayal of refugee, asylum seeker and migrant girls in the trilogy Refugee
Tales (2016, 2017, 2019), this paper aims to reflect on the possible implications that arise as a
consequence of mediated representation (Spivak 1983) for these displaced people. In order to do
so, I will draw on Sara Ahmed’s analysis of strangers as constructed through presuppositions,
stereotypes and mental schemas that render them as threatening or dangerous to themselves and
their community (Ahmed 2000). Similarly, and in line with Bauman’s conceptualization of
strangers as defiant of binary patterns of identity – as they exist between two worlds, in one or the
other, in both or neither, depending on the social values at work (Bauman 2016) –, I will argue
that this concept is particularly useful to analyse contemporary feelings of hostility present in the
countries of destination (in this case, in the United Kingdom) and will explore the ambivalent
implications derived from the mediated literary representation of these experiences in this trilogy.
I will contend that while this mediation may prove problematic by virtue of depriving refugee and
migrant people of the opportunity to provide a first-person account of their experience, it may be
the first step needed towards achieving self-representation in the near future. I will conclude that
the ‘strange(r)ness’ found in the girls’ testimonies conveys the complexity and heterogeneity of
their subjectivities and shows an alternative truth or reality that challenges the hostile discourses
of the media and institutions.
3.
Sandeep Bakshi (Université de Paris, France, Sandeep.Bakshi<at>univ-paris-diderot.fr)
Decolonial Literature Meets Queer Migration: Ocean Vuong’s World-making as Healing
Reflecting upon the urgency of decolonial healing, this paper brings into focus the attempts of
literature as a critical category to connect strands of queerness and transnational migration.
Through a close reading of Ocean Vuong’s sole novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019),
I place the queer migrant subject at the centre of discussion on borders, diasporas – linguistic and
cultural – and decoloniality. Given the significance of healing as an intrinsic conceptualisation of
decolonial theory, my position paper uncovers those aspects of literary conception that engage
with migrant metaphors and queerness in a double bind.
Vuong’s writing unhinges literary creation from conventional heteronormative-nationalist borders
to securely fasten it to queer migration parameters and, in so doing, makes a case for decolonial
healing. The multiple exclusions in the host country and memorial/sensorial trauma of the
“deserted” (left-behind) geographical space contribute to the creation of the ‘refugee migrant’ that
lies outside the conventional realm of ‘elite’ knowledge-producing migration. However,
navigating through notions of critical cosmopolitanism (Mignolo, 2000) and conceptualisation of
convivial thinking (Gilroy, 2004), in this analysis of Vuong’s novel, I attempt to comprehend the
compelling contours of decolonial queer literature that encapsulates experience of migration,
family, language, intergenerational trauma and diasporas under the overarching reference to
healing.
160
4.
Esther Álvarez López (University of Oviedo, Spain, eal<at>uniovi.es)
Facing the Stranger: Hospitality and Hostility in Muslim Women’s Spoken Word
Performances
With the rise of Islamophobia, Muslims in general have come to embody for many the unfamiliar,
the unknown, the stranger. They have had to bear the hostility, fear and suspicion that their mere
presence provokes in people who see them only as ‘walking stereotypes’, in poet Saida Dahir’s
expression. Muslim women have faced further prejudice and discrimination due to their race,
gender and status, as some of them are refugees as well. In this paper, I will look at how US and
UK Muslim women use their spoken word performances not only to explore their identity and
their condition of ‘strangers’ in both the US and the UK, but also to break walls. Using the concepts
of hospitality —a critical idea discussed by Kant, Levinas and Derrida that is instrumental to
understand cosmopolitanism—and hostility (from hostis, stranger, enemy), I will analyze spoken
word performances as creative ways that Muslim women poets use to transform the audience’s
views and positions by moving beyond divisions, reaching beyond prejudice and limits, and thus
rearticulating the ways in which we relate to each other. They seek to achieve a transformation, an
act of receptivity (hospitality) towards the other that is ultimately “the fundamental act of the
ethical” (Benhabib 2006).
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Alessandra
Di
Pietro
(University
of
Bern,
Switzerland,
alessandra.dipietro<at>students.unibe.ch)
Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go: Cosmopolitanism in African Literatures in English
In recent years, the idea of cosmopolitanism has been reconfigured according to the ‘new
internationalism’, as defined by Homi K. Bhabha, through the transnational movements and
diasporic relocations that characterise today’s globalised society. In this sense, the cross-cultural
migrant is now considered a cosmopolitan subject, who also becomes an active agent in literary
productions. World literatures have shifted their attention to these new spaces of representation,
giving voice to the cultural realities that have always been considered as ‘peripheral’. Today,
among those literatures that go beyond the Eurocentric canon by opening up alternative worlds
through which counteract exclusionary discourses is the African literature of the Diaspora. Authors
such as Taiye Selasi, through her notion of ‘Afropolitanism’, are redefining contemporary African
Literatures in English. Using Pheng Cheah’s notion of the world-making powers of literature as a
theoretical framework, the paper will analyse Selasi’s celebrated novel Ghana Must Go in order
to demonstrate its relevance within the contemporary literary canon. I will argue how Selasi’s
representation of the different structures of belonging of a diasporic family, recounted through the
construction of hybrid identities and transcultural spaces, is representative of a new cosmopolitan
perspective of world literatures.
161
2.
Ángela Suárez Rodríguez (University of Oviedo, Spain, suarezrangela<at>uniovi.es)
Homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013): A Window onto
Cosmopolitan Strangeness
The interest in the figure of the stranger has grown significantly since its recognition as the
paradigmatic entity of today’s reality and a cosmopolitan subject (Rumford 2013: 17). Defined
mainly by his/her ability to negotiate the spaces of globalisation and promote new forms of social
solidarity with distant others (2013: 121), the cosmopolitan stranger is exemplified, among others,
by the contemporary homecomer (2013: 165). For this reason, the new Afropolitan narrative,
which distinguishes itself for rendering a transnational experience of being continually on the
move (Knudsen and Rahbek 2017: 118), in an anxious identity quest that usually involves a return
to Africa (Durán Almarza et al. 2017: 109), provides an enriching opportunity to study the
relationship between these two figures, specifically in their version as the ‘other’. Moreover, in
line with Vince Marotta’s (2017) critical views on the discourse of the cosmopolitan stranger, this
literature challenges the traditional fetishising of the immigrant-stranger as ‘victim’ and ‘passive’,
which is indeed inherent in the new approach to the condition of ‘strange(r)ness’. In these texts,
after all, returns to Africa tend to be portrayed as acts of agency and resistance to discrimination,
which, principally, are aimed at protecting one’s identity. By focusing on the image of
homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), the main purpose of this paper
is thus to contribute to the development of a wider understanding of the ‘cosmopolitan stranger’.
I contend that this is clearly embodied by the immigrant woman around whom Adichie builds her
novel.
3.
Miasol Eguibar Holgado (University of Oviedo, Spain, eguibarmiasol<at>uniovi.es)
Spatial Construction of the Stranger: Postcolonialism and the Multicultural City in David
Chariandy’s Soucouyant
Canada, and especially its urban centres, are constructed in contemporary socio-political
discourses as tolerant spaces where all cultures are respected and immigrants are welcome. The
influence of these ideas is very extensive and yet, despite these claims of acceptance and equality,
multicultural policies still place white subjects at the centre and reads non-white ethnicities as
marginalised others. In this context, and more specifically, in urban areas, the figure of the stranger
is often equated with that of the (unwanted) outsider. This paper follows approaches to this figure
that put it at the centre of experiences of globalization. Thus, the ambivalent figure of the stranger
questions established discourses of inclusion/exclusion. This paper analyses the novel Soucouyant
(2007), by Canadian writer David Chariandy. His characters, of Afro-Caribbean descent living in
Toronto, experience feelings of displacement from their homeland and of alienation in a hostile
urban hostland that is previously imagined as safe through ideals of hope. Yet these experiences
are also transcended through connections between the Caribbean and Canada. By analysing spatial
constructions through the figure of the stranger, this paper will illustrate how the urban space of
the city of Toronto and the postcolonial space of Trinidad are perceived and transformed in the
subjectivity of the diasporic self.
162
4.
Fernando Pérez García (University of Oviedo, Spain, perezfernando<at>uniovi.es)
Transmodern Strangers: Corporeity and trans-ethnic cosmopolitism in Wayde Compton’s
The Outer Harbour
The global city is the place of miscegenation, a space where cultures meet and a multiracial mosaic
is produced that maps its skin from exchange to shock. Cities are the tip of the iceberg where
national identities begin to break down or, paradoxically, to assert themselves as a defence
mechanism against the stranger (Ahmed; Marotta). In the case of Canada, despite the myth of
benevolence and tolerance, multiculturalism as a normative framework has been articulated around
discourses that suture non-white citizens externally or adjacent to the nation (Fleras; Walcott),
more like entrenched ethnic pluralism than as universal citizenship. From this paradoxical context
writes Wayde Compton, drawing a somatography (Soja) of the transcultural city of Vancouver and
offering a critical vision of normative socio-political discourses and ethnic nationalisms through
the figure of the stranger as a trickster, pointing out heterogeneous, dissonant or confluent
hybridizations, in a constant challenge to transgress homogenizing closures.
This paper will analyze the role of corporeity in the construction of the stranger in the speculative
fiction of the Black Canadian author Wayde Compton. The figures of craniopagus twins, illegal
immigration as a performance and holographic bodies as riot control devices highlight the
dimension of the stranger as a trickster, and its challenge to both normative multiculturalism
models and rigid, nationalist or ethnic communitarianism. From a transmodern perspective
(Rodríguez Magda), Compton's Afro-peripheral project aims to seek forms of trans-ethnic
cosmopolitanism, negotiated in the exchanges of daily coexistence and citizenship as a
universalizing element of urban space.
5.
Carolina Sánchez-Palencia (University of Seville, Spain, csanchez<at>us.es)
Bodies that Count: Grievability and Resistance in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)
In a context of globalization, displacement and diasporas, new scenarios of mobility and bordercrossing are being addressed within emergent postcolonial narratives. Written by British Muslim
author Kamila Shamsie against a background of radicalization, Islamophobia and oppressive
counter-terror politics, Home Fire (2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction) contests the discourses of
victimization and criminality that have consistently defined contemporary understandings of
migrant women. I draw on Judith Butler’s (2009) theorization on grievable lives and Achille
Mbembe’s (2003) notion of necropolitics to explain different forms of subjugation to the power
of death and mourning in contexts where the citizen is deprived of his/her rights and transformed
into a trespasser. Theresa May’s (UK Home Secretary in 2014) policy of stripping terror suspects
of their British citizenship is one of such contexts inspiring Shamsie’s text. In line with Simon
Gikandi’s belief that the “refugee is the Other of the cosmopolitan” (2010: 26) I address Shamsie’s
challenge to more utopian and romanticized discourses on cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2000; Bhabha
2005) through her depiction of characters that are subjected to “othering” practices in their
experience of legal ambiguity and the abiding condition of statelessness.
163
6.
Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez (University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), Spain,
pbastida<at>uib.es)
Imagining Conviviality: Strangeness, Migrancy and the Hope for a Better Future in Mohsin
Hamid’s Exit West
This paper intends to explore the ways in which the experiences of present-day migrants and
refugees are depicted in Mohsin Hamid’s widely-acclaimed novel Exit West (2017) in the light of
recent (neo)cosmopolitan approaches by Delanty (2012) and Gunew (2017), among others, as well
as theorisations on the stranger and the migrant by Ahmed (2000) and Marotta (2010). The plot of
the novel revolves around Nadia and Saeed, a young couple who are forced to flee from an
unknown Muslim country and whose experiences intersect with those of other refugees and
migrants from around the globe as they go through magical doors leading them to a diversity of
destinations, most of them in the prosperous West. As the narrative evolves, the open hostility
which welcomes them in Western countries – social rejection and state violence are part of their
everyday lives – is gradually followed by the governments’ attempts to negotiate the new global
reality and to understand the needs and requests of the new communities. Thus, Hamid’s novel
resorts to magical realism to imagine a future where conviviality and solidarity can be possible,
where the West can begin to understand the plights and sufferings of individuals from less
fortunate cultures, where the stranger is no longer a stranger and can eventually become an equal
human being, though the process towards the new reality is slow and not exempt from conflict.
S31: Seminar cancelled
S32: Postmodernism and After: A Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Response to
Postmodernism
Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Jaroslav Kušnír (University of Prešov, Slovakia, jaroslav.kusnir<at>unipo.sk)
Dan Horatiu Popescu (Partium Christian University, Romania, dhpopescu<at>yahoo.com)
As early as in the 1990s, the end of postmodernism started to be discussed, for example at the
International Colloquium in Stuttgart, Germany which was attended by the most prominent
postmodern authors and critics (Hassan, Federman, Barth). This session welcomes papers
analyzing a literary, philosophical, theoretical, film and artistic response to postmodernism,
especially postmodern literature and arts. Analyses of particular works of literature and art,
interdisciplinary approach and the critical analysis of new theories and philosophies related to the
post-postmodern culture are welcome.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
Mary Kate Azcuy (Monmouth University, United States, mazcuy<at>monmouth.edu)
Metamodernism and Flannery O’Connor’s “The River”
My intertextual reading of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River” (1953)—from A Good
Man is Hard to Find (1955)—relates to metanarratives and metamodernism. Akker and
Vermeulen’s explain metamodernism as a pendulum that “oscillates between the modern and the
164
postmodern…. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it
back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward
enthusiasm. (“Notes” 5-6). O’Connor’s story depicts the archetypal journey of a doomed, young
child, Harry. His quest is an absurd and ironic search for meaning in spaces and places—in the
mid-twentieth-century, post-war southern USA—beyond his corrupt and meaningless family’s
urban apartment. He sees his world as a wasteland, as he moves into the rural southern landscape,
with his guide, the evangelized babysitter, Mrs. Connin. Harry learns of God and being saved, via
the babysitter and the teen-Protestant preacher, Bevel, who baptizes Harry in the river. Harry’s
metanarrative layers and persona—from the ancient Aeneas, traveling through the depressed,
modern, post-Civil War south to the post-WW2, postmodern-schizoid (Guattari and Deleuze)—
that merge with Harry/Bevel. (Harry has renamed himself Bevel.) He returns, alone, to the red
river and enacts his misunderstanding of sacrifice, death, and salvation. O’Connor’s creates an
ironic end for triadic Harry. The only witness of the child’s death is Mr. Paradise, who also fails
to save the child, and watches the child drift away into the river.
2.
Eniko Maior (Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, enikomaior<at>yahoo.com)
Postmodernism in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
In my paper I want to deal with Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) and the
problems of alienation or sense of isolation that is generated not by the ethnic belonging of the
protagonist of the novel but by his age. Lenny Abramov, another Russian Jewish American
character in this fictional world created by Shteyngart is an old fellow unable to connect with his
age. In this dystopian society youngsters are important and age is considered to be something very
negative. Shteyngart presents virtualized youngsters who do not care for the elderly. They think
that only the young ones are important for the society and the others have to die and give space to
them. Lenny is no longer young and has little to give to this teenage obsessed world. Lenny’s
ethnic identity is not an additional burden that he has to carry. In this work age plays an important
role and ethnic identity is hardly a question. The characters of the novel carry Hebrew names and
Lenny’s workplace is in a synagogue but in this novel the protagonist’s ethnic identity does not
play a vital role. The task of my paper is to show whether the protagonist manages to cope with
this world or he is doomed forever.
3.
Sergio Lopez Sande (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain,
sergio.sande<at>usc.es)
Chasing the Self: David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” and the New Insincerities of the
Late Postmodern
David Foster Wallace’s response to postmodernism can be found in many of his works. The nature
of this response, which took the form of a hyper-awareness of the limitations inherent to the
movement and the work of his predecessors, has been widely discussed over the past decades.
Parallels between Wallace and Barth, Borges, DeLillo and Pynchon, to name but a few, have been
abundant since the rise to prominence of Wallace studies that followed his death in 2008. In this
context, and despite the many contributions that can be found in related literature, the debate on
the state of the postmodernist question in turn-of-the-century fiction appears hardly resolute. The
disputability of the unshattered self, which has been at the core of postmodernism for decades,
remains in Wallace a central theme. Through my analysis of the short story “Good Old Neon,” I
165
will seek to elucidate how Wallace’s attempt to put together the fragments of the literary self after
the postmodernist challenge speaks of a development of a new awareness of the consequences of
postmodernism, rather than a turn to a sensibility beyond it. This shall hopefully reveal how
Wallace’s frustration towards disintegration and dishonesty, as well as the looping rhetoric that he
used to try to mend the epistemological monoliths that postmodernism’s very premises had
disrupted, is not but a result of his own incapacity to move past its impasses, rather than proof of
his successful overcoming of the movement.
4.
Matthias Stephan (Department of English, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus
University, Denmark, engms<at>cc.au.dk)
Transmodern Identity in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World
In attempt to understand identity in the current age, which builds upon an era of postmodernism,
scholars have argued for a new vision of the future, one which champions positive values and
discards those aspects of society deemed harmful or detrimental to sustainability, tolerance, and
cooperation. This view is a “transmodern” position, a position that reacts to movements in
modernism and postmodernism and proposes a way forward, a constructive, rather than a
deconstructive, vision for humanity. A transmodern construction of identity, as I have argued
elsewhere, is built upon the notions of postmodern identity (in which epistemological and
ontological markers are eroded) to construct a new formation – however with acknowledgement
that choices are constrained, not completely free.
Siri Hustvedt’s 2014 novel The Blazing World, deals with the interplay between discourse and
materials, as well as discourse and the physiological body – placing her within new materialist
frames and questioning the completeness of the linguistic turn. Her protagonist, Harry Burden,
creates an artistic project, Maskings, which sets to challenge presuppositions of traditional identity
markers such as sex, gender and race. This paper considers the idea of a transmodern formulation
of identity as a by-product of this potential intersection. The backgrounds of the protagonist, the
focus on various class, racial and ethnic backgrounds, point towards a diversity of experience that
modernism and postmodernism do not specifically address in their formulations, and the question
becomes whether a construction of transmodernism might be able to account for that lack.
5.
Manuel J. Sousa Oliveira (University of Porto, Portugal, mjsousaoliveira<at>gmail.com)
“I haven’t yet decided”: Indeterminacy in Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium
The postmodern episteme, according to Ihab Hassan, was ruled by two crucial tendencies:
indeterminacy and immanence (or, ‘indetermanence’). As contemporary literature turns toward a
new sort of fiction, this paper intends to reconsider indeterminacy, and argue for its enduring
relevance today. To that end, Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) will be read as one
such indeterminate text. First, drawing on recent theoretical discussions, the notion of
indeterminacy will be understood as foregrounding a shifting of the grounds of meaning in the
text, thus creating an undecidability between a vast array of unstable meanings. At its best,
indeterminacy engages the reader by allowing for a playfulness which opens up the possibilities
for meaning production. Second, this paper will sketch those textual and narrative aspects which
generate indeterminacy in Travels in the Scriptorium – aspects such as displacement of references,
or narrative discontinuities. It appears that most of these aspects are constructed into the text
deliberately in order to raise questions instead of providing answers. Rather than being simply
166
meaningless play, here indeterminacy contributes to a critique of the responsibilities of fiction
which has been largely absent from postmodern texts. In this sense, the novel can be seen as
standing at the crossroads of a shift towards a new sensibility in Auster’s later writing, rather than
a return to a postmodern mode of irony. By recovering one of postmodernism’s inaugural ideas,
this approach recognizes how the playfulness and undecidability inherited from postmodern fiction
can be reconsidered productively.
6.
Jaroslav Kušnír (University of Prešov, Slovakia, jaroslav.kusnir<at>unipo.sk)
Post-Postmodernism, Digimodernism and Post-Racial Aesthetics in Touré´s Soul City
In his novel Soul City, Touré depicts a future/istic vision of the American city reminiscent of Los
Angeles to which the main protagonist Cadillac Jackson, a journalist, is sent to write on a mayoral
election. The novel, however, eventually turns out to be not only a parody of a political campaign,
but also a futuristic vision of the American life in a post-racial society as understood by R. Saldívar.
In several of his works, Saldívar argues there is a recent tendency in American literature he defines
as post- postmodern literature using post-racial aesthetics as a response to postmodern literature,
philosophy and aesthetics including some of the works of Touré. The paper will analyze the way
the author uses narrative techniques and visions of the world close to post-postmodernism
(Saldívar) and Digimodernism (Kirby) as a response to postmodern vision of the world and a
depiction of reality. In addition, the paper will discuss both a construction and a deconstruction of
ethnic identity which is close to the notion of post-racial aesthetics as understood by R. Saldívar.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Irina Popova (World Literature Department, Moscow State University, Russia,
irapo<at>mail.ru)
Tracing the Recent Developments of the British Novel and the Context of PostPostmodernism
Peter Ackroyd’s First Light (1989) can be considered the first British parodic reaction to
postmodernist theory and practice and will be treated as such in this paper. I will then analyse
novels by Graham Swift focusing on the four recent ones – The Light of Day (2003), Tomorrow
(2007), Wish You Were Here (2011), Mothering Sunday (2017) – and try to show in what way they
can be regarded as definitely post-postmodernist, or radically post-ironic. The same post-ironic
traits can be traced in some works of the once postmodernist novelists such as Ian McEwan (e.g.
On Chesil Beach (2007)) and Julian Barnes (e.g. The Noise of Time (2016)). Novels by a few
authors who never wrote within postmodernist tradition will also be considered in the attempt to
show whether they have at all been tinted by that tradition or whether and in what ways they are
totally different: study of the works by Sebastian Faulks, John Lanchester, Mark Haddon, Zadie
Smith et al. written in the recent two decades will hopefully help me to fulfill the task. They may
also enable me to demonstrate the contemporary literary scene in Britain as a highly heterogeneous
one.
167
2.
Elena Pinyaeva (The Institute for Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of
National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia, el.pinyaeva<at>yandex.ru)
Towards a Poetics of the Metamodernism in Challenging Conventional Historical Discourse
and Gender Binaries in J. Winterson’s The Daylight Gate
This paper intends to present J. Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012) as an illustrative example
of a radically new form of creative writing that, while displaying recognizable postmodernist traits
such as metafiction, eclecticism, intertextuality, the fragmentation of discourse and the erasure of
boundaries, fits into an innovative non-ironic kind of narrative that symbolizes a significant shift
of cultural paradigm from postmodern ambiguities to postmillennial trends of metamodernity by
deploying Neo-Romantic sensiblitity with a feminist/lesbian flavor to defend female bonding in a
queer love triangle; its formidable mixture of multiplicity and hyperreality compounded by its use
of the Gothic thriller and folklore places The Daylight Gate at the crossroads of metamodernity,
and creates an unresolved tension between conventional dichotomies such as patriarchal/feminist,
normative/the other, orthodox/heretical and real/magical. Winterson’s adherence to the subjective
storytelling in historical discourse allows her to open up a discursive space in which univocal
interpretations of history are rejected in favor of alternative histories presented by the minoritarian
voices of the marginalized to finally highlight peripheral viewpoints on the 1612 Lancashire Witch
Trials’s representation. Moreover, Winterson’s deployment of the queer Gothic disrupts any
attempts at reconstructing a reliable account of historical events due to its associations with the
tabooed sexual transgression and liminality, and reveals the performative nature of gendered
identities, the latter shown as discursively produced and legitimized by the male power structures.
3.
Marta Pérez Escolar (Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Spain, martaperez<at>uloyola.es)
Beatriz Valverde (Universidad de Jaén, Spain, bvalverd<at>ujaen.es)
Analysis of the Scopic Impulse in “The National Anthem” and “15 Million Merits” (Black
Mirror) as a Response to the Phenomenon of Postmodern Hypervisibility
Nowadays, we live surrounded by an increasing number of fabricated versions of reality – what
Lippmann (1922) called stereotypes- which absorb the communicative space. This is one of the
most distinguishing features of the postmodern era. Given this, examining the potential value of
the image (Sartori, 1998) to influence public opinion in societies becomes fundamental. Theorists
like Lipovetsky (2006) define the postmodern society as a community characterized by hyperspectacularization and express the need to challenge this model. In this vein, Gérard Imbert (2000)
coined the term hypervisibility to define the process by which visibility and promotion have
become a sine qua non for existence in our present society. Moreover, making use of new media,
the public discourse has clearly invaded the private sphere: our intimacy is publicly shown to the
world, and this fact is not only more naturally accepted each day but appreciated and even
demanded by the public. Consequently, the line between public and private spheres is more blurred
than ever before. Drawing upon Imbert’s analysis of the significant role of pathos ⎯in the form of
emotions⎯, we will examine the dramatization of the scopic impulse in “The National Anthem”
and “15 Million Merits” (Black Mirror) as a response to the phenomenon of postmodern
hypervisibility in our current social scenario.
168
4.
Dmytro Ihorovych Drozdovskyi (Department of World Literature of Shevchenko Institute
of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kiev, Ukraine,
drozdovskyi<at>ukr.net)
Fredric Jameson's Postmodern Theory as the Introduction to the Theory of PostPostmodernism
The purpose of the paper is to revise the reception of the views of the postmodern theorist
F. Jameson from the post-postmodern (J. Nealon’s) perspective. The key object of the analysis is
V. Chernetskyi’s study and the reflections on this subject in the contemporary British compendia
(e.g. The contemporary British novel since 2000; edited by James Acheson, 2017; The Routledge
Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction; edited by Daniel O'Gorman and Robert
Eaglestone, 2018). The methods: hermeneutic approach. F. Jameson's theoretical visions are
considered in the aspect of their relevance for studying the philosophical and narrative specifics of
post-postmodernism, in particular on the material of D. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which belongs to
the significant works of literature of the 21st century. The discussed novel is one of the key in the
aspect of affirmation of the thesis about the “end of postmodernism” and the need to study new
literature after postmodernism in F. Jameson's Antinomies of Realism. F. Jameson’s theory of the
novel is not limited to postmodern narrative practices but is rooted in the philosophical discourse
of both I. Kant’s idealism and materialism (Marxism) and, moreover, in ontological realism, which
determines the crystallization of the thematic units of the British post-postmodern novel. The lines
of poetic and philosophical dialogue between two cultural periods (postmodernism and postpostmodernism) have been discussed.
S33: Reorientations: Reading Neo-Victorianism in Contemporary Culture
Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey, United Kingdom, p.pulham<at>surrey.ac.uk)
Marie-Luise
Kohlke
(University
of
Swansea,
United
Kingdom,
m.l.kohlke<at>swansea.ac.uk)
This panel explores the affective and cognitive responses of readers/viewers of neo-Victorian texts.
It considers how the polytemporal dynamics between writers, readers and critics of neoVictorianism reorientate and/or disorientate textual reception eliciting or short-circuiting empathy.
In addition, it examines the tension between ‘unknowing’ and ‘knowing’ readers who negotiate
immersion versus critical distance, and the strategies of adaptation, interpretation and interpolation
that such (re)positionings involve. Seminar participants are invited to reflect on the comparative
effectiveness (or failure) of such (re)orientations in relation to temporal contexts of production and
reception. How do such strategies impact engagements with the nineteenth-century past? What
manner of cultural memory work is thus enabled?
1.
Charlotte Wadoux (Université Paris 3- University of Kent, France and United Kingdom,
cwadoux<at>gmail.com)
Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London as transfictional work
“Spenser did not want to be further confused: each time a new interpretation of Little Dorrit was
sprung upon him, it subtly devalued his own and it took a conscious effort of will for him to reassert
169
it.” (Ackroyd, 85). Spenser Spender’s confusion mimics the reader’s disorientation when
confronted to Peter Ackroyd’s “labyrinthine writing” (Gibson & Wolfreys, 2) in The Great Fire
of London. The novel propels the reader on a hermeneutic quest marked by a meta-reflection on
adaptation and rewriting, thus providing “a response to the trace of the other text” (Wolfreys, 8384) or an echo chamber of Dickens’s resonance in the twentieth century. Considering The Great
Fire of London as a transfiction that is a “diegetic migration” (Saint-Gelais, 10-11), this paper
contends that the novel allows for a reflection on memory work as adaptation.
The novel also presents a tension between its explicit game with Little Dorrit and a subtler
game with Ackroyd’s own works on Dickens and London. The second contention of this paper is
thus that the novel offers a palimpsestic autofiction through, amongst others, the character of
Rowan Philipps which enables a reflection on the role of the neo-Victorian writer. The novel is
peppered with references to Ackroyd’s research for his future works and thus provides a mise en
abime of his writing process which sheds light on the ambiguity of the genre of his Dickens as well
as of his London: a Biography. This paper thus wishes to show that this intertwining offers a
striking subterranean reflection on historiography.
2.
Barbara Braid (University of Szczecin, Poland, barbara.braid<at>usz.edu.pl)
Haunted houses and heterochronic spaces: neo-Victorian time in The Living and the Dead
(2016) and The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
In “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault wrote that “we are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in
the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed”
(1986). The current culture’s temporal anxieties linked to this network of simultaneous
interconnections has one of its outlets in the neo-Victorian rendition of a haunted house motif. A
haunted space is, generally speaking, a space “in which distinctions between past and present
are questioned, violated or erased” (Freeman 2017). Most often, gothic fiction focuses on the
past haunting the present; yet, in the mingled juxtapositions of time relations that are neoVictorianism, the opposite is possible: the past is haunted by the present.
While this motif in gothic fiction has been used before – most prominently, in Alejandro
Amenábar’s The Others (2001), I discuss two instances of television series: a more obviously neoVictorian The Living and the Dead (BBC, 2016) and The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018)
located in a haunted Victorian mansion. I look at these texts of culture as ones which represent the
haunted house as a heterochronic space, that is, one in which there is “an absolute break with (…)
traditional time” (Foucault 1986). I also argue that this depiction of time – as one of the characters
of The Haunting of Hill House says, more of a confetti than a single line – is a staple element of
neo-Victorianism, which therefore may be understood not a descendant of Victorianism, but a
tangled network where the past and the present haunt each other.
3.
Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey, United Kingdom, p.pulham<at>surrey.ac.uk)
Affect, Space and Temporality: Reading Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger as Neo-Victorian
“cofactor”
In their introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), Patricia Clough & Jean
Halley argue that ‘Affects require us … to enter the realm of causality because the affects belong
simultaneously to both sides of the causal relationship. They illuminate … both our power to affect
the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these
170
two powers’. Unsurprisingly, affect studies, involving questions of mind and body, reason and
passion have been informed by feminist studies, theories of the emotions, and queer studies, and,
more recently, have become significant in the reimagination of literary critique. In her 2015 book,
The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski asks us to challenge the ways in which we engage in literary
criticism, to counter what she calls ‘militant’ readings based on what Paul Ricoeur identifies as a
‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. In her final chapter, Felski suggests a different mode of reading, one
which recognises the text as ‘coactor’, as ‘something that makes a difference, that helps makes
things happen’. This paper aims to examine what it means to read the novel as ‘coactor’,
particularly when the text in question engages in a series of polytemporal cues that simultaneously
signify and challenge the novel’s status as ‘neo-Victorian’. To that end, this paper will explore
Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) which, as Ann Heilmann has shown in her 2012 article
‘Spectres of the Victorians in the Neo-Forties Novel’, plays with Victorian Gothic though set in
the twentieth century. This paper will argue that it is the novel’s affective resonances that allow it
to shift and slip between textual and temporal spaces.
4.
Marie-Luise
(Mel)
Kohlke
(Swansea
University,
m.l.kohlke<at>swansea.ac.uk)
‘Cross-Cultural Empathy in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Biofiction’
United
Kingdom,
The investment in recovering silenced or marginalised nineteenth-century subjects and voices is
widely regarded as indicative of neo-Victorianism’s implicit ethical agenda of historical
conscience-raising, the pursuit of symbolic justice and a more inclusive commemoration of past
suffering. Yet comparatively little critical attention has been paid to texts’ strategic manipulation
of reader responses, so as to facilitate audience empathy and sometimes outright identification with
historical victims, not just across temporal but also ethnic/racial, spatial and cultural divides. This
paper unpicks the complex dynamics of reader affiliations with traumatised subalterns across a
range of neo-Victorian fictions and biofictions, including Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006)
and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008). Analysing the problematics surrounding cross-cultural
empathy in light of the risks of appropriation, instrumentalisation, and over-writing, this paper
explores the disorientations produced by imaginative projections into the place of the ‘Other’, and
the kinds of narrative techniques that enable, or conversely disable, ethically responsible responses
to past suffering. To what extent can readers maintain the ‘empathic unsettlement’ advocated by
the historian Dominik LaCapra vis-à-vis the second-hand witnessing and consumption of traumas,
especially in the case of first-person narrations? Does cross-cultural empathy encourage a more
self-conscious engagement with non-heroic national histories, or does it undermine critical
memory work through unreflective affective immersion in other people’s suffering, without due
regard for one’s own society’s implication therein? This paper traces the unavoidable tensions
produced by the flows of cross-cultural empathy, accentuated by present-day ideological agendas,
competing global identity politics, and postcolonial reception contexts. I argue that spectacles of
subaltern collective suffering and personalised microhistories of trauma demand especially
sensitive negotiation, lest neo-Victorian texts end up imitating the exploitative conditions that their
writers set out to critique.
171
S34: English Printed Books, Manuscripts and Material Studies
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30 and 15:30-17:30
Co-Convenors:
Prof. Carlo Bajetta (Università della Valle d'Aosta, Italy, c.bajetta<at>univda.it)
Dr. Guillaume Coatalen (University of Cergy-Pontoise, France, guillaume.coatalen<at>ucergy.fr)
Dr. Ileana Sasu (Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, Poitiers, France,
sasuileana<at>gmail.com)
Dr. Daniel Starza Smith (King’s College,
London, United Kingdom,
daniel.s.smith<at>kcl.ac.uk)
This panel will focus on the physicality of English printed books and manuscripts—whether they
be strictly literary or not—in an attempt to discuss textual circulation, influence, and reception
alongside material aspects, issues of palaeography, as well as questions of methodology and
practice overview.
Scholars are invited to share their experience in dealing with these issues: How do the material
features of the page influence the text’s interpretation and reading practices? To what extent is the
circulation of a text linked to its medium? Is it possible to apprehend contents from texts we have
not seen?
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Angela Andreani (University of Milan, Italy, angela.andreani<at>gmail.com)
Early modern Celtic-English wordlists: manuscript and print
Throughout the Tudor and Stuart period, and especially against the backdrop of the Elizabethan
conquest of Ireland, English colonists, travellers and scholars began collecting lexicographical and
etymological information about Irish and speculated about its affinity with Welsh. This was
happening decades before the systematic study of the Celtic languages flourished leading to the
definitive demonstration of their relatedness. Evidence of these early inquiries survives in the form
of wordlists, proto-dictionaries, glossaries or phrasebooks. In this paper I will discuss the known
wordlists and some hitherto underexploited manuscript evidence to give an account of their scope
and examine variation in their forms. I will concentrate in particular on the relationship between
scope and medium, to understand how knowledge and/or assumptions about the Celtic languages
circulated in manuscript and print.
2.
David
Gehring
(University
of
Nottingham,
United
David.Gehring<at>nottingham.ac.uk)
Books, Manuscripts, and the Personal Archive of Robert Beale (c.1541-1601)
Kingdom,
This paper will be examining the collecting habits of Robert Beale – religious exile, legal scholar,
diplomatic intelligencer, and Clerk of the Privy Council during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At
the time of his death in 1601, Beale’s personal archive included hundreds of printed books in a
range of languages and dozens of manuscript volumes containing both personal papers and arcana
imperii. The archive was a product of Beale’s peregrinations in the Holy Roman Empire and
France during the 1550s and 1560s, as well as his comparatively more sedentary career in London
172
at the heart of the English government from 1571 onwards. By examining Beale’s collecting
habits, personal annotations, and correspondence, we can get a sense of how his mind worked, the
direction of his political and religious leanings, and where he situated himself within both
particularly English as well as broadly European ideological geographies. Of course, we cannot
tell everything about a person from what they owned or supposedly read, but we can get a sense.
This paper will argue, if cautiously at the level of a case study, that Beale’s archive was much
more than a repository of political and religious information; rather, it was a window into a mental
worldview shared by many of his compatriots at home in England and across the Channel on the
European mainland.
3.
Anne-Laure De Meyer (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle,
al.demeyer<at>gmail.com)
Sir Kenelm Digby’s reading of The Chronicle of the Kings of England
France,
Chronicles and histories are commonplace in the 17th century – they are used to instruct pupils, to
prepare gentlemen to government, and to provide entertainment and food for thought. How these
books were read, however, is little known. This paper aims to show how an individual reader was
informed not only by his personal interests but also by his understanding of what history is and
should be.
Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), author of several treatises on physics, metaphysics and religious
polemics, had a keen interest in collecting manuscripts, perusing recently published books and
circulating those he found insightful. It comes as no surprise that, when the printer Daniel Frere
published Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle of the Kings of England, Digby should have purchased it
diligently, inscribed his famous vindicate tibi on the title page and annotated the content – to a
certain extent converting this printed book into manuscript. The close proximity of print and
handwritten comment allows to hear concurrently the two voices of the chronicler and of his
reader.
This paper will analyse Digby’s aims and ideas through his annotations while reading the
Chronicle. His marks provide an example of how the Chronicle was received and what he was
looking for when reading it. A breakdown of the handwritten notes will give insight into Digby’s
interest in religious matters and well-phrased sayings, while opening space for a direct criticism
of the author’s work and the perceived inconsistencies in his writing, and more generally in the
practice of writing history.
4.
Beatrice Fuga (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle, France, beatrice.fuga<at>sorbonnenouvelle.fr)
No less profitable than pleasant: The cultural significance of frontispieces and title pages in
Renaissance Italian books in translation
If nowadays a book’s cover reveals very little on its contents and instead attracts the reader’s
attention through other advertising means, in the early modern print market the author would
usually, though briefly, elucidate the book’s topic on the title page. What the title could not convey
with stereotypical formulations such as “no less profitable than pleasant” was left to a tell-tale
frontispiece, meant to decorate the book and transform it into a valuable, refined object that the
reader would purchase to assert a certain level of cultivation. This paper will explore the woodcut
and engraving techniques, employed to carve the plates and often reused for multiple works. I will
173
argue that an image could be used by the printer – and the author, when he oversaw the printing
process – to suggest a precise message, addressed to a specific readership, on the contents of a
book. I will focus on translated Italian books because of the general suspicion aroused by the
English appropriation of enthralling Italian authors. I shall explore how frontispieces and print
images inside books were employed by English printers to justify – to the public as well as to the
Stationer’s Register – the author’s choice of subject and an eventual parting from the supposed
Italian wantonness. I will analyse images taken from the earliest editions of G. Fenton and W.
Painter’s refashioning of Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554) and from other “Italianated” works. I
shall attempt to demonstrate how, by looking at the illustrations and title pages, we can find
invaluable information about the contents of these books and, by extension, about their readers.
5.
Christina Sandhaug (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway,
christina.sandhaug<at>inn.no)
Dancing courtiers and running titles: the Stuart court masque from stage to page
English Stuart court masques were lavish, spectacular, one-off events staged for an exclusive and
limited audience and designed to glorify the monarch and his court. Written accounts of these
events not only transfer them from stage to page, but occasion reorientations in production and
reception, opening the court masque up to several voices, broader audiences and alternative
interpretations.
This paper discusses the implications for circulation and interpretation of this process for George
Chapman’s The Memorable Masque (1613), looking specifically at the significance of the running
titles of the printed account published the same year. This masque celebrates the wedding between
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Frederick of the Palatinate, and it was, as so often, paid for by the
Inns of court. During performance, the presence of the sponsors was eclipsed by the royal presence
and the importance of the occasion. In the printed account, however, the running titles span every
double spread and make sure the reader never forgets the provenance of the masque. The paper
explores the interpretive potential of such page features with reference to the printed account as a
whole, arguing that zooming in on individual typographical features must be tested against more
holistic readings.
The paper thus addresses two of the issues posed as questions in the seminar description,
concerning the influence of material features of the page and how the medium affects circulation,
and invites discussions of methodology.
6.
Silvia Riccardi (University of Freiburg, Germany, silvia.riccardi<at>anglistik.unifreiburg.de)
The Page Embodied: Chaos and Order in the Layout of The Four Zoas
In its heavily reworked pages, The Four Zoas is the only prophecy where William Blake’s creative
endeavor is physically manifested and interlaced with his own calligraphy in a form of handwritten
manuscript. On the one hand, Blake seems to rigidly enclose textual spaces, where the body of the
text can be virtually confined into a box. On the other hand, some pages present difficulties in
discerning the textual from the designed area. Namely, the text breaks into the design and the
design breaks into the text. How can the reader, then, find what Blake calls ‘the bounding line’
174
beyond the apparent chaos of the draft? What are the dynamics regulating the struggle of written
and drawn forms, blurred and defined lines, on the inconsistent pages of The Four Zoas?
This paper approaches the layout of Blake’s incomplete manuscript from the reader’s implicit
strategy for integrating text and image. The aim is to propose a negotiation between the two media
beyond the seemingly chaotic state of the sketched page. To illustrate how this yields the
identification of Blake’s bounding line, three cases are proposed and scrutinized herein: textual
layout becoming an integral element of hidden designs, written script flooding the graphic setting,
and illustrations intruding into the written space. Examining these graphic phenomena will be the
focus of this study in favor of the argument that the power of the manuscript is inherently tied to
its state of (apparent) incompletion.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Anna
Swärdh
(Karlstad
and
Uppsala
anna.swardh<at>engelska.uu.se)
Helena Northampton’s supplicatory letter to the Earl of Sussex
Universities,
Sweden,
This essay examines the supplicatory letter the Swedish-born Helena, Marchioness of
Northampton, addressed to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex, in 1576 or 1577, hoping he
would help her regain access to Elizabeth I. The paper briefly situates the letter within the early
modern patronage system and the court environment, and within the field of early modern letterwriting in general, and the supplicatory letter in particular. In the letter, a number of rhetorical
strategies are employed to create positions for both supplicant and addressee, designed to raise pity
and benevolence mainly through ethos and pathos and this way reach the desired goal of regaining
royal presence. A tension can be detected between the letter’s stated sentiment of “utter confusion”
and its highly formalised expression, indicative of the letter’s rhetorical situation and especially
the constraints related to its sender’s social status.
Specifically, the paper discusses the likelihood of having employed a scribe in the writing of the
letter, looking at rhetorical as well as material evidence for this (language mastery, turn of phrase,
mise-en-page). The paper also accounts for the editorial history of the letter, looking at how
translation, transcription and editing have handled its content. Finally, the paper raises questions
about the damaged state of the letter, older photographic material showing pieces no longer extant.
2.
Yona Dureau (University of Lyon-St-Etienne, France, kinbot<at>free.fr)
The numerous problems of digitalized versions of the manuscripts of the Lopez Trial
I have ordered and bought a numerical version of all the manuscripts associated with the Lopez
Trial and to my dismay, I have only been able to use two of the items.
Using the digitised version was almost impossible, except for one item. For the second manuscript
I could decipher, I had to print out a coloured version of the e-mailed digitised manuscript to be
able to read it. The print-out version is interesting because it permitted to enhance the contrast of
the original document. Nevertheless, even as full-size reproduction, my experience comprised a
form of return to the materialized document which showed the limits of digitalization.
After this first step, I experienced some new difficulties as the different scripts used different
alphabets, and some were really beyond readability.
175
Some of these documents have never been deciphered to this day because of the state of the original
document.
I propose to show examples of the two steps of my experience with the Lopez affair documents,
to conclude that research should compose with all means, while defining and setting the limits of
interpretation on a clear basis.
3.
Velid Beganović (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, v.b.borjen<at>googlemail.com)
Textual Gardening: Some Aspects of Authorship and Editing on the Example of Dimitrije
Mitrinović's 1920-1921 “World Affairs”
This paper focuses on a series of articles by the poet and philosopher Dimitrije Mitrinović, first
published under the pseudonym M. M. Cosmoi in A. R. Orage's British weekly The New Age. The
column, entitled „World Affairs“, ran from 19 August 1920 to 13 October 1921 and totaled at 63
articles, each a page and a half in length. Out of the 63 articles printed in The New Age the first 17
were written by Orage himself, based on his conversations with Mitrinović. The authorship of
these 17 articles is therefore worth examining in and of itself. The column was never reprinted
until 1987, when a selection was published for the centenary of Mitrinović's birth as Certainly,
Future: Selected Writings by Dimitrije Mitrinović. Selected, edited, introduced and annotated by
H. C. Rutherford, Mitrinović‘s friend and colleague, this book contained only some of the articles
and saw a number of large and small editorial interventions into the original texts, mostly to the
detriment of the column as a whole. I analyse these editorial changes and the complicated authorial
history of the articles as informed by the theoretical works of Jack Stilinger, especially his three
’90s works centred on the author-text-reader triangle, starting with Multiple Authorship and the
Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), in order to ask whether conscious editing is necessarily also
conscientious.
4.
Wojciech Drąg (University of Wrocław, Poland, moontauk<at>gmail.com)
Material Loss: B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Anne Carson’s Nox
B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) and Anne Carson’s Nox (2009) are among the most
formally inventive and materially unique literary responses to personal loss. The first novel-in-abox in English literature, The Unfortunates is a poignant account of the premature death of
Johnson’s best friend Tony Tillinghast. The lack of binding of the book’s 27 sections has been
interpreted as reflecting the randomness of cancer and the impossibility of the time-bound process
of mourning. Also contained in a box, Carson’s elegy is printed on a 25-metre-long concertinaed
scroll, which contains a collage of textual and visual fragments of various artefacts connected with
Carson’s dead brother.
This paper considers the implications of the material properties of The Unfortunates and
Nox for their representation of loss and mourning. I shall argue that both the card-shuffle structure
and the scroll format accentuate the ongoingness of mourning and convey scepticism about the
possibility of its completion. I will also examine the significance of encasing the contents of both
elegies in coffin-like boxes, as well as the importance of the extensive use of the blank page and
fragmentation. I shall also analyse the effect of Carson’s employment of the poetics of the
scrapbook, constructed through collage-like juxtapositions of cut-outs and photographs from the
family album. In my discussion of the strategies of coming to terms with loss, I will draw on
176
Patricia Rae’s concept of “resistant mourning,” which conceives of mourning as a potentially
never-ending process and expresses wariness of the imperative of healing and “moving on.”
S35: Forms of Refugee Writing
Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Gerd Bayer (FAU Erlangen, Germany, gerd.bayer<at>fau.de)
Vanessa Guignery (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, vanessa.guignery<at>enslyon.fr)
This seminar will study the formal limits and means of expression found in contemporary refugee
writing. Contributors will therefore examine such aspects as narrative modes, focalization and
voice, genre affiliation, instability and experimentation, use of interiority and the relationship to
traditions of life writing. Our aim is to focus on examples of fictional or non-fictional refugee
writing that move beyond the realistic mode of journalistic writing and instead draw on lyrical,
fragmented or dramatic forms of expression. Contributors may also examine the mechanics of
form as a means to lend expression to pain, suffering, and trauma.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Vanessa Guignery (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, vanessa.guignery<at>enslyon.fr)
Destabilising Form in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Helon Habila’s Travelers (2019)
As noted by Claire Gallien, “Refugee literature and arts […] ask fundamental questions about how
to articulate experiences of the limit” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54.6: 738). The condition
of being a refugee involves instability and a fragmentation of the self, first because of the
“unhealable rift [that is] forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and
its true home” (to quote Edward Said about exile), and then due to the lack of hospitality to
refugees often observed in Western countries. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which
literature may mirror that instability formally, in fictional representations of the contemporary
refugee crisis, particularly in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Helon Habila’s Travelers
(2019). While some writers may choose to represent the experience of refugees through realistic
narratives or testimonies relying on linearity, causality and the prevalence of a monological voice,
this study will focus on the way in which the vulnerability of refugees may be communicated
through vulnerable forms (in terms of structure, voice, literary genre, etc…). The paper will
examine more specifically the tension between instability and a longing for stability which is
perceptible both in the experience of the refugees and in the matrix of the fictional texts
themselves.
177
2.
Teresa Botelho (CETAPS/ Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova
de Lisboa, Portugal, tbotelho<at>mail.telepac.pt)
Making the Visible Knowable: Claiming Personhood in No Friend but the Mountains (Berouz
Boochani) and The Jungle (Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson)
The dehumanization and delegitimization of contemporary refugees has been countered by selfauthored or fictionalized narratives that reaffirm personhood and expose the unimaginable cruelty
of the traps of borders, seas, walls, smugglers, bureaucratic categorizations that manage and
mismanage the movement of desperate people. Contemporary refugee literature, is a complex
construct, open to many visions and formats but, as Timothy K. August suggests, shares a strategy
that aims to render legible and intimate a presence that, having been “produced, detained and
contained at a distance” is “visible without being knowable” (2016: 68). This paper will discuss
alternative literary strategies of representation of refugee experiences, by focusing on how two
texts foreground the personal narrative against anonymity of the “nowhere” spaces that interrupt
and obstruct the mobility of refugees – No Friends but the Mountains (2018), a memoir by
Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani, which chronicles the brutalizing migrant detention
in Papua New Guinea, where, deprived of all other means, he composed the text using WhatsApp
messages, and The Jungle (2017), a play by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, two volunteers who
worked in the migrant camp of Calais until its destruction, and which, performed by refugees,
brings to the stage a sketched portrait of a diverse set of characters from a variety of conflict zones,
who built an intermediary space of conviviality which became a temporary “somewhere.”
3.
Cédric Courtois (University of Lille, France, cedric_courtois<at>yahoo.co.uk)
‘Let’s Tell This [Short] Story Properly’: Home and Migration in Manchester Happened
(2019) by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Better Never the Late (2019) by Chika Unigwe
Both Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe give voice
to those who are often (always?) unheard: African migrants/refugees in Europe. In this paper, I
study the poetics and politics of voice in these two very recent short story collections, which delve
into the lives of Ugandans in England, and Nigerians in Belgium. The two works weave together
Nigerian/Ugandan and English/Belgian cultures, and offer a kaleidoscopic portrait of Ugandan and
Nigerian migrants/refugees who choose – or do not have the choice – to make England or Belgium
their homes; these collections also contribute to debunking the idealised vision of Europe for these
migrants/refugees. They seem to aim to “tell this story of [migration] properly”, to use the title of
one of Makumbi’s short stories. One of the characters in Makumbi’s collection declares: “Inside
we were dying, I threw away all that Uganda had taught me socially and culturally and allowed
Britain to realign me”. What can be said about voice here? What is left of the migrants’/refugees’
voices? How are these characters impacted by their experiences in Europe? Questions regarding
the generic choice of the short story will have to be addressed. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote that
the short story is a “concentrated form, wrought out of an intensification of thought and feeling
and demanding an equivalent stylistic intensity”. In a short story, the focus is therefore on lifechanging episodes; migration is indeed such a life-changing event, which seems to make the use
of the short-story genre difficult to escape. We will see that the choice of the short story is political
since these stories can be perceived as “minority literature” (Deleuze and Guattari).
178
4.
Sidia Fiorato (University of Verona, Italy, sidia.fiorato<at>univr.it)
The Voice of Refugee Children in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand
Migration, diaspora and refugee studies seem to overlook the voice of children (McLaughlin, 2013;
de Block & Buckingham, 2007), probably because of the conception of childhood as a transitory
state towards adulthood. In this sense, children tend to be seen as connected to/ parts of their
families, therefore subsumed into the family unit, or mainly as passive victims of exploitation,
subjected to conventional frameworks of thought of the host countries, and not as independent
actors in the context of specific policies and institutions. Research has suggested that children
migrants make decisions about their lives, and react to the opportunities posed by displacement
(Dall’Oglio, 2008). The concept of resilience, defined as “the process of capacity for or outcome
of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances” (Masten, 1994), does
not overcome vulnerability and intersects with the ethos of reception, that is, the social and cultural
climate of the host country. Chris Cleave’s novel The Other Hand (2008) reconstructs the
traumatic events that led a young Nigerian girl to arrive at a detention centre for
immigrants/refugees in England, where the novel opens. The girl’s flight from her country due to
a civil war for oil remains on the background of the girl’s attempts at rebuilding her identity as she
tries to understand and relate herself with the host country’s culture and social reality. The text
seems to intersect different genres, like the fairy tale, (auto)biography, and proves the power of
storytelling in the investigation and negotiation of identities and in offering a critical stance on our
contemporary world through the eyes of a fictional refugee child.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
1.
Olivia Rosane (Cambridge University, United Kingdom, obr23<at>cam.ac.uk)
‘See You on the Other Side’: The Ambiguous Border Crossings of Warsan Shire’s
‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ and ‘Home’
This paper looks at two different versions of Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home’ and how they both
conform to and challenge the pressure for poetry by and about refugees to act as a lyrical mirror
of the asylum seeker’s legal ‘certificate of trauma’― the documentation of suffering is required to
authenticate both individual’s refugee status and the text’s status as refugee writing. In the first
version of the poem, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, a greater
complexity in both the poem’s form and the speaker’s voice works to challenge the requirement
that refugees must perform their trauma in order to earn asylum. This legal process reinforces the
differentiation between ‘refugee’ and ‘economic migrant’ in global North discourse, which
suggests certain bodies may only move under duress, while others may travel freely. The
simplified form and narrative of Shire’s later ‘Home’, which has been widely shared online and
called a ‘rallying cry’ for refugees, paradoxically seems to accept and answer the logic of the
asylum-seeking process, insisting that ‘No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark’.
However, its shareability has also enabled it to literally cross borders, showing up on signs at
protests against U.S. President Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ and the proposed deportation of
African asylum seekers in Jerusalem. Refugees themselves have been able to reappropriate its
expression of trauma as a demand. Its words voice an appeal, but its form is a force.
179
2.
Katarzyna Bazarnik (Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, k.bazarnik<at>uj.edu.pl)
Inventing/Inviting Refugee Voices in Ali Smith’s Spring
How can fiction respond to the urgency of the times? How can it respond to the migrant crisis?
Can fiction responsibly (re)tell stories of refugees whose truthfulness is questioned, whose
narrative sincerity is investigated, challenged and tested, whose reliability is undermined? Is
fiction able to report the truth of their experience? In “The Witness” Giorgio Agamben recalls
Primo Levi’s unease “with the fact that as time passed […] [Levi] ended up a writer, composing
books that had nothing to do with his testimony: ‘Then I wrote…. I acquired the vice of writing’
(Levi 1997: 258)” (Agamben, 2004: 437). In Spring, the third of the series of Four Season novels,
the Scottish writer Ali Smith seems to be going the opposite way: transforming herself from the
“pure” writer into the “writer-witness”. Smith feels the pressing need to become the witness of the
times, and of the people who are deprived of their voice. She is convinced that fiction has the
power to dodge and bypass fenced borders and refugee detention walls in order to let these stories
be heard. In order to do so, she “writes to time”, with urgency, inviting a multiplicity of voices
into her fiction. In my presentation I will explore Smith’s techniques of creating an encompassing
space where they can be heard and put into dialogue.
3.
Kerry-Jane Wallart (University of Orléans, kjwallart<at>yahoo.fr)
‘internal polemic with the other’: Isolation and Dialogism in Edwige Danticat’s Brother, I’m
Dying (2007)
This paper inserts Haitian-American author Edwige Danticat in a lineage which connects
confessional modes of writing in Dostoevsky, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison around
“underground” narration and narratological dissensus. In the opening pages to his Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin introduces dialogism as resulting from a “concealed” form of
“internal polemic with the other”. I wish to suggest that Danticat examines the practice of testifying
through a reflection on modes of address and on literary reception. Through ventriloquizing her
uncle in the title, and superimposing a number of voices and documents, she adopts novelistic
techniques which actually translate experiences of migration as well as of institutional and social
exclusion. This will include a probing of female positioniality, authorship and authority and
therefore, tackle gender issues.
S36: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
Wednesday 1st September 10:30-12:30, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Jean-Michel Ganteau (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France, jeanmichel.ganteau<at>univ-montp3.fr)
Susana Onega (University of Zaragoza, Spain, sonega<at>unizar.es)
Literary genres like elegy, testimony or (pseudo-)autobiography provide means to perform
mourning or, conversely, postulate an ethics of melancholic attachment to the departed. Our posttrauma age has revealed the influence of race, class, gender and/or sexual orientation in the
determination of the precariousness and grievability of subjects and groups submitted to violence.
Drawing on Judith Butler’s work, we propose to address the ways in which fictions in English
since the 1990s delve into the socio-cultural construction of (un-)grievability, thereby refining and
180
displacing the more traditional categories of subalternity, inaudibility and invisibility associated
with the poetics of postmodernism.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Jean-Michel Ganteau (University
michel.ganteau<at>univ-montp3.fr)
Introduction
Paul-Valéry
Montpellier
3,
France,
jean-
2.
Susana Onega (University of Zaragoza, Spain, sonega<at>unizar.es)
Trading Relations, the Evil of Cruelty and the Ungrievability of the Other in David
Mitchell’s The One Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Described by David Mitchell as his first attempt to write a historical novel, The One Thousand
Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) offers a characteristic Mitchellian multiperspectival account of
the complex effects of the confrontation of European and Japanese cultures. The novel begins in
1799, when European countries were fighting for national pre-eminence and the creation of
international trading routes. It presents the Dutch trading post on Dejima as an important element
for the advance of civilization and the eradication of barbarism, with international trade fostering
the goal of mutual Dutch-Japanese recognition. However, the dual narrative structure and the
perspective cast on the events narrated by Jacob de Zoet, an “implicated subject” (Rothberg) with
strong ethical and religious convictions, work to enhance the cruelty and violence routinely exerted
by some European characters on their social, racial and/or gender inferiors. Given that, for many
Enlightenment thinkers, cruelty, not sin, was the summum malum, the paper seeks to demonstrate
that the true barbarians on Dejima are not the heathen slaves but their civilised masters, who treat
them with the brutality of an institutionalised ungrievability justified by their asymmetrical
interpretation of the classical civilised/barbarian opposition. Less extreme forms of
institutionalised ungrievability are those exerted on same-race inferiors and women, whose lives
are determined by physical aspect as well as rank and status. Below them, we find the mixed-race
children of Dutch traders and Japanese women, like de Zoet’s son, left behind by his father when
he returns to Holland.
3.
Paula Romo Mayor (University of Zaragoza, Spain, paularmg<at>unizar.es)
Undermining the Hierarchy of Grief in Rachel Seiffert’s A Boy in Winter”
A common ploy of societies in conflict is to restrict the domain of grievability through the
dehumanisation of the Other. This has led Judith Butler to denounce the establishment by those in
power of a “hierarchy of grief” (2004, 34) that determines whose lives are mournable and whose
lives are ungrievable. During the Third Reich, the denial of full humanness to Jews and other racial
minorities, handicapped Germans, and political opponents (Die Untermenschen) legitimised Nazi
violence. However, after the war, the exclusion from public memory of the atrocities perpetrated
against German civilians prevented the defeated from mourning their losses (Barnouw). In A Boy
in Winter(2017), Rachel Seiffert, a British author with Nazi ancestors, provides an encompassing
view of the Nazi invasion of Ukraine (1941) through the encounter of a set of characters belonging
to antagonistic sides (Jewish, Germans and Ukrainians). The paper proposes a reading of the novel
from the perspective of Holocaust Studies (Vice, 2000) and Ethics (Butler, 2004; Ganteau and
181
Onega 2017). Its aim is to demonstrate how the interplay between the different voices in the novel
erases the possibility of imposing the discourse of power and how the encounter between
antagonistic characters leads to epiphanic moments where the precariousness of the human
condition is recognised in the life of the Other. More concretely, it will attempt to demonstrate that
Seiffert’s narrative opens up a site wherein the acceptance of human life as a set of
interdependencies and the grievability of every human loss is possible.
4.
Maite Escudero Alías (University of Zaragoza, Spain, mescuder<at>unizar.es)
Ungrievable Incest: Desire, Contingency and Kinship in Michael Stewart’s Ill Will
The publication of Michael Stewart’s Ill Will. The Untold Story of Heathcliff (2018), celebrating
the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, evokes poignant questions on nature, vulnerability and
kinship that have permeated our culture for centuries. In this paraquel, Heathcliff narrates his life
story after his hasty departure from the Heights. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s research on kinship
(2000) and the social and political conditions of vulnerability as potential sites for rage, violence
and endless melancholy (2004), I will attempt to demonstrate that Heathcliff’s untamed and
tormented spirit is the result of the foreclosed and ungrievable status of the prohibition of his desire
towards Cathy. While some critics have discussed Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship as
incestuous (Goetz 1982; Perry 2004; Kuper 2009), I would argue that Ill Will confirms their
incestuous blood link, foreclosing the possibility of imagining other structures of kinship, like
marriage, despite their desire for one another. Thus, Heathcliff and Cathy are condemned to a
living death that refuses the public recognition of their loss, thereby triggering feelings of violence,
masochism and sadism and, in the case of Heathcliff’s narration, relegating him to an aberrant
violation of the norm. Concomitantly, I will also explore how Heathcliff’s romantic spirit, in his
steady care for and attachment to the English moors, echoes a dialectical movement between
melancholy and freedom that will recast his social position as a conscious act, acknowledging the
internal conflict of a desire that cannot be properly grieved, and yet finds solace in nature.
5.
Paula Martín Salván (University of Córdoba, Spain, ff2masap<at>uco.es)
(Un)Grieving Celestial in Toni Morrison’s Love
Toni Morrison’s Love (2003) is structured around a series of juxtaposed female perspectives on a
central but absent male character, the late Bill Cosey. One female character, however, is markedly
absent from the textual centre and emerges only marginally as a ghostly presence, vague but
recurrent: Celestial, a scarred-face prostitute who is said to have been Cosey’s lifelong true love.
I would like to explore how Celestial is constructed as an ungrievable subject in the text, through
structural and social mechanisms that bring about her exclusion. My reading of the novel, and
specifically of this character, tries to establish a correlation between the social dynamics of gender
and class prejudice that the story dramatizes and the narrative structure of the text, in its treatment
of Celestial as a paradoxically central but ungrievable character. Evidently, Morrison seeks to
establish Celestial as a figure of marginality and otherness. The text is narrated in the third person
through variable focalization combined with an enigmatic first-person narrator, L. It is quite
noticeable that Celestial is the only female character whose perspective is never offered in the text
through focalization. She is only present to the extent that she is remembered by others. Yet, the
very fact that she is ever mentioned in the text, I contend, points to the failure in obliterating her
182
from collective memory. I will argue, therefore, that Celestial thus joins the cohort of Morrison’s
unmourned ghosts.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
José María Yebra-Pertusa (University of Zaragoza, Spain, jyebra<at>unizar.es)
What Remains of (Un)Grievability in Alan Hollinghurst and Colm Tóibín’s AIDS Fiction
The outburst of AIDS in the nineteen eighties constituted a mass traumatic event, especially for
gay men and other disenfranchised communities. Indeed, the disease was grander than a metaphor
(in Sontag’s terms), becoming a sort of homophobic dystopian fantasy. For Simon Watney: “The
spectacle of AIDS calmly and constantly entertains the possible prospect of death of all Western
European and American gay men from AIDS … without the slightest flicker of concern, regret, or
grief” (1994: 58). In other words, it is not only that, drawing on Butler, the lives of these diseased
men do not “qualify as a life and [are] not worth a note” (2004: 34). The spectacle of their
prospective departure resides in its purifying ungrievability. Gay fiction has diversely reacted to
this homophobic fantasy of ungrievability, most often addressing what remains after the AIDS
dystopia. To illustrate my point, I will make reference to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-pool
Library (1988), The Folding Star (1994) and The Line of Beauty (2004) and Colm Tóibín’s The
Blackwater Lightship (1999). In Hollinghurst’s novels, what remains is the elegiac testimony of
narrators recalling oversexualized bodies before the AIDS outburst. There is thus a melancholic
attachment to the departed which problematizes actual grievability. By contrast, in The Blackwater
Lightship, the protagonist’s diseased body is desexualized and overtly mourned in Catholic
Ireland. That is, in de-spectacularising AIDS, the novel recasts Catholic redemption, sanctions
grievability and paves the way for a socio-cultural change on sexual dissidence.
2.
Bárbara Arizti (University of Zaragoza, Spain, barizti<at>unizar.es)
‘How bold to mix the Dreamings’: The Poetics and Ethics of Mourning in Alexis Wright’s
The Swan Book
Saluted by critics as a planetary novel, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) connects the fate
of Indigenous Australians and climate refugees in a dystopian post-apocalyptic scenario. This
paper draws on Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, a work inspired by the September 9/11 attacks,
which promotes ways of political mourning that highlight the “inevitable interdependency” of
human lives (xii) and deem any life equally worthy of grieving. Its aim is to explore Wright’s
inclusive conceptions of mourning in The Swan Book, rendered according to Aboriginal realism,
a poetics arising from Indigenous relational ethics. Aboriginal realism escapes the pitfalls of
magical realism —a concept rooted in Western binary thought— as it faithfully reflects the much
more comprehensive Indigenous worldview, capacious enough to hold together the ordinary and
the numinous, the political and the spiritual, humour and pathos, at the same time that it promotes
a deep reverence for all forms of life, be it that of native Australians, boat-people, all sorts of
animals, or the environment. My ultimate contention is that Wright’s novel is both proof and
symptom of Transmodernity, the time in which we now live, a period in history when
unprecedented connectedness has erased the clear-cut distinction between centre and periphery,
183
the local and the global, and where a growing sense of empathy, in the midst of widespread unrest,
transcends the human and reaches out to animals and the earth itself.
3.
Valeria Mosca (University degli Studi di Milano, Italy, valeriamosca1606<at>gmail.com)
Grieving gods, dogs, and undeliverable messages: J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus
Death usually happens off-stage in Coetzee’s fiction: it is either a highly anticipated but not yet
occurring event (Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year) or a past occurrence and a
narrative backdrop (The Master of Petersburg, Summertime). However, things are remarkably
different in the Jesus trilogy. Coetzee’s latest works of fiction are set in a Kafkaesque,
bureaucratized world permeated by a feeling of after-ness: its inhabitants have moved on to ‘the
next life’ after being stripped down of their memories, passions, and languages. They cannot
remember – and much less grieve – people they loved from their previous lives, and death is
depicted as a rather inconspicuous step in a cycle of reincarnations. Coetzee’s allegorical Jesus,
David, dies halfway through the last instalment in the trilogy. The aim of my proposed contribution
is to explore his father figure’s grieving process in this tepid world and frame it within critical
commentary on the link in Coetzee’s fiction between death, authorial authority and its loss (Danta,
Wilm). At the same time, I will argue that Simón’s grief encompasses previous representations of
the ethics and aesthetics of mourning in Coetzee’s oeuvre. The dignified burial of stray dogs from
Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello’s failed attempts at defining her own identity in the face of death
converge in Coetzee’s latest representation of death: an unspeakable reality that is only understood
by gods, who embody words, and animals, who live beyond them.
4.
Katia
Marcellin
(University
Paul-Valéry
Montpellier
3,
France,
katia.marcellin<at>gmail.com)
Escaping ‘Dead Time’: The Temporal Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Ali Smith’s The
Accidental
In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud observes that mourning occurs over “a certain lapse of
time” (244). Similarly, grieving is a process, temporality being a precondition to grievability.
However, in Ali Smith’s novel, The Accidental, the members of the Smart family seem to be stuck
in a “dead time abstracted from experience” (Agamben). Their rigid and bourgeois conception of
time (Levin) precludes real change insofar as it remains hermetic to instability, chaos, accident.
Until the arrival of an intruder, Amber, the parents, Michael and Eve, are the enforcers of this
conception of time. Their obsession with an artificial kind of renewal (i.e. a new love affair every
year for Michael) forecloses the notion of the self as vulnerable and the very possibility of grief.
They act as allocators of grievability and enclose their children within this fixed time: Astrid is
obsessed with preventing time from passing while Magnus is paralysed by guilt after a school
prank led to a tragedy. My contention is that, in this novel, the “allocation of [un-]grievability”
(Butler 2004, xiv) relies on a dynamic metaleptic relation to temporality. Metalepsis is a figure of
speech that consists in substituting the antecedent for the consequent and vice versa. It is employed
either as an operator of fixity—suppressing the causes of grief encloses the characters in an
inescapable present—or as an inducer of flexibility producing referential shortcuts through which
grievability is resignified. Ali Smith recasts grief as a transformative force encouraging us to
acknowledge and own our vulnerabilities.
184
5.
Maria Grazia Nicolosi (University Catania, Italy, mariagrazia.nicolosi<at>tin.it)
“Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving”: Re-Claiming Antigone’s Grief for a
Poetics of Ethical Solicitation in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
As has been the case for the whole Western literary and philosophical imagination (Steiner 1984),
the figure of Antigone seems to haunt Judith Butler’s recent work, where “the apprehension of a
common human vulnerability” (2004, 30) is elevated to ethical foundation of our social existence
“attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by
virtue of that exposure” (20). Butler regards Sophocles’ grieving heroine as exemplary of “a
differential allocation of grievability” (37) by that operation of power that sets “limits on the kinds
of losses we can avow as loss” (32) and “forecloses [...] what kinds of lives can be countenanced
as living” (2000, 29). Yet Antigone’s public mourning, which “is and is not her own” (24), gestures
towards an ethics of interdependency grounding justice on the “constitution of vulnerability as a
precondition of the ‘human’” (2004, 43). In her novel Home Fire (2017), Kamila Shamsie crafts a
post-9/11 Antigone to reposition onto its ethico-political terrain the intractable complexities of
Islamic jihadism. Through a recalibration of the “hierarchy of grief” (Butler 2004, 32), Home Fire
restores to grievability – as socially intelligible and aesthetically representable affect – those lives
that do not endure to enact the grieving. In my paper I will approach the novel through the prism
of Sophocles’ tragedy and its major critical interpretations; I will then examine along Butlerian
lines Shamsie’s poetics of ethical solicitation across temporal and spatial boundaries “by virtue of
visual or linguistic translations” (Butler 2015, 103).
Slot 3: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Jean-Michel Ganteau (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier
michel.ganteau<at>univ-montp3.fr)
The Grievability of the Non-Human: Ian McEwan’s Machines like Me
3,
France,
jean-
Grievability and its sibling, precariousness, have been theorised in relation to groups entangled in
historical, military or socio-economic difficulties, or else submerged, excluded populations whose
fragility is revealed in times of crisis. It seems that with the rising interest in artificial intelligence,
and possibly alongside the new-materialist turn, the question of grievability may have come to
haunt new shores. In his novel Machines like Me (2019), Ian McEwan taps the possibilities of
slipstream to imagine what happens when a very evolved robot or “artificial human”, Adam, comes
to live with a young couple and becomes entangled in the economic, legal and affective aspects of
their lives. Even if the novel allows for a return to previously explored ground (the fascination for
science, the two cultures debate, among others), I shall argue that, above all, it forcibly raises the
issue of the status of lives of all types, their dignity and grievability. Adam, as new homo sacer,
cannot be expected to be mourned after his execution. Yet, the novel gainsays that version and
reinstates grief and value despite and beyond their denial. The novel’s central paradox allows the
reader to intuit that superhuman strength is the condition for precariousness, and that absence of
value is a way towards and possibly a condition for grievability. Its ultimate paradox may lie its
use of slipstream that complicates time, provides an original presentation of the presence of the
past, and thereby triggers off a reflection on the grievability of the future.
185
2.
Angelo Monaco (University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, angelo.monaco<at>gmail.com)
From Elegy to Dystopia: Ecological Grief and Human Grievability in Ben Smith’s
Doggerland
Ben Smith’s debut novel, Doggerland (2019), is a vivid portrait of a claustrophobic post-industrial
environment with strong ethical implications. Set in a near future, the novel stages an old man and
a boy who work in a wind farm in the North Sea, bound to a contract with a mysterious corporation.
And yet, what appears at first sight to be a melancholic lamentation soon veers towards the genre
of environmental dystopia. On the one hand, Doggerland, with its marine setting and ghostly
atmosphere, manifests an elegiac obsession with loss and mourning. On the other, the narrative
overarching organisation presents occasional incursions into a deep geological timescale
concerned with the changing nature of Doggerland, the mainland that once connected England to
continental Europe. Starting from this premise, my presentation seeks to illustrate how Smith’s
operaprima ties in with Judith Butler’s categories of “precariousness,”“grievability” and
“dispossession.” By focusing on its fragmented and precarious narrative form and on its disarrayed
temporal frame, I intend to emphasise how Smith’s novel not only promotes attentiveness to bare
life, but also favours an ethical encounter with eco-precarious manifestations, thereby expanding
on Butler’s conceptualisation of grievability.
3.
Sylvie Maurel (University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, CAS
maurelsylvie<at>free.fr)
Grieving the Subhuman in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
EA
801,
France,
In the second chapter of Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith
Butler rethinks the possibility of community “on the basis of vulnerability and loss” (21), loss
being a kind of common ground that may become the breeding ground of a political “we”. Butler’s
essay opens with a series of questions which chime with those raised by Ishiguro’s Never Let Me
Go (2005): “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, Whatmakes for a
grievable life?” (Butler 20). In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro writes of an alternative England where
clones are bred for the sole purpose of providing organs for “normal”, and are thus committed to
an early death for the sake of ordinary citizens. Ishiguro’s dystopia explores what it means to be
human, as well as the role of literature and art as potentially humanizing factors. The latter,
however, fail to earn the Hailsham clones a place in ordinary, visible humanity. They remain
repulsive outcasts haunting invisible and decrepit recovery centres. The paper will investigate
whether grievable loss is not, precisely, the defining feature of humanity in the novel, whether the
melancholy attachment to departed others, which the title suggests and which Kathy’s narrative
expresses, is not a form of obituary that identifies the spectral clones as humans, unless the novel,
on the contrary, stages a diseased relationality that can only create horrific systems of exploitation
where certain deaths are more grievable than others.
4.
Giulio Milone (University of Pisa, Italy, giulio.milone<at>phd.unipi.it)
‘What a burden to be the one with the memory!’: Overcoming Grief and Salvaging Memory
in Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers
Juggling between Chicago in the mid-80s and Paris in 2015, Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel The
Great Believers is an enthralling exploration of the effects of collective trauma on the individuals,
186
as well as an inquiry into the complex dynamics of overcoming loss and grief while keeping one’s
memory alive at the same time. Building from some of the most recent theoretical acquisitions in
trauma and grief theory, this paper takes a close look at how the first narrative of the novel, set in
Chicago at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and focusing on a circle of gay friends, is closely
interwoven with a second one about the sister of one of those friends, who is now looking for her
estranged daughter in Paris against the backdrop of the terrorist attacks. The paper intends to argue
that in The Great Believers the burden born by those who have survived or witnessed the AIDS
epidemic engenders a broader meditation on the ripples and repercussions of traumatic events and
senseless violence over decades. Furthermore, the multigenerational feature of the novel also
provides a framework in which the politics of mourning over marginalized groups can be
investigated, both in terms of their development over time and of their initially contested and
eventually hard-earned legitimacy.
S37: Just ‘making it new’? Modernist Fiction Writers Reaching Back to their Predecessors
Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Janka
Kascakova
(Catholic
University
in
Ruzomberok,
Slovakia,
janka.kascakova<at>ku.sk)
Nóra Séllei (University of Debrecen, Hungary, sellei.nora<at>arts.unideb.hu)
Modernist writers have been notoriously known as “making it new”, cutting ties with the previous
generations, as famously declared by Virginia Woolf, denigrating their predecessors as materialist
Edwardians. More recent research, however, argues that in spite of their manifestos, modernist
writers actively engaged in a dialogue with their predecessors from all ages, taking inspiration and
even narrative models from their texts, thus deconstructing the sharp dividing line created by the
modernists themselves. The seminar invites presentations that pertain to this area of research so
that we can have a more complex view of how modernism is positioned in literary history.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Maryam
Thirriard
(Aix
Marseille
Université
Aix-en-Provence,
maryam.thirriard<at>univ-amu.fr)
Virginia Woolf and Eighteenth-Century Life-Writers: a Sense of Kinship
France,
Virginia Woolf wrote “The New Biography” (1927) because she was convinced that biographers
had finally succeeded in making it new for the genre. She had in mind Lytton Strachey, André
Maurois and, above all, Harold Nicolson, whose book, Some People, she reviewed in this very
essay. All three had been able to break away from the conventions of Victorian biography, which
Woolf considers to be steeped in hero-worship and to be polluted by the moral values of the 19th
century.
At the same time, an important part of the essay is devoted to the history of biography, which
shows Woolf’s intent to place this revolution in life-writing on a broader cultural timeline. In doing
so, she draws a bridge across the previous ages: Woolf reaches past the Victorian age, right back
to the eighteenth century, which, as I shall argue, she considers to be a golden age for life-writing.
This paper explores the sense of kinship Woolf feels with the life-writers of the eighteenth
century—for instance, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell—as expressed in “The New
187
Biography” and her other essays; it also discusses, in particular, the way in which her sympathy
for the works of her eighteenth-century predecessors relates to the question of truthfulness in
literature.
2.
Nóra Séllei (University of Debrecen, Hungary, sellei.nora<at>arts.unideb.hu)
Virginia Woolf and the Brontës: An Ambivalent Matrilineage
Whereas in her 1919 and 1924 essays, “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown”
Virginia Woolf (in)famously denigrates the materialist Edwardians, her relationship to her
predecessors, including the Victorians is a lot more appreciative and meaningful (even though in
some cases ambivalent), particularly when it comes to women writers. The Brontës, or at least
Charlotte and Emily Brontë, feature not only in her essays as her predecessors in the female literary
tradition (like in A Room of One’s Own), but in the essay devoted to their novels “Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights” (1916) she also explores their mode of writing. Woolf developed a lot more
ambivalent attitude to Charlotte Brontë both in A Room of One’s Own and in her essay on Jane
Eyre. In A Room she memorably criticises what she calls Charlotte Brontë’s anger and feminine
voice, whereas in the 1916 essay she tackles Jane’s character as a governess who is constantly in
love, even though she esteems certain aspects of the novel. In contrast, she is more appreciative of
Wuthering Heights, praising its poetic vision and universal appeal. My contention is that Woolf’s
arguments probe deeper, and in many ways do not simply show what she thinks of these two
specific texts and authors, but the hidden agenda behind her critique and appreciation paves the
way to, and is an indicator of, her own modernist aesthetics in terms of narration, and it is from
this respect that she more fully embraces Wuthering Heights than Jane Eyre.
3.
Giulia Bigongiari (University of L’Aquila, Italy, g.bigongiari<at>gmail.com)
George Eliot and Virginia Woolf: A Dialogue
My paper is devoted to the study of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and George Eliot.
The Victorian writer is frequently mentioned in Woolf's letters, essays, and fictional works.
Woolf's words about Eliot let us gather information about her conflicted and nuanced attitude not
just towards this Victorian writer's work, but towards the Victorian Age as a whole. Woolf seems
to consider Eliot both as a symbol of it, and as a rebel. I will argue that coming to terms with Eliot,
“the first woman of her age”, can be understood as a significant part of Woolf's path towards
coming to terms with the problematic heirloom of Victorian female writers, in general. I will
suggest that Woolf consciously shares with Eliot a special interest for “sympathy”, and for
literature's role in extending it. Consequently, I will argue that Woolf's personal confrontation, as
a reader, with Eliot's treatment of the issue of “sympathy” was fundamental for Woolf's own
understanding of the same concept, which was, to her, a fascinating but not an unproblematic one,
being associated, in some of its forms, with exploitative gendered norms. I will take care to define
“sympathy” in a historically accurate way, indicating its links with Victorian culture. To prove my
points I will employ the Bakhtinian notion of “dialogue”, especially in its form of “diatribe”, a
dialogue with an absent interlocutor. I will also employ Wolfgang Iser's definitions of repertoire,
implied and real author and reader, in order to describe Woolf's experience of reading Eliot.
188
4.
Tamar Hager (Tel Hai College, Israel, tamar.hager<at>gmail.com)
When a Woman Has a Studio of Her Own: The Dialogue of Virginia Woolf with her Great
Aunt, the Pioneer Victorian Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron
The famous modernist writer Virginia Woolf was engaged in a continuous dialogue with her great
aunt, the prominent Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who died three
years before she was born. My paper looks closely at the way this dialogue has made itself manifest
in Woolf's writing. Marion Dell and Emily Setina show that Woolf saw in Cameron a role model:
she was a successful wife and mother as well as an independent businesswoman and artist who
subverted patriarchal institutions. In this paper, I argue that Cameron's image as a woman artist
was at the core of Woolf's most known feminist statement: ‘a woman must have money and a room
of her own if she is to write fiction.’ When living in Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, Cameron
had family money and a studio of her own, and she used this independence to invest all her time
and energy in creating art and achieving success, so rare for a 19th-century woman artist. Reading
Woolf's writings on her great aunt – a short play, Freshwater, and an introductory essay to
Cameron's catalogue Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women I describe how
Cameron, who specialized in image creation, was herself turned into an icon by her great niece
and how this image contributed to Woolf's perception of the fate of women artists.
5.
Elizabeth
English
(Cardiff
Metropolitan
University,
United
Kingdom,
eenglish<at>cardiffmet.ac.uk)
Women Against the World: Margaret Goldsmith, Vita Sackville-West, and Queer Historical
Biography
If recalled at all, the writer Margaret Goldsmith is most often noted for her brief affair with Vita
Sackville-West and possibly her novel, Belated Adventure (1929) thought to be inspired by her
lover. This neglect is particularly unjust when one considers the fact that Goldsmith spent a
significant portion of her professional life documenting women’s lives. This paper focusses on
Goldsmith’s work as a historical biographer and chronicler of women’s lives, and it explores the
affinities between this project and Sackville-West’s own historical writing. Between 1929 and
1938 Goldsmith published 13 biographical studies, featuring such historical women as Florence
Nightingale, Christina of Sweden, Marie Antoinette, Madame de Stael, Sappho of Lesbos, and
Maria Theresa of Austria. While not quite as prolific, Sackville-West also published a handful of
historical women’s biographies during the same period: Joan of Arc, Aphra Behn, Teresa of Avila,
and Therese of Lisieux. This paper positions Goldsmith and Sackville-West as writers of queer
modernist biography. Goldsmith’s and Sackville-West’s choice of genre does not sit easily in the
narrative of modernism because of its seeming disconnect from modernity. But these texts use
history to reclaim figures whose sexuality has been obscured and to carve out concepts of modern
sexual identity. This makes their work, I would argue, modernist in spirit if not form. Both authors
retell their subjects’ stories with modern agendas influenced by contemporary discourses such as
sexology and psychoanalysis, and they craft a narrative of queer lineage to challenge masculine
concepts of historical truth and accuracy.
189
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Olga Polovinkina (Russian State University for the Humanities,
olgapmail<at>mail.ru)
‘Making’ Classical Chinese Poetry ‘New’: Arthur Wiley and Ezra Pound
Russia,
H.A. Giles introduced classical Chinese poetry to British readers in 1883, but his effort as a
translator was fully appreciated more than two decades later, when a new generation of writers
was in search of their own language. This poetry was perceived as fresh and unusual and opening
new ways of expression. But, paradoxically, its value for the Modernist writers was partly
determined by associations with two European traditions that it evoked. Lytton Strachey put a
finger on these associations reviewing in 1908 the new edition of Giles’ translations. He compared
Chinese poetry to Paul Verlaine’s and described it as a sort of poetic impressionism, “a long series
of visions and of feelings”. On the other hand, this poetry, Strachey said, “reminded one of some
collection of Greek statues”. These two positions were audibly pronounced by Ezra Pound several
years later. Though Strachey’s and Pound’s dicta slightly differed in details, in the main they
agreed: classical Chinese poetry was seen as a proper model for new poetry, since it pressed “a
thousand years” in a current moment, and thus “antiquity itself became endowed with everlasting
youth”, in Strachey’s words. From this point of view, I will explore Pound’s ‘Chinese poetry’ in
comparison to Chinese translations of Arthur Wiley, which were also English verses that pointed
to the newborn poetic language.
2.
Janka
Kascakova
(Catholic
University
in
Ruzomberok,
Slovakia,
janka.kascakova<at>ku.sk)
‘Delicate perception is not enough’: The Free Indirect Discourse in Jane Austen’s and
Katherine Mansfield’s Writings
The majority of English modernists had a very ambivalent attitude to Jane Austen. While many of
them at least reluctantly acknowledged her formal artistry, they, nevertheless, felt the need to
distance themselves from their fellow Edwardians by, among other things, rejecting this
increasingly popular predecessor. The more Jane Austen became admired by mainstream culture,
the more she was becoming the synonym of dated, no longer relevant kind of writing for the young
generation of innovators. This was most famously illustrated by the animosity between Katherine
Mansfield and Virginia Woolf due to the review of Woolf’s newly published novel Night and
Day (1919). Mansfield summed up the alleged failings of the novel and its author by claiming it
to feel like “Jane Austen up-to-date”.
Based on this criticism and Woolf’s very offended reaction, it would seem that neither Woolf nor
Mansfield held Austen in particular esteem, but it is not the case at all. Due to time constraints, it
would not be possible to discuss both female modernists’ approach to Austen, so this paper will
focus only on one of them, Katherine Mansfield and that, more particularly, on how the way both
Mansfield and Austen use their main discursive strategy, the free indirect discourse, shows
significant affinities. I will claim, that the FID is one of the main reasons for Mansfield’s repeatedly
expressed admiration for Austen’s novel Emma.
190
3.
Ivana Trajanoska (University American College Skopje, Northern Macedonia,
trajanoska<at>uacs.edu.mk)
Grasping Pilgrimage’s Frame: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
This paper aims at shedding light to the extent to which Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage is
indebted to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Dorothy Richardson, a forerunner of English
Modernism, to whose technique May Sinclair applied the term “stream-of-consciousness” for the
first time, believed that there was no literary model to turn to at the time when she started writing
the thirteen-chapter novel Pilgrimage (the first chapter-novel Pointed Roofs was published in 1915
and the thirteenth was published in the posthumous complete edition of Pilgrimage in 1967). At
the suggestion to write a novel, Richardson responded: “The material that moved me to write
would not fit the framework of any novel I had experienced.”(Hanscombe, 6). However,
Pilgrimage, not only in its title and the references in the text, demonstrates a meaningful
relationship with Bunyan’s 1978 Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress. Jean Radford in her
Dorothy Richardson from 1991 was the first to point out to this significant intertextuality.
Although Richardsonian studies are perhaps more alive than ever after the nearly complete neglect
of Richardson and her role in English Modernism, this aspect of Pilgrimage has not been addressed
since Radford’s publication. We argue that Richardson’s quest for suitable form took her back to
the English religious writings of the seventeenth century i.e. to the English Puritan writer John
Bunyan and his Pilgrim’s Progress, shaping her ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novel as a revisionary
allegory, an allegorical journey constructed upon a thread of extended metaphors of life as a
journey using Bunyan’s work as a framing device.
4.
Frederik Van Dam (Radboud University, The Netherlands, F.vanDam<at>let.ru.nl)
Peaceful Conscription: Security and Realism in the Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
In the era of World Wars, people were caught between the trauma of one total war and fear of the
next. Scholars of modernist literature have argued that this culture of anxiety determined the
experimental form of interwar modernism. While the focus on modernism’s imbrication with
anxiety and isolation has yielded significant findings, it has obscured its imaginative and
connective potential. This paper contributes to larger project which aims to recover this potential
and which suggests that certain modernist works returned to the forms of nineteenth-century
realism in order to instil a longing for peace and security. The short stories of W. Somerset
Maugham play a vital role in this hitherto unrecognized part of literary history. Indeed, Maugham’s
work has not made it into the modernist canon, even though his work shares many traits with that
of modernists such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. In this paper, I will explore the relationship
between the realist dimension of his stories, such as readerly conscription and the promotion of
affective attitudes, and his representation of modernist themes, such as anxiety and isolation. By
recuperating aspects of Victorian realism and involving readers in an active and playful way, I
would argue, Maugham’s stories provide an alternative to mainstream modernism: his stories ask
readers to imagine a culture of security, thus countering the age’s culture of anxiety.
191
5.
Jiří Rambousek (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, Jiri.Rambousek<at>phil.muni.cz)
Vladimir Nabokov: Between Inspiration and Coincidence
Vladimir Nabokov’s taking inspiration from his predecessors has been discussed in connection
with several of his works. The nature of his “reaching back” involves motifs and topics rather than
narrative techniques, and his works’ independence of the inspiration sources is indisputable. The
best-known instance, discovered by Michael Maar, is his Lolita and the “Ur-Lolita” by von
Lichberg (von Eschwege), but other sources of inspiration have been suggested as well. The
present paper discusses the dividing lines between inspiration and random coincidence of motifs
as well as the applicability of the concept of cryptomnesia – the possibility that an author borrows
an idea or motif unconsciously, usually after some time, and considers it his own – which has been
discussed in connection with Nabokov. Furthermore, the paper adds another candidate to the list
of possible inspiration sources: a work by the Czech writer Ivan Olbracht (and its translations) as
a possible inspiration for Nabokov’s book Kamera obskura, which was later re-created in English
as Laughter in the Dark. Its precursor, the manuscript fragment Rayskaya ptitsa (The Bird from
Paradise), is discussed as well. The paper presents the timeline, the plausibility of Nabokov’s
access to Olbracht’s book, and motivic links between the texts.
S38: The Roaring Novels of the 1920’s
Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00 and Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Michaela Mudure (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, mmudure<at>yahoo.com)
Begoña Lasa Álvarez (University of A Coruña, Spain, b.lasa<at>udc.es)
The Roaring Twenties were not only the gilded age of dance and entertainment sandwiched
between the First World War and the Great Depression. They were also the age of roaring novels
in the British and American tradition. Although written almost a century ago, these novels deal
with the basic and fundamental aspects of modern life. They pushed experimentation to very
daring limits, explored sexuality without any false prudery, gave voice to the ethnic minorities
and the new comers to Britain and America. This panel aims at analysing novels authored by
British and American men and women during this decade.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
1.
Gönül Bakay (Bahçeşehir University, Turkey, gonulbakay<at>gmail.com)
The Influence of Virginia Woolf’s Travels to Greece and Turkey on her Novels
Virginia Woolf made a tour of Italy, Greece and Turkey between the years 1906- 1909 and
recollected her memories of these places in her travel and literary notebooks. Woolf was 24 at this
time and embarked on this trip with her siblings, Adrian, Toby, Vanessa and family friend Violet
Dickenson. She arrived in İstanbul by boat and was very much excited by the city, which allowed
one to get in touch with one’s innermost desires and feelings. İstanbul also blurred gender
boundaries. According to Woolf, such a place made possible to face one’s unacknowledged
feelings: Clarissa acknowledges the coldness she feels for Mr Dalloway in İstanbul. Nancy in To
192
the Lighthouse, on the other hand, feels her hidden desires for Minta when she holds her hand
while observing scenes of Istanbul.
In the year 1908, Woolf finally made her long-awaited visit to Greece. In her notes, Woolf
describes her feelings with precision while visiting its sites. When viewing Olympia, she observes:
“There I think you have the God. The stone, if you can call it a stone, seems so acquiescent to
sculpture that it is almost liquid. If only it had been possible to stand the stone in air. Cold stone
needs that background” (4). She also admires the Parthenon.
Drawing on archival research on Woolf’s notes on her Istanbul and Greece memoirs, this paper
aims to examine the influence of her travels on her two books: Orlando and Jacob’s Room.
2.
Petra Machová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, 264221<at>mail.muni.cz)
Nietzsche’s ‘Seeker after Truth’ in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room
The paper is based on my dissertation “The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on Virginia Woolf’s
Oeuvre” which explored Nietzsche’s influence on Woolf as a result of my reading of Jacob’s
Room as a consistent intertextual reference to Nietzsche. Since its first publication in 1922, Jacob’s
Room has been predominantly analysed in relation to its fragmentary form and the elusive portrait
of Jacob and the novel has been accompanied by literary criticism addressing the notion of the
impenetrability of modern character, which conceals the possibility to read the novel linearly.
However, if the echoes of Nietzsche’s metaphors are recovered in the seemingly unrelated
passages of the novel, Jacob’s Room can be appreciated for the literary possibilities of Nietzsche’s
metaphors related to his criticism of truth as the main value in the Western intellectual tradition.
Because the development of the metaphors in the novel is consistent and intentional, the
dissertation is conceived as the author-centric study of the influence of Nietzsche’s critical
epistemology on Woolf. In this paper, I will demonstrate Woolf’s appropriation of Nietzsche’s
metaphors on the comparison of the published version of Jacob’s Room with its Holograph Draft.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Silvia Antosa (University of Enna “Kore”, Italy, silvia.antosa<at>unikore.it)
Exploring Desire between Women in British Fiction of the 1920s
My paper aims to investigate how, inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, several early 20thcentury British novelists wrote about passionate female friendship taking place in the restricted
and selected environment of girls’ schools. The theme of girlhood crushes can be found in the
work of celebrated, high-profile authors such as Colette (Claudine At School, 1900) and Gertrude
Stein (Fernhurst, 1904), as well as in the novels of lesser known writers such as Clemence Dane
(Regiment of Women, 1917) and Rosamond Nina Lehmann (Dusty Answer, 1927). I examine how
the theme of female friendship and (more or less) latent homoeroticism is developed in their work,
and demonstrate that these authors drew on similar sociocultural discourses and gave voice to
193
similar anxieties about female identity, girlhood and female desire which were circulating across
Europe in the sexological and cultural texts of the time.
2. Sascha Klein (University of Cologne, Germany, klein.sascha.28<at>googlemail.com)
The Roar of Modernity: Metropolitan Soundscapes and the Making of the Modern Subject
in Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925)
A wide range of scholars has convincingly analyzed the role of urban architectures and its panoptic
visual regimes in producing a modern subjectivity. The sonic dimension of this process, however,
has been largely overlooked. A literary genre that captured this specific aspect of modern urban
life with great accuracy may be found in the modernist city of the 1920s: From the deafening noise
of engines over advertisement slogans to the perpetual chatter of the urban crowd – these novels
are remarkable when it comes to their attention to the rich soundscapes of their metropolitan
settings.
In this presentation, I would like to focus on John Dos Passos’ 1925 experimental prose work
Manhattan Transfer and the specific ‘roar’ defining its narration both on a literal and formalistic
level. Much like Manhattan’s high-rise urban space and its relentless panoptic regimes, it is the
ubiquitous human and mechanical noises that provide a constant source of irritation, but also
inspiration to the myriad of characters populating the novel. Thin partition walls and overcrowded
cities turn apartments and entire tenements into true ‘panacousticons’ where audibility is much
more of a trap than visibility. In other cases, advertisement slogans or popular songs serve to lift
characters up, connect them or even establish new identities. Apart from its content level, the novel
also succeeds in producing a formal roar by way of its powerfully sensory language marked by
countless instances of neologisms and onomatopoeia. After all, the urban roar also invades the
characters’ minds in the form of a stream of consciousness, thus ultimately fusing them with the
metropolitan soundscape on a deep psychological level.
3.
Begoña Lasa-Alvarez (University of A Coruña, Spain, b.lasa<at>udc.es)
A Girl’s Life in English Interwar Suburbia: Evadne Price’s Just Jane (1928)
Just Jane, the first of a series of books for young female readers, written by the Australian-English
writer Evadne Price (1896/1901-1985), was published in 1928 as a counterpart of Just William
(1922), which was addressed chiefly to boys. However, while the William’s series has enjoyed a
successful afterlife, the series starring Jane Turpin has fallen into oblivion. Interestingly, the young
heroine and her family represent the typical middle-class family living in a suburban area, a type
of neighbourhood which underwent an unprecedented growth during this decade. In a moment of
rapid changes and unstable social and political circumstances in the aftermath of the Great War,
the modern suburban lifestyle had a great impact in the English household behaviour. Indeed, in
these new communities with more hygienic, healthier and spacious homes, such amenities as
electricity, hot-running water or bathrooms were available for families of all classes. Together with
the new houses, new values concerning family relations and child-rearing, gender roles and
decorum, or new ideas about nutrition, hygiene and gardening were generated and promoted. Thus,
suburbia became very identifiable but also evocative literary and filming locations. The aim of this
paper is to analyse Price’s text in the light of the new lifestyle fostered in English interwar suburbia.
S39: Seminar cancelled
194
S40: Energy in Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad’s works
Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00 and Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Richard Ambrosini (Università Roma 3, Italy, richard.ambrosini<at>uniroma3.it)
Peggy Blin-Cordon (CY Cergy Paris Université, France, peggy_cordon<at>hotmail.com)
Nathalie Martinière (Université de Limoges, France, nmartiniere<at>gmail.com)
The age of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad saw the discovery of many new forms of energy:
steam, gas and electricity contributed to reshaping the environment as well as the social and
economic organization of the world. How did these new energies compete or interfere with older
ones, like those of the human body and of nature in general? And how did the two writers
accommodate, or render in prose or verse the power of these new energies, the
fascination/repulsion for their chemical/physical impulses? Aside from pure epistemology, can the
notion of energy help us read the two authors differently?
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Hugh
Epstein
(Joseph
hughepstein<at>hotmail.co.uk)
Hardy, Conrad and Energy Physics
Conrad
Society
(UK),
United
Kingdom,
This paper looks at the way in which the novels of Hardy and Conrad participate in an
understanding of the forces governing moments in a life and the condition of life itself that can be
associated with the emergence of energy physics in the 1850s and 60s. While there will be brief
reference to contemporary scientific history and modern commentary upon it, the paper will be led
by the text of the novels: here the prevalence of a vocabulary of force(s) rather than use of the term
energy is evident and equivalent in both writers, and the task will be to show that it is the newer
language of thermodynamics which is in practice the most illuminating with which to explore this
writing, both at the level of close reading and of scenic construction. The focus is likely to fall on
A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far From the Madding Crowd, and Tess, and The Rescue, Lord Jim, and
Nostromo. An end-point for the paper might be to decide, whether separately or equally, if Hardy’s
and Conrad’s writing portrays the closed systems beloved of nineteenth-century physicists (leading
to entropy), or the open systems proposed by more modern conceptions of non-equilibrium
thermodynamics. Another way of putting it might be, how gloomy and pessimistic are they?
2.
Julie Gay (Université Bordeaux Montaigne – Université de Poitiers, France,
julie.gay<at>univ-poitiers.fr)
‘There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal’: New Energies
and the Crisis of Adventure in Conrad’s Insular Fiction
By the turn of the 19th century, the development of new energies had led to the creation of new,
faster forms of transportation, which played a crucial role in the emergent process of globalization.
The late Victorians seem to have experienced great difficulties in coming to terms with this
195
revolution, and understanding the way Conrad engaged with the challenges posed by such rapid
and dramatic change could help shed new light on his fiction.
In works such as Victory, Lord Jim or Nostromo, this transitional period is indeed associated with
a form of crisis of the adventure genre, as there seem to be fewer and fewer opportunities for
adventurous exploration in an almost entirely mapped out world. Even the most remote insular
spaces have somehow been affected by the development of these new energies, bringing about
essential changes in the dynamics if insular adventure: it is thus my contention that in Conrad’s
fiction, this phenomenon has an impact not only on the setting of adventure, and especially on the
island landscape, but also on typical adventure motifs such as that of the treasure hunt, which is
progressively deromanticized through its association with less noble commodities. The
development of new energies finally impacts the very essence of adventure writing, the
acceleration of transportation paradoxically leading to the slowing down of adventure, as the
apparent lack of danger entailed by these new forms of trading and travelling prevents the
protagonists from displaying the stamina that used to be typical of adventure heroes.
3.
Brygida Pudelko (University of Opole, Poland, b.pudelko<at>op.pl)
Hardy’s and Conrad’s Disdain Upon Scientific and Technological Progress in ‘The
Convergence of the Twain’ and ‘Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic’
“The Convergence of the Twain” (1912) by Thomas Hardy and “Some Reflections on the Loss of
the Titanic” (1912) by Joseph Conrad both discuss the tragedy of the Titanic after colliding with
an iceberg on 15th April 1912, during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Hardy’s
poem and Conrad’s essay similarly portray the opulence of the ship – which was a symbol of
wealth, extravagance, power, and industrialization of Britain – and the ship’s ephemeral nature,
through the use of irony and juxtaposition. Both writers express their disdain for the pride and
importance that their contemporaries placed upon scientific and technological progress. Hardy
shows the waste of the ship’s magnificence, which is juxtaposed against its present environment,
to emphasize the waste of money, technology, and craftsmanship.
In contrast to the sensationalist media exploitation of the sinking of the Titanic, Conrad’s is a
distinctively personal and human voice speaking on behalf of dead brother-seamen who, betrayed
by the so-called “unsinkable” ship, and forgotten in the media “babble,” have no voice of their
own. The modern era – represented by journalistic opportunism, the quest for speed, an emphasis
on the commercial and mechanical, the modern foolish trust in material, and impersonality –
confronts what Conrad delineates as a code of values inherited from the past, a life dependent upon
devotion to a traditional and exacting craft with an emphasis on individual effort and respect for
community.
4.
Stéphanie Bernard (Université de Rouen, France, Stephanie.bernard<at>univ-rouen.fr)
Jude the Obscure and Heart of Darkness: negative energy at the core
Both Jude the Obscure and Heart of Darkness evoke the lack of light and therefore failing energy
in their titles. Christminster, “the city of light”, exerts the same power of attraction on Jude as the
Congo river and African wilderness do on Marlow and Kurtz. The male protagonists are attracted
to a dark kernel or to false lights. The energy that drives them and sets them in motion is negative
energy, what is called gravitational or potential energy in physics.
196
The two characters are led by a death wish rather than by life instinct. Jude and Kurtz cannot
survive what they have seen in the darkness of their respective experiences. They can no longer
cling to any external reality for survival – what Marlow achieves by working on his ship at the
station or what Sue opts for through religious belief, whereas Kurtz’s girlfriend has to be hidden
the truth that lies beneath the surface of things and of the story.
Energy as a negative force in those texts lets death and obscurity gain ground. A disillusioned
picture of life is drawn. It is only the poetic power of words that makes it bearable and readable.
5.
Richard Ambrosini (Università Roma 3, Italy, richard.ambrosini<at>uniroma3.it)
William Lingard’s Choice: Steam vs Sailing in Joseph Conrad
In the opening pages of An Outcast of the Islands (August 1894-September 1895) the omniscient
narrator presents the figure of the merchant-adventurer Tom Lingard as “a master, a lover, a
servant of the sea” – only to then specify that he is referring to “the old sea”, “the sea of many
years ago […] Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steamboats was spread over the
restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in
order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends.
The model for Tom Lingard, William Lingard, had refused to buy a steamboat, as his Arab rival,
the owner of the Vidar, the steamship on which Conrad served as mate. (A fact Conrad does not
mention in his Malay novels.) In my paper I will outline the many geopolitical meanings of this
choice, in the late 19th-century “Sulu Zone” (James F. Warren, 1981); I will then point out the
parallels between the meanings Conrad reads into the transition from sail to steam and those Carl
Schmitt recognizes in them in his Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, 1942; finally, I
will make a few suggestions about Conrad’s awareness of the impact new technologies were
having and would have in the world with reference to others of his works, notably Nostromo.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Annie Ramel (Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France, annie.ramel<at>gmail.com)
Energy and ‘the stillness of the stones’ in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
The third phase of the novel (“The Rally”) shows Tess indulging in “the irresistible, universal,
automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life”. Freud’s “pleasure
principle” is fully alive here, channelling all her energy into an attempt at regeneration. Moved by
“the natural energy of [her] years”, she walks towards the dairy of her pilgrimage, “full of zest for
life” (Tess 110).
How then does that life force turn into a death-drive? How does the life pulsing in her veins and
in those of her fellow-creatures at Talbothays lose its vigour, its pulsatile quality, to become a
continuous flux driving Tess inexorably towards a tragic end? Could it be that the circulation of
energy between two human beings (Tess and Angel) requires a polarity, a dynamic tension
between poles, as in an electric current? And that without a polarity, without an essential difference
keeping the lovers apart, desire cease to operate and only disaster can ensue — a sort of shortcircuit? Which, after all, is exactly what Hardy said when he wrote that “love lives on propinquinty,
but dies of contact” (Life 230, 9 July 1889). Then, we seem to have moved beyond the pleasure
principle, into the area of a lethal jouissance. And, as Jacques Lacan argued, energy (according to
197
physicists) is nothing but “the ciphering of a constant”. Now, jouissance is not “something that
can be ciphered, it can only be deciphered”. Therefore, it is not energy.
2.
Catherine
Delesalle-Nancey
(Université
Jean
Moulin-Lyon
3,
France,
Catherine.delesalle<at>univ-lyon3.fr)
Degeneration and regeneration in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Joseph
Conrad’s The Secret Agent
In Tess just as in The Secret Agent, energy seems to follow two different paths. On the one hand,
there is a form of depletion, as evinced both in the d’Urbervilles’ “fancy farm” or the city of
London, cut off from the true sources of energy, and in the family lines, which also seem to be
affected by this weakening life energy. On the other hand, energy can be so powerful as to be alldevouring and even explosive. Tess is presented as a victim of “the ache of modernism”, while in
The Secret Agent Stevie’s body is atomized in the failed explosion of the bomb in Greenwich. In
both novels, whether it be through lack or excess, energy appears as destructive and unsparing.
Even in the hands of the two heroines – Tess and Winnie, presented as such by Conrad in his
preface to The Secret Agent– the release of energy proves deathly as the two victims turn
murderers. Yet the circular structure of Stonehenge in Tess and the “coruscating whirl of circles”
drawn by Stevie in The Secret Agent appear as human attempts to try to understand and
tame/orchestrate a mysterious and powerful force. I will argue that the two novels are likewise
attempts to provide a dynamic and elusive representation of the ambivalent force that drives them,
attempts to turn the death-drive into a life-force that fuels creation.
3.
Martina Saric (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, daimonbell93<at>gmail.com)
Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: Outcast Bodies and the Sensual Experience of the World
The essay is an exploration of the concept of outcast bodies in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and Conrad’s “Amy Foster,” bodies that are displaced, foreign and broken by nature or society.
Their different treatment showcases the author's differing relationship towards the body within
nature and the body confronted with the new industrialised late Victorian landscape (steam engine,
railway).
In Conrad’s “Amy Foster” the foreigner Yanko appears shipwrecked, as an outcast body that is
not only confronted with a foreign society, whose language he doesn't speak, but equally outcast
in natural terms (inability to acclimatise). In Hardy, on the other hand, it is the threat of
urbanisation that displaces old ways and custom that is disintegrating the individual body. In
Thomas Hardy the human body is something that is not at odds with nature – Tess even with her
transgression hasn’t broken any natural laws. The Woodlanders or The Return of the Native both
display insurgent bodies that have transgressed only human (social or moral) laws. However, in
Conrad the foreigner brought to the island within the new steam machine is rejected by nature
instead – his disintegration and inability to adapt are in equal measure to the environment as well
as to social conditions.
This paper will ultimately strive to prove that Conrad’s and Hardy’s diverging treatment of the
body is significant to unravel their different perspective on the changing world at the end of the
19th century.
198
4.
Catherine
Lanone
(Université
Paris
3-Sorbonne
Catherine.lanone<at>univ-paris3.fr)
Short circuit : the paradox of energy in Youth and Tess
Nouvelle,
France,
In Thomas Hardy’s Tess and in Joseph Conrad’s Youth, the protagonists display tremendous
energy. Tess walks long distances and works hard— in fact the better she works at Flintcomb Ash,
the harder her work becomes; Conrad’s narrator is enthusiastically fighting the odds, desperately
pumping water in his wreck of a boat. Yet the tremendous display of energy leads to paradoxical
energy dissipation, less in the form of entropy than in the form of sudden bursts of diffused energy
that manifest a contrary fate. In Conrad’s tale, the ship is torn to pieces not by water but by the
explosion that follows mysterious smouldering. In Tess, sudden lapses at the worst possible
moments, and a kind of daze or sleepiness numb the protagonist’s mind when she should be most
alert and ward off danger. The paralysis of energy through lapse or excess revisits the model of
entropy offered by thermodynamics; this allows Hardy to explore psychic numbing from an
ecofeminist perspective, and Conrad to suggest the self-defeating violence of Imperial trade.
5.
Yann Tholoniat (Université de Lorraine, France, yann.tholoniat<at>univ-lorraine.fr)
Pent-up and explosive energies in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes
Evolving in a world which is fundamentally cynical, hard, ruthless, and where double-agents kill
for both camps without compunction, the main characters of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western
Eyes develop pent-up energies that become dramatically unleashed at key moments. Given that
“all secret revolutionary action [is] based upon folly, self-deception, and lies,” not being what they
seem to be, not looking what they actually are, such characters undermine the logic of nineteenthcentury characterization in realist novels. In Under Western Eyes the phenomenon reaches a new
dimension in that the “Flaubertian” construction of characters goes hand in hand with the
systematic undermining of the elements which have been foregrounded to delineate them. The
paradoxical logic of characters in Under Western Eyes is particularly dramatized in a series of
powerful explosions.
S41: Theatre and Minorities
Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30 and Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Christine Kiehl (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France, christine.kiehl<at>univ-lyon2.fr)
Serena Guarracino (Università dell'Aquila, Italy, serena.guarracino<at>gmail.com)
Vesna Tripković-Samardžić (Mediterranean University, Montenegro, vesna.tripkovicsamardzic<at>fvu.me)
The birth of theatre is historically related to the birth of democracy, but it may have become an
elitist artform. And yet, by nature and scope, theatre has always been a welcoming space for voices
of dissent in the city, the ‘Polis’. The seminar “Theatre and Minorities” contemplates the
representation and the expression of minorities (migrant communities, groups discriminated on the
grounds of race, ethnicity, class, gender, or ability, LGBTIQ, intersectional identities) in
contemporary Anglophone theatre since the 1990s. Such questions as staging alterity, stereotyping
199
minorities, repression and transgression, specific dramatic voices and aesthetics for minority
groups may be raised.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Sebnem Nazli Karali (Edith Cowan University, School of Arts and Humanities, Western
Australia, skarali<at>our.ecu.edu.au)
Post-Catastrophe Drama and Theatre: Postmemorial Politico-Aesthetics of the Armenian
Genocide (1894-1923)
The Armenian Question (1977) is a two-act courtroom drama that centres on the conflict between
Armenian Genocide survivors and a Turkish general. It is a collage of interviews, oral histories
and photographs of the Catastrophe survivors who shared their childhood stories of torture and
murder before a tape recorder. The playwrights/directors experiment with a participatory theatre
form that directly engages the audience even before the ‘real performance’ starts. It positions the
spectators as actors — as the jury during the performance — and witnesses — in and through time.
This immersive theatre experiment provides a symbolic space for arriving at collective views about
a century-long (vain) discussion about whether what befell Ottoman Armenians is a genocide,
emphasising that the Catastrophe still defines the lives of postgenerations of Armenian Genocide
survivors.
In what follows, I seek to understand the interrelationship between law and theatre in the context
of following questions: How does the spectator become actor and witness at once in this specific
narrative? Speaking of witnessing, what are the types of spectatorial witnessing? What transforms
the audience to secondary and/or intellectual witnesses in testimonial theatre? Most importantly,
what does a fictional courtroom environment have to do with postmemorial politico-aesthetics in
post-Catastrophe theatre?
2.
Professor Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University, Sweden, vicky.angelaki<at>miun.se)
Urban and Rural Spatialities of Self in Contemporary Anglophone Drama: Modes of
Othering and Forms of Belonging
As thoroughly outlined through a historical re-evaluation in Raymond Williams’s seminal As
outlined historically in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973), Britain has a long
record of categorisations and assumptions when it comes to citizenship, labour, production and
access. Williams pursues a dialogue with various literary forms as a means of gauging societal
shifts; he highlights systemic stratifications that attempt to render identity a sedentary notion, when
it is profoundly fluid and mobile.
What does the Other mean today? How do factors of locationality, mobility and nomadism, also
in the context of climate crisis, reflect – and impact on – privilege or its lack? To whom do the
country and the city belong? For whom are they reserved, and how do the same spaces operate on
the basis of contradiction, crafted out of variant allocations of space to, on the one hand, elites,
and, on the other, the dispossessed? What are, today, the connotations of the term ‘minority’ and
how is the base, or the middle, defined, considering zero hours contracts, precarity and unequal
wealth distribution?
200
This paper will take on examples of contemporary plays engaging with different socio-spatial
contexts, addressing inequalities and discrepancies, as well as ideologies that lead to their
proliferation and the complacencies involved in these processes.
3.
Maria Elena Capitani (University of Parma, Italy, mariaelena.capitani<at>unipr.it)
“The Dignity That Comes with Being Heard”: Changing Attitudes to Sexuality in Alexi Kaye
Campbell’s The Pride
Contrasts and connections between different generations and decades of postwar Britain pervade
Alexi Kaye Campbell’s debut play The Pride (Royal Court, 2008), which jumps from 1958 to
2008 and back, analysing changing attitudes to sexual identity and intimacy in a homosexual
context. This text explores a complex love triangle in the fear-ridden Fifties and in the liberal
Noughties, while delivering an important message about sexual politics, repression, liberation, and
change.
I will start by analysing the peculiar structure of The Pride, which opens as a Fifties drawing-room
play and gradually collapses into a “multi-locational second half” (Kaye Campbell 2009). I will
then focus on the evolution of the main characters in order to highlight how, in both periods, it is
a woman that functions as the play’s pivot and ultimately enables the two men to embrace their
true selves.
Despite being an award-winning play, The Pride has not yet received adequate attention.
Therefore, this paper addresses a gap in scholarship, focusing on the intersections between
personal and communal identities and the ways in which gay characters become metaphors for
wider mutations in British society, before and after the sexual revolution.
4.
Dr. Juanjo Bermúdez de Castro (University of the Balearic Islands, Spain,
j.bermudezcastro<at>uib.es)
University Theatre of the Oppressed: the UIB Theatre Company Stages Class,
Gender, and Race Thought-Provoking Plays to Awake Social Consciousness (2018-2020)
The University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) Theatre Company is known for approaching social
themes and giving voice to minority groups through Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. In
Neighbourhood Herstories (2018), the company recorded interviews to courageous women living
in the marginal district of NouLlevant (Majorca, Spain) and transformed these testimonies into
theatre pieces that were represented in professional theatres, thus empowering the
neighbourhood’s women who could re-enact their life stories rewriting the district’s herstory; in
Midsummer-ter UIB’s Queer Dream (2019), the company staged an LGBTIQ+ adaptation of
Shakespeare’s play by giving visibility, voice, and special prominence to trans and intersex people;
and in 2019, the company put on the controversial play F…..g Nigger, in which an adopted African
boy is insulted by a Spanish girl in an early childhood class. Both children’s parents start a fight
that reaches the media and brings out sexism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, and the question
of whose responsibility the fact that a white little girl insults a black little boy is. This presentation
will expose the working methodologies and results of this university theatre company that
empowers minority groups under the theoretical frame of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.
201
Slot 2: Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Ludmila
Martanovschi
(Ovidius
University,
Constanta,
Romania,
ludmila.martanovschi<at>gmail.com)
Staging African American Women’s Empowerment in Katori Hall’s Memphis Plays
Using black feminist criticism, the analysis focuses on various instances of feminine empowerment
in four plays by Katori Hall: Hoodoo Love, Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, The Mountain Top
and Hurt Village. These texts are called Memphis plays by the playwright herself in the
introduction to the Methuen Drama Contemporary Dramatists edition (2011) since they are all
linked to this southern city in the United States of America. Whether taking the form of women’s
cooperation to fight racist and sexist oppression, that of black motherhood as cornerstone to the
health of the community, or that of self-assertion and courage in the face of adversity, the theme
of feminine empowerment appears throughout Hall’s work. Hoodoo Love, Saturday Night/Sunday
Morning and Hurt Village feature cross-generational alliances that help characters cope with the
challenges society reserves for African American women. The female protagonist in Hall’s
celebrated The Mountain Top, a hotel maid in Memphis, is Martin Luther King Jr.’s interlocutor
the night before his assassination and she carries this burden gracefully. Her being articulate and
brave helps the Civil Rights leader, her whole part coming to represent another facet to Hall’s plea
for the empowerment of African American women.
2.
Élise Rale (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France, elise.v.rale<at>gmail.com)
Reclaiming History: The Theater of Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks and Lynn Nottage are two of the most influential African American women
writers, and the only two African American women playwrights who have been awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama. They both explore the political interest of a popular genre, historical
fiction, reclaiming a place in History for those who have been left out of its dominant account, so
that they can have a place in the present times.
Their different approaches of History lead us to question the theatrical medium and its treatment
of History. Is it possible to represent and dramatize historical events faithfully? How can real
events be used as creative material, and to what extent may artistic creation be free in the process?
Park’s and Nottage’s works lead us to consider and question the necessity of inventing new
esthetics to represent new perspectives.
Whereas Nottage strives to represent a particular period of the past precisely and faithfully, Parks
is not interested in the real events that have taken place: she rewrites History to evince new
meanings and enable new interpretations of reality by focusing on the metaphorical scope of past
events. Parks suggests that no certainty may be derived from History and its related stories.
3.
Raphaëlle
Tchamitchian
(Université
Sorbonne
Nouvelle,
Paris,
France,
raphaelle<at>epistrophy.fr)
Is Contemporary African American Theatre « Post-Black »? Suzan-Lori Parks’s legacy in
the work of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Jackie Sibblies Drury and Tarell Alvin M Craney
In contemporary African American theatre, few playwrights have been as influential as SuzanLori Parks. Her sophisticated and groundbreaking and 1990’s. If the very existence of a “post-
202
black” era is questionable, the term coins an undeniable turn in the way black theatre theorizes
itself. Unlike the Black Arts Movement’s playwrights for instance, Parks believes “a black play
does not exist. Every play is a black play” (“New Black Math”, 2005); in her work, she has
challenged in countless ways what a black play is and how African Americans are represented
onstage.
As Parks’s theatre has been well documented, this paper rather aims to study her legacy in the
work of following playwrights. What is left of this political and aesthetic shift in the plays by
authors such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Jackie Sibblies Drury or Tarell Alvin McCraney? Do
those writers, who were born in the 1980’s, have anything in common? How do they represent
their community on the contemporary stage? Can we trace a similar “postblack” aesthetics in their
work, or was there another shift?
4.
Cyrielle Garson (Avignon University, France, cyrielle.garson<at>univ-avignon.fr)
Intersectionality in Contemporary Anglophone Canadian Theatre: Perspectives on a 21stcentury Political Praxis
How is contemporary Anglophone Canadian theatre, as a ‘theatre of the world– but at the same
time uniquely Canadian’ (Heinze 2014: 326) aesthetically and politically engaging with the
seminal concept of « intersectionality » as used by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1993, 383)?
Are these minority stories and voices currently able to reach the main institutional stages and
unsettle single-axis thinking?
And what exactly happens when they do in a global context that increasingly sees the systematic
and mainstream recuperation of gestures of protest and resistance? To answer these pressing
questions and through a close study of the work of Theatre Replacement, Swallow-a-Bicycle
Theatre, Jordan Tannahill, and Nina Arsenault, this paper sets out to examine the staging of such
intersections in contemporary Anglophone Canadian theatre as a cultural and artistic field in its
own right, where both theatre and militantism productively intersect. A particular focus will be
placed on the disruption of the neat borders between race, gender, sexual preferences, and class
through aesthetic means, as well as the enhancement of dramatic representation and
characterisation. Finally, the promise of VR and AR technologies recently used by theatre and
performance makers across Canada will be discussed in the context of under represented
communities and intersectional identities.
S42: Revisiting the Periodical Essay (1860-1940)
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30, Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Laurel Brake (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, l.brake<at>bbk.ac.uk)
Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne, France, Benedicte.Coste<at>u-bourgogne.fr)
Adrian
Paterson
(National
University
of
Ireland,
Galway,
Ireland,
adrian.paterson<at>nuigalway.ie)
Christine
Reynier
(Université
Paul-Valéry
Montpellier3,
France,
christine.reynier<at>univ-montp3.fr)
This seminar focuses on Victorian and modernist writers' literary essays that were initially
published in periodicals, and subsequently republished or forgotten. The aim of the seminar is to
reconsider these essays in the context of easily discarded media and see how this affected their
203
meaning, compared to later republications; or to unearth forgotten essays by influential writers of
the time. We seek firstly to trace a tentative history of the genre and define its characteristics from
various perspectives (literature, print history, periodical literature, gender studies, etc.) and,
secondly, to study the transition between the Victorian periodical essay and its modernist
counterpart.
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
1.
Maria Elena Ditrani (University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy, elena.ditrani<at>gmail.com)
“Never thought of, or had the least to do with any branch of that!” – Thomas Carlyle and
the periodical essay
Thomas Carlyle’s early writings (1824-1832), if we except his translations and his sole work of
fiction, Sartor Resartus, consist almost entirely in periodical essays, published in the most
important reviews of his time – without any strictly political intent, despite the admittedly political
nature of journals such as the Edinburgh Review (edited by the Whig Francis Jeffrey) or the Tory
Fraser’s Magazine. This paper aims to reflect on the ways in which, in Carlyle’s writings, topic
means genre. Carlyle dealt explicitly with literature and literary theory only in the periodical essay
or in the peculiar form of the lecture (Lectures on the History of Literature, 1838). It may be useful
to consider the probable reasons for this choice: for example, the unsystematic nature of these
genres (Luckacs 1910, Adorno 1953-67, Pavel 2003, Ercolino 2014) and the possibility they offer
to express opinions, without the scholarship and the authoritativeness that a more systematic
discourse on literature would normally require (Woolf 1925). Another possible reason is his
ambivalence towards both literature (Shine 1940) and periodical publishing. On the one hand, he
regarded literature as “suspect”; on the other hand, despite his acknowledgement of the importance
of “journalism” in the construction of the spirit of his age, he forcefully rejected the definition of
himself as a journalist. In particular, this paper examines the essays: Goethe (1828, Foreign
Review), Voltaire (1829, Foreign Review), and Novalis (1829, Foreign Review) in order to
elucidate the characteristics of Carlyle’s “periodical” discourse, and its blending of philosophical
and literary issues, as well as its almost contradictory tone.
2.
Mark Niemeyer (Université de Bourgogne, France, mark.niemeyer<at>u-bourgogne.fr)
“The Ambiguous Literary Nationalism of Putnam’s Monthly”
Putnam’s Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art, whose first issue appeared in
January 1853, was one of the best literary and general interest magazines in antebellum America.
Besides its high quality, what made the New York-based magazine stand out was its commitment
to publishing American writers and focusing on American themes at a time when, with no reliable
international copyright protection in place, many periodicals in the United States were in the habit
of reprinting the works of foreign (primarily British) authors, often without payment. However,
despite its optimistic cultural nationalism, Putnam’s Monthly, both implicitly and explicitly,
expressed uncertainty about the quality of contemporary American literature and, indeed, about
the capacity of American society to encourage intellectual pursuits. And when the magazine
looked towards the nation’s past—a theme often viewed as of central importance by cultural
nationalists—there, too, its view of the United States seemed uncertain, characterized by an almost
desperate attempt praise the literary value of earlier writings and a tendency to publish new literary
204
works that were imbued with a such a strong sense of nostalgia that they tended to undermine the
positive dimension that cultural nationalists often attributed to history in the construction of a
distinctive native literature. This paper will explore some of the ambiguities created by the tension
between the editorial policy of cultural nationalism adopted by Putnam’s Monthly and the
uncertainties expressed in its pages about the current state of American letters and the nation’s
relationship with its past.
3.
Lesley Graham (Université de Bordeaux, France, lesley.graham<at>u-bordeaux.fr)
The Autobiographical Turn in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Uncollected Essays (1880-94)
During his lifetime Robert Louis Stevenson wrote over a hundred essays on a very wide variety of
subjects for a large range of periodicals. This paper will concentrate on the autobiographical turn
discernible in a selection of essays written for periodicals in both Britain and America during the
period 1880-94. The periodicals include Fraser’s Magazine, The Pall Mall Gazette, The
Fortnightly Review, The Magazine of Art, The Contemporary Review, Scribner’s Magazine, The
Idler, and McClure’s Magazine. Particular attention will be paid to the essays that remained
uncollected during his lifetime. The subject matter of these essays ranges from reflections on travel
and convalescence to childhood reminiscence; from questions of literary style and inspiration to
politics and morality, and they become noticeably more autobiographical as time passes. This
autobiographical content is always ingeniously intertwined with the exploration and examination
of another more universal topic e.g. the origin of literary imagination (“A Chapter on Dreams”);
the difficulties of mutual comprehension (“The Education of an Engineer”); the creative impulse
(“The Lantern Bearers”); the respectful treatment of others (“Gentlemen”). The paper takes into
consideration the biographical context in which the essays were written, notably Stevenson’s poor
health, his peripatetic lifestyle during the period in question, and his growing celebrity. We also
consider the ways in which the constraints imposed by the periodicals for which Stevenson was
writing and the expectations of their editors and readership shaped both the form and style of the
essays he submitted as his mastery of the genre reached maturation.
4.
Laurel Brake (Birkbeck College, University of London, United
l.brake<at>bbk.ac.uk)
Editing Walter Pater’s ‘Poems by William Morris’ and ‘Coleridge’s Writings’
Kingdom,
Professor Emerita of English Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck College, Laurel Brake is
currently completing an edition of Walter Pater’s journalistic essays for the OUP Collected Works
and will discuss her findings.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Teresa Bruś (Wroclaw University, Poland, tbrus<at>poczta.onet.pl)
On Sketching the Essay: Thomas De Quincey and Virginia Woolf
The paper is going to address unfinished sketches: De Quincey’s “A Sketch from Childhood” and
Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” in connection with the idea of distinctive incompleteness
and the publishing conditions of their time. De Quincey writes that “where the whole is offered as
a sketch, an action would not lie. A sketch, by its very name, is understood to be a fragmentary
205
thing: it is a torso, which may want the head, or the feet, or the arms, and still remain marketable
piece of sculpture”. Surviving only in the piecemeal fashion, with parts perished in fire and in the
publication processes, his “mutilated” work can be read as an example of the author’s “marketing
idiom”, promoting both the authenticity of the self but also the value of only a “torso” on the
literary market (Alina Clej). Woolf’s “Sketch,” a digression from her “proper work”, testifies to
her compulsion to disclose in a more immediate way her provisional moments of being and nonbeing. It stands out as the only text where Woolf reflects on the meaning of the sketch against
larger and complete portraits. To publish (with publicare, as de Quincey evoked it, as an ultimate
act of disclosure), both for De Quincey and Woolf is an impossibility and hence, by sketching,
both essayists set out to destabilize principles of certainty, to make apparent the impossibility of
‘‘real” publishing.
2.
Marie Laniel (University of Picardie, France, marie.laniel<at>gmail.com)
Solvitur Ambulando: The Peripatetic Essay from Leslie Stephen to Virginia Woolf
This paper will try to bring to light some continuities between periodical essays written by
Victorian critic Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) and Modernist writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), by
focusing on a specific type of essay—“the peripatetic essay”—, which uses walking as a
structuring device (Forsdick 48) and which both father and daughter quite frequently resorted to.
Although they were published some fifty years apart, “London Walks” (1880), “Street-Haunting”
(1927) and “Oxford Street Tide” (1932) testify to their authors’ common interest in the material
culture of their times and their rootedness in the British empirical tradition, a tradition epitomized
by Stephen’s motto as the leader of the Sunday Tramps: “Solvitur ambulando”, “solved by
walking” or “solved by practical experience”, which connects empirical proof with the act of
walking (Maitland 366). The peripatetic essay, because it relies on the “alternation between
thought and perception”, “self-consciousness and consciousness of a world beyond the self”,
“physical and mental experience” (Forsdick 47), allows both writers to firmly root their reflection
in bodily sensation, to represent thinking not as “an abstract process” but as “a complex operation
in which the physical condition, and still more the half-perceived relations of the reasoner, count
for more than he knows” (Stephen, “London Walks”, 237). Comparison with Stephen’s essays
reveals the magnitude of Woolf’s re-appropriation and revision of the genre: while Stephen’s
persona, “a professed misoscopist” (224), refuses to be absorbed or alienated by visual perceptions,
using them merely as a “promoter of thought” (234), and keeping the balance between
“observation and self-preoccupation” (Good xii), Woolf’s persona radically conflates thought and
sensation, turning into “a central oyster of perceptiveness”, “an enormous eye” (481), as well as
an army of conflicting selves, who dissolve the frontiers of personality.
3.
Leila
Haghshenas
(Université
Catholique
d’Angers,
leilahaghshenas<at>yahoo.com)
Reading and Rediscovering Conrad through Leonard Woolf’s Essay (1925)
France,
Throughout his career as a writer, journalist and publisher, Leonard Woolf wrote and published
hundreds of articles and essays on a great variety of subjects ranging from literature to criticism
and education to international politics. A collection of these essays, selected by Woolf himself,
was republished by the Hogarth Press in 1927. The collection is entitled Essays on Literature,
History, Politics, Etc. and includes essays on such prominent literary figures as Joseph Conrad,
206
Ben Jonson, Samuel Butler, George Moore as well as essays on politics and history. This paper
aims to unearth one of Woolf’s literary essays entitled “Joseph Conrad” initially published in
Nation and Athenaeum (October 3, 1925). In a later version, Woolf revisited the essay and
republished it under the title “Joseph Conrad” in Essays on Literature, History, Politics, Etc
(1927). In this essay, Leonard Woolf admires Conrad’s art of “craftsmanship” and judges his
fiction as ranking with the works of the best Victorian writers of his time such as Thomas Hardy
and George Bernard Shaw. Analysing Conrad’s literary merits, Leonard Woolf reveals the
singularity of his modernist approach and exposes the aesthetic distance that separates his work
from that of his Victorian counterparts. I argue that Woolf’s essay reflects the transition between
the literary tradition of the nineteenth century and the nascent modernism of which Conrad is a
precursor. Likewise, I intend to compare Leonard Woolf’s essay with that of his wife Virginia also
entitled “Joseph Conrad” (1924).
4.
Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne, France, Benedicte.Coste<at>u-bourgogne.fr)
Data-mining in Periodicals
I am currently exploring the reception of British Aestheticism in French periodicals including the
press between 1860 and 1910s and will share my experience with text mining methods and tools
for addressing extensive corpora. Mining those corpora, can scholars still find forgotten essays?
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Dominika
Buchowska
(Adam
Mickiewicz
University,
Poznań,
Poland,
dominika<at>wa.amu.edu.pl)
Constructing modernism periodically: T. E. Hulme’s essays on art in The New Age
The paper analyses essays on modern art written by T. E. Hulme and published originally in The
New Age magazine between December 1913 and July 1914. In 1922 Herbert Read published
posthumously Hulme’s series of earlier essays entitled “Bergson’s Theory or Art” (originally
written in 1911-12) in The New Age, and in 1924 in a separate volume Speculations, which
republished all the essays from The New Age, with the addition of “Modern art and its Philosophy,”
which was originally delivered as a lecture at the Quest Society in 1914. Through these essays
Hulme came to be known as an avid defender of avant-garde art, as they emerge out of a debate
on modern art between the expressivist approach and formalist formula, defending the artwork’s
right for autonomy and freedom from representation. Referring to aesthetic theories by Bergson,
Berenson, Riegl, Worringer and Lipps, Hulme positions himself within the context of formalist art
criticism. Their ideas, including the intensity of reception, subjective approach and direct
communication to a work of art, as well as the need for abstraction, were of great importance in
the formation of the modernist thought in art and literature. These formulations were strengthened
by Hulme’s series of reproductions of modernist artworks also appearing in The New Age in 1914.
The aim of this paper is to show how Hulme’s formalist approach to modernist art in his essays
published originally in The New Age promulgated the development of modernism in Britain.
207
2.
Daniel Schneider (Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München,
Daniel.Schneider<at>anglistik.uni-muenchen.de)
“Such Common Objects”: Periodical Thing-Essays of the 1920s and 1930s
Germany,
This study is part of a book project that introduces the concept “thing-essay” to describe a
continuous – albeit so far tacit – tradition in British essays since 1700. In their contemplations of
quotidian objects, thing-essayists often come up with universal and existential insights that
transcend the object in question. Yet, the essay genre as “a haven for the private, idiosyncratic
voice” (Scott Russell Sanders) has always offered a highly appropriate form for the literarization
of personal associations with things as well. Thing-essays thus provide little windows that allow
us to see how people perceived and were impacted by material items during different time periods.
Next to Romanticism, the first four decades of the 20th century can be viewed as the apogee of
British thing-essays so far: Among the thematic broadness of periodical essays of that time,
everyday objects constitute a particularly popular thematic cluster. Drawing on the New
Materialisms and Martin Heidegger’s and Bill Brown’s distinctions of objects and things, this
study will therefore explore the role of things in three periodical essays of the 1920s and 1930s:
G.K. Chesterton’s “Lamp-Posts”, J.B. Priestley’s “Toy Farm” and Rose Macaulay’s “Arm-Chair”.
It will be argued that although it was mainly their rootedness in everyday life that made these
essays immensely popular at the time of their publication, Chesterton, Priestley and Macaulay also
used the solidity of objects to illustrate and defend the Catholic, socialist and anti-modernist beliefs
that they held vis-à-vis an increasingly relativist and iconoclastic Zeitgeist.
3.
Xavier Le Brun (Université d’Angers, CIRPaLL, France, xavier.lebrun<at>univ-angers.fr)
How Should One Read an Essay? : The Yale Review and the Common Reader versions of
Virginia Woolf’s ‘How Should One Read a Book’
The genesis and publication history of Virginia Woolf’s “How Should One Read a Book”, whose
final version appeared in The Second Common Reader in 1932, is by now well-established. Critics
have traced its inception in a lecture given by Woolf in 1926 and documented the successive
revisions undergone by the text. As Andrew McNeillie observes, the talk itself, “delivered at a
private school for girls at Hayes Court in Kent” was published the same year in The Yale Review,
and subsequently appeared in Woolf’s 1932 collection of essays in a “very considerably revised”
form. In an essay entitled “Readin’, Writin’, and Revisin’”, Rigel Daugherty compares the three
versions of Woolf’s essay and relates the changes occurring between them to the necessity of
adapting to varying audiences – the Hayes Court school girls, the readers of The Yale Review and
those of The Second Common Reader.
In the wake of such studies, this paper focuses on the differences between the Yale Review and the
Common Reader versions of “How Should One Read a Book” to suggest that the change in
medium – periodical vs. book-form essay – alters Woolf’s relationship to the subject she is writing
about: reading books. Whereas in The Common Reader, Woolf is writing from within the field she
explores (books and their various “classes”), The Yale Review essay approaches the same question
from the perspective of the journal article. As I argue, a number of the differences between the two
versions of the essay – including in the reading strategy devised by Woolf – are accountable to this
change of perspective.
208
4.
Annalisa Federici (Roma Tre University/University of “Tuscia”, Italy,
annalisafederici3<at>gmail.com)
“Ladies’ clothes and aristocrats playing golf don’t affect my style”: Virginia Woolf in Vogue
This paper analyses Virginia Woolf’s frequent forays into the domain between highbrow and
lowbrow culture over the 1920s, a time when the canon of modernist writing had not yet been
fixed and the “great divide” between “high” and “low” was still to be established. Such boundarycrossings include the essays she contributed to mass-circulation, popular magazines like the British
Vogue, long disregarded as incidental commissions undertaken purely for money. Indeed, these
articles show that the elitist author was nonetheless eager to participate in the new middlebrow
culture and reach ordinary as well as professional readers. Vogue was a fascinating cultural hybrid
where work presumed to be unique and of high aesthetic value was juxtaposed with the somewhat
degraded status of mass-produced objects. At a close analysis, the five essays Woolf published in
Vogue between 1924 and 1926 do not differ in style and imagery from other examples of her witty
and brilliant criticism. The homogeneity between these articles and the rest of Woolf’s literary
production strengthens the notion that writing for middlebrow magazines did not in the least affect
her style as a highbrow intellectual, a view also corroborated by the fact that most of them were
reprinted in subsequent collections of essays. Exactly as their appearance in popular periodicals
created a complex interplay between high modernist aesthetics and decadent, “throwaway”
consumer culture, the posthumous publication of these essays in book form, along with more
mainstream pieces of criticism, contributed to the portrayal of a multifaceted artist who never
compromised her high intellectual ideals.
5.
Christine
Reynier
(Université
Paul-Valéry
Montpellier
christine.reynier<at>univ-montp3.fr)
Rebecca West’s Essays of the 1930s in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine
3,
France,
Throughout her life and career, Rebecca West wrote many essays for British and American
magazines and newspapers such as Freewoman, Clarion, Time and Tide, Harpers, The New
Yorker, to quote but a few. In 1934-1935, together with David Low, she published a series of
essays on ‘The Modern “Rake’s Progress”’ in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine.
The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress’. Words by Rebecca West. Paintings by David Low was then
published in book form. Although Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine had a high circulation and was
popular in the 1930s, although West and Low were famous at the time as a novelist and a
cartoonist, The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress’ has almost been forgotten.
This paper means to have a close look at these essays in their initial and final form of publication.
It also means to appraise Low’s and West’s unique take on William Hogarth’s series of paintings,
A Rake’s Progress (1733-1735), see how they adapt it to the 1930s, and compare it with Gavin
Gordon’s ballet The Rake’s Progress, created one year later with choreographer Ninette de Valois.
S43: Polyglossia and Multilingualism in Early Modern Travel Writing and Drama
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30 and Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, sophie.lemerciergoddard<at>ens-lyon.fr)
Chloe Houston (University of Reading, United Kingdom, c.houston<at>reading.ac.uk)
209
As exploration and overseas migration steadily grew over the period from 1550 to 1660, Britain
slowly established itself as a global and Atlantic power and more citizens became “cosmopolitans”
(Game 2008). Geographic mobility encouraged multilingual practices and polyglossia: travel
reports often relied on earlier translations, displayed multilingual exchanges between explorers,
mariners and “others”, and were themselves translated into vernaculars that circulated widely in
Europe. This seminar (which is part of the “Translation and Polyglossia in Early Modern England
– LLCT project, (https://tape1617.hypotheses.org/author/tape1617) will explore the uses, forms
and functions of polyglossia in early modern English travel writing as well as in Renaissance travel
drama. Contributions examine the staging of multilingual practices in travel plays and travel
writing, as well as linguistic hybridity and pluralism; pronunciation and accents; reading habits,
literacy and use of maps among travellers and their fictional counterparts.
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
1.
Anna Demoux (Université Clermont Auvergne, France, anna.demoux<at>uca.fr)
Polyglossia and Multilingualism in The Art of Navigation
Published in London in 1561, The Art of Navigation is generally considered as the first English
manual of navigation: the story goes that the original Spanish text, Martín Cortés de Albacar's
Breve Compendio de la Sphera y de la Arte de Navegar (1551), was brought to England in 1558
by navigator Steven Borough after his visit to the navigational school in Seville. In this paper, I
propose to survey polyglossia and multilingualism in the three versions of The Art of Navigation:
the Spanish original, the English translation by Richard Eden and John Tapp's amended edition
(1596 onwards). In doing so, I will determine whether the coexistence of several languages turned
out to be an idiosyncratic phenomenon or a more widespread one characteristic of early modern
works of navigation in general.
I will start my study with some paratextual considerations to build up a framework to the main
argument of this paper. Then, I will survey the presence of other languages by relying on specific
examples from the three parts of the work in the three versions of the text. This will allow me to
identify regular patterns in terms of language, discourse and rhetoric, and to isolate variations and
differences. Finally, all these considerations will be related to the circulation of the texts within
their editing, publishing and marketing context. All in all, my paper will examine to what
extent The Art of Navigation paved the way for new linguistic practices of navigational literature.
2.
Donatella
Montini
(University
of
donatella.montini<at>uniroma1.it)
Travel and Translation in John Florio’s Two Navigations
Sapienza,
Rome,
Italy,
Just returned to England by the mid-1570s after achieving his intellectual and linguistic education
on the continent, the well-known anglo-italian lexicographer and translator John Florio spent
several years at Oxford as a language teacher, around the time of the publication of his famous
didactic dialogues, Firste Fruites, in 1578. In this period of his early career, Florio also developed
a collaboration with the English geographer Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616) (Divers Voyages 1582,
Principall Navigations 1589, 1598-1600), a translator himself, a go-between, a key figure in
promoting English colonial and commercial expansion in the early modern period. Hakluyt
210
commissioned and paid Florio’s translation of the account of the first two voyages of the French
explorer and geographer Jacques Cartier (1494-1554), concerning the 1530s French exploration of
Canada. However, Florio –Montaigne’s future translator!- did not work on Cartier’s reports, but
on the Italian version translated from French by the Italian humanist Giovan Battista Ramusio.
Two Navigations is clearly another typical example of transit and translation in early modern
Europe: the focus is on the geographical triangle France –Italy –England this time, and the story
of Two Navigations is a story of multiple authors/translators, of multiple and multilingual voices.
The aim of my presentation will be to build a case of this less known translation by the young
Florio, firstly describing the book and its intertextual connections, that are intercultural as well. As
a second step, I will draw on the model of the early modern translations communications circuit
proposed by Brenda Hosington and Marie-Alice Belle in 2017, and try to visualize the interrelated
connections of Florio’s translation.
3.
Emily
Stevenson
(University
of
emily.stevenson<at>exeter.ox.ac.uk)
Englishing Strangers in The Principal Navigations
Oxford,
United
Kingdom,
Both editions of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English
Nation, edited by Richard Hakluyt, are a major source for the study of Elizabethan travel and
imperial history. Using a combination of network and textual analysis I work on examining both
the social structures which influenced Hakluyt’s editorial choices and the effects of this process
on the text itself.
4.
Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Paris Nanterre, Institut Universitaire de France, France,
l.sansonetti<at>parisnanterre.fr)
Five translations and no original: the case of Duarte Lopes’s Report of the Kingdom of Congo
(1591-1598)
In 1591 Filippo Pigafetta published a work entitled Relatione del reame di Congo et delle
circonvicine con trade, tratta dalli scritti e ragionamenti di Odoardo Lopez which he claimed to
have compiled drawing material from both the writings (“scritti”) of Portuguese merchant and
explorer Duarte Lopes (or Lopez) and from the conversations (“ragionamenti’) Pigafetta himself
had with Lopes. Pigafetta’s translation of an original forever doomed to be missing, since his
Italian version was composed instantly as he was listening to Duarte’s oral report (so he states in
the dedication), was in turn translated into several languages over a few years. A Dutch version
came out in 1596, then an English one and a German one (both in 1597), and a Latin one in 1598.
My point is that these five texts can be considered a polyglot corpus, five versions of the same
absent original which question the concepts of authorship and authority and challenge the
hierarchy between source and target by their uses of foreign vocabulary (ancient or modern,
European or African). For reasons of time I will be focusing on the Italian and English versions,
with a look at the Dutch one, paying particular attention to: passages which explicitly refer to the
oral dimension of the missing original; whether foreign words are translated or not (with the
specific case of Pigafetta’s Italian words in the English text); instances in which Portuguese words
are added in the English version.
211
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Asseline Sel (Université de Namur, Belgium, asseline.sel<at>unamur.be)
‘Why speak you this broken French when y’are a whole Englishman?’: French, travelling,
cultural mediation, and self-satire in Jacobean city comedy
Given the widely multicultural and multilingual context of seventeenth-century London and the
central role of French culture and language in Renaissance England, it comes as no surprise that a
number of the highly topographical Jacobean city comedies contain French scenes. Drawing on
Niayesh’s argument that French often served as a cultural and linguistic mediator between England
and further, ‘exotic’ destinations in early modern drama (Niayesh 2008), this paper explores the
links between French and travelling in two city comedies, Eastward Ho! and Anything for a Quiet
Life. Exploring how and why staged French and Frenchmen are linked to the issue of England’s
new, growing role as a colonising, global power and to the consequences of this role on London’s
cosmopolitanism, it argues that French, often staged in the plays as spoken by Englishmen, is
regularly used to criticize, comment on, or warn against superficial attitudes of Londoners toward
‘Others’. Linking the traditional analysis of city comedies as satirical plays criticizing English
attitudes with scholarship on travel drama, it suggests that French in city comedies may be used as
a means to make sense of an ever-evolving early modern English society which felt increasingly
foreign or alienating. This paper thus follows McManus’s broad definition of the term ‘travel
drama’, which is not restricted to plays staging trips in foreign countries represented as ‘exotic’
but also includes any play which is ‘in some way concerned with the motivations and consequences
of travel’ (2018), and argues that the inclusion of plays set in London in this category is therefore
contradictory solely in appearance.
2.
Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, sophie.lemerciergoddard<at>ens-lyon.fr)
‘I cannot tell wat is dat’: Double Tongue, Double Dutch and Mingle-Mangle Speech on the
English Stage
Mingle-mangle speech, ‘when we make our speech or writings of sundry languages, using some
Italian word, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Scottish, not for the nonce or for any purpose
(which were in part excusable) but ignorantly and affectedly’ is an intolerable vice according to
Puttenham (1589). Yet a hodgepodge of strange words or barbarisms into the vernacular is part of
the usual depiction of foreigners, alongside some stereotypical characteristics, like excessive
drinking or an extravagant taste in fashion. Linguistic difference as a marker of national identities
on stage has a double function: it is a double mock as it mocks the foreigner – thereby flattering a
national ego which is unsettled by the pressure of immigration and the contemporary linguistic
and literary debate – but it also mocks the Londoner or English subject mocking the foreigner, thus
exposing English untravelled selves. While the forms of linguistic difference, ranging from the
foreign import to the pidgin and to the erasure of linguistic differentiation, have been well studied
(Fleck 2007, Hoenselaars 1999), I will focus on barbarous insertions – foreign phrases but also
multilingual double entendres – that are not meant to be incorporated by the vernacular and that
resist understanding and appropriations. Focusing on Katherine’s role as an interpreter in Love’s
Labour’s Lost, Lacy / Hans in Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday and Franceschina in Marston’s
212
Dutch Courtesan, I would like to suggest that obscure forms of polyglossia encourage audiences
to listen to the appeal of foreign speech, beyond linguistic discrimination and didacticism.
3.
Chloe Houston (University of Reading, United Kingdom, c.houston<at>reading.ac.uk)
Lost in translation: multilingualism and knowledge gaps in early modern English travel
writing and drama
Translation, the movement of information or meaning between different languages, was integral
to early modern Europe’s processes of discovery and learning. Translation and its challenges were,
unsurprisingly, a preoccupation of early modern English travellers, who were obliged, either by
design or by circumstance, to become translators themselves. The necessity of speaking foreign
languages abroad often involved a degree of performance on behalf of the traveller; as Arturo Tosi
notes in his recent study, Language and the Great Tour (Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 57),
many Englishmen attempted to pass themselves off as continental Europeans while travelling in
Europe, a deception which necessitated at least a basic level of language-learning (and also,
perhaps, of acting).
When recounting their attempts at trying to assimilate with a foreign culture and convincingly
speak a foreign language, travellers often turned to the language and experience of the stage,
describing themselves both as actors and spectators. Recent scholarship has explored the interrelated nature of travel writing and drama, including the influence of travel texts on stage and the
performativity of travel writing. This paper will consider the particular issues and tensions that
arise in the necessary processes of translation that occur both in travel literature and in travel plays.
Beginning with Samuel Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), it will look at the problems that
travellers experience due to mistranslation or misunderstanding in attempting to convey meaning
between languages. Turning to the stage, it will consider the use of words and phrases from nonEnglish languages in mid-seventeenth-century English plays, arguing that errors and absences of
meaning themselves constitute a form of meaning, one which is only evident when we pay
attention to what becomes lost in translation.
S44: Urban and Suburban Spaces and the Narrative of Locality in Victorian and NeoVictorian Fiction
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Elisabetta Marino (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, marino<at>lettere.uniroma2.it)
Octavian More (Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania, octavian.more<at>ubbcluj.ro)
Of all periods of British history, the Victorian Age is best remembered for its irrevocable
transformation of the very fabric of modern existence. For a nation caught in the grip of the world’s
first industrial revolution, a particular challenge was represented by the rapidly developing cities,
which created a medium where societal and individual values were questioned and contested. This
seminar is aimed at exploring the echoes in Victorian / Neo-Victorian fiction of this second, urban
revolution, in whose wake “future-shock” led to a novel understanding of “locality” and a
reappreciation of the dialectic relationship between “periphery” and “centre”.
1.
Alina Cojocaru (Ovidius University, Romania, alina.cojocaru<at>univ-ovidius.ro)
213
Victorian London after Dark: The Impact of Urban Design on Criminality in the Novels of
Charles Dickens and Peter Ackroyd
Victorian and neo-Victorian portrayals of London in fiction centre around cartographies which
capture the tension between practices of inclusion and exclusion and uncover hidden places within
the city which undergird a farrago of crimes. Hence not only linguistic, but also architectural
devices are employed to depict the sinuous dismantling of the relation between the city and the
mind of its denizens. This paper examines the Dickensian representations of the cityscape in the
novels Bleak House and Oliver Twist, as well as the nefarious effects of urban planning on the
proliferation of criminality in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and The Casebook of Victor
Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd. I argue that the disorienting spaces create a labyrinthine setting
which kills. The urban landscape may therefore be interpreted as equally reflective of and
conducive to criminality. This intrinsic connectedness of spatial and cognitive models materializes
into a space which amounts to more than an architectural and aesthetic statement. In this respect,
I conduct a geocritical exploration of the underworld of Victorian London, examining both the real
and the fictional spaces portrayed in the selected novels.
2.
Maria
Dubkova
(Lomonosov
Moscow
State
University,
dubkova.maria.v<at>gmail.com)
Rutherfurd and Ackroyd: Londons in Historical Perspective and the Genre Issue
Russia,
Both authors address to London in their works. Ackroyd wrote “London: The Biography” in 2000,
and “London” by Rutherfurd was first published in 1997. The main similarity between the two is
that both authors write about the history of the city from the very beginning to the modern time
with special attention to the Victorian era. History becomes a tool of storytelling for them. Both
authors make a fusion of fictional and non-fictional texts in their books, although the recipes are
quite different.
In these novels we see two distinctive cities, which are defined by the authors’ approaches.
Ackroyd’s London is a character on its own, with its personality and fate, while Rutherfurd’s
London is a uniting place for the characters. Despite this difference, both authors show us how
close history and stories are. In Rutherfurd’s novel factional characters meet real historical
personalities, and in Ackroyd’s biography we see all kinds of people, from royals and celebrities
to commoners, who add to the face of the city.
Both works blur the limits of genres. Rutherford mixes history and novel, Ackroyd mixes
biography and fiction. This tendency continues in later novels by Rutherfurd, as well as, for
example in Norfolk’s novels. It seems interesting to investigate the nature of these blurred genres,
and how the concept of the place changes.
3. Nataliya Polosina (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, netalie<at>yandex.ru)
Urban Experience and Modern Subjectivity in Late Victorian Poetry
Sharing the general interest in Victorian urban spaces the paper contributes to the discussion by
taking poetry for its material. Dating back to Benjamin's canonical study of Baudelaire the French
poetry has received much scholarly attention as a source of insights into the paradoxical
relationship between urbanism and modern sensibility. Meanwhile, the same interest towards the
British literature of the time has been almost exclusively focused on prose writing. My claim is
214
that the late Victorian poetry has much to reveal about “the irrevocable transformation of the very
fabric of modern existence” in the largest of the 19th century metropolises. The paper suggests a
reading of several collections of poetry where the London experience is thematized and reflected
upon in various genres and modes of diction: A London Plane-Tree by Amy Levy (1889), London
Voluntaries by W.H. Henley (1893), London Nights by Arthur Symons (1895), London Visions by
Lawrence Binyon (1896, 1899). My reference point is the classical work by Simmel, The
Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), that comes from the same fin-de-siècle cultural context. What
I take from Simmel is a) his fundamental concern for the destiny of the individual in the modern
city; b) his link of individualism with “culture” which he conceives in terms of refined
“subjectivity” and opposes to the “objective” impersonal forces of encroaching “civilization”; c)
his dialectical vision of the modern city that both grants and frustrates unprecedented opportunities
for freedom and self-perfection.
4.
Carla Fusco (University G.D’Annunzio Chieti-Pescara, Italy, carla.fusco<at>unich.it)
Metropolitan Spaces. Victorian London in City Of The Mind
The XIX century is acknowledged as the age of transition which sees the transformation of
England from an agricultural to an industrial country. Factories outline the new skyline of big cities
with their smoky chimneys and above all the rise of slums in the outskirts create and extension of
the urban space. What also characterizes this urban modification is the appearance of the crowd
on the city scenario. An anonymous and alienated crowd wandering in the city represents a
significant change towards a more modern concept of living. London becomes the epitome of this
revolution. This transient characteristic remains constant through times. Identifying transitoriness
as a central and temporal trope is indeed the purpose of the neo-Victorian stories too in which past
and present real and imaginary coexist simultaneously. This is the first cue of Penelope Lively’s
novel City of the Mind (1991) where the city is London while the mind belongs to the protagonist
Matthew Halland, an architect involved in the restoration of some historical buildings. This the
starting point of Halland’s wandering and musing about London. The aim of my paper is to show
how this evocative London tour can also provide a convincing and fascinating narration of human
history in London oscillating between a dichotomic feeling of wonder and anxiety.
5.
Sinem Oruç (Middle East Technical University, Turkey, sinoruc<at>metu.edu.tr)
Urban/Rural Dichotomy and Its Change: Victorian Fiction Analyzed through Spaces in
Great Expectations and Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Space in the works of Victorian Fiction offers great insight into social and economic conditions at
that time. The Victorian Era can be named a “spectacular” period that placed great value upon
seeing and being seen. In line with this idea of spectatorship, the nation presented and sustained
its vision as a wealthy and powerful state to other countries through promotion of representative
spaces such as The Great Exhibition and The Crystal Palace. In addition to these landmarks, space
represents the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the social changes in its aftermath both in
urban space and rural space. Victorian fiction has reflected and steered the views on urban and
rural spaces widely because urban/rural distinction was a pressing issue at that era. For the
purposes of exploring urban and rural space in Victorian fiction, Great Expectations and Tess of
the d’Urbervilles are suitable works in that both novels entail the protagonist’s departure from
their home located in a rural space, moving to an urban space and return to home although the
215
paths of the protagonists are very different from each other. Additionally, Great Expectations and
Tess belong to different periods of Victorian fiction. An analysis of these novels is expected to
reveal the changing paradigms in urban/rural dichotomy and the perception and significance of
urban and rural spaces. It can be argued that the differences between Great Expectations and Tess
in terms of urban/rural dichotomy and spaces in these novels reflect the shift from realism to protomodernism, which will be analyzed from the aspect of individual, socio-economic issues and
perception of nature.
S45: Shell Shock in Modernist Fiction
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30 and 15:30-17:30
Co-Convenors:
Armela Panajoti (University of Vlora, Albania, armelap<at>assenglish.org)
Angelika
Reichmann
(Eszterházy
Károly
University,
reichmanna<at>gmail.com)
Hungary,
This seminar focuses on shell shock, a puzzlingly physical condition of anxiety affecting many
soldiers during WWI, not only as a physical, mental and psychological state but, most importantly,
as a literary representation. It aims to discuss the various forms of shell shock, literal and nonliteral, and question how WWI contributed to the expression of modernist moods and literary
imagination on the whole. Potential participants are invited to discuss any of the following:
- Representations of shell shock and war trauma(s)
- The shell shocked individual, self and the world
- WWI and the post-war period
- Modernist isolation, fragmentation, disillusionment, alienation and WWI
- Post-war private and public lives
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Andrea Sáenz R. (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain, andrea.saenzr<at>ecampus.uab.cat)
“Not-Writing” About War When Writing About War: Diversion and Indirection in Virginia
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Kate McLoughlin (2011) states that the representation of war is inherently anxiogenic since
conflict resists depiction but it also demands it. Therefore, she argues, one of the literary responses
to the inadequacy of language to portray such a traumatic event as war is “not-writing” about it. In
To The Lighthouse (1927), for example, Virginia Woolf— a war victim herself— portrays the
story of the Ramsay family before and after the breakout of the Great War, without any direct
depiction of conflict, leaving war in the distance. In this paper, however, I will examine Woolf’s
particular approach to war in which the employment of several diversionary tactics may suggest a
deliberate intention to overcome the anxieties of representing what had seemed so far
unrepresentable. In the light of this, I believe that through fragmentation, and silence Woolf
attempts to divert attention away from the main action with the inevitable result that the true target,
the war, eventually becomes clear.
216
2.
Linara Bartkuvienė (Vilnius University, Lithuania, linara.bartkuviene<at>flf.vu.lt)
Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Shell Shock: who is there to give an account of oneself?
The paper will look into shell shock from a three-fold perspective: first, as the analysis draws on
Michel Foucault’s views on bio and psychiatric power (Society Must be Defended, etc.) and Judith
Butler’s ethics of precariousness (Giving an Account of Oneself, etc.), it will seek to answer the
question of how the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway (in particular) (artistically and politically)
approaches the varying degrees of mental breakdown as a consequence of collective and individual
post-war trauma. The analysis will extend its focus in examining where the need for having one’s
self-identity suspended comes from, and if one’s identity is suspended, how does one remain
recognizable by normative discourse as it is enacted by the medical and military, legal and political
system (Thee Guineas)? How does one give an account of oneself so as to be recognizable? What
happens if this account remains outside the frames of normative (medical and military, etc.)
recognition? Second, the paper will read shell shock as a metaphor for the narrative that seeks to
find its way to account for the lived experience so as to verbally (and metaphorically) give voice
to the unsaid, to the troubled and chaotic mind shamed by a sense of failure (Clarissa, Septimus).
Thirdly, shell shock will serve as a metonymic common denominator between appearances and
reality with a focus on analytical philosophy and its method of logical atomism, as formulated by
Bertrand Russell, a member of Bloomsbury group, and its odd affinities with the epistemology of
Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics.
3.
Mariglena
Meminaj
(University
of
Vlora
“Ismail
Qemali”,
Albania,
mariglena.meminaj<at>gmail.com)
Roland Zisi (University of Vlora “Ismail Qemali”, Albania, roland.zisi<at>univlora.edu.al)
Shell Shock and Time in Mrs Dalloway
Shell Shock and the problems related with it in post-war English society are revealed in Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway through the experiences of Septimus Smith. The atmosphere surrounding
the two characters, Clarissa and Septimus, bear the mark of spiritual death, crisis, and lack of
prospective.
The aim of this paper is to examine, through an analysis of the narrative, this phenomenon as well
as time in the novel, which, as Ricoeur points out in Time and Narrative (1990), is such an
important literary means there that he considers Mrs Dalloway a novel about time. At first sight,
the novel’s time appears to be a historical post-war time. For the characters, though, time is lived
as an overstretched unbearable present, devoid of natural hope about the future. On the other hand,
the novel’s time is the time of the individual who returns over and over again to the past, as their
only option. In such a timeline, the future is beyond imagination, which is why the characters avoid
it by only coping with the present through their past reminiscences and traumas. Big Ben, which
periodically marks a real present, is the mark of the novel that signifies the characters’ everlasting
challenge and their strife with society and time, a challenge that in Septimus Smith’s case is won
by death.
217
4.
Jakob
Summerer
(Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Freiburg,
Germany,
Jakob.Summerer<at>gmx.de)
“Strangeness had come into the House”: Shell Shock and Gender in Rebecca West’s The
Return of the Soldier
This paper discusses the representation of shell shock in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier
(1918). In particular, I am interested in three separate but interconnected aspects of this textual
representation. Firstly, through a discourse analysis of wartime medical literature on shell shock,
I establish in what shape the medical discourse found its way into West’s novel and consequently
into the public sphere. Secondly, seeing that shell shock was perceived as exclusively affecting
men during and after the First World War, I focus on instances in the text that depict the complex
relationship of this gendered mental illness and the dominant modes of British masculinity. At the
same time, West’s choices in regard to setting and point of view also demand a discussion of the
novel’s portrayal of British femininity in the context of shell shock. Finally, a stylistic and
narratological analysis of the novel will reveal the formal aspects of West’s fragmented and elliptic
representation of this mental disorder and its effects on the British soldiers and their environment.
The investigation of these different elements of literary shell shock reveals the intertwined and
dynamic relationship between the medical discourse and British masculinity in The Return of the
Soldier, as well as the great versatility and adaptability of the modernist form in the face of mental
and cultural disruption.
5.
Maria-Ana Tupan (University of Alba Iulia, Romania, m_tupan<at>yahoo.com)
Shell-Shock: Discursive Negotiations and Fictional Representation
The present paper discusses the thematization of shell-shock in post-war novels by Virginia Woolf,
Rebecca West and Ernest Hemingway, which, despite the common topic, differ wildly in point of
narrative structure, character construction and representation. Our reading is meant to disentangle
the narrative threads woven into each novel and account for the incompatible figures emerging in
the end. How does choice of narrative voice (centres of consciousness, unreliable narrator, firstperson or omniscient narrator ...) influence representation? Or the ontogenesis of the novel (origin
in psychoanalytic papers read to conferees in Budapest, including military officials, personal
experience, or fictional experiment)? What are the effects of poetic operators in the shaping of the
plot (modernist planes in relation, or the economy of a narrative style acknowledged as source by
American minimalists of the later twentieth century)? New Historicist approaches to discursive
negotiations and narrative theory are called upon in this revisionist study of a number of canonical
modernist novels.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Angelika
Reichmann
(Eszterházy
Károly
University,
Hungary,
reichmanna<at>gmail.com)
Trauma, Muteness and Remembering: Shell-shock and Narrative in Parade’s End
The present paper discusses Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy, Parade’s End (192428), with a special
focus on shell-shock and related narratological aspects of the text. Taking my clue from Wyatt
Bonikowski’s Freudian-Lacanian interpretation of shell-shock (the death drive) as a structuring
218
principle behind Ford’s, Virginia Woolf’s and Rebecca West’s respective modernist texts (2013),
I aim to discuss the compulsive-repetitive pattern of storytelling prevalent in Parade’s End.
Central to this pattern is a scheme Bonikowski associates both with attempts to narrate traumatic
events and the delayed decoding of Ford and Joseph Conrad’s impressionism: occasionally huge
gaps in the chronological sequence of events, which parallel the amnesia caused by shell-shock,
are followed by a nonlinear retrospective narrative of fragmentary nature. This narrative invariably
leads back to a traumatic event, whether it is a domestic or war scene, which, however, is never
fully revealed. In other words, while Parade’s End obsessively tries to approach traumatic kernels,
voluntary and/or forced muteness, an inability to communicate, which is symptomatic of the shellshock experience, remains a crucial component of the text’s narrative technique. It is in this context
that the paper aims to reinterpret crucial aspects of the novel sequence’s ending: the thematic
presence of muteness – Mark Tietjens’s mysterious illness – and the muted (repressed) motivation
of the tetralogy’s “villain,” Sylvia Tietjens, to ruin Christopher Tietjens and his family.
2.
Armela
Panajoti
(University
of
Vlora
“Ismail
armelap<at>assenglish.org)
Shell-(w)holed humanity: A reading of desertion in “Court-Martial”
Qemali”,
Albania,
In “Court-Martial”, a story about Mason, a married 35-year-old clerk, father of a small son, who
unwittingly but voluntarily enlists in the army out of an impulse to overcome his childhood
physical and emotional feebleness, Alfred Noyes tries to restore the dignity of and express
sympathy for deserters of war. In the story, three successive episodes, leaving behind a drowning
soldier in mud because his company could not be delayed, witnessing the death of a fellow soldier,
and, eventually, falling into a shell-hole full of human remains lead Mason to desertion. His
childhood weak nerve remerges and he breaks down. His court trial points out the difference
between civilian conventions and martial laws. In my reading of this story, I will try to demonstrate
how Mason’s civilian impulse is confirmed by his breakdown in the shell-hole and his humanity
comes to fullness when he decides to desert the military machine. The irony of his condemnation,
desertion for cowardice, is mouthed by the man who once recruited him who affirms the cold
“inhumanity” to fellow countrymen.
3.
Marta Lucari (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Italy, marta3791<at>hotmail.it)
“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over”: The World War
and the Gender Ideology in Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald
“World War I changed the human universe, quite literally. […] It brought about fundamental
change in governmental structures and social foundations […] all of which Fitzgerald lived to
see.”1 This paper will focus on the question of the war and the gender ideology in Tender Is the
Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Tender Is the Night cannot be categorized as a historical novel
in the strict sense, but we can find numerous references to the semantic field of the war. The war’s
trauma is commonly associated with the so-called “shell-shock”, in our specific case, Dick Diver,
the protagonist of Tender, serves the USA as a military psychiatrist, but not as a fighter, so
apparently he seems to have been spared all the traumatic consequences that ensued, but Fitzgerald
in the novel seems to suggest the exact opposite. We will see as Dick’s guilt of survivor and his
1
Milton R. Stern, “Tender is the Night and American history”, in Ruth Prigozy (edited by), The Cambridge
Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002, pp. 103-104.
219
war’s nightmares are typical examples of the kinds of traumatic reenactments typical among shell
shock sufferers. Moreover, Dick as a psychiatrist is therefore well aware of these psychological
implications when ironically self-diagnosing a non-combatant’s shell shock, he is also identifying
himself as womanish at the same time.
4.
Torunn Skjærstad (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway,
torunn.skjarstad<at>inn.no)
First World War literature in the English language classroom
The British Poet Laureate (1999-2009) Andrew Motion said at the eightieth anniversary of the
armistice that the “memories of the First World War are still endlessly pondered and transformed
in the minds of those born long after it ended… Those guns may have fallen silent…, but their
echoes neither die nor even fade away” (38). This paper examines the role of these echoes by
reviewing what the First World War literary representations might offer English language teaching
(ELT) in Norway. It takes the concept of historical literacy as its point of departure, emphasising
that historical literacy concerns people’s understanding of the pasts and individuals’ ability to
navigate the world. Encountering literary representations of the past has been suggested as a
valuable disciplinary history method to use in a language learning setting (Maposa and
Wassermann, 2016), and that learning from literature to develop historical literacy may enhance
pupils’ literacy skills in general, as well as contribute to the development of citizenship and
encourage democratic processes (UN). In this paper, I therefore present a literature review putting
forward the purpose(s) that literary representations of the First World War may serve the
development of pupils’ historical literacy in ELT in Norway.
S46 Literary Studies after the Spatial Turn
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30, 15:30-17:30, Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors
Prof. Michael C. Frank (University of Zurich, Switzerland, michael.frank<at>es.uzh.ch)
Prof. Johannes Riquet (Tampere University, Finland, johannes.riquet<at>tuni.fi)
The “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences involves both (1) a renewed interest in
spatiality as a social and cultural phenomenon and (2) a socio-constructivist reconceptualisation
of space itself. Literary scholarship has played a crucial part in these developments. While spatial
concepts originating from literary theorists have had remarkable transdisciplinary careers, the field
of literary studies has, in turn, adopted spatial approaches from other disciplines. We invite
contributions that take stock of the spatial turn and critically (re-)assess its potentials. At the same
time, this seminar aims to challenge current space-oriented approaches by pushing beyond their
limitations – for instance, by exploring the material and experiential dimensions of space.
NB: There will be no live presentations; papers will be shared in the form of manuscripts or prerecorded presentations prior to the conference. We will use the sessions to discuss the papers.
Please contact the convenors via e-mail if you would like to participate in the seminar. We will
then provide the necessary links and passwords.
220
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30: Imaginative Geographies
1.
Seminar Opening & Introduction
2.
Nicoletta Brazzelli (University of Milan, Italy, nicoletta.brazzelli<at>unimi.it)
Going Beyond: The Representation of Extreme Places in Theory and Practice
In my paper, I intend to focus on the intriguing notion of extreme place. This concept allows us to
discuss one of the crucial issues and challenges concerning spatial representation: the role of the
point of view, which, during and after the “spatial turn”, has been fundamentally Eurocentric and
obviously anthropocentric. On the one hand, such a perspective is limited, as an ideologically
oriented approach has been pursued by scholars; on the other, it is inevitable, as space is always
subjective and “felt”. Cultural geography (deeply influenced by Denis Cosgrove) is probably the
discipline that has better explored these questions. The idea of the extreme becomes a tool for
defining and redefining personal and national identities, and for revisiting the connections between
the centre and the periphery. Spaces “at the end of the world”, “off the map”, are geographical
goals as well as literary and symbolic sites. Textual Patagonia (especially Bruce Chatwin’s and
Paul Theroux’s) can be used as an example of how extreme places shape literary texts and how
literary texts shape extreme places. Patagonia takes the form of a collage accumulating or
juxtaposing local and global discourses. Ideological and rhetorical narratives create Patagonia as
an imaginary geography, figured as the outer limit of a global order and as a land at the antipodes
of the known and “civilized” world; in this sense, it defies the ordinary spatial knowledge and
perception.
3.
Jos Smith (University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, jos.smith<at>uea.ac.uk)
The Engendering of Space: Narrative Entanglements of the Human and Nonhuman
In Down to Earth, Bruno Latour proposes a new “Terrestrial” politics that dismantles the uneasy
opposition of “Local/Global”. The “new climatic regime”, he argues, demands that we shift from
a modernist historical trajectory governed by a “system of production” to a more grounded “system
of engendering” based on recognising relations, dependencies and co-existences, especially those
that operate across human and non-human boundaries. This paper explores this demand and
considers its implications for the spatial turn, so profoundly influenced by Lefebvre’s The
Production of Space, asking instead “what would the engendering of space look like?”
In doing this, it reads two literary texts that take human/nonhuman relations seriously, exploring
narrative spaces of painful, dependent, uneasy and innovative entanglement – Eleanor Passarello’s
Animals Strike Curious Poses and Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Such entanglements suggest a
literary space based not on “points of view” so much as “points of life” (Latour). These texts make
starkly apparent what Latour calls “a situation of war” that “some people see everywhere [while]
others ignore”. The paper also deploys Vinciane Despret’s notion of “agencements” as a way of
thinking about the ethical demand that such entanglements of adjacent agency make on the reader.
221
4.
Anna-Tina Jedele (Tampere University, Finland, anna-tina.jedele<at>tuni.fi)
Climate Change and Place in John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019)
Faced with ongoing climate crises, debates about literature and the environment have gained new
urgency. As knowledge about the interconnectedness of ecosystems increases and globalization
connects societies all over the world, the spatial elements of literature become all the more
pertinent. Progressive settings in stories about such a global phenomenon therefore require
constructions of places that take these manifold interconnections into account. However, western
environmentalism traditionally conceptualizes place in terms of spatial closeness, rootedness,
homogeneity and independence (Heise 2008), which seems inept to encompass the global scope
of the issue. It is precisely this large scope that presents a challenge to novelists and the genre of
the novel itself (Ghosh 2016; Trexler 2015). While geographers such as Doreen Massey have
brought forth constructive notions of place that acknowledge the increasing interconnectedness,
some novelists envision the climatically changed world in more a reactionary fashion.
John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) demonstrates how the insistence on perceiving the UK as a
bounded place set apart from the rest of the world prevents not only a realistic, multilayered
depiction of a place in the middle of a climate catastrophe but also renders impossible a hopeful
future in times of environmental destruction. By looking at the depiction of the UK and characters’
reactions to this bleak and bounded place, I will outline the implications of the novel’s refusal to
integrate its setting into global social and ecological networks onto the spatial challenges that
climate change poses to novelists both on the content and formal level.
5.
Kirsten Sandrock (University of Göttingen, Germany, ksandro<at>uni-goettingen.de)
Border Studies, Spatiality, and the Symbolic: Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018)
The proposed paper looks at the relationship between border studies, spatial approaches and the
symbolic by exploring the role of spaces and spatiality in Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018).
Although clearly set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the novel avoids the use of any
geographical locations, historical references or any other specifying system that we usually
associate with spatiality. Instead, it offers a purely symbolic system of orientation that takes on
significance not despite but because of its eerie metaphorical nature. The Irish border, in Milkman,
is not simply a geographical, cultural, political or religious construct. It is a site of difference that
exists anywhere and everywhere, not only in the physical realm but above all in the realm of
thinking and speaking. The proposed paper takes its discussion of Milkman as a starting point to
think about the epistemological realities of borders, and also about what we might be able to gain
by refocusing on language and the symbolic as a central constituent of socio-constructivist
approaches to space.
222
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30: Watery Spaces
1.
Ursula
Kluwick
(University
ursula.kluwick<at>ens.unibe.ch)
Virginia
Richter
University
virginia.richter<at>ens.unibe.ch)
Experiencing Aquatic Spaces
of
Bern,
Kluwick,
Switzerland,
of
Bern,
Kluwick,
Switzerland,
One of the most innovative recent interventions in spatial studies has been the shift towards aquatic
spaces advocated in the Blue Humanities. Moving from territory to water demands a radical
rethinking of space, and a new methodological approach. As programmatic articles (Blum,
“Prospect”; Steinberg, “Of Other Seas”) insist, the ocean is not simply a metaphor (of connection,
flux, infinity and so on), but an arena of social interaction as well as a fluid, voluminous body that
partly eludes human experience, and hence social constructivism. The ocean is also more than a
surface – as which it is experienced from ships, from the shore and via satellites – but has depth,
force and a three-dimensional materiality (Steinberg and Peters, “Wet Ontologies”; Alaimo,
“Violet-Black”). Recent studies emphasise the ocean’s dynamics and agency, and its quality as a
socio-natural assemblage in which human labour, incommensurable objects and elemental forces
are closely enmeshed (Yaeger). Conversely, rather than positing a detached human subject, these
studies assert the corporeal experience of the ocean in various practices such as swimming and
surfing, as well as the animality of the human body immersed in water and its continuity with the
nonhuman world (Neimanis), its trans-corporeality (Alaimo). In our paper, we want to show how
this new epistemology challenges the traditional binary divides between nature and culture, body
and mind, humans and other biota. We also claim that our understanding of matter, space, but also
culture, identity and subjectivity changes if these foundational concepts are no longer
paradigmatically based on land but on the wet, fluid sea. This ‘aquatic turn’ within spatial studies
enables reassessments of literary texts, as we will show in our readings of two watery classics:
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Michael Ondaatje’s Cat’s Table (2011). Both novels
depict their protagonists’ changing sense of self through their corporeal interactions with water,
and engage with the sea as a material force that shapes human lives, as well as a three-dimensional
body that is entered and in whose depths human bodies are transformed.
Papers 2, 3, 4: The Poetics of Island Space
This panel presents a book project on the poetic construction of islands in island fictions across
media and genres; our goal is to foreground the poetic processes through which islands come to
be in literature and audio-visual media rather than discussing islands as tropes for a set of often
preconceived and fixed meanings. The book examines how textual islands are conceived through
a combination of sensory perception, spatial practice, and mediatisation, and thereby develops a
new methodology for reading textual space that is also applicable to other geographical forms.
While being attentive to the historicity of spatial and poetic form, Part I primarily systematises the
different dimensions of what we call island poetics by drawing on many examples from twentiethand twenty-first-century island fictions. The chapters of Part II examine classics of island fiction
through the method of analysis developed in Part I; the latter’s phenomenological, spatial and
medial analyses are complemented by historical theories of perception, (island) space and
mediatisation.
223
2.
Johannes Riquet (Tampere University, Finland, johannes.riquet<at>tuni.fi)
The Poetics of Island Space (I): Utopia and the Mediation of Geography
This paper, the first in a panel of three, discusses Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) through the lens
of early modern cosmography, geography and cartography, bringing it into dialogue with the
writings of Martin Waldseemüller, John Thorie and others. It argues that the interplay of mediality,
spatial practice and sensory experience that runs through More’s text is grounded in
contemporaneous concerns with the mediated experience of geography in the wake of the
“discovery” of the New World. This coming together of the spatial and the sensory in the medial
is linked to various tensions that are embodied in the figure of utopia: between abstract models of
geography and lived experience, between the island as a geometrical ideal and a body, and, finally,
between the influence of geography over human actions and the human production of space.
3.
Daniel Graziadei (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany,
daniel.graziadei<at>romanistik.uni-muenchen.de)
The Poetics of Island Space (II): Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and the Production of
Absolute vs. Relational Space
This paper, the second in a panel of three, discusses Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)
alongside Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Starting from the premise that these two
novels negotiate eighteenth-century debates about the nature of space, we suggest that the island
in Robinson Crusoe is the product of a Newtonian understanding of absolute space, while the
islands encountered by Gulliver in Swift’s novel embody a Leibnitzian conception of space as
relational, simultaneously critiquing the tendency towards geographical abstraction in the work of
contemporaneous geographers like Herman Moll. At the same time, we argue that attention to
different forms of sensory perception in Robinson Crusoe complicates the island’s function as a
figure of absolute space and of colonial mastery: in line with material theories of perception by
philosophers like John Locke, the island repeatedly seems to enter Crusoe’s very body, challenging
the Cartesian subject’s separation from the space it surveys and maps.
4.
Barney
Samson
(City
University
of
London,
United
Kingdom,
barney.samson<at>city.ac.uk)
The Poetics of Island Space (III): Treasure Island, Environmental Determinism and the
Uncertainty of Spatial Perception
This paper, the third in a panel of three, discusses Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883)
in relation to contemporaneous anxieties about the relationship between human agency and the
physical environment as evident in the tension between environmental determinism – exemplified
by Ellen Churchill Semple’s Influences of Geographic Environment, which includes a long chapter
on island environments – and the idea of human geological agency, present in texts like George
Rolleston’s “The Modifications of the External Aspects of Organic Nature Produced by Man’s
Interference.” Experienced in radical phenomenological shifts, the island in Stevenson’s novel at
times seems to generate perceptual experiences (such as smells and tastes) that are linked to
infection and disease, and at others to offer exhilarating bodily possibilities for inscription and
transformation. Resonating with late twentieth-century debates about space as perception, it
224
thereby maps an uncertainty about the links between man and environment onto a second
uncertainty that pertains to the tangibility – or lack thereof – of space as an external reality.
5.
Jopi Nyman (University of Eastern Finland, jopi.nyman<at>uef.fi)
Mediterranean Borderscapes in Victoria Thompson’s Losing Alexandria: A Memoir
To address the seminar’s focus on new ways of imagining space in literary studies, this paper
addresses the role of cultural, ethnic, and civilizational borders and borderscapes in the memoir
Losing Alexandria (1998) by Australian writer, actor, and psychotherapist Victoria Thompson.
The ongoing change in interdisciplinary border studies suggests that the border should no longer
be understood as a fixed boundary marker generating binaries such as here and there, us and them,
but as a more extensive space that also generates diverse encounters that involve both acts of
bordering and debordering, exclusion and inclusion.
This paper is based on an emerging borderscaping approach: Thompson’s memoir of life in
multicultural and -lingual Alexandria in Egypt is approached in the context of what contemporary
border theorists call borderscapes, “zones of varied and differentiated encounters” (Rajaram and
Grundy-Warr 2007), which extend beyond the actual border. I suggest that the city of Alexandria
– mythologized in modern literature a space of cultural, ethnic, and sexual encounters – is a
borderscape as revealed in its negotiations and displacement. Located on the border between East
and West, it provides in Thompson’s memoir a space for imagining identity and offers moments
of “belonging” and “becoming,” to use the terms presented by Brambilla (2015). The memoir is
act of rememory that attempts to revisit the space of the narrator’s family memories as well as the
mediated cultural memory of Alexandria in modern writing. As is typical of borderscape
narratives, it emphasizes cultural plurality and polyphony.
Session 3: Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30: Writing Cities
1.
Hanne Juntunen (Tampere University, Finland, hanne.juntunen<at>tuni.fi)
Reading Space and Time through Rhythmanalysis
This presentation approaches space-oriented literary studies from the viewpoint of time-space.
Spatially-oriented thinkers have long fought the Bergsonian idea that space is static, mathematic
and representational, whereas time is living and dynamic. However, spatio-temporal approaches,
such as Massey’s (2005) and Thrift and May’s (2001), reveal the artificiality of the division.
Especially as the emphasis is laid on the dynamism of space, the question of time cannot be
ignored. Space is experienced in conjunction with time, it changes and shifts in time. One effort to
consolidate the differences is that of rhythmanalysis originally proposed by Henri Lefebvre (1992).
Rhythms are determined by both the space the they exist in and the time they exist as. In the
framework of rhythmanalysis, time and space are both viewed as dynamic and experiential.
The importance of rhythms for space and time is explored in the presentation through an analysis
of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The two titular
characters, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, are divided both temporally and spatially, with one being
awake at day light and one at night, one having his sphere of life in a nice part of town and one in
a bad part. As such, their dynamic is already defined through rhythms. However, rhythms are what
truly define their relationship – the rhythm of the human digestive system. When reading the story
225
and its legacy through the lens of rhythmanalysis, we can see the lasting impact of rhythms in
culture.
2.
Airin Tegelman (Tampere University, Finland, aino.tegelman<at>tuni.fi)
‘We Do Things Differently Here’: Contemporary Music Memoirs as Narratives of Post-Punk
Manchester
As much as music is often regarded as something which possesses no limits, a great number of
20th century music is nonetheless defined by its location. Whether the Merseybeat of Liverpool or
the grunge of Seattle, the history of popular music is often obsessed with spatial origins. For
instance, the legacy of 1980s post-punk is heavily characterized by the city of Manchester, UK,
where various bands and physical venues have become emblematic of the city’s cultural identity.
While a number of films and documentaries have tried to capture this era since the early 2000s,
the past couple of decades have also witnessed a surge in autobiographical works penned by the
performers themselves. These texts, often regarded as the “true” voice of post-punk Manchester,
combine individual memories with communal events to present the private and the public
dimension of the city – constructing narratives of the imagined self as much as the imagined
Manchester. In this presentation I will use autobiographical works of post-punk Manchester to
illustrate how contemporary music memoirs can be utilized as a tool for studying this type of
cultural spatiality. Focusing on both the methods and the influence of these texts, I will argue that
not only do these works become vessels of personal and communal identification, but that the
physical location is a key element in producing their narratives of identity and imagination.
3.
Andreas Lehtinen (Åbo Akademi University, Finland, andreas.lehtinen<at>abo.fi)
Manchester as Heideggerian Dwelling in Michael Symmons Roberts’s Mancunia
Alongside ‘spatial turn’ criticism drawing explicitly on theorists like Lefebvre, Foucault and de
Certeau, a fairly recent development in the literary study of place is the return to the
phenomenological topology of Martin Heidegger’s later philosophy. For Heidegger and the
theoreticians following in his footsteps (e.g. Jeff Malpas & Jason Finch), a location signifies not a
mere geographical site, but instead a contextually-bound mortal experience in which space and
place unite. In his 2017 collection of poetry Mancunia, the British poet Michael Symmons Roberts
(b. 1963) imagines the city of Manchester as such a place. Despite his own interests in spatiality—
as seen for instance in his book on the contingent plots between city and countryside entitled
Edgelands (2011)—there exist, to date, no published literary studies of place in Roberts’s poetry.
This presentation aims to open the field by studying the multifarious and mythological Manchester
in Roberts’s poetry with the help of the Heideggerian concept of ‘dwelling.’ Mancunia, being a
collection which overtly connects spatiality with death, is a particularly apt platform for a
Heideggerian study, as the philosopher saw dwelling itself as a Being-towards death. While the
connection made by Heidegger in “Building Dwelling Thinking” between place, mortality and
poetry has been expounded by Jeff Malpas during the 2000s, the link is seldom emphasized in
literary studies on place. Here, the theory is developed further and applied to Roberts’s
contemporary work of poetry in order to highlight new aspects in both.
226
4.
Meeria Vesala (Tampere University, Finland, meeria.vesala<at>gmail.com)
Digging Toronto: Uncovering the City’s Urban Past through Literature
Historian John Tosh argues that “[a]ll societies look to their collective memories for consolation
and inspiration”, and emphasizes that a shared interpretation of the events and experiences of the
past is definitive for any social grouping. Despite having witnessed decades of scholarly neglect
in literary urban studies, today Toronto shines in fiction and, 227 years after its creation, is
rediscovering its material history. My multidisciplinary analysis of Michael Redhill’s historical
city novel Consolation (2006) combines traditional spatial theory with new locational criticism,
looks for similarities between archaeological and literary research, and shows how Toronto myths
connect to the imaginative and material qualities of the locale. Evoking the palimpsestic model of
the city, the novel addresses Torontonians’ collective identity, recounts the city’s (his)story
through multiple acts of digging, excavating and burying, and problematizes the role of official
history. Urban theorist Amy Harris calls Toronto writers “archaeologists of memory”, and writes
that “by travelling downward” is how we make our way into the city within a city. My research
agrees that in order to discuss the buried city, which literature and archaeology are particularly
good at doing, we must turn our attention to the ground below.
6.
Tereza
Topolovská
(Charles
University,
Czech
Republic,
tereza.topolovska<at>pedf.cuni.cz)
Reading Buildings: The Textual Turn of Architecture as a Complement to the Spatial Turn
of Literary Studies
This paper offers an insight into the development of the textual turn of contemporary architectural
theory and practice, perceived as a response to the spatial turn embraced by literary studies. The
paper has the following objectives: first, to explain and exemplify the nature of the connection
between these two contemporary tendencies; second, to summarise different theoretical
approaches to the textual turn of architecture drawing on works pioneering and highlighting this
practice; and, third, to provide practical examples of the mutual influence and involvement as well
as enrichment of the textual turn of architecture and the spatial turn of literary studies.
Architecture is to be seen as a principle of the physical structuring of space, whereas language is
regarded as structuring the abstract sphere. What bridges the difference between the two spheres
– the physical and the abstract one – is the human perspective. It is because of the nature of human
perception that the experience of space and physical forms is no longer understood as separate
from other sources of experience such as literature, music, or fine arts. The result of the inclusion
of the human dimension and involvement within spatial relations is the liberation of architecture
from its purely formal understanding. Where literary studies benefit from the qualities of the spatial
turn, architectural criticism is to be seen as implying the epic nature of buildings, inviting us to
their reading.
S47: Seminar cancelled
S48: Writing on the Move: The Conditions of Writing during / about Travel
Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00 and Wednesday 1st September 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
227
Tim Hannigan (Athlone Institute of Technology, Athlone, Eire / Republic of Ireland,
thannigan<at>ait.ie)
Samia Ounoughi (Université Grenoble Alpes, France, samia.ounoughi<at>univ-grenoblealpes.fr)
We invite reflexions on the conditions in which travel writing is produced and the effects of these
conditions, both on the narrative discourse and on the travel itself.
One can write from a vessel (a ship, an aeroplane, a train), a mode which implies an immediate
conveyance of the experience. Does this render the narrative richer or more accurate? How much
does the writing take from the travel experience? Can both processes be fused? In other instances,
the mode of travelling (mountaineering, cycling, even walking) may be so demanding that there is
no opportunity for writing in the moment. As Jean Viviès reminds us of ‘travel’ and ‘travail’ share
an etymology.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
1.
Béatrice Blanchet (Lyon Catholic University, bblanchet<at>univ-catholyon.fr)
“On foot to Constantinople”: Liminality, transgression and intercultural encounters in A
Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My contribution investigates narratives of geographical and temporal boundary crossing in A Time
of Gifts (1977), a travelogue depicting a pedestrian journey undertaken by British author Patrick
Leigh Fermor across Central Europe in 1933-1935. In A Time of Gifts, walking invokes
timelessness: the confrontation with the unfamiliar is frequently mediatized through the lens of
cultural analogies, conjuring up references to Brueghelian landscapes and Shakespearian Bohemia.
But the reflexive practices associated with walking also create contingent “spaces of enunciation”
(Certeau, 1994) that subvert existing representations of identities and alterity. In Fermor’s
narrative, contemporary political boundaries are superseded by alternative thresholds such as the
Danubian bridges whose crossing (imbued with desire and anxiety) materializes transgressive
impulses. A Time of Gifts has been published more than forty years after the completion of Patrick
Leigh Fermor’s journey across Central Europe. The delay between the original experience by a
nineteen year-old dropout and subsequent redrafting by a mature man reveals the trials of the
journey (involving the loss of travel diaries) as well as the tragedies of WW2 and the Cold War
divisions. This multilayered and polyphonic narrative is consequently imbued with nostalgia,
illustrated by the haunting figure of the parallax (Moroz, 2016). Blurring the boundaries between
past and present, home and away, this tribute to a bygone cosmopolitan Europe epitomizes
postcolonial concerns with displacement while outlining the ubiquity of liminal spaces in
contemporary narratives of self and otherness.
2.
Kelly Hall (Cedar Crest College, United States, Kelly.Hall<at>cedarcrest.edu)
Writing from the Ice: An Examination of Travel Writing in Modern-Day Antarctica
Antarctica can be a harsh place. It’s the highest, driest, windiest, coldest continent, and the few
people who go there for work, research, or adventure, are an eclectic mix of individuals with many
228
interesting stories to share. The people there work a great deal and yet still find time for creative
pursuits.
Many books have been written about Antarctica by journalists, station employees, adventurers,
and historians—all of whom had time to edit their work back home before publication. However,
little research has been undertaken on how current workers and scientists in Antarctica compose
their personal and professional travel writings while working there. This presentation will explore
both post-Ice edited works and those composed on Ice.
This presentation will explore the various forms of travel writing being done at research stations,
how that writing is shared, and to what extent a reader would consider the work ‘literary.’ This
will include: an examination of published books and the Antarctic Sun newspaper, a description
of and excerpt from McMurdo’s Writing Contest (a fun contest with a giant reward), examples of
poetry read at the Women’s Soirée, as well as postcards, hand-written letters, and an excerpt from
my own published article.
3.
Tim Hannigan (University of Leicester/Athlone Institute of Technology, Eire / Republic of
Ireland, thannigan<at>ait.ie)
“Did They Even Go There?”: Latent narrativity and projected journeys in commercial
travel guidebooks
As utilitarian texts, commercial travel guidebooks (Lonely Planet, Rough Guide etc.) are not
generally viewed as having “literary” status. This paper considers the radical shifts in guidebook
production of recent years, prompted by the industry’s financial contraction and the ready
availability of online information. Many 21st-century guidebook editions are researched by “desk
updaters” who are no longer paid to visit the destination in question, but who check existing details
and produce new content at a distance, and who may, in the most extreme cases, never even have
visited the place in person.
Guidebooks typically feature suggested itineraries – “ten days along the Mekong River”; “three
days in Paris”; “two weeks on the Silk Road”. Unlike the bulk of guidebook content, these sections
do use a narrative form (though usually with a second-person imperative mode – “Next, travel
south along the river…”). The itineraries may well have been constructed by an author who has
never made the trip in question. They are still forged from empirical input, but rather than direct
personal experience of the destination, this may consist exclusively of maps, Google images and
street-views and YouTube videos, as well as the mediated accounts of other travellers. The paper
considers the question of whether this empirical grounding is sufficient to qualify these texts as
“travel writing” without an actual journey having taken place – leading to the further question of
what actually constitutes a journey – and thus what constitutes “travel writing” – in the digital era.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Monika Kocot (University of Lodz, Poland, monika.b.kocot<at>gmail.com)
Moving Between Modes. Robert Macfarlane’s and Kathleen Jamie’s Journeys on Foot and
in Time
The paper will discuss journeys on foot and in time in Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and
Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing. It could be argued that both authors are fascinated with walking and
the notion of “deep time.” This is why it would be interesting to compare and contrast the ways in
229
which they interact with the land, and the modes/tones/emphases of their stories. In order to do so,
I will try to investigate complex relations between landscapes and mindscapes. Journeys “in time”
in the title of my presentation will also point to intriguing, and often dynamic, links between
places/landscapes and personal memories; most importantly, “in time” will refer to the length of
the post-editorial process (in Macfarlane’s case, we are speaking of six years). I will also discuss
the importance of paratexts such as the book cover, epigraphs and/or selected pictures which open
a given narrative, and last but not least (especially in Macfarlane’s writing practice) notes listed at
the end of the book.
2.
Gemma Lake (University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom, gemma.lake<at>myport.ac.uk)
Affective Gender: Navigating the unknown in contemporary female solo travel writing
Written fifteen years apart, Dervla Murphy’s In Ethiopia and Rosemary Mahoney’s Down the Nile
represent two very different experiences of women travelling alone. For Murphy, being a woman
is advantageous, endearing even, among the local men and women of the Ethiopian Highlands; for
Mahoney, it is cumbrous and problematic, particularly in a fisherman’s skiff on the River Nile in
Egypt. Both demonstrate how gender impacts on the contemporary female solo travel experience
in different ways. This disparity between gender representation in women’s travel writing is further
problematised by Murphy’s reasoning that travelling on foot, rather than by bike, in an ‘unknown
country’ is the root cause of her vulnerability under the locals’ ‘suspicious gaze’, and not her
gender. Rather than reductively referring to gender essentialist, polarised assumptions about
women travelling alone, Murphy elicits other cultural and environmental influences from her
experience and in so doing demonstrates a more dynamic understanding of her environment and
the ways in which she affects, and is affected by it. Though ostensibly accounts of two very
different environments, In Ethiopia and Down the Nile offer valuable insight into the myriad
reciprocal influences and capricious undercurrents of human-environmental interaction. This
paper focuses on the lived, everyday experiences in contemporary female solo travel writing and,
through the analysis of internalised manifestations of affect, simultaneously interrogates the role
of gender identity in, and its bearing on, their solo exploration of space.
3.
Dan Horatiu Popescu (Partium Christian University, Romania, dhpopescu<at>yahoo.com)
Writing Travel in 1938 Romania: Bugs and Anti-Semitism
In 1938, when Harold Webber Freeman undertook his travel by bicycle throughout Romania,
Patrick Leigh Fermor had been living there for almost three years, apparently unaware of the
underground upheavals of the time. Fermor was going to write only a few pages on this prolonged
experience, reserving his remote – in terms of time and space –, testifying for the interval he
actually walked, i. e. 1934, as materialized in Between the Woods and the Water.
In 1938, Sacheverell Sitwell published his Roumanian Journney, based on his one month travel
by car experiences in 1937. Sitwell offered his English readers a generally positive perspective on
realities encountered, probably feeling indebted to the cosmopolitan Romanian princess who had
invited him. On the other hand, his insistence on the picturesque of the marginals gave way to
accents of anti-semitism that used to be common in the pre WWII Europe.
Once considered a Thomas Hardy of the 1930s (for his native Suffolk), Harold Webber Freeman
took advantage, in 1938, of travelling in a way that provided another perspective in capturing the
landscape and interacting with people. In a type-written draft that, for mysterious reasons, he never
230
got to publish, the bicycle itself became a narrative prop in exposing harsh facts, overlooked by
the two writers previously mentioned. As for the end product, one could add to the time for living
and the time for testifying about living, as identified by Camus, the time for editing as unavoidably
significant for its acquiring a literary status.
4.
Julia Szołtysek (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, julia.szoltysek<at>us.edu.pl)
How to Disembark Completely: Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s and Ella Maillart’s Afghan
Journey (1939)
In 1939, when the world was but a step away from the irreversible, Ella Maillart and Annemarie
Schwarzenbach, two young Helvetians, dragged two typewriters and a stack of single-malt
whiskey to the trunk of an old Ford, and set out from the rural Engadine towards the Geneva
motorway, heading for Kabul. They were no novices: both keen and experienced drivers, they
stepped on it with an assuredness of rugged roadmen, ready and raring to go.
As affluent intellectuals who were quite well-connected in the world, Schwarzenbach and Maillart
represent a different order of migrants or exiles than the refugees of today; nevertheless, theirs is
a record of transitioning amidst a double crisis – the global and the personal, which they dared to
tackle on their own terms. In the present paper, I wish to shed light on modes of arrival as
escape/departure as deliverance which they negotiated and which marked them off as, at once,
representatives of the ‘leisure classes’ of old, and harbingers of the tragic heroes of today’s grey
zones.
S49: Behind Closed Doors: Reconfigurations of Domestic Architecture and Gendered Spaces
in Contemporary Indian Literature in English
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
Co-Convenors:
Elisabetta
Marino
(University
of
Rome
“Tor
Vergata”,
Italy,
marino<at>lettere.uniroma2.it)
Daniela Rogobete (University of Craiova, Romania, dani.rogobete<at>yahoo.com)
According to Bachelard, “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the
house allows one to dream in peace” (The Poetics of Space), but it also shapes our understanding
of reality, of the surrounding world and our relation to it. Our seminar focuses on various strategies
of mapping and representing domestic spaces and the relationships that shape their human
geography, in the context of the social, political and cultural changes that redefine gender binarism
in modern India. We welcome proposals mostly analysing the correlation between the ever new
dynamics of gendered domestic spaces, and the contemporary architectural reconfigurations of the
“house” in recent literary productions.
1.
Natacha Lasorak (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, natacha.lasorak<at>ens-lyon.fr)
Imagined Houses in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988)
Amitav Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988), is a narrative of crisscrossing
displacements epitomised by the titles of its two parts, “Going Away” and “Coming Home”,
whether ‘away’ and ‘home’ refer to Dhaka, Calcutta, Delhi or London. Houses often come into
focus despite the international trajectories the novel depicts, and critics have rightly underscored
231
the alternating focus on local and global as a rooted form of cosmopolitanism. Behind the shape
of roofs and the arrangement of walls, images of the nation and society pervade domestic spaces
and with them, gender representations. Therefore, the way some of the novel’s women characters
relate to images of the house questions their acceptance of the roles they are given not only in the
house but also in the world. Focusing on an Indian family settled in Calcutta and a British family
living in London, whose relationships strengthen across generations, the novel leads us to visit or
revisit the houses in which the characters evolve, sometimes in uncanny repetitions that the nonlinear narrative emphasizes. Houses undergo sharp observation under the eyes of the narrator’s
uncle Tridib; their walls are redrawn under the fingers of his cousin Ila while she plays “Houses”
with the narrator; their tales are told as his grandmother Tha’mma remembers them. Through the
lines which are erased, accentuated or interrupted, the differences in the reappropriation of the
domestic space through imagination invites us to see how they question gender distinctions.
2.
Elisabetta
Marino
(University
of
Rome
“Tor
marino<at>lettere.uniroma2.it)
On the Threshold: Gendered Spaces in Home by Manju Kapur
Vergata”,
Italy,
Starting from her first, award-winning novel, Difficult Daughters (1998), Manju Kapur has always
chosen to focus her narratives on the controversial condition of women in the context of Indian
patriarchal society. Moreover, her characters’ struggle to balance tradition and modernity, their
attempts at reconciling the demands of their families and their own individual aspirations, have
often been reflected in the tension between the spaces women are entitled to inhabit and those
from which they are supposedly excluded. This essay sets out to explore the way physical and
metaphorical thresholds are trespassed in Kapur’s Home (2006). As will be shown, family values
symbolically identified with domestic spaces are challenged and transgressed to attain the freedom
and self-fulfillment the characters long for.
3.
Ecaterina Patrascu (“Mihai Viteazul” National Intelligence Academy, Bucharest, Romania,
catipatrascu<at>gmail.com)
The Difference of the Same: Heterotopic Spaces in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness
Spatiality, temporality and identity interrelate in shaping imagined worlds and creating literary
works. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is no exception to this dynamics, and
reflects upon the workings of Indian contemporary societal construction, with a focus on the
divergent identities, the out-of-the-law lives that, though apparently particular cases, do make part
of the daily life of a society that is struggling between patriarchal, traditional hegemony and the
all too human course of diversified identities. Roy’s special protagonists, Aftab turned Anjum, a
Hijra, and Tilo, an elusive entity, inhabit heterotopic spaces: the Khwabgah – liberating sleeping
quarters, the graveyard – life vanity turned living safety, the Kashmiri Shiraz cinema – the theatre
transformed into interrogation center. All these thirdspaces become alive and meaningful as they
construct themselves out of the characters’ growing identities. The process of self-definition in the
case of the two characters is mutually dependent on the architecture of the spaces they inhabit and,
at a larger scale, portrays how Roy reflects on the natural multiplicities that define the social
structures of contemporary India. Accommodating the different in terms of identity is possible by
envisaging the inherent normality of fragmentarity as a common space.
232
4.
Daniela Rogobete (University of Craiova, Romania, dani.rogobete<at>yahoo.com)
Genie of the Gutter: Labyrinthine Spaces and Conflicting Intimacies in Deepa Anappara’s
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, Deepa Anappara’s much acclaimed and awarded 2020 novel,
builds up a labyrinthine spatial structure with parallel spaces that mirror one another in a
continuous game of reflections and trompe l’oeil. The story told by Jai, a nine year-old child who
lives in a basti (slum settlement), though spiced up with humour and irony, with freshness of
perspective and innocence of judgment, is at the same time a detective story, a coming-of-age tale
and a sharp critical comment on various Indian institutions. Real events that happen in real spaces
(a series of disappearances among the children of a poor neighbour), mirror mythical events that
recreate legendary spaces populated by soul-snatching djinns and supernatural beings, the gloomy
spaces of the invisible underbelly of India are mirrored by the glamorous spaces of globalised
modern India and are counterbalanced by the open spaces of imagination, of high expectations and
of the miraculous escape offered by TV reality cop shows and Bollywood productions. This article
mainly focuses on the strategies Anappara uses in order to subtly create – amid the claustrophobic
spaces of the slums where poverty, suffering and injustice delimitate their own unbreakable
boundaries of insecurity, resignation and self-deprecation – unexpected spaces of intimacy, human
solidarity and beauty.
5.
Olivia Bălănescu (University of Craiova, Romania, olivia.balanescu<at>gmail.com)
Spaces of Identity
The house functions as the cradle of human existence, representing, as Gaston Bachelard
emphasised, man’s primal metaphysics, followed by a secondary one, when he is ‘cast into the
world’ outside the house. The interrelation between the spaces inside and outside the house
provides the key to our understanding of subjectivity and its connection to the collective
consciousness. From a feminist perspective, the house is typologically considered a feminine
space, or the place allotted to women, epitomising the relation between space and patriarchal
power. Apart from gender inscriptions, space implies the reality of physical borders, of margins,
and, since space is a social construction, the borders become ideological, constrictive barriers. The
concern with the production of space has largely been informed by colonial and postcolonial
studies, which attempt to expose the effects of European domination over space by focusing on
issues of geographical marginality, migration and political displacement. Starting from these
theoretical considerations of space, the aim of this paper is to investigate space and symbolic
boundaries of selfhood in Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss.
S50: War and its Aftermath in Contemporary English-Speaking Theatre
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Sibel Izmir (Atılım University, Turkey, sibeleceizmir<at>gmail.com)
Claus Peter Neumann (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, cpneuman<at>unizar.es)
War has been a major topic represented in theatre since Greek antiquity. While the focus of much
of 20th-century English-speaking theatre lay elsewhere, the Yugoslav wars and 9/11 and its
233
aftermath have brought war back centre stage in more recent years, this renewed interest taking on
many different forms. In our seminar we want to debate how war has been portrayed in the Englishspeaking theatre in the last three decades with the following possible topics:
- war and migration/displacement
- political, ideological and economic implications of war
- aesthetic modes and war
- memory, identity and war
- staging war and the use of technology
1.
Ifeta Čirić-Fazlija (University of
Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina,
ifetaciric<at>yahoo.com)
‘Not the Time for Fighting but for Taking Care of Each Other’: Dramatization of the Second
World War in Two Asian-American Plays
Most of the recorded history of humanity has been indelibly marked by armed conflicts in sundry
places of the world, yet none of the wars seem to have had such a crushing scale or overwhelming
effects as the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Both world wars remapped
the geography, politics, economies, and consciousness of the pre-Great-War realities, and
deafeningly echoed in modern literatures of various nations. Anglophone literature has overtly
portrayed the atrocities and human ordeals, and concurrently raised awareness and agitated against
the savagery of warfare in its poignant Trench Poetry, anti-war novels of the Lost Generation
authors, dramas of the Holocaust and theatre of Genocide, among others. Yet a relatively recent
subgenre of Anglophone drama has appeared to avoid the subject of armed conflicts and its
consequences, mainly because its critics and reviewers focus on identity politics and minority and
ethnic studies’ potpourri of ideas and images that Asian-American theatre abounds in. Conversely,
precisely in Asian-American dramas a researcher may find arresting examples of how an Englishspeaking theatre represents conflict-induced displacement and migrations, and repercussions of
the Second World War, while dealing with one of the most discomfiting events in recent US
history.
This paper aims to examine the staging of state-controlled relocations of Asian American citizens
and their consequent experiences in Wakako Yamauchi’s play 12-1-A, and the ideological and
socio-economic repercussions of the Second World War for the Japanese in Velina Hasu
Houston’s Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken).
2.
Cristina Pividori (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona / Universitat Oberta de Catalunya,
Spain, MariaCristina.Pividori<at>uab.cat)
Representing the Malvinas/Falklands War on Stage: Crossing Borders in Minefield/Campo
Minado (Lola Arias, 2016)
The English/Spanish bilingual play Minefield/Campo Minado, written by Argentine theatre and
film director Lola Arias in 2016, was crafted as a collaborative project involving British and
Argentine veterans of the Malvinas/Falklands War of 1982. The cast is formed by six combatants
who act out their own war experiences and recollections. This paper will explore how aspects such
as past/present, friend/foe, fact/fiction, amongst others, blend together in an effort to challenge,
reframe and deconstruct fixed categorizations, enabling the intersection and crossing of
234
representational borders. By doing so, the play invites viewers to rethink and/or cross borders
within social, political and cultural spaces on the stage.
In drawing from documentary records, the theatre of testimony has become a genre of rupture that
responds to the trauma of war, as it calls upon the conceptual framework of ‘witness literature’ to
respond, in this particular case, to the devastation of the Malvinas/Falklands War, all the while
recreating within this responsive framework a reinterpretation of more conventional forms of
expression. Minefield/Campo Minado produces the effects of estrangement and instability that
represent the enormity of war trauma, inviting the viewer to participate in an ethical, social and
cultural act of watching but also of bearing witness. Through the crossing of borders between the
documentary and the fictional, between personal and cultural memory the play lends itself to wideranging texts that not only call upon diverse narrative strategies of destabilisation, but tend both to
closure and to the shaping of British and Argentinian personal and collective memory.
3.
Andrea Roxana Bellot (Rovira i Virgili University, Spain, andrearoxana.bellot<at>urv.cat)
Sink The Belgrano! (Steven Berkoff, 1986): A Grotesque Caricature of M. Thatcher’s
Belligerence
The satirical verse-play Sink the Belgrano!, written by British actor and playwright Steven Berkoff
in 1986, was conceived in the aftermath of the Falklands/Malvinas War as a critical response to
Margaret Thatcher’s management of the conflict, and more specifically to the controversial sinking
of the ARA General Belgrano, which was torpedoed by the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror
outside the Maritime Exclusion Zone, causing the death of hundreds of young sea cadets.
The play seeks to counteract the Thatcherite myth, rebuking Margaret Thatcher (“Maggot
Scratcher” in the play) and her War Cabinet for their electoral cynicism, imperial snobbery, and
meritocratic individualism in the disproportionate and illegal use of force and the boycott of the
peace negotiations. To do so, Berkoff relies on some of the strategies of the so-called ‘in-yer-face’
theatre (Aleks Sierz regards him as one of the early pioneers of this style of drama): mostly the use
of the grotesque in the portrayal of Thatcher and her Cabinet, and the shifts in style from the epic
and chivalric to the violent hooligan slang. Yet, I contend that by representing the conflict as the
resulting expression of Thatcher’s political ideology, Berkoff is caught up in what he criticizes as
the play becomes the binary opposite of the myth, disregarding historical and social complexities
and even the playwright’s own ideological ambiguity towards Thatcherism, as shown in Greek
(1980), in which he appears to somehow endorse the neo-conservative culture that Thatcher
represented.
4.
Marion Coste (Sorbonne Université, France, marion_coste<at>live.fr)
‘The war was all right. I miss it. It’s just you come back to this’: Alienation and Trauma in
Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006)
Motortown was written in just four days in July 2005 during the 7/7 bombings in London: a sense
of horror and urgency therefore permeates the play, which tells the story of Danny, a young soldier
returning home after a tour in Iraq only to find himself back on the battlefield on a new home front.
The apocalyptic tone of the play serves to highlight Danny’s traumatic experience in Iraq and his
disenchantment with the country he sought to defend but now sees as utterly corrupt and lacking
any moral standard. Danny’s blinding rage and frustration with his failure to belong to a collective
235
identity reaches its climax with the graphic torture and murder of a young innocent black girl.
This paper will argue that Motortown, through its carefully choreographed staging, does not
explain Danny’s violence as a failure to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, but rather as the
result of his socio-economic situation, which was later exacerbated during his time in the army.
Motortown is therefore as much about the Iraq war as it is about the class war: the violence evoked
or displayed in the play aims at unsettling its largely liberal audience and shocking them into
acknowledging the culture of despair in which Danny is trapped.
5.
Sibel Izmir (Atılım University, Turkey, sibeleceizmir<at>gmail.com)
Deconstructing Politically Constructed History: David Hare’s Stuff Happens and The
Vertical Hour
The British playwright David Hare’s two plays Stuff Happens (staged at the Royal Court Theatre
in 2004) and The Vertical Hour (staged on Broadway in 2006) are among the most renowned
productions which were written as an artistic response to the Iraq war in 2003, post 9/11. In Stuff
Happens, Hare makes use of the techniques of verbatim theatre to write a “history play” as he
claims and tries to picture the political actualities behind the closed doors by further elaborating
the discourse of the “War on Terror”, while in The Vertical Hour, the companion piece to the
previous play and a fictional account, the Iraq war is treated in a more indirect and personal
manner. As it is apparent, although the common topic in both plays is the Iraq war, the playwright
utilizes distinctive dramatic methods in each of them. This paper will try to investigate how and to
what extent Hare achieves to deconstruct politically constructed history and the war discourse in
the two plays, one being documentary, the other being fictional. The deconstructive and distinctive
strategies consciously employed in the plays and their overall effects on the plays’ aesthetic
structure will also be the concern of the study.
6.
Claus Peter Neumann (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, cpneuman<at>unizar.es)
Dismantling the American Army Family: Lydia Stryk’s American Tet
Contemporary English-language plays on war-related topics seem to have left behind the postdramatic forms of the turn of the century in order to return to dramatic modes. Abstraction and
intertextual play are being exchanged for more realistic representations of historically concrete and
geographically localized events. Frequently, these plays, rather than staging acts of war per se,
depict the repercussions of war on people’s lives in their respective communities, thereby probing
the local effects of global conditions.
A case in point is Lydia Stryk’s American Tet (first performed in 2005 and published in 2008),
which focuses on the lives of an American army family: the father is a retired Vietnam war veteran
and the son a soldier returning from Iraq in the course of the play. The monologues by and
dialogues between the different family members, full of references (mainly made in passing) to
bodily disfigurement suffered and gender violence perpetrated by homecoming war veterans,
simultaneously invoke and dismantle the image of the American army family as self-abnegating
but proud and supportive haven. At the same time, while the play challenges the national rhetoric
of the USA’s “war on terror” as a humanitarian mission of liberation, it also cautions against a too
simplistic inversion of dichotomies, thereby questioning any dualistic vision of war.
236
S51: Adapting Literature in Film and the New Media
Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Işıl Baş (Istanbul Kültür University, Turkey, isil<at>boun.edu.tr)
Katerina
Kitsi-Mitakou
(Aristotle
University
of
Thessaloniki,
katkit<at>enl.auth.gr)
Greece,
We invite papers that will explore different ways in which literary works have been adapted and
appropriated for the screen, or other media, such as, video games, cartoons, comic books,
advertisements, newspapers, etc. Some of the questions that will be addressed are related with how
the adaptation industry impacts on the book industry; how the adapter’s production choices enable
new readings of the source text; whether issues like race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity are dealt
with in ways that produce more politically correct versions of the plays for contemporary
audiences; or if and how literary texts are revisited in an effort to question expansionist and
imperialist discourses and politics.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
Işıl Baş (Istanbul Kültür University, Turkey, i.bas<at>iku.edu.tr)
"Vampyric" Cultural Texts: Politics of Westernization and The Women’s Question in the
Turkish Adaptations of Dracula
My paper will discuss two cultural adaptations of Bram Stoker’s seminal work, Dracula. The first
is a much shortened version of Stoker’s text written by Ali Riza Tevfik in 1928 originally titled
Vlad the Impaler and later published as Dracula in Istanbul. Tevfik’s novella goes beyond
adaptation by not only summarizing the main text but also blending in lengthy references to
Ottoman history thereby underlining the significance of Vlad, a western aristocrat and warlord on
whom the character of Dracula is based upon, for Turks, the target audience of Tevfik. Late 1920’s
mark the emergence of the nation state and top-down reforms of modernization that created
tensions in all sections of a predominantly Muslim society and reactions to the West which are
reflected in Tevfik’s fiction. The 1953 film adaptation of Tevfik’s novella goes even further by
adding socio-cultural elements while diminishing Dracula’s character and highlighting gender
relations of the era that were significantly different from the early Republican period in which
Tevfik’s work appeared.
2.
Maria Vara (Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece, marivara<at>enl.auth.gr)
A Museum of Literary Adaptations: Charles Dickens Museum in London
It is common experience today to immerse oneself, “all the year round,” into the fiction of Charles
Dickens, which continues to evolve into an inexhaustible cultural phenomenon adapted for all
types of media, old and new: movies, cartoons, comic books, advertisements, newspapers,
computer games, blogs, social networking platforms, etc. The purpose of this paper is to illuminate
how the above range of Dickens powerful transmedia adaptation industry underlines the structure
of a whole museum, the Charles Dickens Museum in London, which was Dickens’ home for two
years. The house where famous novels were written – Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby among
others – has been turned into a museum of literary adaptations which constructs a fascinating
237
illusion of time-travel into the author’s intriguing narratives as well as into his own literary
biography.
3.
Irene Stoukou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, enstoukou<at>enl.auth.gr)
Escaping Alice: The Posthuman in Claude Chabrol’s Alice or the Last Escapade
Claude Chabrol’s Alice ou la Dernière Fugue (1977), an adult fantasy film, has been one of the
most scholarly overlooked screen appropriations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. Already known
for her leading role in the erotic film series Emmanuelle, Sylvia Kristel is the adult Alice Carroll
who decides to abandon her husband, before entering a mansion that proves to be a kind of
purgatory. Influenced by the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, the French New Wave
director alternates between realism and expressionism, the subjective and the objective camera,
realising elements of cinematic voyeurism, desire, innocence, guilt, fear, and violence, while
addressing questions pertaining to death, gender, and sexuality. In the present paper, I explore the
film’s stylistic and narrative elements, and I look into the power relations and the notion of death—
present in both Carroll’s text and Chabrol’s film—through the lens of posthuman critical theory.
Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s philosophy within posthuman (feminist) theory, I pose that Chabrol’s
aesthetics and his use of the death metaphor serve as a critique of the inhuman(e), patriarchal,
bourgeois culture of twentieth-century France, while, through his more-than-human characters, the
director poses questions with regard to the essence of human nature and humanist logic in ways
that anticipate contemporary posthuman discourse. In doing so, Chabrol offers a new reading of
Carroll’s texts, one that defies humanist logic and anthropocentric ethics structured upon
Enlightenment ideals, and moves towards a posthumanist approach to the concepts of “life” and
the “human.”
4.
Margarida Esteves Pereira (University of Minho, Portugal, margarida<at>ilch.uminho.pt)
“Poor, poor Tess”: Adapting Tess of the D’Urbervilles to the Screen
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy has been recurrently adapted to audio-visual media,
be it the big screen, be it the television screen. In the first case, apart from old silent film
adaptations, Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) stands out as a landmark version of the novel; in the
case of television, there are at least two productions: one, a LWT film, from 1998 and the other a
BBC mini-series from 2008. It has also been adapted into different locations, as is the case with
Michael Winterbottom’s film Trishna (2011), a transcultural adaptation which relocates Hardy’s
novel to twentieth-first century India. Central to the several versions is the character of Tess, a
heroine that is presented in the novel as “a pure woman, faithfully presented by Thomas Hardy”.
This paper aims at comparing different adaptations of Hardy’s novel with a focus on the central
character of the story. We will take as a point of departure feminist readings of the novel which
point out contradictions in the presentation of the character both as an innocent country girl and as
an object of male desire. It is our purpose to understand the way the several adaptations of Tess of
the D’Urbervilles reinforce or dismiss the contradictory presentation that is made of this character
in the novel.
238
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 17:00-19:00
1.
Nina Moroz (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, nina.a.moroz<at>gmail.com)
The Forbidden Fruit and the Bomb: Soviet Animated Adaptations of Ray Bradbury
My presentation is concerned with the animated adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s short stories, made
in the USSR in the 1980s – “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950; animated film directed by Nazim
Tulyahodzhaev, “Uzbekfilm”, 1984) and “Here There Be Tygers” (1951; animated film directed
by Vladimir Samsonov, “Ekran”, 1989). Ray Bradbury was one of the most popular and influential
foreign sci-fi authors for the Soviet readers of cold war era. Nevertheless, both adaptations omit
some Bradbury’s key metaphors and transform the original plot and imagery, making them
ideologically freighted. It is, of course, the cold war fear of nuclear attacks and, moreover, the fear
of Western world itself. But, paradoxically, these are also the projections of the Soviet isolation
and total panoptical control onto the hated and desired “other” world. The house in “There Will
Come Soft Rains” turns into a mechanical tyrant and an embodiment of a repression machine. In
this connection, it is of interest to note that both films use Biblical imagery, absent in the source
texts – the garden of Eden and the forbidden fruit, the serpent, the crucifix, etc., and sacrificial
motives. Unusual Christian symbolism in Soviet films was legitimized by their western setting.
Widening the context, I will also comment on the late Soviet sci-fi adaptations, thoroughly
focusing on the animated films and on their specific visual language.
2.
Anja Meyer (University of Verona, Italy, anja.meyer<at>univr.it)
Adapting Classics of Literature to Social Media: The Case of Insta-Novels
The exceptional growth of audio-visual media and digital texts over the last decades has deeply
changed the modes of diffusion and reception of literature. The continuous production of new
kinds of multimodal reading, emerging both in print and on screen, represents a great challenge
for researchers, who constantly need to redefine the boarders of today’s visual culture. From the
“pictorial turn”, theorized by W.J.T. Mitchell in the ’90s and the raise of visual literacy as a basic
competence for understanding meaning, to the more recent theories about the visual grammar of
multimodal texts (G. Kress, 2003, T. Leeuwen, 2006), it is increasingly clear that new reading
practices and technologies are reshaping the borders of readability of our contemporary culture.
In the last years, the Internet has become the most popular platform for the creative realisation of
new stories under the form, for instance, of fan fictions and Twitter novels (‘Twitterature’), leaving
the consumption of literary ‘classics’ to more traditional channels. In 2018, however, the New
York Public Library has announced the launch of the series “Insta Novels”, and started to share
classic novels like Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), Gilman’s short story
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) or Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (1843) on Instagram, today’s
most popular social media platform visited by millions of people every day. In order to engage the
attention of virtual instagrammers, literary novels are accompanied by original images and
animations specifically realised by artists with large followings. The aim of this paper is to analyse
the way such novels, chosen for their highly visual nature, have been addressed to a vast digital
audience through a new media tool, in the attempt to make the practice of reading classics a new
experience of visual literacy.
239
3.
Katerina
Kitsi-Mitakou
(Aristotle
University
katkit<at>enl.auth.gr)
LOL: Let Ophelia Live: Shakespeare in the Age of Memes
of
Thessaloniki,
Greece,
If genes transfer genetic information and are subject to continuous mutation for the sake of
assisting survival, then memes, their cultural equivalent, are responsible for cultural transmission
and also undergo transformations for the sake of cultural evolution. A few decades after the term
‘meme’ had been coined by Richard Dawkins in his seminal study: The Selfish Gene, memes
became a new mode of communication for a generation of digital natives in the age of the social
media revolution. Shakespeare memes came to claim a noteworthy section in this new cult and are
being unremittingly disseminated, ‘liked’, ‘re-blogged’, and/or ‘shared’ in platforms such as
Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter.
Like all cultural replicators, memes are constructed on the basis of intertextuality, and (anomalous)
juxtaposition, and as mini adaptations, may spoof the original, re-contextualize it, or re-appropriate
it. In this vein, communities like 9GAG.com, quickmeme.com, 4chan.com, cheezburger.com, or
Tumblr.com, engage with Shakespeare’s works or image to create Hipster or Scumbag versions
Shakespeare, fool around with Shakespeare’s Insults, joke about his ironies, or design Infographics
of his work. This paper aims at exploring how Shakespeare memes have changed the ways
Shakespeare is (re)produced, consumed, shared and read today. Do memes enable the new
generation of digital natives to appropriate the text for its own cultural, social and/or political
agenda? Do memes contribute to the democratizing effect of adaptation, by setting a cultural icon
free from its constricted territory of elitist canonicity? Do they participate in Shakespeare’s
globalization? Do they, finally, threaten to trivialize the ur-text or do they contribute to the survival
of Shakespeare through forcing into a process of necessary mutation?
4.
Sergej Macura (University of Belgrade, Serbia, sergej.macura<at>fil.bg.ac.rs)
The Sacrifice of the Old-God King in Conrad and Coppola: Narratological and
Anthropological Parallels
The presentation focuses on the climactic segment of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when
Marlow and his boat crew arrive in Kurtz’s forest village to make an end to his “unsound methods”
of running the company’s operations deep in the Congolese forest. Although he is just a man dying
of jungle fever, the natives see him as a sort of deity, which he has abundantly exploited in his
favour, having become an object of worship. Despite his wish to bring European civilisation to
Africa – it must be said, in an outrightly abusive manner bleeding the land of its wealth – he
succumbed to the mythical lure of kingship beyond the confines of the Western episteme of order.
Its film adaptation, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, retains many motifs from the original
storyline, like the upstream journey of Captain Willard, the almost inaccessible village with loyal
native subjects, the accountant (Colonel Kilgore in the film), the black helmsman (Chief Phillips),
and the Russian harlequin (photographer played by Dennis Hopper), with the unearthly-looking
mass of followers, who serve as Kurtz’s dedicated soldiers and adorers. The talk will also touch
upon the subsequent products of culture that have found plausible motivation in the film’s
structure, like the critical moment of the Vietnam War, the liminal state of mind of an officer sent
into hostile territory, his reading of scholarly studies of myth such as The Golden Bough and From
Ritual to Romance, side by side with Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” and his giving over to the ritual
sacrifice performed by the “new god.”
240
S52: European Translations and Adaptations of 19th-Century British Classics
Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Ebbe Klitgård (University of Roskilde, Denmark, ebbek<at>ruc.dk)
Alberto Lázaro (University of Alcalá, Spain, alberto.lazaro<at>uah.es)
It is well known that many 19th century classics in British fiction have been adapted for children
and published as easy readers in several European countries, e.g. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist,
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It
is less known, however, that classics from Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters to George Eliot
and Thomas Hardy have also been edited for adult readers and that translation practice well into
the 20th century involved editing, abbreviation or other kinds of text transformation. This seminar
includes papers investigating how 19th-century British classics have been re-shaped across
Europe, both for children and adults.
1.
Evgenia Sifaki (University of Thessaly, Greece, evsifaki<at>uth.gr)
Eleni Kontaxi (University of Thessaly, Greece, kondax<at>uth.gr)
The Reception of Jane Eyre in Greece
We propose to present a study of the translations and abridged editions of the Brontë sisters in
Greece, particularly focusing on the reception of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The first translation
of Jane Eyre was followed by the translation of the Classics Illustrated comic book (from the series
created by A. L. Kanter in 1946) and, subsequently, by a number of abridged editions (the novels
were first published in Greek about a century after the publication of the originals). More recently,
there have appeared Greek translations of several English abridged editions of the novel, addressed
to adolescents and even much younger children. In the first decades of the twenty-first century,
new, commendable translations were produced.
Given the fact that, during the twentieth century, cut down and abridged editions of the text of
Jane Eyre were intended not only for young people but adult readers as well, we approach these
texts by means of recent theories that relate translation to adaptation, assuming that translation
always involves transcultural interaction, and differentiating between “ethnocentric” and
“foreignizing” translations. We also aim to relate the reception of the Brontë sisters in Greece to
the changes in the “horizon of expectations” regarding gender identity formations, from the
beginning of the twentieth century till today.
2.
Marta Ortega Sáez (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, marta_ortega<at>ub.edu)
‘To Be for ever Known’. The Early Construction of ‘The Brontë Myth’ in the Spanish
Literary System: Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre in the 19th Century
The concept of the “Brontë Myth” in the title of this paper derives from Lucasta Miller’s book
(2005 [2001]), which explores the worldwide recognition of the sisters from Haworth. In the case
of Charlotte Brontë, Miller argues that she was “her own mythologizer” (4) and distinguishes
241
between “two distinct and conflicting myths”: Jane Eyre, the heroine of Charlotte’s widely-known
novel, and the writer herself.
In Spain, Aurora Astor Guardiola shares the belief in such mythological dimension which is
similar, she argues, to that “of fairy tales” (2006: 38). The critic also stresses the fact that there
may have been a considerable number of people who, in spite of not having read the novel, are
familiar with the atmospheres, the landscapes and the protagonists. Arguably, the constant visual
presence has contributed to the diffusion of the Brontë myth in contemporary times.
The construction of such myth around Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre in the Spanish peninsula
began already in the mid-nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, it was only three years after its
publication in Great Britain that the first references to the novel appeared in the press of the capital.
It is the aim of this paper to track down the origin of the legend in order to present and examine
the earliest manifestations of the novel in the Spanish literary system, which adopted quite varied
“shapes” that reveal the ever-expanding quality of such classic book. Special emphasis will be
placed on the publication of Juana Eyre ó memorias de una institutriz, a translation in installments
in the daily newspaper El Globo between 9 September 1882 and 7 February 1883.
3.
Ebbe Klitgård (University of Roskilde, Denmark, ebbek<at>ruc.dk)
Translations of Jane Eyre in Denmark
In this paper I will discuss the Danish translations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), focusing
on the two most often reprinted Danish translations from respectively 1905 and 1944, while
treating in less detail the remaining five translations of Jane Eyre. My approach is analytical, and
my aim is to provide original research by demonstrating that all the translators except the very
recent ones have severely edited and abridged their translations and taken liberties unheard of in
modern literary translation. The clearest example of this is the many times reprinted Jane Eyre
translation from 1944 by Aslaug Mikkelsen. On the basis of this translation and a consideration of
Mikkelsen’s books about 19th century English authors, including the Brontë sisters, I argue that
Mikkelsen lets her personal taste play a huge part in translating and editing these classics for a
Danish readership. I demonstrate that Mikkelsen tends to edit out Jane Eyre’s self-reflections, and
that also some melodramatic parts of the novel are not translated. Comparing Mikkelsen’s
translation with an anonymous translation from 1905, which has also been heavily edited, I
conclude that the two most often reprinted Danish Jane Eyre translations are far from being full
and proper translations. Finally in my paper I offer a brief comparison with Danish translations of
other Victorian classics, many of which have actually been well translated.
4.
Naciye Tasdelen Saglam (Fırat University, Turkey, naciyetasdelen<at>gmail.com)
Batman Noel as an adaptation of A Christmas Carol and its Turkish Translation
A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens is one of the most famous and timeless books, being
still translated into countless languages and adapted for stage and movies as well as other forms
such as video games and graphic novels. The transformations the text has gone through throughout
the years reveal countless different interpretations all around the world. Tracing these
interpretations in intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic levels will shed light upon the new
facets of the 19th century classic A Christmas Carol. With the widening use of intertextuality, in
some cases it is even possible to observe adaptations based on a metafictional reading of the
classic. One such example is the graphic novel Batman: Noel in which the story of A Christmas
242
Carol is integrated in a Batman story. The aim of this paper is to analyze this interesting Batman
adaptation of A Christmas Carol that is Batman: Noël written by Lee Bermejo and its Turkish
translation Batman Noel. Such an evaluation requires to consider the intertextuality concept as
well as intersemiotic perspective before examining interlingual translation practice. Bringing the
story of A Christmas Carol into the city of Gotham, this adaptation will be examined in two
dimensions. The first one is based on the adaptation of A Christmas Carol into Batman story. The
intermingling of the two stories will be evaluated in terms of a translation act reshaping the source
text. In the second level, interlingual translation between the two graphic novels in English and
Turkish languages will be elaborated.
5.
Alberto Lázaro (University of Alcalá, Spain, alberto.lazaro<at>uah.es)
The Popularity of Wilkie Collins’s Sensation Fiction in Spain: The Case of The Woman in
White
One of the most popular Victorian novelists, Wilkie Collins has been widely acclaimed as the early
master of the sensation novel and a pioneer of English detective fiction. Novels such as The Woman
in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) became best sellers and captivated Victorian readers
with their convoluted plots full of mystery, crime and sexuality, usually within the respectable
middle-class home. His popularity crossed national and linguistic borders and his novels, novellas
and short stories were soon translated into different languages. In Spain, we find a dozen of
different editions of Collins’s stories already in the 19th century, which often appeared serialised
in popular journal or magazines, like their original counterparts. One of these early Spanish
translations was The Woman in White which, in different forms and with different titles, attracted
the attention of many publishers and Spanish readers during the 20th century, despite the obstacles
posed by censorship and the hardships of the post-war period. This paper aims to discuss the
Spanish publication history and reception of Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White and
analyse the scale of its popularity.
S53: Experience and Experiment: Seventeenth-Century English Essays and Other
Nonfictional Prose Writings
Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Prof.
Ingo
Berensmeyer
(University
of
Munich,
Germany,
ingo.berensmeyer<at>anglistik.uni-muenchen.de)
Dr. Paolo Bugliani (University of Pisa, Italy, paolo.bugliani<at>fileli.unipi.it)
Dr. Emanuel Stelzer (University of Verona, Italy, emanuel.stelzer<at>univr.it)
This seminar aims to explore the forms of the English essay in the seventeenth century, which can
be considered a formative age for this genre following its emergence in late sixteenth-century
France. We are especially interested in contributions that highlight the historical progression of
the genre, both in its intertextual evolution (e.g. Florio’s translation, Cornwallis’s and Bacon’s
modes, etc.) including questions of readership and life-writing, and its transgeneric dimension (the
contamination with other discourses, most notably the scientific, religious, and political ones).
Contributions on other non-fictional genres within the same period are welcome, as are those on
non-fiction writers of the late Elizabethan and early Augustan ages.
243
1.
Fabio Ciambella (Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Italy, f.ciambella<at>unitus.it)
A Stylistic Analysis of the War Lexis in Thomas and Dudley Digges’ Four Paradoxes
Enlisted by Elbert N. S. Thompson (The Seventeenth-Century English Essay, 1967, 2nd edn)
among the essay-like seventeenth-century genre of problems and paradoxes, Thomas and Dudley
Digges’ Four Paradoxes (first edition: 1604; complete title: Foure Paradoxes, or politique
Discourses. 2 Concerning Militarie Discipline, written long since by Thomas Digges Esquire. 2
Of the worthinesse of warre and warriors, by Dudly Digges, his sonne) represents one of the first
and very few seventeenth-century English attempts to deal with war essay writing (see Angela
McShane’s “Recruiting citizens for soldiers in seventeenth-century English ballads”, 2011).
Taking into account genre-related issues and possible source material, this paper aims at
conducting a stylistic analysis of the Diggeses’ collection of essays, mainly focusing on
lexicosemantic features and considering the pervading ‘interlinguicity’ (“a condition where
multiple languages continuously cohabit systems of meaning”, Michael Saenger (ed),
Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare, 2014: 5) which characterizes this text –
consisting in continuous quotations from Latin and French writers – and which fully contextualizes
it within the early modern English linguistic milieu.
In order to conduct such a kind of analysis, the relationship between essay writing and paradoxes
in seventeenth-century England will be outlined at first. Secondly, the research object will be
introduced and contextualized within the complex early modern English linguistic panorama.
Finally, lexicosemantic peculiarities related to war lexis will be explored, also with reference to
the authors’ possible source material.
2.
Jaroslaw Jasenowski (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, wljasen<at>gmx.de)
‘We might easily invent a probable Account of this Matter’: The Truth-Making Mechanisms
of Micro-Essayistic Writing
Ranging from the deeply personal to the strictly objective, the essay repeatedly proves to be one
of the most tenacious shapeshifters of the literary ecosystem. One thing most definitions can agree
on, though, is the fact that the essay represents a form of non-fictional writing. It is therefore not
surprising that essayistic conventions were appropriated and shaped by (proto-)scientific
discourses. In order to circulate their observations and to contribute to a growing body of verifiable
knowledge, natural philosophers meticulously recorded experiences and experiments, which
formed the basis of their professional credibility. Sometimes, however, experiences differed
decisively and the form of the experiential report was taken advantage of in order to spread
fictional or satirical content, undermining the essay’s factual grounding. Shining a light on
essayistic truth-making mechanisms and their involvement in the popularisation of science, this
paper will therefore examine the limits of the factuality traditionally attributed to the essay. As the
periodical constituted one of the main arenas for discussing new knowledge and making it
accessible to a wider public, the Athenian Mercury and its competitors will be the main focus of
this study. Reading them as forms of micro-essayistic writing, this presentation will pay close
attention to prefaces as well as experiential reports of editors and readers alike and the means by
which they conjure up an air of veracity. In the course of this, the epistolary dimension of said
periodicals will be taken into account and employed to illuminate the communicative strategies of
the essay.
244
3.
Katarzyna Kozak (Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, Poland,
katarzyna.kozak<at>uph.edu.pl)
Against Sophistry and Mock-Logicians: The Examiner’s Appeal to Logic
At the end of the seventeenth century and the first two decades of the eighteenth-century
Parliament, along with the entire English political scene, was radically transformed by a sequence
of events leading to the formation of a predominantly two-party system. Association with one side
or the other of the developing Whig-Tory divide (within the initial versatility of the various
political circles) assumed not merely following a specific political philosophy or outlook but also
identifying with the groups that were associated with it such as those belonging to a particular
class, occupation, region or one of the religious denominations. All these factors influenced the
party propaganda rapidly developing within the growing newspaper market. A newly emerged
genre, the periodical essay, appeared to be of great importance for the early eighteenth-century
politicians who were intent on unleashing a plethora of ministerial propaganda. This presentation
aims to identify and analyse the ‘rhetoric of reason’ employed by The Examiner (the main Tory
Press organ in 1710-14) specifically in order to build up its own positive image which then could
be skilfully juxtaposed with that of its Whig adversaries. This image, so powerfully created on the
pages of The Examiner, represents an element of a wider vision depicting passionate Whigs as
opposed to orderly and reasonable Tories.
S54: Spaces and Places of Care: The Medical Humanities and Literature
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30, Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-convenors:
Elise Brault-Dreux (Université Polytechnique des Hauts-de-France, France,
braultel<at>wanadoo.fr)
Eszter Ureczky (University of Debrecen, Hungary, ureczkyeszter<at>hotmail.com)
What is meant by care in a society identified by Foucault as somatocracy? From the Christian
notion of caritas to what Nancy Fraser calls the current “crisis of care”, the affective labour of
caring has always been a preoccupation of Western culture and literature. The spatialization and
somatization of (self-) care especially reflects on the precarity of the ill subject. The seminar invites
presentations on 20th- and 21st-century literature with a background in the medical humanities,
philosophy, psychology, history, biopolitics, phenomenology related but not limited to:
- institutional spaces of medical care: hospitals, old people’s homes, wellness resorts, rooms,
beds
- patienthood, phenomenology of illness, pain, chronic illness, disability
- thanatology, end-of-life care
Slot 1: 30th August, 16:30-18:30: Care
1.
Dr. Seda Arikan (Firat University, Turkey, bulutsedaarikan<at>gmail.com)
Unconditional Care in The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing planted the notion of caring into many of her novels. The unconditional care she
frequently proposes turns into a virtue in her fiction while vicious ignorance is revealed as a
malevolent product of utilitarian and egoistical character of the twentieth century. In The Diaries
245
of Jane Somers, Lessing especially puts emphasis on caring not only for elderly parents, sick or
dying close relatives but also for distant others who are old, sick and ending. Jane Somers, a woman
of fifty who was once an ignorant daughter and wife, –insensitive to the disease and death of her
mother and husband from cancer–, develops an unconditional care for Maudie, a woman of ninety
living alone and waiting for her death. By depicting Jane’s transformation into a caring and
interdependent persona, contrary to her earlier uncaring individuality and autonomy, Lessing
reveals how the claim of the old, the sick and the dying people could be responded by sharing their
experiences and feelings (mostly pain, anger and fear) with an unconditional care which differs
from a social worker’s, a paid neighbour’s or caregiver’s interest in a person– within the spaces of
hospitals, old people’s homes, rooms and even beds and bathrooms.
2.
Isabelle Brasme (Université de Montpellier, France, isabellebrasme<at>gmail.com)
Liminal Geographies of Care: Nurses in the First World War
During WWI, the figure of the nurse was affected with a paradoxical tension: on the one hand, the
nurses caring for the wounded were idealised as avatars of the Virgin Mary. On the other hand,
the nurses’ accounts of their experience tended to be erased from collective memory. Recent
research has been focusing, however, on the contribution of women, particularly of nurses, to the
war effort.
This paper proposes to focus on the testimony of the experience of care at the front, as recorded
by two nurses, Mary Borden and Vera Brittain. I will look at the sections from Borden’s The
Forbidden Zone (1929), written during the war, as she created and directed L’Hôpital Chirurgical
Mobile n°1 behind the front line of Ypres; as well as Brittain’s diaries, written as she was a VAD
nurse, and published posthumously as Chronicle of Youth: Great War Diary 1913-1917 (1981).
This paper aims at delineating the ways in which there emerges not only the singular voice of the
female carer, but also a phenomenology of WWI, distinct from that of the soldiers and made
palpable through the relationship to the bodies of the wounded and of the dying, at odds with
traditional relationships between the sexes; but also through a reconfiguration of the geography of
the war as seen from the perspective of the nurses and from the spaces of care that they occupy –
these ‘forbidden zones’, or interstitial spaces between the soldiers and the civilians, between the
living and the dead.
3.
Andrew
Hodgson
(Université
Paris-Est
Marne-la-Vallée,
France,
andhodgson1<at>gmail.com)
B. S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal, Disciplining Language and the Institution of Care
B. S. Johnson’s 1971 novel House Mother Normal takes place in an elderly care home. The book
takes the form of a sequence of eight character-narrators, relaying the same series of scheduled
events at the same paginated timing, over the course of the same evening in the care home.
Each character-narrator accounts their version of events, their ability to participate, perceive and
communicate what is going on around them, defined by a stats page that codes their cognitive
ability, loss or degradation: a character sheet that prefaces each narrative section.
The list of medicalese and cognitive percentages presage the coherency of the narrative account
that follows – and in this sense each narrator appears a sort of optical machine of variable
dysfunction, placed with the set space of the institutionalised home. Kate Connolly thus reads a
“Foucauldian disciplining” in this “language of pathology” – the definitional statistics themselves
246
dictating what percentile of human cognisance, thus human being, each ‘machine’ is prescribed
by the societal institution of ‘the home’.
And yet, when we try to piece together the scheduled space of the institution of care, it is the space
of care itself that appears pathologically dysfunctional. A space of violent objectification in which
interior human life appears persistently variable, discursive.
Johnson then depicts a disciplinary language of pathology that seeks to reduce the complexities of
human interior life to the strict codes of the institution of care as a space itself of confinement,
disciplining and social exile.
4.
Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France, denervaux<at>u-pec.fr)
Places of care in Katherine Butler Hathaway’s The Little Locksmith (1942)
A central motif in most autobiographies, the growth of the self takes on poignancy in narratives of
illness or disability that give voice to diminished bodies. The Little Locksmith, a memoir written
in 1942, could be described as a precursor of today’s disability memoirs.
Struck by tuberculosis of the spine as a child, Hathaway led an invalid’s life pinned down to a
board for several years. When she emerged from the disease, she found out she was afflicted with
the deformation which her medical treatment had meant to save her from. Now sister to the “little
locksmith”, a hunchback whose disturbing presence haunts the first chapters, she begins to suffer
from an illness of a different kind: her body becomes a prison which she can’t escape.
In her autobiography, Hathaway explains how she managed to define an identity for herself outside
the diminishing environment imposed on her by her family. Pointing at something unutterable,
kept under lock, the hovering figure of the locksmith and the lock motif suggest that identity and
sexuality are bound up with notions of space. The first, highly ambiguous, place of care of the
book is the bedroom where she is trapped and has to lie flat for years and from which she emerges
cured but maimed for life. Reconstruction occurs through two other places of care: the house she
purchases to buy a protective shell and, finally, the space of the page where she gradually learns
to articulate a self.
5.
Maricel
Oró-Piqueras
(GrupDedal-Lit,
Universitat
de
Lleida,
Spain,
maricel.oro<at>udl.cat)
Núria Casado-Gual (Grup Dedal-Lit, Universitat de Lleida, Spain, ncasado<at>dal.udl.cat)
‘Yes, that’s me singing to myself’: Jackie Kay’s “These Are Not My Clothes” as an AntiAgeist Narrative of Care
Fiction set in care homes has developed in the last decades, and the representation of care homes
has therefore been diversified. These fictional narratives reveal the increasingly varied possibilities
of care that a residential settlement can offer. At the same time, they highlight the attributes
attached to human beings once their bodies are not regarded as fully functional or ‘able’ by their
carers and society at large. Jackie Kay’s short story “These are not my clothes” (2011) presents a
highly symbolic ‘carehome narrative’ in which depersonalized care and infantilization lead to the
residents’ inevitable dehumanization, and eventual deterioration. Through the viewpoint of its
female protagonist, a resident called Margaret, Kay creates an extremely subjective, poignant and,
at times, humorous narrative of care that undermines prevailing images of the so-called ‘fourth
age’ as a period of extreme cognitive deterioration. On the contrary, Margaret’s insightful
perspective on her own situation at the care home, together with her imaginative connection with
247
the landscape, her witty remarks, and her symbolic resistance to renounce to her own clothes,
prevent her from losing her own identity in an extremely alienating environment. Drawing from
theories of care and the interdisciplinary field of ageing studies, especially in connection with
theories of embodiment and old age, and social approaches to ageing, this paper offers a close
reading of Kay’s short story as both an anti-ageist narrative on the fourth age, and as a story of
care which can serve as a model to both gerontologists and care practitioners.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30: Hospital
1.
Alice Braun (Université Paris Nanterre, France, alice.braun<at>u-paris10.fr)
The Hospital as the Scene of Childbirth
Up until the 20th century, childbirth as an event was rarely represented in literature. Because it
was so closely related to sex, as well as female bodily functions, it was confined to ellipsis or
metaphor. But with the emergence of autobiographical expression from female writers, it started
being represented in the first person. This coincided with the evolution of childbirth practices and
the medicalisation of the event. The scene of birth now happens at hospital, which has replaced
the home as the place where babies get born. As a result, the representation of childbirth is deeply
linked with the hospital and its attending ideology: the superiority of medical knowledge, the
power play between the mother-to-be and the medical staff, the intrusion of the male gaze, etc.
Using the works of Adrienne Rich, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and others, I will try and study
the effect that the hospital as a place and as an ideology has had over the representation of
childbirth in self-life-writing by women.
2.
Elise Brault-Dreux (Université
braultel<at>wanadoo.fr)
The Hospital as a Poetic Space
Polytechnique
des
Hauts-de-France,
France,
My purpose is to analyse how some English poets (20th and 21st century) have unexpectedly turned
the hospital into a poetic space. Relying on Bachelard’s Poétique de l’espace, I will show how this
specific space of care, at once universal, common, neutral (it welcomes all vulnerable patients
indiscriminately) and exceptional (the individual patient goes through a physical ordeal and, often,
an ontological crisis) is turned into a poetic chamber of echoes. Vertical like the poems which
“contain” it, the hospital stands as a massive, sometimes austere, building (Philip Larkin, Roy
Fisher, Peter Reading), at the heart of the city but at the same time marginalized from it (Hugo
Williams). Its corridors (its bowels almost) repeatedly appear as liminal zones where the
submitting patient’s evolution in space is structurally disciplined, coded with specific units,
“zones” (Jo Shapcott) and numbers (Sarah Broom), constrained and limited by their vulnerable
condition (Julia Darling), unless they are wheeled (submission is then total). Using Foucault’s idea
of the hospital as a panopticon and Deleuze’s theory of “the society of control”, I want to study
how the poets subtly outline this hospital ecosystem, this regulated machine in which staff,
patients, sounds and smell circulate under the vigil of the poet and of the reader.
248
3.
Rocío Riestra-Camacho (University of Oviedo, Spain, riestrarocio<at>uniovi.es)
A Book Nook Saves Lives which Hospital Beds Can’t: Reviewing Laura Freeman’s Anorexia
Recovery through English Fiction
Anorexia is a pervasively treatment resistant disease. The clinical domain has proved unable to
offer a definitive solution to it. It should not come as a surprise that alternative treatment methods
have been appearing over the last years. Art therapies are a good example of this and yet their
inability to provide empirical results of their efficacy poses an obstacle to their justifiability.
However, this is not the case with the works of cognitive literary scholars, who draw on
psychological expertise to add validity to their claims. Their perspective can indeed be taken as a
point of reference to analyze how precisely it is that reading fiction was what prompted Laura
Freeman, author of The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite (2018), to combat
anorexia. In this paper, I explore some of the examples which prompted her to “eat again, my
appetite stirred by wonderful descriptions of food in books” (Irish Times, 2018). I will focus on
the English novels she read, including those by Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens or J.K.
Rowling. Drawing on cognitive literary studies, I suggest some of the psychological mechanisms
by which descriptions of food and of characters eating aided her to lose her fear of nourishment
much effectively than psychologists themselves did. In particular, I will resort to the motif of
fiction as a space of care in order to examine how Freeman was able to rearrange her “library”—
a metaphor she uses to describe her mind—back in order again.
4.
Eszter Ureczky (University of Debrecen, Hungary, ureczkyeszter<at>hotmail.com)
Family ties and Mourning in Péter Esterházy’s Helping Verbs of the Heart
Péter Esterházy (1950-2016) was one of the most outstanding representatives of postmodern
Hungarian fiction, and his 1985 novelette, Helping Verbs of the Heart shows his focus on his
family and political history, as well as the powers and limitations of language at his best. The work
is the story of two brothers and a sister, summoned by their father and reunited at the hospital
where their mother lies on her deathbed, who must come to grips with their relationships with both
their parents. A combination of a fairly straightforward narrative of a parent’s hospital death and
the narrator’s deeply emotional reflections on the process of the mother’s agony, the text becomes
an elaborate reflection on the medicalized, or, with Norbert Elias’s word, hygienic way of dying
and the crisis of care in the 20th century. The emotionally drained, uncaring nurses and doctors and
the paralyzing, awkward grief of the family members outline the vacuum of the modern death-bed,
where end-of-life care often falls short of a meaningful psychological copying with the situation.
Grieving after her funeral, the narrator suddenly visited by the ghost of his mother, who announces
that it is he, rather than she, who is really dead, and thus the text also follows the stages of grief
following the funeral. The presentation focuses on the phenomenological interconnection between
the hospital’s institutional spaces, with special attention to the death bed, the thanatopolitics of
end-of-life care, and the domestic places of grieving.
5.
Alda Correia (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, al.correia<at>fcsh.unl.pt)
Storytelling for Health - Storying Patient Experience in Maeve Binchy's Heart and Soul
Maeve Binchy (1940-2012) is a very famous Irish writer who wrote novels and short stories, being
known for her presentation of the complexity of human relationships. In herwork Heart and Soul
249
(2008), written after Binchy developed a heart condition, and which takes place in a cardiology
clinic, she reveals the importance of communication, support and relationships in medical care and
also, in a second level, testifies to the importance writing can attain, in the lives of people who
face deep illness. My proposal is to analyse these two features of the book with the help of Arthur
Frank’s argument that illness is a call for stories (The Wounded Storyteller, 1995) and his essay
(2009) on the benefits of storytelling.
6.
Laura Goudet (Université Rouen-Normandie, France, lauragoudet<at>gmail.com)
“Because I was born into a world of suffering”: transcending care in Bob Flanagan’s Visiting
Hours
Bob Flanagan’s exhibition Visiting Hours, first presented in 1991, depicts a world between the
hospital (in which he spent much time because of his cystic fibrosis) and the museums. He showed
his interpretation of rites (Kauffman, 1998) as a mix between popular culture, BDSM and his
sickness. This paper examines Flanagan’s twists on his illness and the medical world, as a poet
and a performance artist.
His “sadomedecine,” as Kauffman dubs it, is an array of experiences he is subjected to, or which
he relates in his poems, as the fact doctors had him “lie inside this plastic bag so [they] could
collect [his] sweat” (to test him for cystic fibrosis). Medical elements in his life are indissociable
from his empowerment through BDSM. Caring for a sick body using masochistic and sexualized
depictions becomes a cry for the recognition of Flanagan’s inner strength: “because I learned to
take my medicine/because I was a big boy for taking it/because I can take it like a man.”
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45: Pain
1.
Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain, abdelshadia<at>uniovi.es)
Aching Heads: Chronic Pain, Self-Representation and Medical Discourse in Joan Didion’s
“In Bed” and Sallie Tisdale’s “An Uncommon Pain”
Normally approached as a symptom of physiological malfunction, pain has the quality of
transmuting into chronic illness. The experiential divergences between acute and chronic pain have
been the object of philosophical and medical interest. Several authors, like David Morris, Drew
Leder, Jean Jackson or Robert Kugelmann, have contributed to define the particularities of chronic
pain in opposition to “normal”, acute pain. Unlike acute pain, which is linear and finite, chronic
pain is cyclical and fluctuating and is not normally associated to a physical cause, contributing to
its misdiagnosis.
This paper analyses two autobiographical representations of a specific type of chronic pain,
migraine. Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed” (1979) and Sallie Tisdale’s short pathography “An
Uncommon Pain” (2013) chronicle what is inside their heads: the physical pain invading their
cranium and their minds trapped in a faulty container. From a phenomenological perspective, the
pain experienced by the authors is analysed as a world-destroying force that shrinks their world to
the sickbed in the domestic sphere, the space of private suffering. From a discursive perspective,
it is relevant to examine the contraposition between the author’s voices and the voice/gaze of the
masculinist and objectivist medical discourse when they enter the medical paradigm of healthcare
and adopt the role of patients. Finally, it is also pertinent to consider the new meaning that the
250
embodied experience of well-being adopts for the chronically ill subject, when the boundary
between health and disease starts to blur.
2.
Dr. Teodora Domotor (Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church, Budapest,
Hungary, teodora.domotor<at>hotmail.com)
Bedridden Patients - Pain, Silence, and Control in Hemingway’s Short Stories
This paper examines the controversial narrative representation of bedridden patients in two of
Hemingway’s short stories: ‘Indian Camp’ and ‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife’ (In Our Time,
1925). Both stories portray the silenced suffering of people confined to bed by a medical condition.
Interestingly, however, the physical agony that the characters undergo is only of secondary
importance. Hemingway’s preoccupation with the theme of pain and trauma adds to his trademark
manipulation of interpretation. He developed an obsessive compulsion with defining masculinity,
which governs the above-mentioned tales as well through structures of domination carrying themes
of gendered violence and bodily pain within a racially charged context.
In ‘Indian Camp’, a baby is delivered by Caesarean section. The word Caesarean speaks volumes
from the point of view of supremacy, and the woman’s body is thus envisaged as a voiceless
territory, a kind of uninhabited land the man takes possession of and must control.
‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife’ reverses power relations. Here, the Indians speak and theirs
is the last word, and the white doctor is silenced after a fight. He goes home, defeated, and he has
no one to speak to. His sick wife lives in her dark room, obsessed with religious books. She has a
stronger belief in divine intervention than in any treatment her physician husband could cure her
with. Accordingly, the doctor and the doctor’s wife represent completely opposing value systems.
Through the religious books she silently attacks her husband’s medical journals that establish his
status.
3.
Maximo Alaez Corral (University of Oviedo, Spain, alezmaximo<at>uniovi.es)
‘The Most Humane Alternative’: Cancer, Suicide and Agency in Lorrie Moore’s ‘Go Like
This’
Lorrie Moore’s short-story ‘Go Like This’ (Self-Help, 1985) is one of the author’s finest attempts
at confronting the cultural and psychological impact of breast cancer with her trademark wicked
sense of humour. However, the drama caused by the disease remains undiminished until the end.
After being told by her physician she is suffering from a very aggressive type of breast cancer, Liz,
the main character, takes the decision of committing suicide on Bastille Day. Using Arthur W.
Frank’s concepts of “chaos” and “quest” narratives, this paper aims to dissect the reasons and
meaning behind Liz’s choice, as well as the contrasting views of the medical, family, and societal
sides surrounding Liz and her experience of cancer. In ‘Go Like This,’ the cultural and religious
bias against suicide intermingles with the social rejection of cancer, and both elements are exposed
as catalysts employed by the main character to strengthen her mindset in the face of her demise.
Humour is used to deepen the philosophical reflections upon the circumstances that have led to
her decision. In the stark face of the disease, therefore, suicide is presented as a valid path, a way
out of cancer that implies a rejection of the alternative offered by the medical system, as well as a
willing acceptance of mortality.
251
4.
Marta Fernández-Morales (University of Oviedo, Spain, fernandezmmarta<at>uniovi.es)
On Having to Be (a) Patient: Ovarian Cancer as Phenomenological Experience in Memoir
of a Debulked Woman
In 2012, Susan Gubar published Memoir of a Debulked Woman, about her experience with ovarian
cancer. In it, she exposes the scarcity of narratives around a disease that continues to be hidden,
and elaborates her own story of enduring it. She tackles the physical and psychological effects of
the tumor and its treatments on herself, as well as their impact on friends and family members. In
particular, she delves into what she dubs the tyranny of her body: “I no longer ‘have’ or ‘relate to’
a body. This injured body rules me”, she states.
Working within the field of the Medical Humanities, and using as starting point Jackie Stacey’s
idea that, during cancer treatment, “the body becomes the only reality”, this paper proposes a
phenomenological reading of Gubar’s ovarian cancer memoir. It argues that her narrative choices
around the sick female body, and in particular, around the ileostomy procedure, are conceived with
a double objective: on the one hand, to make sense of her plight in the framework of a selfconscious and often metanarrative autobiographical praxis. On the other hand, to break the
prevailing silence around a condition that makes the patient carry a burden of shame and selfrejection due to the cultural construction of the female and of the abject.
5.
Şebnem Kaya (Hacettepe University, Turkey, sebnemkaya2005<at>yahoo.co.uk)
Mutism in Context: Andrew Taylor’s The Silent Boy
One night in 1792, Charles – ten-year-old protagonist of Andrew Taylor’s historical thriller The
Silent Boy (2014) – whose mother has just been butchered before his eyes, is cautioned by the
faceless murderers, to “[s]ay nothing. Not a word to anyone. [...]. Ever.” He is, it seems, let in on
a secret, which, if revealed, will bring France and England to the edge of an abyss. Too traumatised
to trust anyone, the boy thereafter lapses into silence. As Charles moves from a Paris permeated
with the metallic smell of bullets and blood to the relative safety of London and the outskirts of
Bath, it seems nobody, in private spaces of “care” off the beaten path, can make him speak though
they expose him to corporal punishment, indifference, scorn, and nightmarish threats such as that
posed by Dr. Gohlis, a malevolent German physician with a morbid interest in human anatomy
and centuries-old, sterile methods of treatment bordering on torture.
Setting out with extreme case of elective mutism, the present paper attempts to delve into
the eighteenth-century conception of mutism that held the mute to be less than sane and thus less
than human, together with the false treatments and cures back then seen fit to use for this condition
or inability, against the transnational backdrop of the chain of, both clinical and non-clinical,
spaces likely to do more harm than good to the already troubled central character of the novel.
252
S55: Representing Brexit: Community and Body Politics in Contemporary British Fiction
and Visual Arts
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Catherine Bernard (Université Paris Diderot, France, catherine.bernard<at>u-paris.fr)
Tamás Bényei (University of Debrecen, Hungary, tamasbenyei<at>yahoo.com)
The Brexit crisis has brought recent British fiction and visual arts to rethink the nature of the body
politic. The seminar invites papers that address how metaphors of the body – including those of
division, metabolism, expulsion, segregation and encystation, contagion and immunity, the
permeability of racial, sexual and class membranes and boundaries, bodily metamorphosis – have
been deployed to reimagine the community. Taking its examples from a wide range of genres –
from condition-of-England novels and new regionalism through historical and dystopian fiction to
cyberpunk and urban fantasy – and media – painting, photography, installations, video art –, the
seminar will thus explore anew how closely the body politic is entangled in thinking the biopolitics
of the present.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Catherine Bernard (Université Paris Diderot, France, catherine.bernard<at>u-paris.fr)
Tamás Bényei (University of Debrecen, Hungary, tamasbenyei<at>yahoo.com)
Introduction to the seminar: Brexit and the Changing Face of Literature
2.
Tatjana Jukić (University of Zagreb, Croatia, tjukic<at>ffzg.hr)
The Melancholy Intelligence and the Ends of Modernity: on John le Carré
Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, I propose to analyze how the
fiction of John le Carré contributes a discourse of self-reflection to the mutating modern body
politic. With a steady focus on intelligence in its different and interlocking meanings, le Carré
suggests that modern political intelligence is metonymic and paratactic, which is why metaphors
of the body politic, even though they may amount to an operative fantasy, ultimately serve to derail
the modern project. If this means that modern intelligence coincides with the pitfalls of melancholy
subjectivation, it also means that the end of the Cold War, cohering fast into a privileged metaphor
of political reason, was how modern melancholia gave way to uncritical fantasies of selfsufficiency, in narrative, political and psychoanalytic terms. Finally, I argue that le Carré criticizes
Brexit precisely as one such fantasy of self-sufficiency.
3.
Catherine Bernard (University of Paris, France, catherine.bernard<at>u-paris.fr)
Between Melancholy and Utopia: the Politics of Nature in Ali Smith’s Winter (2017)
Brexit literature has been intent on probing the fault lines that the 2016 referendum has brought
into full view (see, among others, Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut [2017], or Jonathan Coe’s Middle
England [2018]). Ali Smith’s second volume in her Brexit quartet, Winter (2017) adopts a different
perspective and chooses to inscribe her reading of the crisis into a longer history of social and
ideological fractures dating back to the 1980s. Once again reappropriating the genre of the
condition of England novel, she queers it by bringing it into conjunction with the language of
253
allegory and that of myth. Her previous exploration of the politics of metamorphosis (see for
instance “The Beholder,” Public Library [2016]) is here harnessed to a reflexion on the experience
of collective crisis and of historical belonging.
While never couching her meditation in the language of political utopia, she weaves a metamorphic
poetics of a possible future, grounded in aesthetic memory. As the running dialogue with both
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Barbara Hepworth organic Modernism reveals, the novel elaborates
a poetics of transmutation harbouring the promise of collective redemption. This paper will thus
reflect on the poetics of affect imagined by Smith and the way her vision of a metamorphic body
politic, fuelled by the rhythms of nature, fashions an embodied national community. It will thus
also explore Smith’s covert experimentalism and how her politics of experience harbours the
promise of a reimagined collective subjectivity.
4.
Petronia Popa Petrar (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania,
petronia.petrar<at>gmail.com)
Accruing Corporeality in the Times of Brexit: Patrick McGuinness’ Throw Me to the Wolves
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler continues Adriana Cavarero’s reflections on the
irreducible character of the bodily exposure that is said to make up our singularity (Cavarero
1997/2000). Butler argues that this “constitutes a collective condition, characterizing us all
equally;” our common participation in the vulnerability of exposure therefore recovers the
possibility of a “we” and introduces “a structure of substitutability at the core of singularity”
(Butler 2005, 35). For Butler, corporeal exposure is defined by its unnarratability, because in itself
it does not fully coincide with the temporality of the societal norms that regulate our stories about
it. Language’s struggle – or failure – to account for the paradoxical community created by the
exposure of singular bodies lies at the heart of Patrick McGuinness’ Throw Me to the Wolves
(2019), a darkly comic novel written against the background of Brexit, revolving around the
murder of a young woman whose body is found next to a fly-tipping site that happens also to be
close to the detective narrator’s former boarding school. The ensuing investigation, having as a
main suspect the narrator’s former English teacher, reconstitutes the linguistic, material and
corporeal debris of a personal and communal past that constantly returns to haunt the present,
registering bodily accretion (such as in the figure of the “fatberg” discovered in the sewers) or
various forms of unnarratable absence.
5.
Tamás Bényei, (University of Debrecen, Hungary, tamasbenyei<at>yahoo.com)
Metamorphosis and the Arboreal Body in Ali Smith’s Fiction
In Edward Bond’s Lear (3.3), the broken king says: “I see my life, a black tree by a pool. The
branches are covered with tears. The tears are shining with light. The wind blows the tears in the
sky. And my tears fall down on me.” This vision of the royal body (politic) in the shape of a tree
is the perfect contrast to Ali Smith’s use of the trope. In Smith, vegetal or arboreal metamorphosis
is dispersed – Daniel’s dreams of his metamorphosing body in Autumn; the foliation of the child’s
head and Iris’s fantasy of becoming moss in Winter –, it is non-teleological – an open, ongoing
process rather than terminating in a finished body –, it is metonymic rather than metaphorical –
triggered by contiguity –, and it involves mental, spiritual and political entities as well as physical
bodies and landscapes, which are between the two. Thus, what we have is alteration or Deleuzian
becoming rather than metamorphosis proper; foliation, sprouting and arborescence rather than
254
transformation. Even though arborescence is seen as a territorialising process by Deleuze and
Guattari (“the subordination of the line to the point”), the paper will argue that, in Smith, it is
rhizomatic, informing both the narrative strategies and the politics of her texts. The paper will
juxtapose Smith’s poetics of (ex)foliation with Paul Klee’s 1935 Metamorphosis as well as with
some landscapes by post-war British (mainly St. Ives) artists.
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1. Wolfgang Funk (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, wfunk<at>unimainz.de)
Physical Divisions: Pre-Brexit Visions of a Divided Kingdom
My paper will illustrate how the social, political, economic – but probably more than anything
else, emotional – divisions in English society which have manifested themselves in the run-up to
and aftermath of the Brexit referendum, are foreshadowed in a number of novels that significantly
predate any thought of Brexit.
In view of the overall topic of the seminar, I will concentrate on how these divisions, and the crisis
of national identity of which they are symptomatic, are presented by way of corporeal metaphors,
or, in other words, how these novels envision England as an ailing body politic. In Rupert
Thomson’s Divided Kingdom (2005), which will be the main focus of my paper, England is
partitioned into four separate states, which are hermetically sealed off from one another and which
are constituted along the lines of the four bodily humours. I will argue that this dystopian vision
can be seen as a potent literary imagination of the post-Brexit referendum break-up of English
society into opposing ‘camps’ of Leavers and Remainers, which are likely identified by
commonalities of emotional constitution.
To provide a socio-political background for this analysis, I will read Thomson’s novel against
David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere (2017), in which he reads the outcome of the Brexit
referendum are the result of a social antagonism of what he describes as the ‘Somewheres’ and the
‘Anywheres’.
2.
Svitlana Pereplotchykova (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine,
s.pereplotchykova<at>knu.ua)
The Wall Metaphor in BrexLit: Material and Immaterial Barriers to Protect the Vulnerable
Body of Britain
Brexit has stripped British society of many illusions and left it naked and exposed. Previously
existing but largely ignored social rifts have been brought into focus and attributed by some to the
‘infection’ of foreign intrusion, so that in the speeches of certain highly motivated supporters we
hear “the necessity to defend the precious ‘body’ from ‘outside’ dangers” (Scholtz 2000) by means
of protecting walls.
The present talk involves an investigation of this Wall metaphor in selected BrexLit texts,
specifically John Lanchester’s “The Wall”, Sarah Moss’s “Ghost Wall”, and in partial contrast,
Zadie Smith’s “Fences: A Brexit Diary”. It is an attempt to compare the modern situation to that
depicted in Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”, where the image of the human body is used
to symbolize the English Commonwealth of the Elizabethans (Scholtz 2000).
255
This work is part of a broader programme of research dedicated to the investigation of the changing
idea of Britishness from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the present day. This is being carried out
by correlating and contrasting political rhetoric on the subject with literary and intellectual
responses through the ages, with a view to achieving a better understanding of how citizens’
identity has been shaped and reshaped through political action, literary works and the mass media.
The investigation into literary reflections is of importance due to “literature’s potential to engage
with emergent political realities” (Shaw 2018), allowing authors to present different views within
a single space-time dimension.
3. Diane Leblond (Université of Lorraine, France, diane.leblond<at>univ-lorraine.fr)
A Time for Esprit de Corps and a Time for Rebellious Corporealities: Ali Smith’s Politics of
Critical Embodiment, 2016-2020
Brexit appears as a critical moment for the body politic: one in which ‘the people’ was asked to
make a decision for itself, and in doing so to redefine or reposition itself as a nation with regards
to the Continent. And while much has been written on the divisions which the original vote
crystallised within the British population, the echo between the Referendum results and the most
recent general election suggests a degree of ‘esprit de corps’, a general intent to honour ‘the will
of the people’ as expressed in June 2016.
Focusing on Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, this paper will aim to show that Smith’s novels bring
out rebellious, nonconforming corporealities which challenge and ultimately refashion the notion
of a unified body politic, working with one overriding purpose. Autumn, Winter and Spring all
point to the unruliness of their protagonists’ bodies – in some cases, because the necessity of
physical degradation and entropy questions the very concept of organic integrity, in others, because
physicality becomes a means of political resistance, in the form of activism and civil disobedience.
Yet while it challenges empty or self-serving references to ‘the people,’ and in the context of a
wider, environmental crisis, the quartet also suggests new ways of being with others, new concerns
for the organic forms of kinship that unite us: Smith’s rebellious corporealities thus work to
reconfigure the material field of politics as an ecological space to be protected for the survival of
all.
4.
Christine
Berberich
(University
of
Portsmouth,
United
Kingdom,
christine.berberich<at>port.ac.uk)
Bodies washed up on the shore…: BrexLit and the Anonymity of the EU Migrant
This paper focuses, quite literally, on bodies. Cynan Jones 2011 novel Everything I found on the
Beach starts with a body washed up on the beach; Linda Grant’s 2019 novel A Stranger City opens
with a body found in the Thames. Grant’s novel is an openly declared ‘Brexit’ novel, dealing with
the lead-up and the fall out of the 2016 Brexit Referendum. Jones’ novel can be seen as a precursor
for contemporary Brexit novels in that it deals with the plight of European migrant workers in
Britain. What unites both novels is that the ‘bodies’ washed up on by sea and river are the bodies
of EU migrant workers who remain, for quite some time in the narrative, officially unnamed. This
paper argues that the focus on the unnamed ‘bodies’ in both novels is symptomatic not only for
the contemporary Brexit debate but also for much of contemporary ‘BrexLit’: migrants are there,
in large numbers, but mostly remain nameless, faceless, devoid of an identity. Contemporary
political debates in the UK deny migrants a voice; contemporary BrexLit – possibly
256
unintentionally – mirrors this by featuring very few migrants that actually have a real voice and
role to play in the novels.
S56: Orientalism and Borealism in the Long Eighteenth Century
Wednesday 1st September 17:00-19:00, Thursday 2nd September 10:30-12:30
Co-convenors:
Michaela Mudure (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, mmudure<at>yahoo.com)
María
Jesús
Lorenzo-Modia
(Universidade
da
Coruña,
Spain,
maria.lorenzo.modia<at>udc.es)
Both Orientalism and Borealism are modes of thinking, ways in which the Orient or the North
were produced and re-produced as exotic performances and representations by the West eager to
control the world by Othering anything that is different. Starting with but not limiting to the famous
Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters
Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, this panel will analyse various ways of commodifying
the Orient and the North, the negotiations of identities in the various texts that constituted the
Orientalist and the Borealist discourse during the long eighteenth century.
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September 17:00-19:00
1.
Juliana Borbely (Partium Christian University, Romania, juliannaborbely<at>gmail.com)
Lord Byron's Orientalism in Turkish Tales Distilled to the Modern Byronic Hero
Strong, brooding, silent and attractive male characters in books and films are easily labelled
“Byronic” based on Lord Byron persona and his male characters. Many of these “Byronic”
characteristics stem from his Turkish Tales. In spite of that, representations of Byronic heroes in
contemporary literature do not seem to resemble Byron’s characters. My hypothesis is that few of
these characteristics can be found in modern male characters due to spatial and temporal distance.
My aim in the paper is to investigate to what extent the Byronic hero in Turkish Tales has survived
in film adaptations and artefacts these adaptations triggered. In order to do this, I propose to 1)
analyse the male heroes presented in “Turkish Tales”; 2) identify major "Byronic heroes" in
literature that were later adapted to film; 3) identify the literary pieces/film adaptations the abovementioned adaptations have triggered; 4) find traces of Byron's Orientalism in male
characters from points 2) and 3).
2.
Achraf Idrissi (University of Debrecen, Hungary, achraf-idrissi<at>outlook.com)
Colonial Spanish America through Arab Christian Eyes: Hanna al-Mawsuli’s Travels 1668–
1683
Whereas Western views of Islam and Arabs have received increasing scholarly attention during
the last decades, this is much less the case with Arab views of other cultures and religions. This
article brings into light the travelogue of Hanna al-Mawsuli, an Arab Christian who produced the
first account of Spanish America to be written in Arabic documenting the interaction between
western Europeans and the Levant through the activities of Catholic missionaries titled The Book
of Travels of the Priest Ilyas, Son of the Cleric Hanna al-Mawsuli 1668–1683. While such account
provides an important perspective on the “Levantine” view of America and of the Spanish and
257
American Indian populations in the early modern period, I argue that it unconsciously puts on
display an interplay between Al-Mawsuli’s knowledge of Spanish colonial scholarship about
America, and his Eastern Christian lexicon and Levantine geography which were immensely
influenced by a Mediterranean linguistic outlook and constituted the prism through which he
epistemologically came to understand colonial Spanish America and native Indians. The
complexity of al-Mawsuli’s travel account stems from his belonging to two cultural milieus; he
was a Catholic priest from Ottoman Iraq, and he spoke Arabic, Latin, Eastern Syriac, Spanish,
French, Turkish good enough to give sermons, perform Mass and translate from all of them. This
research also demonstrates how the transferability of colonial discourses from imperial
geographies to the outside world is yet another bane of imperialism which discloses that not only
do imperialists denigrate and alterize “natives,” but they establish the definition that is adopted
and propagated about the “natives” by disseminating anti-Indian sentiment in countries and among
communities that had no interaction with America.
3.
Cristina Flores (University of La Rioja, Spain, cristina.flores<at>unirioja.es)
Robert Southey’s Romanticised Spain in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain
and Portugal (1797)
It has been already argued that ‘in British Literature, Spain was largely the creation of
Romanticism’ (Saglia and Haywood 2018, 1), a figuration (Saglia 2000) and/or invention (Howard
2007). Based on this premise, the main purpose of this paper is to explore the contribution of
Robert Southey’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797) to the
shaping of the fictionalised vision of Spain that emerged during the Romantic period. As Lynda
Pratt poses, Southey was a crucial figure in the development of early nineteenth-century Orientalist
ideologies, showing both fascination and aversion by the foreign (Pratt 2006, xxvi-xxvii). Hence,
Southey’s travelogue departs from previous eighteenth-century factual descriptions of Spain by
British travellers (Clarke, 1762; Twiss, 1775; Carter, 1777; Dillon, 1780; Cumberland, 1787;
Jardine, 1788; Townsend, 1791; Young, 1793) in presenting a more complex, subjective and
‘imaginary’ approach to Otherness. Southey, who considered himself ‘Half a Spaniard’, shows
in Letters an ambivalent position partly derived from his earnest interest in all things Spanish,
moving from outright repulse against the contemporary fallaciousness of Spanish ‘Popery’,
superstition and cultural backwardness to utterly admiration for an idealised Spanish past. This
paper focuses on Southey’s romanticised representation of Spain in which Medieval chivalry and
the Oriental traits of Spanish civilization are underlined.
5.
Elena Butoescu (University of Craiova, Romania, elenabuto<at>yahoo.co.uk)
Legitimizing Exoticism: The Case of George Psalmanazar’s Pseudo-Oriental Account
The persuasive power of the paratextual features that frame George Psalmanazar’s An Historical
and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704), a pseudo-Oriental narrative, is the main
concern of this article. A designer of Oriental constructs, Psalmanazar came across as the figure
of the Oriental traveller, whom he used as an anti-Establishment device to subvert the official
system of values and, in a Rabelaisian manner, use a false historical account as a form of unofficial
truth. George Psalmanazar, the ‘pretended Formosan,’ the erudite impostor who ate raw meat and
taught Formosan at Oxford with the financial support of the Royal Society and the moral
encouragement of Samuel Johnson, fabricated a description of Formosa featuring an objective
258
paratextual scheme (title, name of author, table of contents) in addition to a more subjective
organisation of the epistles dedicatory, prefaces and other appendages which advertised the
publication. The extra-textual paratext exhibits illustrations and a portrait of the author with the
aim of commodifying the exotic world of the Oriental Other. The study examines how
Psalmanazar’s Oriental narrative impacted the Enlightenment paradigm of rationality. By
investigating the role of the paratextual elements in the construction of exoticism, this article
argues that they functioned as tokens of legitimacy which promoted the author as a credible, though
exotic, writer; they highlighted the role of knowledge in the eighteenth century, proving an
essential key to understanding the reception of Psalmanazar not only in England, but throughout
Europe, after the account had been translated into French, Dutch and German.
4.
Carmen Borbely (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, carmenborbely<at>yahoo.com)
Discursive Framings of the North: The Scandinavian Travelogues of Mary Wollstonecraft
and Edward Daniel Clarke
Tracing the different spatial practices that led to the discursive delineation of the European North
as a multi-layered space of romantic wilderness and enlightened sociality, this paper examines
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
(1796) and Edward Daniel Clarke’s Travels in Various Countries of Scandinavia: Including
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lapland and Finland (1823) through comparative lens. Documenting
their authors’ encounters with the otherness of a space situated at the northernmost edge of the
continent, the two travelogues critically engage, to a greater or lesser extent, with the preestablished conventions of travel writing. In the case of Wollstonecraft’s autobiographical travel
narrative, the cohesive plurality of the Scandinavian space is sieved through competing frames of
perception. Her observations on the picturesque and the sublime in nature are interspersed with
personal reflections on everyday life, as revealed to her in local forms of permanent or transitional
habitation. In Clarke’s account of communal travel, echoing the tradition of the Grand Tour, the
North is appraised through the distancing grid of panoramic perception. The emphasis is laid not
so much on a personalised mode of experiencing place as on the production of an official, objective
image of the “Northern latitudes.”
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Ana Voicu (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, ana.voicu17<at>gmail.com)
Borealism and the British Experience of the North in Matthew Consett’s “A tour through
Sweden, Swedish-Lapland, Finland and Denmark”
The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which eighteenth century British traveller Matthew
Consett’s series of letters on Sweden, Swedish Lapland, Finland and Denmark can be integrated
within Borealism as a concept and as an attitude in discourse. Because his time to write is brief
and his paper scarce, Consett’s choices of what to include and what to insist upon in his letters are
relevant with regards to the general opinion and interests of his readers, the educated society of
the day. In order to relate to his contemporaries, the author makes many comparisons with his
native England, thus showing a contrast which often underlines, politely but firmly, the superiority
of his native country. His detailed descriptions of nature, of people’s dress and homes, as well as
259
the few funny interactions with the locals he delights in mentioning will be discussed as examples
of a curious, but often superior attitude towards the exotic Northern Europe.
2.
María
Jesús
Lorenzo-Modia
(Universidade
maria.lorenzo.modia<at>udc.es)
Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Orientalism
da
Coruña,
Spain,
Orientalism is a pervasive feature in many eighteenth-century English texts. The theoretical
framework of this presentation will be that of reception studies, as well as gender studies and
medical humanities. Following Ros Ballaster (2005), the East is represented in eighteenth-century
English texts by means of translations, pseudo-oriental tales, travelogues and letter fictions. Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) would be included as a traveller who wrote Turkish Embassy
Letters (1763) from Istambul, which would eventually be labelled both as a historical and a literary
document. Through her letters she disseminated the culture of Ottoman Empire, considered at the
time a threat to Western civilization. She performed this task from a female perspective, provided
not only by her own gender, but also by means of the voices of the Turkish women included in her
text. She was a pioneer in many fields. A friend of Mary Astell, author of the feminist essay A
Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest (1694),
and a successful salonnière in London, in Montagu’s house were received famous authors such as
Alexander Pope or John Gay. She became also an activist who fought for the popularization of
“vaccination” or “variolation” in the United Kingdom. While she had access to Eastern medical
knowledge and wanted to transmit it, she received a reluctant response by the Western
intelligentsia, particularly when these new medical discoveries in inoculation were disseminated
by a female aristocrat who did not belong to the medical profession.
3.
Miriam Borham-Puyal (University of Salamanca, Spain, miriambp<at>usal.es)
Reading the Other: Orientalism and the Feminisation of Eighteenth-Century Culture
Addressing the Western imperial gaze and its perception of the Oriental as female (Said 219-20),
commodified and often sexualized, this paper considers the presence of an Eastern trace in
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Jane Barker’s patch-work narratives as a symbol of
the feminisation of culture identified with the imagination, romance and an opposition to Augustan
classical taste. For an eighteenth-century “classical purist… the orientalist picture, concerned with
alien traditions…can easily appear frivolous, or at least no more than an eccentricity” (Sweetman
1, emphasis added), while in fiction it was often associated with “the disruptive powers of the
imagination” (Zuroski 258, emphasis added), terms connected with fiction written by women.
Pope’s inclusion of Oriental traces in his satire against consumerism and the higher classes can
then be read as serving his critique to this increasingly feminised society. In addition, the fact that
he mockingly frames his heroine’s world within a male-centric genre such as the epic exposes the
eighteenth-century wish to assimilate and control the other, especially in the context of the tensions
between classical and popular narratives. On her part, Barker’s work employs the metaphor of a
rich tapestry to evoke these disruptive and rich pictures. The presence of the frame narrative and
the tales of imagination evoke the influential One Thousand and One Nights and subvert the
canonical realistic narrative, highlighting the dialogic tensions of gender and genre, East and West,
older and newer forms of storytelling, that conform eighteenth-century fiction.
260
4.
María Eugenia Perojo Arronte (Universidad de Valladolid, Spain, eperojo<at>fyl.uva.es)
Spanish Literature and Orientalism in British Magazines of the Romantic Period
The reassessment of the Spanish inheritance of Arabic culture was carried out by scholars such as
Miguel Casiri, with his monumental Bibliotheca arabico-hispana Escurialensis (1760-70), and
Juan Andrés in his Dell’ origine progressi e stato attuale d’ogni Letteratura (1782–99), where the
latter advanced his thesis about the relevance of the Arabic tradition for the development not only
of Spanish Medieval poetry but also of European poetry as a consequence. However, the literary
and cultural histories of Spain written by foreigners such as Friedrich Bouterwerk, Simonde de
Sismondi, the Schlegel brothers, or Germaine de Staël at the turn of the nineteenth century
relegated the influence of the Arabic tradition in the Iberian Peninsula to a downgraded kind of
Orientalism. This image was widely disseminated through the reviews and critical articles of books
related to Spanish literature that appeared in British literary magazines at a time in which the
conflicts in the European battleground, the end of Enlightenment universalism, and the burgeoning
of national canons projected diverse and even fleeting images of the Other. In this paper, I analyse
the reviews and articles on Spanish literature that appeared in the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly
Review and Blackwood’s Magazine in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Since
literary journalism was closely related to historical events and the ideological agendas of the
magazines were obviously partial to contemporary political controversies, a close look at these
writings can throw light on the politics underlying this process.
S57: Genre, Gender and Nation in Early Prose Fiction in English (1600-1700)
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Dr. Sonia Villegas-López (University of Huelva, Spain, villegas<at>uhu.es)
Professor María José Coperías-Aguilar (University of Valencia, Spain,
maria.j.coperias<at>uv.es)
Professor Karen Gevirtz (Seton Hall University, United States, karen.gevirtz<at>shu.edu)
This seminar proposes the study of the prose fiction in the seventeenth century, with special
attention to the aspects of genre, gender and nation. Paper proposals which address any of the
following topics and lines of research are especially welcome: women’s access to the writing of
prose fiction, their newly acquired roles as professionals in the printing and publishing business,
the importance of anonymity, generic variance and experimentation, as well as the transcultural
nature of early fiction in prose, focusing on the consolidation of a native tradition of the novel in
English from the perspective of its European sources.
1.
Olivia Carpenter (Harvard University, United States, olivia_carpenter<at>g.harvard.edu)
“Her Own Nation”: Race, Nationhood, and the Woman Writer in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
Taken from a larger dissertation project on race, gender, and marriage in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, my paper examines questions of genre, gender, and nation in Aphra Behn’s
Oroonoko (1688). I argue that Behn posits the woman writer of prose fiction as a crucial response
to seventeenth-century colonialism and the catastrophe it presents for questions of nationhood.
With her gender positioning her as a bystander in the violence of a slave rebellion, the female
narrator intervenes through text. The English woman in Oroonoko can take action once she gains
261
access to writing prose fiction. I examine the deeply experimental nature of this early example of
the English novel tradition, focusing especially on Oroonoko’s ethnographic elements as its
narrator describes African and Native American nations, all while maintaining a stable English
national identity for herself in the face of colonial contact. The problem of nationhood leads to
crisis when her royal protagonists refuse to relinquish their own ties to national identity. Their
tragic downfall occurs when they combat slavery’s demand of relinquishing ties to their original
nation. The resultant carnage, I contend, forces the woman writer from witness to author, and her
text from ethnography to the features of European romance: orientalist sentiment, royal
protagonists, and complicated desires, sexualities, and traumas. Generic variance becomes
essential for a more empowered female response to the crisis of slavery. The woman writer crafts
a transcultural fiction, revealing a native tradition of the novel in English deeply invested in
questions of nationhood.
2.
Karen Gevirtz (Seton Hall University, United States, karen.gevirtz<at>shu.edu)
Soldiers and sultans: war and political allegory in Restoration prose fiction
War was a constant backdrop during the Restoration. In Europe, England fought three wars with
the Dutch between 1665 and 1685, battled with and against France, Spain, Sweden, and the United
Provinces from the 1670s to the 1690s, and supported European military engagements with the
Ottoman Empire, including sending troops in 1669 to help relieve the twenty-year siege of the
Venetian fortress of Candia, in Crete. At home, the Restoration was punctuated with outbursts of
violence and rebellion, including the Exclusion Crisis, the Rye House Plot, Monmouth’s
Rebellion, and the Revolution of 1688.
A number of genres had emerged by the mid-seventeenth century to grapple with war, including
the history, “returned soldier” narratives like the return of Martin Guerre, “European slave”
narratives, and military accounts. Most of these genres operate in a liminal zone between fiction
and non-fiction. Using Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1688) as an example, this paper
argues that Restoration prose fiction made use of these genres to create both verisimilitude and
fictionality, and to represent or comment on contemporary events without endangering their
authors. Behn’s readers recognized familiar, real military actions–the ongoing wars with the
Ottomans and in the Low Countries with France, Spain, and the United Provinces–as history, but
they also understood these wars as encoded depictions of the fraught, potentially militarized events
at home.
3.
Rafael Vélez Núñez (University of Cádiz, Spain , rafael.velez<at>gm.uca.es)
Transhistorical Fiction and the politics of genre in Restoration England
The nouvelle historique was an appealing genre to the readers of Restoration England. They were
accounts of the lives and deeds of important historical characters described in an uneven mixture
of fact and fiction. Although Mish refers to only six novels, up to 25 were published in England
after 1662. They were mostly translations from French into English and published throughout the
whole period, with a subtle increase in publications during the mid-1670’s. Other novels shared
the same characteristics as the nouvelles historiques, although they were not described as such in
their title pages, Casimir, the King of Poland being a good example of this.
Although the number of historical novels seems scarce (4% out of the total novel production) the
fact that translations of French sources appeared in England almost immediately after their original
262
publications points at a clear interest in the genre. The plots of these novels recount, with unequally
successful psychological insight, the human and Manichean dimensions of power: from good
governing to intrigues, ambition or treason. In the complex political scenario of Restoration
England, the history of politics seems to gain certain importance. This paper will try to discern
whether the choice of nouvelles historiques translated in England respond to literary fashion or
might serve as fictional reflections of contemporary discussions of power.
4.
Gerd Bayer (University of Erlangen, Germany, gerd.bayer<at>fau.de)
The Truth and Generic Experimentation: Paratextual Framings in Restoration Poetics
This paper will offer a detailed reading of early modern poetological treatises, including the
substantial corpus of paratextual poetics that accompanied Restoration theatrical texts, narrative
prose fictions, and the notion of criticism at large. Taking these paratextual engagements with how
veracity was implemented for a reassessment of how truth can be harnessed to a discussion of
aesthetic merit, the paper will analyse how works such as Dryden’s extensive essays on theatrical
forms and language or much-noted prefaces such as the one attached to Congreve’s Incognita find
it necessary to insist that matters of artistic truth exist independently of any claims of
verisimilitude. The presentation will shed light on the manner in which English paratextual poetics
already betrayed an awareness of the distinction between fictional make-believe and a more
abstract engagement with matters of truth-making. While much of the derisive commentary about
the detrimental consequences readers will suffer from exposure to the fantastical context of
romance-inspired fictions relates to the foundational principle of mimesis, the legacy of the late
medieval understanding of truthfulness, closely tied to mimeticist thinking in both Plato and
Aristotle, allows for another understanding of what is at stake when literary texts address matters
of truth: by evoking the very principle of veracity they pick up a discursive threat that extends
beyond the merely literary to most other forms of verbal communication, including the social,
religious, and political.
5.
María José Coperías-Aguilar (University of Valencia, Spain, maria.j.coperias<at>uv.es)
Literary journals and the making of prose fiction, the case of The Gentleman’s Journal
In the seventeenth century, the heyday of literary journals in Britain was still to come, although
some periodicals devoted to books –even if short-lived– could already be found as early as the late
1670s. What has been considered the first magazine in English devoted entirely to the arts and the
most important publication of its times, The Gentleman’s Journal, published thirty-three issues
from January 1692 to late 1694. This journal, edited by the prolific author and translator Peter
Anthony Motteux, offered a ‘monthly miscellany’ including some news but also pieces on topics
such as history, philosophy, and music, as well as poetry and some short works (2 to 6 pages
average) of the budding genre of prose fiction. Some of the contributions to the journal were made
by professional writers with whom Motteux had collaborated, but the publication also relied
heavily on pieces sent by ordinary readers and for which the editor often made appeals from the
pages of the journal (e.g. May 1692). Motteux also explained (February 1693) that his decision to
include novels in each issue was due to the fact that ‘the Ladies desire them’, from what we may
surmise that an important part of the journal’s readership was made of women. Bearing these two
ideas in mind, the aim of this paper is to discuss the influence of amateurism and gender in the
263
burgeoning genre of prose fiction as presented in the short novels published in The Gentleman’s
Journal.
6.
Sonia Villegas-López (University of Huelva, Spain, villegas<at>uhu.es)
Eroticism in the cloister: the uses of pornography in Restoration prose fiction
The influence of the French nouvelle in English prose fiction was paramount during the
Restoration. In the decade of the 80s in particular, more than a third of the novels published in
English were translations from the French. Especially since the publication of Guilleragues’s
Lettres portugaises (1669), and Roger L’Estrange’s English version of 1678, the motif of the nun’s
passion associated with the topic of dejected love became commonplace in the incipient tradition
of the novel in England. On the one hand, it influenced well-known and established authors, like
Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, in writing some of their works, Love-Letters between a
Nobleman and His Sister (1684-7) and Letters (1696), respectively. On the other, it contributed to
the popularization of a number of novels in translation that exploited the same topics in a bawdier
fashion, choosing nuns and monks as willing objects of amorous intercourse. This paper will assess
the uses of pornography in a selection of short novels, most of them published originally in French,
and soon translated into English in the early 1680s. In different degrees, scenes of love and passion
become explicit, reinforcing the association of the early novel with degeneration, scandal and
moral reprehension. Looking closely to the selected examples, though, other nuances and
interpretations come to light. In Eve Revived, or the Fair One Stark Naked (1684), Venus in the
Cloister, or the Nun in her Smock (1683) and The Adamite, or the Loves of Father Rock (1683),
pornography is at the service of an anti-Catholic critique, which is especially pressing in England.
I suggest that, beyond reading these texts as simple erotic manuals, they could be interpreted as
vehicles to vent an anti-Catholic conscience, especially at a time when Charles II’s reign was on
the wane.
S58: Seminar cancelled
S59: English Dialects from Page to Stage
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30 and 15:30-17:30
Co-Convenors:
Pr.
Natalie
Braber
(Nottingham
Trent
University,
United
natalie.braber<at>ntu.ac.uk)
Dr Claire Hélie (Université de Lille, France, claire.helie<at>univ-lille.fr)
Kingdom,
Many writers have written in / on dialect, accent and non-standard languages. This seminar
examines the construction of diatopic variation on the page and on the stage.
- how dialect is enregistered in the literary field
- how dialect is encoded by the writer and decoded by the reader in the text
- how textual / literary dialect is actualised by the writer or the actor and received by the
audience during poetic and theatrical performances
- how dialect translates in other regions and other countries
264
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 9:30-11:30
1.
Natalie
Braber
(Nottingham
Trent
natalie.braber<at>ntu.ac.uk)
Literary Dialect of the Nottinghamshire Coalfields
University,
United
Kingdom,
Nottingham, in the East Midlands of England, has a strong literary tradition including authors such
as Lord Byron, D.H. Lawrence and Alan Sillitoe. However, from a linguistic point of view, until
recently the city and the region more generally had received little attention and not much was
known about the dialect(s) used by its speakers. Recent research by the author has shown that there
is considerable variation in the region which needs further investigation. A crucial factor of the
local economy was coal mining, which ceased to exist in 2015. This has had a major effect not
only economically but also socially for these communities. The history of coal mining in the region
has not always run smoothly and many problems still linger after the coal miners’ strike of 198485 which still divides those who were on strike and those who worked. This paper examines how
authors and also miners themselves have written about their past, often in local dialect and how
this language is used to express a sense of local identity.
2.
Antonio Fornet Vivancos (Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain,
antonio.fornet<at>upct.es)
The scalpel of language: style-shifting and translation in three Spanish versions of The
Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
The view that translating Literary Dialect (LD) is ‘doomed to failure’ (Leppihalme 2000: 260) is
an arguably widespread one among scholars of translation. This agreement on the general futility
of the task has possibly deterred attention from more specific phenomena, among which the
translation of style-shifting. In works of fiction where a character and/or narrator alternates
between different varieties of the same language (usually the standard one, and a given LD), styleshifting is important insofar as it has specific literary functions, such as displaying a character’s
emotions or modulating the distance between characters and narrators. In order to gain more
understanding of style-shifting and LD – and the process of translating both – this paper studies
instances of style-shifting in Alan Sillitoe’s short-story collection The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner (TLLDR, 1959); those instances are then referred to the three existing
translations of TLLDR into Spanish (respectively published in 1962, 1981 and 2016). Styleshifting in TLLDR is approached from a ‘ficto-linguistic’ perspective (Ferguson 1994; Hodson
2014) that draws on literary and sociolinguistic factors, whereas Spanish translations are examined
in terms of translators’ strategies and agency. The results of the study suggest that no attempts to
convey source-text style-shifting can be found in any of the three translations, which would seem
to tally with the prevailing scholarly views. However, it is argued that such results and views
should be qualified in light of different factors, i.e. the status of LD as a literary construct, and the
concerns of target-language publishers and audiences.
265
3.
Léa Boichard (Université Savoie Mont Blanc, France, Lea.Boichard<at>univ-smb.fr)
From pub to stage: eavesdropping on Irish English in Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997)
Ireland’s literary history owes much to the country’s ancient oral tradition. The Literary Revival
led by Lady Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge at the turn of the 20th century took on the mission
of renewing this tradition through the rewriting of traditional Irish folk tales. At that same period,
playwrights such as W.B. Yeats, G.B Shaw or Oscar Wilde contributed to developing a genre that
had been surprisingly left aside by Irish writers, despite its apparently natural connection with oral
tradition. With this genre, the voices of Irishmen and women found an (almost) unmediated place
in Ireland’s literary culture. Their idioms and sometimes even their accent made it to the page and
to the stage, in a development that constituted a counterpoint to the long-standing English tradition
of the Stage Irishman, by which the Irish idiom had been used to maintain sociolinguistic
stereotypes. More recently, Conor McPherson decided to use a pub as the setting of his play The
Weir (1997), a play in which Irish English is given a prominent place. This choice is not trifling,
since the pub is both an Irish space par excellence and a place where spontaneous conversation
can flow and be eavesdropped on easily. Having pointed and studied McPerson’s choices
regarding the encoding of Irish English, this paper intends to decipher the role played by dialect in
the play: is it a mere aesthetic component, or does it serve a more profound literary and/or
ideological purpose.
4.
Juliette Pezaire (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, France, juliette.pezaire<at>sorbonnenouvelle.fr)
Re-creating and performing the Scottish voice from one language to another
The problematic status of the Scots language, for some the source of regional or nationalistic pride,
and for others a base for linguistic insecurity, is increasingly being portrayed in literary
productions, revealing the question to be a widespread and intimate concern among Scottish
people. The literary use of Scots is therefore rarely neutral: driven by aesthetic or political motives,
or on the contrary by a wish to make it a commonplace writing language, authors express varying
degrees of defiance to the London standard. This is the case of the three novels in this study: Irvine
Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994), and Alan
Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995). After an exploration of the motives and authenticity of the
literary recreation of Scottish voices in these novels, this presentation will focus on their recreation
in French through translation. Starting from the assessment of typical deforming tendencies, such
as variation masking or social downgrading, which are often fostered by unconscious ideology and
the constraints of the publishing industry, this study will look towards the theatrical stage and the
notion of performance as a way out from the impossibility of translation. The works of Martin
Bowman and Françoise Morvan will therefore serve as inspiration for an approach to translation
as a localised and possibly multiple performance of voice and authenticity.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1. Patrick
Honeybone (Edinburgh
patrick.honeybone<at>ed.ac.uk)
Wigh ai lyke eye-dialect
University,
Scotland,
United
Kingdom,
266
A common feature of dialect writing is the use of ‘eye dialect’, in which respellings are used which
simply represent a word in a way which is consistent with its pronunciation in many varieties,
including the relevant standard/reference dialect (as in ‘reezun’ “reason” and ‘kride’ “cried”). The
use of eye dialect is often disparaged (as in, for example, Preston 1982, 1985), because it is argued
that such forms are intended to show a speaker’s illiteracy or lack of education. While this is a fair
criticism of some use of eye dialect in certain texts, it misses the fact that there are also reasons to
view the use of eye dialect in positive ways: eye dialect need not necessarily contribute negatively
to a dialect writing text, and indeed is sometimes used playfully by authors, both to represent the
freedom the dialect writing can offer and to differentiate a text from Standard English (potentially
contributing to the perception that the variety being represented is an independent linguistic
system).
2. Gayatri Devi (Lock Haven University, United States, gdevi<at>lockhaven.edu)
Dialectal Diglossia in African American Hip Hop Breakbeat Poetry
In the current times, dialectal poetry employing the Black English Vernacular (BEV), a nonStandard dialect of Standard American English (SAE), has become a locus of linguistic diglossia,
or the use of two dialects or registers of the same language for variant social discourse contexts.
Black dialectal poetry has moved away from mainstream creative writing among black writers to
the domain of spoken word poetry, in particular, hip hop and rap. In this presentation, I discuss
half a dozen hip hop poems by renowned and lesser known American hip hop Breakbeat poets and
performing artists to isolate the structural and pragmatic features of the strategic dialectal diglossia
practiced by these spoken word poets. The poets and poems under discussion use multiple voices
and multiple registers: a Standard American English for certain thematic foci addressed to a nonblack audience, and a black dialect, a black Muslim dialect, or a Nuyorican dialect addressed to a
black audience for certain other tendentious ends. I argue that the political poetry of racial
discontent in the United States is now housed in the dialectal diglossia of hip hop poets, which
conjures up an internal and external audience to their poems through the use of two different
dialects of English, one prestige and privileged, and the other private and subversive.
3. Dr Claire Hélie (Université de Lille, France, claire.helie<at>univ-lille.fr)
Bob Beagrie’s real and invented dialects
Bob Beagrie is a poet from the North-East of England who has chronicled the history and stories
of the region in his poetry collections, artistic collaborations and performances (2003-2020). In
Leasungspell in particular, he mixes Old English, Middle English and Northern dialects to create
a dialect that sounds authentic to the era and area. And yet, his “bygonese” poses a real challenge
for the reader who has to decode every sign on the page with the help of glossary and pronunciation
notes to understand the narrative. Yet, whether on Soundcloud or on stage, his bardic performance
– he is accompanied on stage by musicians – makes heard the deep meaning of his dialect, i.e. that
it is co-constructed by the poet and the audience through what he calls the “shamanic capacity of
poetic performance”.
267
4. Natalie Braber (Nottingham Trent University, England, natalie.braber<at>ntu.ac.uk)
Claire Hélie (Université de Lille, France, claire.helie<at>univ-lille.fr)
Testing poetry from the page to the stage, a conversation with and a reading by Rob Francis
and Bob Beagrie
Natalie Braber and Claire Hélie will host a conversation with poets Rob Francis and Bob Beagrie
about the use of dialect in their poetry and they will read from their works.
S60: Dickens: Heirs and Heirlooms
Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Emily Bell (University of Leeds, United Kingdom, e.j.l.bell<at>leeds.ac.uk)
Georges Letissier (Université de Nantes, France, georges.letissier<at>univ-nantes.fr)
Céline Prest (France, celine.prest<at>gmail.com)
The 150th anniversary of Dickens’s death in 2020 offers a powerful impetus to reinterpret his
relationship with what is left behind. The dead’s legacy exercises its influence through elusive
wills, secret codicils and undecipherable echoes in the Dickensian text, while characters such as
Miss Havisham and Magwitch have been transposed into new contexts to engage with
contemporary issues, nevertheless preserving their Dickensian origin and testifying to the abiding
persistence of the past in the present. These seminars address how heirs and heirlooms trouble
Dickens’s texts and legacy in surprising ways, assailing the boundaries between life and death,
literature and afterlife.
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30: Patterns of Inheritance in and after Dickens
1.
Matthias Bauer (University of Tübingen, Germany, m.bauer<at>uni-tuebingen.de)
Angelika Zirker (University of Tübingen, Germany, angelika.zirker<at>uni-tuebingen.de)
Ambiguous Heirlooms: Freedom and/of the Past in Dickens
Dickens, as the title of the ESSE panel suggests, was obsessed with heirlooms, and especially with
the many ways in which the past determines the present and even the future: the case of Jarndyce
and Jarndyce in Bleak House, Harmon Senior’s misanthropic will in Our Mutual Friend, the evil
deeds of the Marquis St. Evrémonde in A Tale of Two Cities and Mrs Clennam in Little Dorrit, the
wager in Oliver Twist… The examples show that often the heirloom of the past is an evil that
subjugates members of a later generation. Dickens’s plots, accordingly, frequently consist in forms
of resistance to those master plots concocted in the past: not being tarnished by the legal case in
the Court of Chancery, rejecting the identity of the heir for whom the will was made, atoning for
the crime of the parent, staying uncorrupted where corruption is easy…
In our talk, we wish to elucidate the link between the aesthetic and the moral dimensions of this
reiterated pattern: Dickens’s plots are triggered by the rejection of plots, just as the characters come
morally into their own by rejecting the attempt of the past to determine their lives. This pattern of
inheritance and resistance, however, is more complex than mere opposition. It is deeply ambiguous
in that Dickens shows the interdependence of heirloom and rejection. Pip in Great Expectations is
a case in point: he creates the very heteronomy that he resists.
268
2.
Lillian Nayder (Bates College, United States, lnayder<at>bates.edu)
Charles Dickens and the Second Son
Reading aloud from Kirby’s Wonderful Museum in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), Silas Wegg
regales Mr. Boffin with the volume’s tales of hidden documents and notorious misers – among
them, the “singular discovery” of Robert Baldwin’s will, “lost twenty-one years.” Suppressed by
Baldwin’s eldest son because it benefitted the eldest son’s younger brother, whose children would
inherit the family lands under its terms, the will is ultimately discovered by the eldest son’s own
younger son, who seeks to protect the claims of his older brother: that presumptive heir has been
disinherited by their father (Baldwin’s eldest son), who has married a much younger woman.
Boffin considers Baldwin’s case to be “most extraordinary” (479). Yet it resembles others in
Dickens’s fiction, tales in which patterns of inheritance are disrupted or subverted, with younger
sons displacing their elder brothers as heirs.
My paper considers Dickens’s portraits of second sons as heirs – the means through which younger
sons replace, or displace, elder brothers (i.e. “unnatural” paternal preference, fraud, murder) and
the larger meaning of this substitution. Focusing on various novels by Dickens, including Barnaby
Rudge, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend; on theatricals involving inheritance and its
disruption, and performed by Dickens; and on the relations between first- and second-born sons in
his family, I consider the figure of the heir-by-default and its implication for ideas of family,
patriarchy, fraternity and power.
3.
Katie Bell (University of Leicester, United Kingdom, katieloubell<at>me.com)
The Haunting of Bleak House
The literary rules for creating ghostly characters in novels were well established by Dickens’s first
endeavor with literary hauntings. This paper begins by defining those rules by which spirit
characters had to adhere in order to be accepted as valid representations. The idea my paper puts
forward is that Dickens did something unique with ghosts: he used the established conventions for
spirit characters to create figures which I term the “living dead.” I demonstrate this melding of the
dead and the undead by exploring how he utilized these regulations in his more realist novels to
create characters that frighten us, but at the same time, move us to feel empathy. In novels such as
Bleak House, Dickens melded the established traits of ghosts with those of living characters who
are haunted by past traumas. These “living dead” figures are unique because they are physically
living, but are haunted by loss, isolation and painful reflections on the past; pasts that they feel
cannot be revisited and changed. Dickens utilized the accepted literary code required for ghostly
characters to create “living dead” figures with which the reader connects despite their statuses as
societal outsiders. These characters are ultimately successful depictions of the uncanny because
they follow the rules laid out in nineteenth-century fiction for ghosts.
4.
Carra Glatt (Bar-Ilan University, Israel, carra.glatt<at>biu.ac.il)
These Three, Met Again: The Repression and Return of Edwin Drood
Edwin Drood criticism has been dominated by psychoanalytic readings. These, in turn, have been
focused overwhelmingly on John Jasper, the respected choir-master and outwardly doting uncle
whose opium-fueled fantasies lead, to all appearances, to an earnest, seemingly successful attempt
269
on his nephew’s life. Seething with resentment and frustrated passion, Jasper is a figure of
doubleness and repression whose depiction anticipates elements of Freudian theory; several
biographers and critics have read him as a refracted mirror into Dickens’s own troubled psyche.
Far less attention has been paid to the eponymous Edwin himself. A self-confessed “shallow,
surface kind of fellow” whose early death seems in any case to remove him from the narrative
economy, Edwin proves less compelling than his tormented uncle. Yet it is Edwin, I will argue,
who winds up at the center of the novel’s exploration of proto-Freudian notions of repression and
return. Representative of a character type far more typical of Dickens’s earlier novels, Edwin, in
death, suggests the psychological and narrative limits of this model: the surface fellow cannot
withstand either a world that demands increasing interiority of its heroes or the protagonist-villain
who possesses such complexity. Yet if, as the novel hints, Edwin is destined to return in some
form (either alive or as a recovered corpse), his reappearance would suggest the impossibility of
fully shedding prior aspects of self. As both a reminder of a previous phase of Dickens’s career
and as a symbolic third part of Jasper’s divided consciousness, Edwin serves as a haunting figure
of a past self that reemerges to reproach and resist his rival successors.
5.
Daniel Jenkin-Smith (Aston University, United Kingdom, jenkind3<at>aston.ac.uk)
A World of Wills and Representations: Dickens’s Ambivalent Bureaucratic Idealism
While Dickens’s preoccupation with bureaucratic documentation is well established, the character
of ‘grey literature’ and legal instruments in his works is contradictory. Where the ‘magical’ device
of the unexpected legacy may enable a protagonist to vault otherwise insurmountable social
boundaries, these very same documents are often also the tokens of professional obfuscation and
institutional entrapment. Dickens’s ambivalence resonates with the broader ideological context of
nineteenth-century bureaucratisation: a process that James Beniger frames as a concerted attempt
to stem the increasing chaos of modernity, but one that, in so doing, excited much handwringing
– indeed, ‘evidence that bureaucracy developed in response to the Industrial Revolution is the
timing of concern about bureaucratisation as a pressing social problem’.
I argue that Dickens’s ambivalence toward bureaucracy is further complicated by the fact that the
epistemological claims of a coalescing officialdom nonetheless reside as fully formed fantasies in
his works. From the ‘curious old records of likings and dislikings’ archived in Doctors’ Commons
in Sketches by Boz (1839), to the hidden wills in Bleak House (1853), and the paper trails of debt
and inheritance in Little Dorrit (1858), Dickens’s profaned world of confusion is linked to the
‘truth’ lying beneath it in the form of documents – howsoever mismanaged. Through such literary
devices, Dickens anticipates an aspiration to technical omniscience while simultaneously decrying
both its shortcomings and its pervasiveness: thus is bureaucratic ideology as much the heir to
Dickens’s worldview as the other way around.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45: Dickens’s Generations
1.
Nathalie Vanfasse (Aix-Marseille University, France, nathalie.vanfasse<at>univ-amu.fr)
The Nature of Business Legacy in Dombey and Son
Dombey and Son is centred around the importance of Mr Dombey’s firm and his obsession about
ensuring its continuity through a son and heir. But what is it exactly that Mr Dombey is intent upon
bequeathing to his son and to the next generations? This paper will examine the nature of this
270
business legacy. It will attempt at defining what Mr Dombey is trying to hand down to his
descendent Paul and to posterity. It will look at what he is striving to build with this goal in mind.
In order to do so, it will resort to the concepts of business legacy and leadership. It will explore how
Mr Dombey endeavors to expand and protect his firm so as to pass it on to the next generation.
His is a multi-generational family business whose transition he is intent upon managing, and whose
continued reputation and prosperity he is anxious to ensure – in other words, he is concerned about
securing the future of the company. The changeover implies financial and emotional issues, hopes
and dreams, as well as family dynamics. Standards of behavior, core values and expectations are
at stake in Mr Dombey’s vision of and for his firm, and the work culture and environment he
creates results from these values. As a matter of fact, Mr Dombey is only writing his part of a
business legacy whose transcription began with his predecessors, and he is preparing the ground
for his heir to write the next chapters or episodes. However, as his plans spiral out of control, the
business legacy takes a more unexpected turn, threatening to come to an end and to be erased
altogether.
2.
Eike
Kronshage
(Chemnitz
University
of
Technology,
Germany,
eike.kronshage<at>phil.tu-chemnitz.de)
“[N]o trace to leave behind.” Vertical and Horizontal Financial Transmission as Dickens’s
Critique of Industrial Capitalism in Dombey and Son
Dombey and Son, “Son and Heir”, one of the novel’s most frequent clusters (17 times in total),
almost reads like an anadiplosis, emphasizing the vertical hierarchy of (male) family relations –
which the novel itself establishes in the very first chapter with young Paul’s birth. Yet this is no
ab ovo narrative, as the sickly child already passes away in chapter 16. By losing the male and by
virtually orphaning the female heir, Florence, the house of Dombey is bereft of its chances of a
vertical transmission of its wealth: It ultimately goes bankrupt, and Dombey himself is forced to
acknowledge his misconception of vertical family hierarchies.
Embedded into this narrative of vertical transmission is a realist panaroma of horizontal
transmission, of financial investment and its transformative as well as destructive power. The novel
tells the story of the reshaping of London through the construction of train lines and the
concomitent gentrification. Just as much as no trace is ultimately left behind of the house of
Dombey, the newly built train lines leave “no trace […] behind but dust and vapour: like as in the
track of the remorseless monster, Death!” While Dombey’s ideas of inheritance are thwarted by
his son’s untimely death, Death itself becomes (in the rhetorically dense train passages) the
testator, leaving behind but death. I analyze the novel’s two different transmissive axes – vertical
and horizontal – in order to propose a reading of Dombey and Son as Dickens’s critique of the
destructive powers of industrial capitalism.
Slot 3: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00: Dickens Translated: Languages, Contexts, Forms
1.
Claire Woods (Ulster University, United Kingdom, c.woods<at>ulster.ac.uk)
Vestiges of French influence or Dickens et l’héritage français
Born near Chatham docks, under the shadows of the Martello towers, Dickens grew up in close
proximity to France. How did the vestiges of French culture impact on his later writing? This paper
asks why should the London-centric novelist choose to include French characters, settings and
271
references in three of his mid-career novels? What was it about the French nation that led Dickens
to include them at this point in his writing career? In Bleak House, Paris is described as a place of
diversion; French fashions and tastes are vividly described, and Lady Dedlock’s French maid
Hortense is of significant importance to the plot. In Little Dorrit, the plot takes the story from
Marseilles through the Alps to Chalon-sur-Saône and on to Calais. The reader is introduced to the
channel-hopping, French-speaking, former convict, Rigaud-Blandois. In A Tale of Two Cities,
revolutionary Paris overshadows the streets of Soho as Dickens brings to life the residents of Saint
Antoine and the French aristocracy. Dickens’s ambivalent perspective of the French is profoundly
striking. Whilst he admires the elegance and culture of the French, he simultaneously reveals a
deep-rooted fear of revolutionary fervour. For Dickens the French nation is defined by its
revolutionary bloodshed in the late 1700s and 1800s. It is this fear of bloody insurrection which
causes him to call upon French characters, settings and themes, in order that they may serve as an
arresting warning to the nonchalant ruling classes of Britain in the 1850s. For Dickens, the vestiges
and trappings of French culture serve as everyday reminders of dangerous Gallic influence.
2.
Shantanu Majee (Techno India University, India, majeeshantanu<at>gmail.com)
Dickens in Bengal
Dickens’s association with Bengal goes beyond the presence of a chipped-off epitaph in the loving
memory of his soldier son, Walter Landor Dickens (1841 – 1863), at the South Park Street
Cemetery in the White Town of Calcutta. Also, the best of his critics, Humphrey House (1908 –
1955), had actually written his wonderful account of Dickens’s world sitting in Calcutta.
Moreover, the literary influence of Dickens’s works invaded the early prose in Bengali literature
to such extent that Peary Chand Mitra (1814 – 1883), who pioneered the form of novel in Bengali
language, was referred as ‘the Dickens of Bengal’. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838 – 1894),
a literary pioneer in Bengali, is on records to have accredited his material imagination to the novels
of Dickens.
However, no body of academic work exists tracing the translation and reception of the works of
Charles Dickens in the Bengali Language. Dickens’s popularity had earned him a Bengali
translation of David Copperfield in the nineteenth century itself. Later, popular publication
concerns housed in Calcutta, such as Deb Sahitya Kutir, Sarat Book House as well as Abhyuday
Prakash Mandir, went on to bring forth a collection of Dickens’s novels translated in Bengali as
publication-series. Such vogue also influenced mainstream Bengali novelists such as Gajendra
Kumar Mitra (1908 – 1994) to come up with a Bengali translation of A Tale of Two Cities in 1935.
This paper will attempt to explore such knowledge networks and the circuit of Dickensian legacy
in Bengal.
3.
Renata
Goroshkova
(Saint
Petersburg
State
University,
Russia,
goroshkovfamily<at>gmail.com)
“Struggle between two different worlds. All against a snowy background”: Christmas after
Dickens in Russian Literature of the 20th Century
As in many other national literatures, in Russian literary history there are many examples of pieces
of fiction connected with Christmas, and which were written before the first translations of
Dickens’s Christmas books appeared in Russia (such as The Night Before Christmas by Nikolai
Gogol, or the famous scene of fortune-telling on Christmas Eve in Eugene Onegin by Alexander
272
Pushkin). However, the symbolism of these stories is based on the folklore traditions and folk
superstitions, and fails to include the Christian or social components, and also imagery and many
stylistic, narratological, or philosophical-aesthetic features of the literary phenomenon that might
be called a Christmas story. It was Dickens who in his Christmas Books had created a specific
formula of Christmas narrative, which then, according to some research, entered and took root in
Russian literature.
The word formula refers not only to the canonicity of the phenomenon, but also points out its
mechanical nature. Indeed, in spite of the symbolical depth and rich imagery, it should be noted
that the Christmas narrative is characterized by its standardization: all Christmas stories are
somehow similar to each other: as the writer (and a character at the same time) in “The Christmas
Story” by Vladimir Nabokov briefly and ironically describes the substance of any Christmas story,
which is “struggle between two different worlds. All against a snowy background”, perhaps,
hinting that a Christmas narrative of the 20th century is exhausted, almost dead.
In my presentation I will make an attempt to analyze Dickens’s influence on Nabokov’s and
Pasternak’s Christmas narrative. Despite the exhaustion of motives of Christmas in literature, they
were able to embody and create both unique and canonic Christmas plots of the 20th century.
4.
Hugo Bowles (University of Foggia, Italy, hugo.bowles<at>unifg.it)
Claire Wood (University of Leicester, United Kingdom, claire.wood<at>leicester.ac.uk)
Preserving and Expanding Dickens’s Shorthand Legacy – The Dickens Code Project
“My father bought each of us a piece of his shorthand at the auction …. That’s all we’ve
got …”.
This rueful comment in a recent Sunday Times interview with Charles Dickens’s great
granddaughters (Scott, 2016), Lucy and Sophie, may perhaps come as a surprise. Yet the
acquisition of two leaves of shorthand by their father Harry was an important gesture towards the
conservation of Dickens’s stenographic legacy.
Most of Dickens’s shorthand has disappeared, burnt in the 1859 bonfire at Gads Hill or simply
thrown away. Generally disregarded by critics, surviving items are widely dispersed in archives
around the world and are fragmentary – a scribbled note or two, copies of letters, lists of arbitrary
characters and a set of dictation exercises. Dickens’s shorthand is also easy to dismiss because the
Gurney system that he used was so difficult that we understand very little of what the texts say.
Following renewed critical interest in stenographic culture (Price and Thurschwell, 2005) and the
mysterious nature of Dickens’s shorthand (Bowles, 2019), an ongoing AHRC-funded digital
humanities project – The Dickens Code – is coordinating a network of libraries, museums and
scholars with the aim of engaging the public with Dickens’s shorthand through an online
exhibition. This paper will describe the network’s activities and the public response to them, as
well as results of early attempts to decipher what the texts actually say.
5.
Emma Curry (Deciphering Dickens Research
e.curry<at>vam.ac.uk)
Deciphering Dickens: Digital Challenges and Opportunities
Fellow,
United
Kingdom,
Charles Dickens left behind a remarkably complete record of his literary output, including
handwritten drafts for most of the major novels, marked-up page proofs, and planning notes. Many
of these manuscripts and other materials were bequeathed to the V&A by Dickens’s agent and
273
executor John Forster. In this paper we will report progress on our ‘Deciphering Dickens’ project,
based at the V&A. It has two major aims: to create a digital platform with high resolution scans of
the novels together with proofs, planning material, the published text of the novel and supporting
material; and to allow members of the public to help decipher in a guided way as much of
Dickens’s deleted and revised manuscript material as possible. The abundance and complexity of
the material present some unique challenges, both technological and scholarly, but we have
trialled transcription tools which have the potential to produce a powerful and lasting resource for
readers, scholars and editors of Dickens’s work, to understand for the first time the process of
composition by Dickens, from ‘planning to proofs’.
S61: Hybrid Transtextualities: Adaptation and the Aesthetics and Politics of Form
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30, 15:30-17:30, Friday 3rd September 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Eva C. Karpinski (School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, York University,
Toronto, Canada, evakarp<at>yoku.ca)
Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak (English Literature and Comparative Studies, Faculty of
Letters, University of Wrocław, Poland, ewa.keblowska-lawniczak<at>uwr.edu.pl)
Jacqueline Petropoulos (English Studies, Glendon College, York University, Toronto,
Canada, jpetr<at>yorku.ca)
Inspired by Genette’s interest in transtextual relations that link the aesthetic form to its outside,
this seminar focuses on adaptation. While giving a new life to the old text, adaptations respond to
the needs of their present moment. Invited proposals can explore the hybridizing effects of
adaptation, and especially the aesthetic, affective, and epistemic gains and losses that occur when
a hypotext transitions into a differently mediated hypertext. We encourage submission of case
studies of literary and transmedial adaptations that can expand the critical idiom of adaptation
studies and broaden our understanding of recent theoretical shifts and emerging hybrid
transtextualities in the context of global inequalities and new communication technologies.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Zeynep Bilge (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University,
Zeynep.bilge<at>msgsu.edu.tr)
When Pygmalion sings: A socio-political analysis of My Fair Lady
Istanbul,
Turkey,
This study aims at displaying the transtextual relationship between George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion and its musical adaptation My Fair Lady. It is significant that this relationship presents
a multi-layered adaptation process: First of all, G.B. Shaw rewrites the Greek myth in his
Pygmalion (1912). Then, Frederick Loewe (composer) and Alan Jay Lerner (librettist) turn Shaw’s
play into a Broadway musical in 1956. Hence this study primarily focuses on intermediality since
by introducing music My Fair Lady reconstructs the communication between the hypotext and the
hypertext. An analysis of these different – yet similar – works of art, displays different points of
view depending on the changes in the genre as well as time. While investigating the function of
singing and music in My Fair Lady, this paper also compares and contrasts the socio-political
background of the source play that is written in 1912 and its musical adaptation, which is one of
the highlights of the Golden Age of Broadway musicals. In this respect, this paper comments on
274
the differences between Shaw’s perception of art, society and woman with Broadway’s perception.
Apart from presenting a close reading of both works of art, particular pieces of music from the
musical that exemplify social differences will be played and analysed as well.
2.
Julia Boll (University of Konstanz, Germany, j.boll<at>uni-konstanz.de)
Lost at Sea: Caroline Bergvall’s Mapping of Early Medieval and Contemporary Maritime
Migration
The anonymous 10th-century Old English poem “The Seafarer” has been translated and rewritten
into modern English multiple times (famously by Ezra Pound, also by Edwin Morgan, more
recently by Amy Riach). Sally Beamish has adapted it to music, Jila Peacock into monoprints, and
it underpins Conor McPherson’s 2006 play The Seafarer. Cross-disciplinary artist Caroline
Bergvall’s multi-media project Drift (2013-16) is a spoken-word and dance performance of
adapted texts and motives from “The Seafarer” and other Old English and Scandinavian seafaring
poems. These texts are interwoven with testimony from the so-called “Left-to-Die Boat”, an
incident that occurred in March 2011, when the international community abandoned a refugee boat
in the Mediterranean Sea. The performance piece and corresponding text publication (2014) work
across different media and incorporate experimental poetry, animated text projections, forensic
reports, soundscapes, maps, nautical charts, and line drawings. Drift is a harrowing account of the
history of global cross-water migration, exiles, and perilous sea journeys, tracing the past’s
linguistic and motivic presence in the present. This talk focuses on how Bergvall’s adaptation
reframes the current so-called “migrant crisis” by exploring its historical trajectory and its
entanglement with global economics and politics of growing inequality. I will also investigate
whether Bergvall’s performance may be read as a revival of the communal, oral and aural
performance of Old English poetry in the context of the recent resurgence of interest in Early
Medieval literature, art and culture.
3. Simona Oliva (Université de Côte d’Azur, France, Simona.OLIVA<at>univ-cotedazur.fr)
Transmedial melodies: music in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Despite recent developments, literary intermediality and transmediality remain relatively
unexplored. This paper will offer an in-depth analysis of the role of music and how it “migrates”
from the original Orpheus myth to Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and finally to
the song adaptation by U2 of the lyrics of an imaginary song written by a fictional singer, Ormus
Cama. Furthermore, the love story, condensed in the lyrics of the song, unfolds across another
medium – the music video inspired by Wim Wenders’ film The Million Dollar Hotel, which is
itself a complex multi-layered narrative. With its multifarious references to pop stars and songs
interspersed throughout the narrative, Rushdie literally incorporates pop and rock music into the
novel. Moreover, musical patterns are used to frame the addressive narrative whose phatic nature
is instrumental in the creation of an intermedial and transmedial novelistic art. We will endeavour
to determine the extent to which the intrusion of music in the form of references, intertexts and
framing devices serves Rushdie’s literary and ideological project, that is to say whether the novel
can be regarded as a hybrid text, in keeping with the author’s celebration of “hybridity, impurity,
intermingling”. Conversely, we will wonder whether the integration of text into the song and the
video falls into the category of “media combination” (Rajewsky) and can be regarded as an
275
illustration of “musicalized fiction” (Wolf). This circular pattern reflects another notion dear to
Rushdie, that of metamorphosis, recreation and newness.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Mathilde Rogez (Université de Toulouse, France, Mathilde.rogez<at>univ-tlse2.fr)
Adaptation backwards? Craig Higginson, South African novelist and playwright
There are remarkably few instances of plays being adapted into novels. One such exception is
Craig Higginson’s first play, Dream of the Dog (2007), which he rewrote as a novel entitled The
Dream House (2015). His sixth novel, The White Room, also adapted from an earlier play, The
Girl in the Yellow Dress (2010), further fathoms the relation between the theatre and the novel
already explored in The Dream House, in a dizzying process of textual and theatrical
embeddedness. These meta-textual allusions strongly highlight the epiphanic event (Badiou,
Attridge) that a theatrical performance supposedly consists of, yet all the more so, paradoxically,
in the way The White Room deviates from the original text, for the first time directly referring to
Higginson’s homeland, South Africa. As both play and novel hinge around issues of confession,
they further recall Higginson’s first adaptation, which itself directly echoed the debates around the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In both adaptations, the interaction between the genre of
the novel and of the theatre, and of their respective modes of enunciation, thus further leads one to
ponder on the very notions of exceptionality, iterability and performativity, all encapsulated in the
very act of confessing (Sanders), but also of alteration and alterity, which the process of adaptation
gives a voice to (Maurin) – an extremely significant shift in South Africa where the choice of a
genre of writing also affects the accessibility of texts for audiences and readers.
2.
Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak (University of Wrocław, Poland, ewa.keblowskalawniczak<at>uwr.edu.pl)
Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey’s adaptation of Macbeth: Towards creative critical writing
Though adaptations of plays into novels are presumably less frequent, some recent publishing
projects contradict this opinion. In line with the policy to publish the best new writing, The Hogarth
Press Shakespeare series (launched in 2015) sees the bard’s classics retold by “acclaimed and
bestselling novelists today”. Turned into popular reading, as in the case of Chevalier’s Othello,
which openly targets young adults, the novels seek to guarantee the survival of the classics. On the
other hand, Beyond Criticism, an experimental series affiliated with Bloomsbury, publishes among
rare and liminal cases Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey’s adaptation of Macbeth (2016). Declared
“a miracle” and “an instant classic” by Slavoj Žižek, it is far from popular fiction. Macbeth,
Macbeth – a case of transmodalization, an expansion or a sequel with elements of repetition, a
fragmented text which avoids following the dramatic structure of Shakespeare’s tragedy – sets out
not so much to rewrite, re-imagine, explain or even comment on the source text (in that way
admitting the possibility of a meta-textual level or frame) but to engage in penetrating the source
text’s “wounds”, to recover the experience of what has been kept off-stage in Shakespeare’s
tragedy of Macbeth. The novel becomes an unstable framing device, a paratext engaged in
276
hypertextual supplementation that feeds on an absence in the hypotext. The authors’ repetitive
essayistic meditations bring the adaptation process closer to a form of creative critical writing.
3.
Jacek Fabiszak (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, fabiszak<at>amu.edu.pl)
Appropriating biography: The Face of Shakespeare in Branagh’s All is True
Kenneth Branagh’s tale about the last years of Shakespeare’s life, provocatively titled All is True
(2019) is an interesting case of a biopic which raises some essential questions pertaining to the
process and potential of adaptation. Since Julie Sanders finds yet another “mode of appropriation
that uses as its raw material not literary or artistic matter but the ‘real matter of facts, of historical
events and personalities” (2006: 138), it is legitimate to consider biographies, including film ones,
in light of adaptation theory. The aim of the paper to is to look at the complex adaptive strategies
and layers of references deployed by Branagh in his rendering of Shakespeare’s life. The starting
point of the discussion will be approaching Shakespeare as a (pop)cultural icon, or indeed, an Idea
(in the sense in which Roland Barthes wrote about the face of Garbo as “an Idea”, 1972: 57).
Douglas Lanier (2007: 95) calls Shakespeare “the Coca-Cola of a canonical culture” and
Shakespeare’s face – “its trademark.” The paper will try to answer the question of how Branagh
handles the representation of ‘the face of Shakespeare’ in the context of his previous experience
of adapting to screen Shakespeare’s plays, marrying Shakespeare and theatre with the typically
narrative Hollywood cinema, and his reputation as a renowned and critically acclaimed stage actor
and director. This will further invite a reflection on the nature of ‘stretching history; or
appropriating the facts’ (Saanders (2006: 138)).
4.
Roberta Zanoni (Universita di Verona, Italy, roberta.zanoni<at>univr.it)
Advertising as Adaptation: The Case of Romeo And Juliet
Advertising is often relegated to a secondary position in the critical debate concerning
Shakespeare’s adaptations, probably in light of the former’s overtly commercial nature. The paper
will underline why advertising reproductions of Shakespearean plays can be considered as forms
of adaptation capable of rearranging and re-interpreting the existing material while at the same
time engaging in a relationship of mutual influence with other popular texts derived from the same
hypotext. The commercials taken into consideration, Nextel and I-Phone 7 can be considered as
adaptations of Romeo and Juliet conveying a highly significant message which is not merely the
invitation to purchase but which has also different possible readings alternatively depending on
the familiarity of the receiver with the hypotext and/or with its subsequent adaptations. While the
commercials adapt various levels of the original to new expressive modalities, the hypotext is
given new interpretations thanks to the passage through popular culture. Concurrently,
Shakespeare’s appropriation does not only concern the play’s script, but it also takes place in the
new elements introduced in the commercials: the setting, the costumes, the sound system, the
intertextual references, the commodity advertised, and the slogans, which all contribute to ascribe
new meaning to the play. New signifieds are attached to Shakespeare’s plays which are
appropriated by a new era and culture.
277
Slot 3: Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Oana Gheorghiu (University of Galati, Romania, Oana.Gheorghiu<at>ugal.ro)
Michaela Praisler (University of Galati, Romania, michaela.praisler<at>ugal.ro)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Visually) Retold
Owing largely to the political situation in the United States, which seems to head, dangerously so,
to a dystopian Gilead, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale gets, at the end of the 2010s, to
be re-told by many voices: that of her original creator – by her writing a sequel, The Testaments
(2019) –, but also those assumed in successful transmedial adaptations – the homonymous graphic
novel authored by Renee Nault (2019) and the TV series that has taken Offred beyond her final
step “into the darkness within, or else the light” (Atwood 2010: 307) into the second and third
(soon, the fourth too) seasons. Aside from Season 1, which follows closely the convoluted structure
of Offred’s monological testimony, the TV series seems, at a glance, less a multimodal adaptation
and more an appropriation of a late 20th-century novel that has become a political and cultural
phenomenon. Part of a project concerned with the many re-tellings of The Handmaid’s Tale, this
paper aims to analyse the TV series’ fabric beyond the plot departures from its hypotext, as well
as the latter’s linguistic, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic ‘translations’, with a view to proving its
unquestionable indebtedness to the ‘mistressmind’ of contemporary speculative fiction.
2.
Davide Brugio (Italy, davide.burgio<at>sns.it)
Intermedial Adaptation in The Handmaiden
My paper examines the technical and thematic innovations of The Handmaiden, Park ChanWook’s movie adaptation of Sarah Walters’ novel Fingersmith. The novel makes systematic use
of techniques that are either uncommon or not directly available to the cinematic medium: in
Fingersmith’s first two parts, the same events are reported by Susan and then by Maud, and the
focalisation, except for some retrospective remarks by the two extra-homodiegetic narrators, is
internal, providing no access to the other protagonist’s thoughts. The incongruence between what
a character thinks and what the focaliser thinks she thinks is Fingersmith’s fundamental narrative
device, and the movie, lacking the immediate insight into the focaliser’s mind of internally
focalised written narrative, attempts to reproduce this incongruence through a variety of means,
including an experimental use of voiceover, pushing the medium’s boundaries further. Another
innovation is the setting, changed from the original’s Victorian England to the Japan-colonised
Korea of the 1930s: the antagonist is a Korean collector, obsessed with erotic books and Japanese
culture, who keeps Hideko (Maud in the original) segregated. Portraying his attempt to emulate
the culture of Korea’s conquerors, the movie analyses from a new angle a fundamental theme of
the original: the key role of imitation in desire. This adds a deeper significance to the movie’s
symmetrical visuals, leads to a different plot development (foreshadowed through visual elements
that are not present in the hypotext), and, I argue, has radical interpretive implications on the
movie’s portrayal of its characters and of desire in general.
278
3.
Jacqueline Petropoulos (York University, Canada, jpetr<at>yorku.ca)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: From Greek Tragedy to Dark Comedy
Martin McDonagh’s film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri transforms a familiar cultural
trope of a protagonist seeking revenge into a narrative of political protest against social injustice.
Inspired by a billboard that he encountered while on a road trip in the Southern US, this medium
served as a source for McDonagh’s story of a grieving mother on a relentless quest to get justice
for the brutal rape and murder of her daughter. This, in turn, led to a new genre of political protest
in the form of billboards across the country that imitated the ones in the film. In addition to
discussing the process of adaptation across media that transformed the discourse of advertising
into a site of social activism, my paper views Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon as possible source for
the film. Both Aeschylus and McDonagh depict a radical woman who challenges a patriarchal
figure of authority in her quest to get justice for the murder of her daughter. While the Greek
tragedy condemns the angry woman for going against the social and moral order, McDonagh’s
dark comedy satirizes social injustice and sounds the call for collective action by making the lead
character a voice of resistance against gendered violence that speaks to our current cultural climate
defined by the Me Too movement and other forms of political protest against structures of
authority.
4.
Eva C. Karpinski (York University, Canada, evakarp<at>yorku.ca)
Multimedia Lives of Anne Frank: Biographical Comics as Adaptation
In addition to being one of the most widely read books, with over 30 million copies in print in 60
languages, Anne Frank’s Diary has spawned an extraordinary number of transmedia adaptations
in popular culture, including feature film, documentaries, TV series, theatre productions, opera,
musical, graphic biography, and even an anime version of the Diary produced in Japan, where
Anne is a hugely popular figure. Following the ethical unease around the use of comics and other
“trivial” media (e.g., selfie or comedy) to convey the Holocaust experience, I will examine two
recent adaptations of Anne’s story in a comic book genre: Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House
Authorized Graphic Biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon (2010) and Anne Frank’s Diary:
The Graphic Adaptation by Ari Folman and David Polonsky (2018). I contend that the graphic
medium of comics can function as a suitable transmitter of the difficult knowledge and affective
registers of trauma, communicating them through visual objects as much as words. I will explore
the semiotic and narrative strategies used in these biographical comics (biographics) in order to
identify multiple cognitive and affective filters (linguistic, visual, and cultural) that mediate, adapt,
and mitigate traumatic content. What new perspectives are produced by these transmedia
adaptions? What kinds of affects do they construct? What new audiences do they reach? And what
new contexts do they flesh out?
279
S62: Bodily (Re)Orientations in Neo-Victorianism
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30 and 15:30-17:30
Co-Convenors:
Rosario Arias (University of Málaga, Spain, rarias<at>uma.es)
Ann Heilmann (Cardiff University, United Kingdom, HeilmannA<at>cardiff.ac.uk)
This seminar addresses the relevance of the materiality of the body in neo-Victorian literature and
culture. It considers how the material turn is deployed in neo-Victorianism, and the ways in which
critical perspectives such as phenomenology, Thing theory, and object-relations ontology
(re)position and (re)orientate the dichotomy between subject and object, materiality and
immateriality in neo-Victorian literature and culture by means of (re)embodiment and sensorial
apprehension. In addition, this seminar explores the neo-Victorian text as a dynamic inter-space
of bodily re-inhabitance, an in-between space of flows and movements, where the contemporary
present brings the Victorian past into close proximity, enacting contact through affective
interactions with various text(s) and bodies.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Ruta Slapkauskaire (Vilnius University, Lithuania, ruta.slapkauskaite<at>flf.vu.lt)
Mundus Patet: Following the Fossils in Joan Thomas’ Curiosity
Nineteenth-century fossil findings broke new ground in the domains of science and public culture,
establishing the fields of geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology as well as
revolutionizing the use of fossil fuels. In reanimating in her novel Curiosity the life of Mary
Anning, the legendary fossil hunter of Lyme Regis, and paleontologist Henry de la Beche,
Canadian author Joan Thomas examines the hidden meshwork of stratigraphy, geomorphism, and
social order, which solicited the material and metaphysical appeal of petrified forms, on the one
hand, and scientific inquiry, on the other. Implicit in the novel’s concern for dinosaur remains is a
reckoning with non-human materiality inherent in the sedimentological arc of industrial
modernity. In this respect, by following the fossil as simultaneously a material, tropological, and
iconic form, this paper borrows from Michel Serres’ phenomenology, Bill Brown’s Thing theory,
Derek T. Turner’s thinking about paleoaesthetics, and Brian Noble’s ideas about dinosaurs as ‘a
specimen-spectacle complex’ to consider how the fossils in Curiosity relate to agency and
patience, structuring multiple links between saurians and humans, deep time and neoVictorianism. Arguably, for Thomas, the conceptualization of the material world aligns with the
conceptualization of humanity so that her inquiry into forms of social and gender inequality stands
on a par with the novel’s critique of scientific arrogance, with the fictional Mary Anning emerging
as a figure of moral coherence and earthbound responsibility. Above all, the material universe
forged in Curiosity speaks to the depths of our being that reminds us of humanity’s shared origin
and destiny in humus.
280
2.
Roberta Gefter Wondrich (University of Trieste, Italy, gefter<at>units.it)
Embodying the Archives of the Earth: Dual Orientation in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable
Creatures
The paper examines Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2014) as a neo-Victorian
biofictional revisiting of Mary Anning’s life and cultural feat which presents a pervasive use of
the semantics of orientation and gendered embodied existence in the early Victorian age. The novel
focusses significantly on the idea of the material trace of the past, represented by the fossil as a
cultural object which, through a sort of defamiliarisation-effect, discloses the possibility of an
unimagined reality and triggers an epistemological breakthrough. More specifically, by adopting
a gender-focused historical perspective on the epistemological obsession of the “excavating”
Victorians with geology, science and archeology, the novel interestingly emphasizes the dimension
of the material and sensorial apprehension of the natural landscape as a repository of the past and
its mystery. This is intimately known and appropriated by the protagonist though her (bodily) dual
orientation, toward and through the environment where she belongs, and toward a possible past
which she cannot fathom or conceive of, but only have intimations of. While Mary Anning’s bodily
existence is progressively affected by her relationship with the physical space she explores, and
the narrative interestingly traces her “embodied” consciousness, she ultimately becomes aware of
accessing the ‘archives of the earth’ on the liminal space of the English Southern coast. In parallel,
the contemporary reader can appreciate Remarkable Creatures’ neo-Victorian focus on the
excavation of the relics from the past turning into “things” for the protagonist, as objects and
subjects share in their respective existences, and they “animate one another” (B. Brown).
3.
Carmen Lara Rallo (University of Malaga, Spain, clarar<at>uma.es)
The Sensorial Interaction between the Human and the Geological in Neo-Victorian Fiction
In On Histories and Stories, A.S. Byatt identified the hero’s encounter with a fossilized creature
as a recurrent topos in several neo-Victorian novels (Byatt, Histories 72). She refers to Thomas
Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes as a possible origin for this topos, quoting the passage where Henry
Knight finds himself face to face with a trilobite: “[t]he eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even
now regarding him. […] He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the
beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously”. From my point of view, this
quotation is significant because it encapsulates two ideas that become particularly relevant in the
light of the presence of fossils and geological specimens in neo-Victorian fiction.
My contention is that the interaction with the geological subtext in neo-Victorian fiction is
mediated by the sensorial apprehension of the fossil or geological specimen through the sense of
sight, a process which usually awakens the sense of touch in the form of the Victorian character’s
desire of material possession and collection of the specimens. This interaction triggers a
polytemporal reflection on life and time that is articulated in terms of a correlation between the
transience of human existence and the immensity of geological time. In this context, the aim of the
present paper is to explore the interaction between the Victorian character and the fossil or
geological specimen in different neo-Victorian texts, examining the sensorial experience
underlying that interaction, and the polytemporal reflection awakened by it.
281
4.
Peter Mortensen (Aarhus University, Denmark, engpm<at>cc.au.dk)
Male Embodiment and Flow in Karen Blixen’s “Ehrengard”
Twentieth-century Danish Anglophone writer Karen Blixen (”Isak Dinesen”) wrote texts in which
she often revisited Victorian literary styles and critically reexamined characteristic Victorian
tropes and motifs. In this presentation, I draw on feminist new materialism, ecocriticism and
ecomasculinity studies to assess how Blixen revisions traditional ideas about the male body and
its relation to other human bodies and the nonhuman environment. Blixen’s last published story,
“Ehrengard” (1962), is set in nineteenth-century Germany and revolves around a specific and
highly gendered physical response: blushing. When blushing occurs in Victorian writing, it often
appears to indicate the female body’s inherent instability, fluidity and susceptibility to external
influences, contrasted (implicit or explicitly) with the male body’s stability, solidity and
imperviousness. At the end of Blixen’s neo-Victorian tale, however, it is the would-be male
seducer (the libertine artist Herr Cazotte) rather than his intended female victim (the innocent
Ehrengard) who blushes. In “Ehrengard” and elsewhere, I argue, Blixen re-genders blushing to coimplicate male corporeality in the trans-corporeal flows and streams of the nonhuman world.
Gender is a key factor in shaping perceptions of natural environments, and moving towards
sustainability requires that we mobilize resources that can help us rethink dominant ideas about
both femininity and masculinity. Blixen’s story, I argue, counters any historical or contemporary
form of masculinism predicated on borders, separations and a repudiation of nature and the
feminine.
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Sarah E. Beyvers (Universität Passau, Germany, Sarah.Beyvers<at>uni-passau.de)
The Ripper at Play: Embodying Jack the Ripper and Exploring the Victorians Interactively
in Assassin's Creed Syndicate
The case of Jack the Ripper seems to be a topic neo-Victorian texts can no longer do without. The
murders still haunt contemporary media cultures in a number of ways. The popularity, or rather
infamy, of the Ripper has been attributed to the absence of closure he represents. Poore, for
instance, conceives of “Jack the Ripper as a space, an absence, one which has come to serve as a
portal between past and present” (6). One of the innumerable texts with the Ripper at their centre
is the expansion to the 2015 videogame Assassin’s Creed Syndicate named Jack the Ripper. In my
paper, I will explore how the embedding of the Ripper as a playable character foregrounds the
possibilities of somatic and interactive engagement with the nineteenth century that videogames
provide. Players’ presence in a videogame was first defined by Lombard and Ditton as “the
perceptual illusion of nonmediation”. The “sense of ‘being there’ inside the game world”
(Tamborini and Skalski 225) makes the “disembodied” Ripper (Lonsdale 98) seem more tangible
than he ever was, while the chance of playing him does by no account fully immerse the player in
bloodlust. Instead, playing the Ripper as well as female protagonist and flâneuse Evie (Gann)
makes possible the neo-Victorian negotiation of the complex issues of gender, sensationalism,
physicality and affect as well as spatial explorability of worlds past. Evie serves as detective and
avenger combined, bringing justice to the victims and working against the oppression of women
in Victorian society.
282
2.
Miriam Fernández-Santiago (University of Granada, Spain, mirfer<at>ugr.es)
Carnival Row: a neo-Victorian expression of posthumanist anxieties
In August 2019, Amazon Prime Video released Carnival Row, a high-budget, aesthetically
impeccable series by René Echevarria and Travis Beacham blending fantasy, romance and
detective fiction along eight episodes. Most of the action takes place in the Burgue, an imperial
metropolis that roughly evokes Victorian London in dress-code, architecture, social distribution of
wealth and spaces and moral dictates regarding gender, class and race. As a narrative piece,
Carnival Row incorporates some of the literary genres that developed and thrived along the
Victorian period in Britain, such as romance, detective and gothic fiction, the social novel, children
literature and colonial narrative. Yet in approach and perspective, the series (another Victorian
publishing innovation) cannot be described as exactly Austenian, Doylist, Stevensonian,
Dickensian, Carrollian, or Kiplingian, respectively. This shift in perspective can be explained by
the fact that despite the continuity in thematic interest between the Victorian and the millenial, the
historical and cultural events developing along the twentieth century have caused a self-reflective
turn in the Victorian humanist prerogatives leading to the birth of a new, posthumanist paradigm
that consistently interrogates the limits of the human body and mind. Examples of posthumanist
reformulation of Victorian humanist paradigms abound in the series, but all of them coincide in
posing questions about the limits of human embodiment in the twenty-first century that are deeply
rooted in their Victorian precedents. I will be tackling the most evident ones in the hope that later
discussion will allow to explore deeper connections and critical consequences of the Neo-Victorian
aspects present in Carnival Row.
3.
Louati
Mezghani
(University
of
Toulouse
II
Jean-Jaurès,
France,
lilia.louatii<at>gmail.com)
(In)hospitality of the Female Body in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White
Phallocentric discourse has often written the female body in terms of sexual difference and
domination – object to satisfy male sexual desires denying female subjectivity and reducing
women to biological roles and organs. Driven by such thinking, Michel Faber’s protagonist,
William Rackham, considers the bodies of both the prostitute Sugar and his wife Agnes in The
Crimson Petal and the White (2002) a place for occupation. Sugar and Agnes, two female subjects
(among many others in the novel) are imprisoned in the position of “comfort women”, constantly
facing masculine “assumptions about men’s right to power over women's bodies” (Stetz and Oh,
Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, Introduction xv). Nonetheless, feminist
Corporealism through the media of Sugar’s and Agnes’s bodies in Faber’s text emerges to
renegotiate this definition of the feminine body by claiming that it is “an arena of control” to
borrow Susan Bordo’s expression from Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the
Body (141) and that materiality is no longer to be exclusively associated with nature and biology
as Elizabeth Grosz argues in Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism and differentiated
from reason and mind: Sugar regains control of her body long occupied by Rackham and Agnes
rejects the restrictive definition of womanhood as motherhood.
This paper focuses on the materiality of the female-sexed body to discuss the sociocultural
dimensions of corporeality in Faber’s text in order to investigate notions of ownership,
(un)availability and (in)hospitality in relation to female identity. This paper also seeks to analyse
how the text advances the liberation from the role of “comfort woman” in its engagement with
283
feminist Corporealism by proposing alternative models of bodily female relationships and
foregrounding an aesthetics of female neo-characterization.
4.
Xu Lei (Nanjing University, China, xu_lei<at>nju.edu.cn)
Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Reorientation of Order in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
Drawing on Mary Douglass’s study on concepts of purity and dirt as well as their underlying
connections with social order, the present paper intends to examine the agency of the dangerous
bodies in Sea of Poppies which seek to reorient towards a cosmopolitan order. Bodies in Amitav
Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) emerge as loci of contested power relations which turns on the idea
of purity. On the local level of the story along the river of Ganga, lying at the center of the struggle
for symbolic dominance in India’s colonized caste society at the eve of the Opium War is the
confrontation between the old normative order of body hierarchy which attenuates purity of blood,
and the individuated bodies whose unrecognizability disrupts the definitive norms of caste and
gender. Staged on the ship Ibis packed with indentured laborers and lascars across the Indian
Ocean, body manifests its transgressive potential in cutting across the color bar on a transnational
level. If body is believed to be an inscriptive surface of social order as expounded by Bryan Turner
and his followers, the dangerous bodies as showcased in the novel’s manifold characters evidence
a purposeful reversal of the idea of purity in an effort to go beyond the confines of ethnic, gender,
and caste categories within the Indian society and the white-dominated colonial era at large.
S63: Textual Production and Reception under 20th-Century Censorship
Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30 and 15:30-17:30
Co-Convenors:
Krystyna Wieszczek (University of Southampton, United Kingdom / University of Milan,
Italy, kw8g11<at>soton.ac.uk)
Giuliana Iannaccaro (University of Milan, Italy, giuliana.iannaccaro<at>unimi.it)
This seminar seeks to connect scholars working in the field of 20th-century censorship in both
English and Anglophone literatures. Intending to explore the spectrum of defiance and conformity
in textual production and transmission (also via translation), it invites proposals concerned with,
among other topics, political or religious patronage and control, canon inclusion and exclusion,
international backing and interference, or censorship evasion via transnational collaborations,
clandestine publishing and circulation. The seminar means to further our understanding of both
apparent and hidden practices of textual authorization and control and the bearing these may have
on canonicity and subsequent influence.
Slot 1: Thursday 2nd September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Pelin Doğan (Munzur University, Turkey, pelin1dogan<at>gmail.com)
‘Prick on Stage’: Censorship and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw
As Sigmund Freud’s well-known statement playfully puts it, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
However, in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, Winston Churchill’s cigar, inserted into the play by
Sir Ralph Richardson after Orton’s death, hilariously over-signifies. The opening of the play is
marked by a significant event, the recently erected statue of Churchill has been damaged in a gas
284
explosion and a shrapnel-like fragment has killed a woman. The nature of the statue’s missing part,
of country-wide concern, relies on sexual innuendo for its humour and is euphemistically kept
unidentified until the end of the play. In fact, the play has two different endings: the version written
by Orton, which survives in a holograph manuscript, and the version first performed on stage. In
the former, Orton strips off euphemism and the larger-than-life-size penis of Churchill’s statue is
triumphantly held aloft, while in the bowdlerised version, the cigar replaces the gigantic penis of
Churchill’s statue.
This significant alteration to the script is often regarded as diminishing the anarchic impact of the
play. However, in this paper, I will argue that this modification paradoxically opens up the text to
polyvalent interpretations. In doing so, I look to demonstrate that What the Butler Saw, written
before the abolition of official censorship yet performed afterwards, straddles pre- and post-1968
and so offers a peculiar case study for the exploration of some complex questions in relation to
representations of and responses to censorship.
2.
Fujeena Abdul Kader (National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Odisha, India,
fujeena1013<at>gmail.com)
Changing Scenario of Censorship in India: Controversial Literatures of Past and Present
Since the British Raj to the present, the tendency to regulate language and imagination is visible
in the Indian literature, mostly influenced by political, religious, ideological, other extremist
groups. During the pre-independent period, the British Raj implemented censorship laws to control
the circulation of information, chiefly to strengthen their dominance, leading to the prohibition of
several newspapers, pamphlets, books, and other literary pieces of expression. However, in the
contemporary scenario, censorship seems to be influenced by various socio-political, cultural, and
ideological groups, particularly to garner the support of specific communities; as a result, denying
the majority their right to read. People or groups of different backgrounds control the literature by
violent protests and suppression of writers, although censorship is supposed to be exercised by the
government through various bureaucratic and legal systems. At this juncture, observing the
censorship from the aspect of strengthening the power by the state to retaining the authority
through power politics, the paper tries to explore the changing scenario of censorship in India, by
analyzing the two controversial texts, Angaaray (1932), an Urdu collection of short stories by
Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar (translated in 2014) from the preindependent period and Madhurobaagan (2010) a Tamil novel by Perumal Murugan (translated as
One Part Woman in 2014) from the post-independent India. The paper also tries to explore the
selected texts’ translations, to evaluate the status of controversial books at present.
3.
Camino
Gutiérrez
Lanza
(Universidad
de
León,
Spain,
camino.gutierrez.lanza<at>unileon.es)
Cinema Censorship and Textual Reception in Francoist Spain: Legislation and Censors’
Reports
The censorship system established in Spain under Franco’s rule remained in force for almost fifty
years (1936-1985), including the Civil War, the entire dictatorship, and the transition to
democracy. Due to the great social impact of cinema, tight control measures were established since
the very beginning. The Catholic Church created an advisory film classification system, but only
the official censorship boards had the power to issue a final verdict. In an attempt to adjust the
285
system to the ever-changing socio-political situation of the country, evolving from more
conservative to more liberal positions, numerous laws and decrees were published to establish not
only the internal functioning of the different boards, but also the criteria to be followed by censors.
These changes were strongly implemented in the censorship reports, which constitute in valuable,
first-hand evidence of the evolution of the reception of films.
The aim of this presentation is to outline the way cinema censorship functioned during the
Francoist period, by explaining all changes in legislation in relation to the socio-political situation,
and to describe the way censorship reports evolved over time, both in form and in content, as a
result of those changes. Two sources of information will be used: the Boletín Oficial del Estado,
where legislation was published, and the censorship files available at the Archivo General de la
Administración (AGA) in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain. Examples of original films in English
released in their dubbed version will show the way translated cinema had to adjust to the ideology
of the Francoist regime.
4.
Giuliana
Iannaccaro
(Università
degli
Studi
di
Milano,
Italy,
giuliana.iannaccaro<at>unimi.it)
Black Writers and Religious Missions in Early 20th-Century South Africa: A Many-Sided
Cultural Relationship
Since the late 1990s, after the demise of apartheid, literary criticism concerning South African
textual production has mainly focused on contemporary issues, with the question of apartheid
censorship at the forefront. Black and white writers under the National Party underwent pre- and
post-publication censorship, from 1954 (with the first Commission of Inquiry against “Undesirable
Publications”) to the Publications and Entertainments Acts of 1963 and 1974. Less attention has
been paid to the pre-apartheid period, even if the first decades of the 20th century are pivotal to
grasp the meaning and the relevance of what happened in the near future. The aim of this
presentation is to shed some light on the conditions of writing and publishing literary works on the
part of black intellectuals in the South African early 20th-century context, and specifically on the
complex and nuanced relationship between black writers and the manifold European religious
missions present on the territory. The latter often held the means of literary production (the printing
presses) and, accordingly, acted as pre-publication censors, approving or refusing the manuscripts
submitted to their acceptance. And yet, paradoxically, even missionaries could feel they were
being controlled by a censorious governmental system when, for instance, their own publications
were stigmatised for taking too openly the side of the natives – to the point of having their own
lodgings searched for alleged subversive activities. Just because the early 20th-century South
African literary and cultural panorama is many-sided and unquestionably challenging, a brief
investigation into some exemplary cases is meant to raise issues and promote debate.
286
Slot 2: Thursday 2nd September, 15:30-17:30
1.
Sergio Lobejón Santos (Universidad de León, Spain, sergio.lobejon<at>unileon.es)
Cristina Gómez Castro (Universidad de León, Spain, cristina.gomez<at>unileon.es):
Textual Reception in Francoist Spain: Looking at Translation through the Lens of
Censorship Files
The censorship system established in Spain under Franco’s rule remained in force for almost fifty
years (1938-1985), spanning the entire dictatorship and the transition to democracy. Several pieces
of legislation regulated the publication of books during this period. The changes they implemented
were strongly reflected in the censorship reports generated and signed by the censors. These
constitute invaluable, first-hand evidence of the evolution of the production and distribution of
books. Furthermore, they offer a window into the regime’s viewpoint regarding the reception of
those texts, which underwent significant shifts mirroring those in Franco’s cabinet.
Book censorship files are available at the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA) in Alcalá
de Henares, Madrid, Spain. The reports contained in these files provide information crucial to
understanding how the operation of a systematic censorship apparatus affected translation work.
A detailed study of report data offers valuable insights into the control mechanisms and the
ideology imposed by the regime. The main aim of this presentation is therefore to present a brief
outline of the way in which this system functioned and to describe how the report forms used by
the censors evolved through time and, with them, the reception of translations. The reports paint a
picture of a slowly shifting landscape in regard to translated text availability, with the regime
transitioning from an isolationist position at the beginning of the dictatorship to a more open policy
that allowed for the distribution and assimilation of an increasing number of cultural models and
manifestations.
2.
Cristina Zimbroianu (Autonomous University of Madrid, and Technical University of
Madrid, Spain, cristina.zimbroianu<at>uam.es)
The reception of Manning’s The Great Fortune in Spain and Romania
Olivia Manning’s novel The Great Fortune (1960) enclosed in the cycle of novels The Balkan
Trilogy (1960-65) enjoyed great success in England being adapted in 1987 to a seven-episode
serial directed by James Cellan Jones. However, in Spain and Romania, two countries governed
during a long period by dictatorships, that of Francisco Franco in Spain and that of Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, The Great Fortune proved to be less
successful than in England. Therefore, the purpose of this presentation is to study the reception of
Manning’s novel in two countries governed by totalitarian regimes—Franco’s Spain and
communist Romania—where culture was controlled by severe censorship systems. The
methodology employed is based on Hans Robert Jauss’s aesthetics of reception. In order to
undertake this research, the censorship files guarded at Archivo General de la Administración
(General Archive of the Administration) in Alcalá de Henares and Arhivele Naționale ale
României (Romanian National Archives) in Bucharest were consulted as well as the monographs
and newspaper articles written by scholars and journalists during the totalitarian regimes. These
documents prove that the reception of Manning’s novel in both countries was conditioned by the
censorial apparatus.
287
3.
Krystyna Wieszczek (University of Southampton, United Kingdom / University of Milan,
Italy, kw8g11<at>soton.ac.uk)
English Letters versus Polish Communist Censorship: A Multinational Story of Suppression
and Resistance
The paper examines the suppression and the reception of English letters under the Polish state
censorship as exemplified by the case of George Orwell. It shows how both this model of
censorship and resisting it involved multinational efforts. When the Soviet Union occupied Poland
at the end of the Second World War for over four decades, the regime attempted to render
disobliging Polish and foreign intellectuals an ‘unperson’. Yet, the official censorship system was
not always successful in preventing their ideas and texts from circulating on both sides of the Iron
Curtain, among the diaspora (émigré reception) and in communist Poland alike (clandestine and
official receptions). The paper explores such themes as the role of individual actors and
organisations in such – sometimes illicit – cultural exchanges, transmission and reception; the
history of translations and of books; letters and diaries as testaments of reception and
dissemination; and censorship files as testaments of suppression but of an insider, official reception
too. It does so by delving into stories of individual émigré and underground activists, émigré and
foreign institutions, printing techniques and smuggling practices, clandestine publishing and
distribution networks as well as holes in the communist censorship system itself. Finally, the paper
reflects on the status that this British author gained and the influence that his ideas exerted in these
political conditions and dissemination practices.
S64: Migrant Writers Writing in English
Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30 and 14:45-16:45
Co-Convenors:
Petya Tsoneva (University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, p.coneva<at>ts.uni-vt.bg)
Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska (Cardinal Wyszynski University of Warsaw, Poland,
szczepanwojnarska<at>gmail.com)
Described as “a controversial world language” (Chantal Zabus), English is no longer the tongue
of particular ethnic communities or even nation states. Spoken and written by more non-native
than native speakers, it has become the medium of new kinds of writing. This seminar will focus
on exophonic writers for whom English is not their first language but is nevertheless a major means
of self-expression. Such writers have frequently experienced some form of migration, and their
work illuminates significant aspects of the migrant experience. Topics of discussion include, but
are not limited to:
- “traditional” and “new” migrant cultures;
- border crossing and cultural translation;
- genres of exophonic migrant writing.
288
Slot 1: Wednesday 1st September, 10:30-12:30
1.
Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, l.kostova<at>ts.uni-vt.bg)
Living with the Burdens of the Past: Trauma in Kapka Kassabova’s Reconnaissance and
Miroslav Penkov’s Stork Mountain
The closing years of the last century and the opening two decades of the present one witnessed a
proliferation of Anglophone fiction with a decidedly political-historical slant. Significantly, some
of it was produced by exophonic writers, that is, writers for whom English is not their “mother”
tongue. This paper focuses on two novels by Bulgarian-born writers Kapka Kassabova and
Miroslav Penkov, who write in English.
Kassabova’s book portrays a deeply troubled young heroine bound on an erratic journey through
her newly adopted country of New Zealand. Her journey is punctuated by bits of traumatic family
history reflecting life under communism, a film-mediated view of Bulgaria under Ottoman rule,
and memories of political violence during her recent visit to the country. The heroine desperately
tries to free herself from what she calls “the halter of history, “which prevents her from forging a
new, “healthier” identity for herself out of the country of her birth.
Penkov’s Stork Mountain similarly focuses on a young character, who must deal with the burdens
of the past. In his case, family history is entangled with the (semi-)mythologized history of the
Strandja Mountains, home of the ancient ritual of fire dancing. As one of south-east Europe’s
ethnically and culturally hybrid spaces, the region has been the site of violence and devastation as
well as of numerous migrations. The novel’s narrator, who has spent his formative years in the
US, must confront its varied past as he comes back to it.
2.
Bianca
Gabriela
Palade
(West
University
butar.bianca<at>gmail.com)
The Immigrant Experience through Dominican Eyes
of
Timișoara,
Romania,
In the recent few decades, Latino American literature in the US has been a major point of interest
for various scholars. Nonetheless, very few research papers dwell upon the immigrants who left
their homelands, not because of poverty but as a means to escape oppressive political regimes. The
following paper constitutes a preliminary part of a PhD thesis whose aim is to analyse the aftermath
of living a life under a dictatorial regime and its impact upon the way in which the selected authors
perceive their experiences as Latino immigrants in the US. The paper will focus on the literary
works of Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz, both representatives of a post-Trujillo era and part of the
1.5 generation of immigrants – they left the Dominican-Republic at a very young age thus
obtaining a bicultural perspective: a Dominican childhood followed by an American adult life. The
paper aims to analyse major concerns in their writings such as the immigration experience,
language as a means of identity construction, and the political factor. Taking all these into
consideration, this paper will ultimately attempt to answer a crucial question: to what extent can
Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz be considered ethnic writers and representatives of the community
of Dominican immigrants?
289
3.
Tereza Šmilauerová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic, denaira<at>seznam.cz)
Language as a Personal Culture Indicator in Recent Asian American Novelists
Recently, the importance of Asian American writings has increased in the United States – due to
their growing numbers, increasing recognition and important issues they deal with. What
distinguishes them from other ethnic minority groups is the lack of cultural connection of Asian
cultures with the culture of the United States – the history of Asia and the United States’
relationship is shorter and less diverse than that with Europe, South America and Asia, and the
difference between their cultures is greater than in the case of Australia.
This gap creates an interesting situation for Asian Americans, who need to negotiate their double
cultural identity for themselves. Those are conditions the writers of this group are rooted in. This
paper is going to explore a selection of recently published Asian American novels written by
women, America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo, The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang and
The Girl from Foreign by Sadia Shepard, where culture and language choices meet. The authorial
background, as well as the particular cultural contexts within the texts, will be considered, and
possible patterns for linguistic and cultural negotiation will be drawn from the analysis. Also, the
history of Asian and American languages as cultural signifiers within Asian American women’s
prose will be briefly introduced.
4.
Concetta Sigona (University of Burgos, Spain, cmsigona<at>ubu.es)
Multilingualism and Multicultural Identity in the New Generation of Italian-Canadian
Writers
Unlike previous generations in which the Italian-Canadian identity came to being in spite of
generation gaps, traumas and depression, through creativity and healing, the new generation of
Italian-Canadian writers share a common heritage (De Gasperi, Seccia, Canton, Mirolla 2015),
thanks to the fact that multiculturalism and multilingualism inspire their writings and provide their
characters with new means to come to terms with reality. These new patterns of the writers’ selflocation produce new forms of literary and artistic interest. As Licia Canton says: "The ItalianCanadian writers have much to say, much more to write and more to publish."
Contemporary Canadian identity is, therefore, multicultural and multilingual (Casagranda, 2008).
Multicultural identity can also be seen as a linguistic function in cases when the writers do not
write in their native tongue. Such linguistic transitions mean that language, histories and identities
are constantly subject to mutation (Ferraro 2011). As a Canadian writer of English and Italian
origins, Caterina Edwards mediates between the different cultural contexts that have shaped her
sense of belonging and identity: Canadian – British and Italian. She says: “We belong to something
if something belongs to us.” This complicated sense of belonging yields new, hybrid forms of
identity built within the cultural dialectic of migrant self-location, in our case, that of origin, Italy,
and that of arrival, Canada.
290
Slot 2: Wednesday 1st September, 14:45-16:45
1.
Petya Tsoneva (University of VelikoTarnovo, Bulgaria, p.coneva<at>ts.uni-vt.bg)
Rethinking Insularity in The Wind Under My Lips by Stephanos Stephanides
This paper aims to contribute to a relatively underdeveloped section of the critical vocabulary of
contemporary literary and cultural studies. Having already attuned their theoretical paradigms and
analytical tools to the speeding events of migration, border crossing and intensive cross-cultural
exchange, they have come up with the means, tropes and terms of study that encourage the
disruption of firmly-fixed forms, “impermeable” boundaries, and “hymns” of the indomitable
nation. Against this background, notions of “home” recede, giving way to departures, linguistic
self-location breeds dislocation, art and literature become multiply rooted.
My concern is that amidst these forms of flexibility, islands and islandness are less likely to be
adopted when thinking about crossways. Island life can produce visions of insularity/isolation and
narratives that shun “undesirable otherness” (Bernardie-Tahir and Schmoll 2014). Such attitudes
project models of insularity that tend to merge the island with an “I-land” (Deloughrey 2011)
especially when the smaller size of the island results in the condensation of the often heterogeneous
composition of the local population.
In this paper I will discuss the work of a less-known island-born writer who writes in English.
Born in a Cypriot village, Stephanos Stephanides joined his father who left for England when
Stephanides was only eight. Subsequently, he lived and travelled in Greece, Spain, and Portugal,
Guyana and Washington DC. In 1991 he returned to Cyprus and presently he reads lectures in
English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. The Wind Under My Lips is his
recently published memoir in which he remembers his origins in a language that veers between
different linguistic identities. I will observe how this ambiguous self-location articulates insularity
as a hub of departures and arrivals that reformulate locality in the dynamics of the world literary
space.
2.
Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska (Cardinal Wyszynski University of Warsaw, Poland,
szczepanwojnarska<at>gmail.com)
On the Significance of Address in Ewa Chruściel’s Poetry Volume Strata
This paper aims to contribute to a discussion on belonging and a human relation to a place in
reference to poems written by a Polish-American poet, a writer, and a translator Ewa Chruściel.
She is a self-described “nomad,” moving back and forth across the Atlantic, writing in English as
well as in her native Polish. Though she flies between countries and cultures, she is not a refugee:
her travels are those of the global cosmopolite however not of the joyful tourist.
The volume Strata that I chose to discuss in this paper, won the 1st prize in the International Book
Contest of Emergency Press in 2011. It represents a series of interconnected lyric prose poems that
builds into a postmodern life story. With the title “Strata” meaning “loss” in Polish and “accretion”
in English, Chruściel juxtaposes and synthesizes through repetition exquisite details about parents
and ancestry, the paradoxes of belonging to two languages, to different historical paradigms. She
reverses the question of belonging when she asks how much an individual subject marks a
particular place, not by asking how much a place of its origin and a place of living influence a
subject. As a key word in my analysis, I have chosen address in its figurative meaning.
291
3.
Joanna Skolik (University of Opole, Poland, jskolik<at>uni.opole.pl)
Joseph Conrad’s Adventure with English
This paper will discuss Conrad’s Anglophone linguistic identity to show how writing became his
“promised land” and fictional homeplace. This fictional retreat reflects his childhood experience,
(connected with his Polish background), hopes and fears, but it is likewise refracted through
episodes of his later life. Conrad’s own articulation of his complex relation to English, England
and his own nationality, reveal his outlook on literature and language: “When speaking, writing or
thinking in English the word Home always means for me the hospitable shores of Great Britain”
(CL 1:12) and “Both at sea and on land, my point of view is English, from which the conclusion
should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in
my case more than one meaning” (Najder 240).
4.
David Szőke (University of Szeged, Hungary, beszelo86<at>gmail.com)
Franz Baermann Steiner, H.G. Adler and the Cultural Transformation of Britain After 1945
The present paper wishes to discuss the cultural significance of the Prague poet and anthropologist
Franz Baermann Steiner and the writer H.G. Adler. Both Steiner and Adler came from the Prague
School of German Jewish intellectuals, whose literary bequest was strongly tied to the works of
Franz Kafka and Max Brod. Both lived as Central European Jewish exiles in London: Steiner in
1938, while Adler in 1948 as a survivor of the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps.
Both belonged to that group of emigrants, among whom Ernst Gombrich, Elias Canetti or Arthur
Koestler, who took their own cultures and values with them. With their scholarly and literary
works, whose concerns include the criticism of modernity and the questioning of human values
after the Holocaust, the nature of power and disempowerment, or the problem of rootlessness,
Steiner and Adler had a significant influence on the British scholarship and culture, and their
contribution to the English scientific and cultural life reshaped and reinterpreted British identity.
The paper will highlight that without a mutual agreement between Britain and its European
intellectuals, no restoration after the war could have been possible. By doing so, it will examine
how the legacy of Steiner and Adler help us reassess the questions of British and European
identities, transculturalism and the dynamics between the proverbial “centre” and “periphery”.
5.
Linda Rossato (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, linda.rossato<at>unive.it)
Easy Eatalian: Chefs of Italian Origin Writing Their Cookbooks in English, Hosting
Cookery Series on British Television and Mediating Their Cultural Heritage
Drawing on the analysis of a sample of extracts from cookery books accompanying TV cookery
series hosted by Antonio Carluccio, Gennaro Contaldo and Giorgio Locatelli, three Italian chefs
who under different circumstances chose the UK as their elective professional home-country, the
present paper sets out to investigate three cases of migrant writers whose recent (after the 1970s)
migration to the UK is linked to the food industry. Well-known London restaurateurs, but also TV
personas, these three chefs have become very popular both in the UK and in Italy via their British
TV cookery series, finding in London the success they could not achieve at home.
The present contribution will address the topic of how culture-specific contents of the Italian food
tradition have been retained, erased or adapted in their cookery books in order to become appealing
to UK recipients, who do not share either the cultural or the gastronomic background of the chefs’
292
country of origin. One further objective of the study is to investigate if the TV chefs’ representation
of a sense of identity and belonging connect more to the Italian community at home or to the
British community in the UK and how these aspects have been conveyed through such culturally
connoted writings as cookbooks. The paper also looks for narration patterns that relate to
migration, redemption and success in the books analyzed.
S65: Material Feminism and Posthumanism in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30, Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Emilie Walezak (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France, emiliewalezak<at>yahoo.fr)
Barbara
Franchi
(Newcastle
University,
United
Kingdom,
barbara.franchi<at>newcastle.ac.uk)
Papers in this seminar assess contemporary women’s writing in the light of material feminism and
posthumanism. What kind of new epistemologies and ontologies does contemporary women’s
fiction design? Contributors are invited to look at human/non-human relations in novels and short
stories, as well as at emerging transcorporeal identities, from the point of view of narrative,
characterization, but also of narrative voice and reader reception. What dialogue with the “vibrant
matter” (Bennett Duke UP 2010) of the world do authors engage with?
Embodied experiences are implicated in chemical, biological, geographical, legal, social and
aesthetic processes: how are these reflected in fiction?
Slot 1: Monday 30th August, 16:30-18:30
1.
Barbara Franchi and Emilie Walezak
Introduction
2.
Anne-Laure
Fortin-Tournès
(Le-Mans
Université,
France,
tournes<at>wanadoo.fr)
Gender politics in Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson: a cyborg approach
al.fortin-
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson interpellates the reader into the position of a multiple,
interconnected subject whose task is to piece together the creature in and of the text, through bodily
action, by clicking on the hyperlinks. The fragmented hypertext makes it impossible for the reader
to hold a position of hermeneutic domination traditionally adopted in the reception of print fiction
because it forces the reader to have a ‘modular and fragmentary’ gaze (Sanchez-Palencia and
Almagro 2006) on the hypertext. The patched body of the monstrous female in the text serves as
a powerful metaphor for the capacity of the hypertext as a ‘feminine form’ (Jackson) to deconstruct
the binaries and boundaries introduced by modern science at the service of male hubris, which
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the key intertexts of Patchwork Girl, forcefully denounced.
Thanks to its paradoxical materiality, Shelley Jackson’s hypertext enables the monstrous grafting
of the female creature’s body onto the form generating it, resulting in a cyborg creature-text which
deconstructs the logic of male-dominated technocapitalism. Engaging with the cyborg hypertext
requires from the reader a cyborg approach (Hayles 2000) which performs multiple, hybrid forms
of interconnectedness.
293
3.
María Paula Currás Prada (Universidade da Coruña, Spain, paula.cprada<at>udc.es)
“Objects Can Be Unintentionally Beautiful”: Feminist Ekphrasis, Photography and
Spectatorship in Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing and Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
In 1981, Laura Mulvey famously amended her original contentions in “Visual Pleasure” (1973) to
introduce the possibility of a “female gaze.” Through ekphrastic poems (lyric representations of
visual art), contemporary women poets have also questioned the plausibility of a “female viewing
subject,” especially when poeticizing photographic material. This essay compares and analyzes
Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing and Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, treating them as literary
examples of female spectatorship. It focuses on their feminist appropriation of the photographed
inanimate object through linguistic devices. In the poetry of Bang and Mayer, objects are subject
to a certain ethics, provided with ontological dignity and (at least theoretically) deinstrumentalized. Their experimental stances, moreover, problematize the very concept of “the
lyric”: both poets incorporate autobiography and narrative into their works, privileging the
paragraph (rather than the line) as a unit of thought. In the essay, I propose a link between these
poetic renderings and Katherine Behar’s ironic reinterpretation of Levi Bryant’s Object Oriented
Ontology in her book Object Oriented Feminism, among others (Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett). I
also resort to Elizabeth Bergmann-Loizeaux’s Twentieth Century Poetry and the Visual Arts, in
order to assess these new relations between contemporary poetry, photography and female agency.
To conclude, I reflect on the poets’ blurring of the problematic dichotomy subject/object by means
of formal experimentation.
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 10:30-12:30
1.
Héloïse
Thomas
(Université
Bordeaux
Montaigne,
France,
heloise.ln.thomas<at>gmail.com)
New Names for Ourselves: Material Ecofeminism and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan
In this paper, I read Lidia Yuknavitch’s post-apocalyptic novel The Book of Joan from a material
ecofeminist perspective, to highlight how the novel explores post-apocalyptic embodiment as a
blueprint for new personal and political possibilities. In Yuknavitch’s novel, changes in the
climate coupled with warfare over resources have accelerated environmental devastation and
caused devolution in human bodies. Orbiting the now-ravaged planet, is the space station CIEL,
where what is left of humankind lives under the fascistic rule of Jean de Men. A teenage girl
named Joan, whose body is the only unaffected one, possesses an otherworldly connection to the
planet. As the novel unfolds, she grows in her understanding of her role in the broader cosmic
ecosystem of the planet, and of her identity, between animal life and inanimate matter. She then
must decide how to wield her power, which harbours potential for both ultimate destruction and
regeneration. Opposite her, Jean de Men is obsessed with trying to recreate a functional
reproductive system, and carries out grotesque, fatal experiments on women, mutilating them. He
wants to find Joan in order to understand why her body has not devolved, replicate her
reproductive system, and thus permanently establish his rule over “human” beings of his own
design. I will argue that through Joan, and her allies Leone and Christine de Pizan, Yuknavitch
is fleshing out – pun intended – the contours of a feminist, post-apocalyptic subject that has
294
profoundly shifted in its relation to the human and non-human world, moving toward
radicalemancipation.
2.
Lidia María Cuadrado Payeras (Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, lidiamaria<at>usal.es)
Tracing the Blurred Lines of Posthuman Embodiment in Contemporary Canadian
Speculative Fiction
In Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood;
MaddAddam) and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, characters abound whose relationship with their
environments transcend the boundaries of the anthropomorphic body and come to include their
physical (natural or otherwise) surroundings and other bio- and techno-beings. The
interconnectedness of matter and the rejection of the mind/body binary are emphasised in these
new forms of relating to the other in its various shapes, as well as being of the utmost importance
in envisioning new forms of embodiment that are fluid, expansive, and heterogenous.
Taking into account the philosophy of Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and others,
my contribution attempts to analyse these new forms of embodiment from a posthuman and new
materialist theoretical perspective, assessing to which extent these new forms of ‘matter-reality’
are representative of a generalized embrace of the posthuman turn, and serve in the novels to
highlight the need for validating new forms of relationality and (un)boundedness that allow for the
construction of resilient strategies of survival and cooperation. It also seeks to assess to which
extent they are representative of feminist ontologies that call for a critical engagement with the
construction of other embodied categories such as gender.
3.
Mónica Calvo-Pascual (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, mocalvo<at>unizar.es)
Herland’s Sci-Fi Offspring: Feminism, Agency and Matter in Larissa Lai’s Versions of
Posthumanity
Approximately a century after the publication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland
(1915) on a utopian all-female country whose asexual citizens reproduced by means of
parthenogenesis, Larissa Lai’s novels Salt Fish Girl (2002) and The Tiger Flu (2018) add a
material and post-anthropocentric turn to Gilman’s vision. Lai’s novels present clandestine allfemale lesbian communities that manage to survive in highly dystopian and repressive sociopolitical contexts ruled by corporations, and whose members also reproduce without the need of
insemination. As the titles of her novels suggest, non-human life plays a fundamental role in its
interaction with the destinies of (post)human characters. Thus, while the women in Herland got
pregnant by their very wish to be get a daughter, in Salt Fish Girl a sisterhood of Asian female
clones with a tiny percentage of carp DNA who have escaped from slave factory work beget
female children thanks to the life-giving agency of a genetically modified fruit species.
Concomitantly, in The Tiger Flu the Grist Sisters can reproduce via parthenogenesis as a sideeffect of genetic modification by a cloning company working for the organ transplant industry.
The novel’s “starfish” protagonist eventually becomes a tree with conscience and storytelling
abilities whose branches grow organs and limbs for the survival of the New Grist Village. Taking
these premises as point of departure, this paper will interpret Lai’s representations of marginal
feminist posthuman communities under the lenses of Karen Barad’s theories of intra-action and
agencial realism, Stacy Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality, and Rosi Braidotti’s postanthropocentric, monistic conception of zoe.
295
4.
Aleksandra
Pogońska-Baranowska
(University
of
Warsaw,
Poland,
ola.pogonska<at>gmail.com)
Constructing New Womanhood: the Representation of Female Cybernetic Organisms in
Contemporary Women’s Dystopian Fiction
Female cybernetic organisms have occupied the collective imagination since 1927’s iconic
science-fiction movie Metropolis. According to some feminist critics, the depictions of female
robots and cyborgs in literary fiction support gender-based oppression and reinforce sexist norms
about female characters through imagining gendered identities programmed by male scientists for
their own purpose. Female cyborgs, produced from the symbiosis between the organic and the
artificial, are mainly designed as sex-objects, having no use beyond pleasing men’s sexual desires.
The contemporary science-fiction and fantasy literary tradition, often seen as important vehicle for
feminist thought, providing opportunity to convey the message about the deficiencies of our world
and its social organization, abounds in examples of different approaches to redefining gender roles
and identities, ranging from the inversion of gender oppression to the amplification of fixed social
stereotypes and tropes. The following paper is focused on profound analysis and comparison of
representative contemporary women’s dystopian novels of two different cultural traditions that
reflect fears and anxieties experienced by the members of patriarchal societies, struggling with
gender-based discrimination. The interpretation of Only even yours (2014), a debut novel by Irish
author Louise O’Neill, will be followed by analysis of Planeta Hembra (2001), a Spanish novel
of Gabriela Bustelo. The main case of the study will be focused on in-depth analysis of the subject,
and, according to the main premises of Comparative Literary Studies, on demonstration of
reciprocal influence of Western literatures. The literary analysis will be preceded by a short
presentation of historical articulations of the problem.
S66: Transnational Perspectives in, Transnational Perspectives on European Feminisms
Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45 and 17:00-19:00
Co-Convenors:
Işil Baş (Istanbul Kültür University, Turkey, isil<at>boun.edu.tr)
Florence Binard (Paris Diderot Université de Paris, France, fbinard<at>eila.univ-parisdiderot.fr)
Renate Haas (University of Kiel, Germany, haas<at>anglistik.uni-kiel.de)
María Socorro Suárez Lafuente (University of Oviedo, Spain, lafuente<at>uniovi.es)
Feminism is back again in activism and in academia, as, among many other things, MerriamWebster’s title Word of the Year shows. For a long time, diverse feminisms have had international
and transnational components or orientations. But definitions of what “transnational” may mean
beyond synonymy with “international” vary greatly, not least from discipline to discipline, e.g.
between American studies, which declared its transnational turn decades ago, and history.
Presentations may analyse concrete examples (movements, works), in particular recent ones, and
/ or develop current concepts of “transnational feminism” (concerning universalism,
intersectionality, etc.). Contributions from ALL ESSE sections are welcome.
296
Slot 1: Tuesday 31st August, 14:45-16:45
1.
Eleonora Rao (University of Salerno, Italy, erao<at>unisa.it)
Mapping Transnational Perspectives in European Feminist Theories
This paper presents a synthesis of conceptual approaches to transnationalism with an emphasis on
liminal spaces of “crossing” and the idea of national identity as a fluid concept in relation to
borders that are necessary, but also moving and changeable. “Navigation” is here a key to working
within a framework of nationhood that simultaneously posits norms of identity and opens national
identity up to discontinuity and displacement. The articulation between these two poles is key to
the question of transnationalism.
Territoriality becomes a crucial geopolitical element to understand how society and space are
interconnected. Human spatial relations are not neutral, but the results of influence and power.
Basic in re-thinking the nation’s territorial imperatives is the link between power and territory. In
the geo-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the solidity of origins gives way to
creative potentials generated by interconnection and by a movement of deterritorialization. From
a feminist perspective, Rosi Braidotti takes Deleuze and Guattari’s work, including their definition
of a “minor literature”, as a starting point to articulate her theory of the “nomadic polyglot”
(Braidotti 1994).
To have a transnational perspective means to be able to exceed the terms of a national culture and
its logic of location and identity. Transcultural understanding should practice an approach towards
singularity. One must be willing to destabilize and decenter the self-assured I to tend towards the
language of cross-culturalism. It is only by dis-placing the self, that one can be opened towards
the discourse of the Other.
2.
Renate Haas (University of Kiel, Germany, haas<at>anglistik.uni-kiel.de)
Julie V. Daubié, Lyon and the First Transnational Feminist Organizations
Julie Victoire Daubié (1824-74) was the first woman to attain the baccalauréat, as early as 1861
in Lyon, thus clearing the way to academic studies and higher careers not only for her compatriots
but far beyond France. Famous examples of foreigners who profited are Elizabeth Garrett,
England’s first female physician, Marie Skłodowska / Curie, France’s first female professor, and
Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, the first fully recognized female professor of English English Studies.
Also through her publications, esp. La Femme Pauvre au XIXe Siècle, and her activism, Daubié
made important contributions that helped feminist thought to further consolidate and women’s
movements to begin to form. Lyon / certain Lyonnais, in particular François Barthélemy ArlèsDufour, played a crucial role for her achievements.
More or less closely, Daubié was involved in the founding of the first transnational feminist
organizations. The Association Internationale des Femmes, the women’s branch of the Ligue
Internationale de la Paix et de la Liberté, was trail blazing in various respects, but soon fell victim
to the Franco-Prussian War. Its Swiss mastermind Marie Goegg already envisioned women’s
equality in democratic, peaceful United States of Europe. An incredibly long existence was, in
contrast, to be enjoyed by another association: the British and Continental Federation for the
Abolition of Prostitution, which Josephine Butler finally managed to establish a few months after
Daubié’s death. Renamed later as International Abolitionist Federation and reconstituted several
times, it survived into the 21st century.
297
3.
Sophie Geoffroy (University of La Réunion, France, geoffroysophie974<at>gmail.com)
Challenging Identities: the Edition of Vernon Lee’s Correspondence, or: Reflections in a
Digital Mirror
Born in France to a cosmopolitan family, educated in Switzerland and Germany, “Vernon Lee”
(Violet Paget, 1856-1935) travelled across Europe, and made her home in Florence. The
idiosyncrasies of her multifaceted personality and interdisciplinary interests have been puzzling to
academic disciplinary thinking, and this has hindered a complete appreciation of her thinking.
Famed author and thinker in the 19th century, Lee was virtually forgotten after WWI, and it has
taken transnational research dynamics to face the challenges of Lee studies in the 21st century:
dispersed archival sources around the world, plurilingualism (4 languages), multiple genres,
multidisciplinary erudition, embargo on certain documents, ideological checks (gender; activist
pacifism during WWI…).
In the context of increased interest in Women and Gender Studies and following the evolution of
new information and communication technologies, our small-scale collaborative work has grown
into a transnational community of researchers. First created in 2003 by The Sibyl, Journal of
Vernon Lee Studies (https://thesibylblog.com/), it was formally structured into an international
research association in 2014: the International Vernon Lee Society, which has now become an
extended international network mirroring V. Lee’s as revealed in her correspondence.
Completing the print edition of Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935 (Routledge; ed. with
A. Gagel), the database Holographical Lee further de-invisibilises her intellectual history,
overlooked in mainstream historiography because of her challenging identity and transnationality.
4.
Sally Blackburn-Daniels (Open University, United Kingdom, sally.blackburndaniels<at>open.ac.uk)
Caroline Playne and Vernon Lee: Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Pacifism through
the Great War Years and across Borders
My proposed paper aims to consider the alignment between the diaries, literary and essayistic work
of C. E. Playne (Caroline Elizabeth Playne, 1857-1948) and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 18561935). Both women were active members of the Union of Democratic Control, resided in England
for the period of the war, and were in correspondence. Lee owned and added extensive marginalia
to her copies of Playne’s work,now at the British Institute of Florence.
The diaries and notebooks of Vernon Lee (1914-1925) have been digitised as part of Holograph
Lee (HoL), and Playne’s archive at Senate House includes diaries, drafts, notes, cuttings and
marginalia. Both act as an amorphous form where the traditionally female space of the diary
becomes a record of the catastrophic impact of the World War on society and politics. Importantly,
they also provide a key resource for understanding the radical act of pacifism and in particular,
pacifism within women’s writing.
This paper will consider Lee and Playne’s diaries as the germs of inspiration for the women’s own
pacifist publications, particularly Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations: A Present Day Morality (1915)
and subsequently Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy with Notes and Introduction
(1920); and Playne’s Neuroses of the Nations (1925) and The Pre-War Mind in Britain (1928).
298
Slot 2: Tuesday 31st August, 17:00-19:00
1.
Dubravka Ɖurić (Singidinum University, Serbia, dubravka2012<at>gmail.com)
Feminism Interpreted, Feminism Internationalized: Feminist Theory and Art in LateYugoslav Society
The starting point of the paper is the thesis that in the late-socialist culture in Yugoslavia, feminist
theory was present during the 1970s and 1980s in numerous translations and in books of domestic
female and male authors, and that feminist issues were openly discussed. On the other hand, in the
New Artistic Practice (term of Ješa Denegri), a significant number of female artists internalized
ideology of contemporary American and West-European feminist art. The first part of the paper
will point to the collections of translated feminist theory and show how translation acted
performatively in generating local (Yugoslavian, Serbian and Croatian) feminist theory. One focus
will be on the dynamics between Anglophone and French feminist theories and their
interpretations. The second part of the paper will analyze the work of the female artists who were
active during the late 1960s and 1970s in male-centered art practice: Marina Abramović, Katalin
Ladik and Sanja Iveković. It will examine how they articulated their artistic work in relation to the
feminist artistic practice of female artists in the West and how and why they internalized feminist
artistic positions.
2.
Pilar Milagros (Boğaziçi University, Turkey, pilar.milagros<at>boun.edu.tr)
Artists as Potential Agents of Transnational Solidarity
Las Tesis’ “Un violador en tu camino” can be considered a cultural text that offers a renewed
transnational awareness about a common struggle among women, gender-based violence. Inspired
by the power of the aforementioned artistic form to transgress boundaries, this presentation aims
to explore whether the current global gender backlash can be reversed via artistic forms that are
transnational in that they are not constrained to “nation-state borders,” and in that they allow
feminist and cultural studies scholars “to rethink the transnational feminist frameworks that disrupt
the prevailing North/South dichotomies,” among other dichotomies (Okech and Musindarwezo,
2019, p. 256).
In artistic installations, a prevalent and transnational symbol to memorialize victims of genderbased violence has been shoes. This presentation will focus on three artistic installations: Mexican
Alina Chauvet’s installation with painted red shoes to commemorate victims of gender-based
violence in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in 2009; an installation by Turkish artist and graphic designer
Vahit Tuna that showcases over 400 pairs of high heel black shoes; and an installation with “fiftyeight pairs of red shoes [that] covered the Jourdan Square, at the heart of the European quarter in
Brussels on Monday (25 November)” (Beatriz Rios, 2019, para 2). The purpose of this presentation
is to analyze whether those artistic installations can become a means of transnational solidarity by
analyzing how the transgressions in which they engage, such as utilizing different colors or forms,
may preclude rather than encourage transnational solidarity.
299
3.
Alejandra Moreno-Álvarez (University of Oviedo, Spain, morenoalejandra<at>uniovi.es)
Understanding Questions of Home and Belonging with the Help of Ghosts: Michelle de
Kretser
Questions of home and belonging are central to current discourses due to mass transnational
movements taking place worldwide. Australian author Michelle de Kretser, born in Sri Lanka,
focuses, precisely, on these ideas of home and belonging. In Questions of Travel (2012), de Kretser
clearly draws the I/Other using the 2004 tsunami as a fictitious literary dystopic trope to erase
binary thinking. She projects with this apocalyptic ending a desirable utopic new beginning where
no dichotomies take place. In Springtime: A Ghost Story (2014), the author gives voice to an
ambiguous and variable subject, who coexists with her past, present and future, inhabiting a fluid
tranSpace. Frances, main character in Springtime, sees ghosts who unconsciously allow her to
voice her insecurities and doubts. These spectres contribute to the formation of Frances’ alternative
conceptualisation of subjectivity and belonging.
De Kretser offers in this novella a so much needed escape from binary definitions of
inclusion/exclusion, offering palimpsests of the spaces she inhabits, Melbourne and Sydney. The
main character is a fluid flâneuse who tries to adjust to her glocality (Braidotti 1994) constituted
and reconstituted by a discursive imaginary. De Kretser’s work is intrinsically connected with
feminist thought, due to the tradition of enunciating alternative and fluid concepts of home and
identities in women’s writing. It is my purpose to analyse how de Kretser decentralises the human
subject in this novella offering the reader an alternative haunting story with an open ending, where
cities, ghosts, humans, dogs and nature become active characters who “are-in-this-together-butwe-are-not-one-and-the-same” (Braidotti, 2017).
4.
Jelena Košinaga (University of Szeged, Hungary, jmilosavljevic87<at>gmail.com)
Japanese Women’s Desire for English: Reconfiguration of Occidentalist Longings and the
Power of Decolonization
In this paper, I explore the relationship between Japan and the West through a feminist
interpretation of Orientalism and Occidentalism concepts. My particular focus is on the passion of
young, educated, urban Japanese women for learning English. I want to understand the work of
their “desire” and explore the symbolic meanings of “English” for them, considering if any (aspect)
of those meanings can subvert the logic of internalized Occidentalism. Also, I would like to
critique the inadvertent scholarly tendencies that reiterate the Orient/Occident dichotomy instead
of moving beyond and asserting novel conceptualizations of a “decolonized” female subject. The
research is based on a critical ethnographic study of Skype, Messenger, and in-person interviews
with Japanese women conducted between December 2018 and March 2020. Showing that these
women’s life narratives are a constituent part of an Occidentalist discourse will open up the space
for challenging the dominant tendencies in research that see these women through an Orientalist
gaze that cannot acknowledge any autonomy in relation to their desire to learn English on the
language market.
300
S67: The Lure of the Renaissance: The Representation of this Cultural Period in Historical
Fiction, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, in a Variety of Different Media
Friday 3rd September, 10:30-12:30
Co-Convenors:
Professor György E. Szönyi (University of Szeged, Hungary, geszony<at>gmail.com)
Professor Rowland Wymer (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom,
rowland.wymer<at>aru.ac.uk)
The Renaissance in general, and the Elizabethan Age in particular, has been fascinating AngloAmerican artists as well as the popular imagination for centuries. Each period, at least since
Romanticism, has developed its own image of the Renaissance, either as glorious and splendid, or
bloody and full of power struggles, religious conflict, and treachery. Also, in each period these
representations were created in media most appropriate to their age, from literature through drama,
opera, or the visual arts, and nowadays also including film, television, youtube, and computer
games. In this seminar we expect comparative analyses of such representations. Quite naturally,
Shakespeare’s life and work potentially play an important part in subsequent representations of the
Renaissance, but we particularly encourage proposals dealing with non-Shakespearean themes.
1.
Prof Sarah Annes Brown (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom,
sarah.brown<at>aru.ac.uk)
Reimagining Emilia Lanier in Contemporary Fiction
Sandra Newman’s The Heavens (2019) engages both with time travel and alternate history. Its
heroine, Kate, begins to travel to the 1590s in her dreams; eventually we discover that Kate’s
Elizabethan alter ego is the poet Emilia Lanier. Kate suspects that her journeys into the past are
changing the present in subtle ways – old friends vanish, new shops suddenly appear, and the
political climate has changed dramatically. The reader may struggle to know quite how our own
reality maps on to the continuum of different possibilities evoked in The Heavens. This science
fictional array of competing realities mirrors the almost equally varied ways in which the past has
been depicted in historical fiction. Different authors, writing in different eras, offer sharply
contrasting versions of the Elizabethan age. This paper will focus on three recent fictional
depictions of Lanier: Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play Emilia (2018), Charlene Ball’s Dark Lady
(2017) as well as Newman’s The Heavens, comparing the different ways in which they try to bridge
the gap which separates the Renaissance from the present.
2.
Cristiano Ragni (University of Genoa, Italy, cristiano.ragni<at>edu.unige.it)
“I am what we have been made”: Multimedia Marlowe and the “Ugly Renaissance”
In his The Ugly Renaissance (2013), Alexander Lee showed that “if the Renaissance was an age
of cultural angels, it was also a period of worldly demons” (p. 5). Though hardly groundbreaking
in itself, Lee’s scholarly work shed new light on an often-neglected side of the (specifically Italian)
Renaissance, with its iconic masterpieces overshadowing the unscrupulousness of, and atrocities
committed by, the people who commissioned them. As regards early modern England, this “ugly”
side seems to emerge particularly from the life and works of Christopher Marlowe, who was
suspected to be a spy, a blasphemous heretic and a sodomite. The perfect representative, in other
301
words, of Lee’s “Ugly Renaissance”, and this image has unsurprisingly enjoyed great success in
the 20th and 21st centuries.
With this contribution, I would like to underscore how Marlowe reached popularity in the media
as the “bad angel” of Elizabethan literature, as opposed to the “good angel” supposedly embodied
by Shakespeare. In this regard, I will touch upon some of the latest portrayals of the playwright –
specifically, Anthony Burgess’s A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), John Madden’s Shakespeare in
Love (1998), Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (2006), Ron Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011), Ros
Barber’s The Marlowe Papers (2012), and Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow (2016). In so doing, I will
show how almost all of them – with the sole exception of Elton’s sitcom – inevitably play with the
more appealingly “ugly” side of Marlowe’s character, thus consciously overlooking other (and
possibly more significant) aspects of his biography and literary output.
3.
Prof Yuki Nakamura (Kanto Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan, midvil<at>kantogakuin.ac.jp)
The Renaissance Paradigm of Humanity in The Tempest and its Modern Interpretation by
Alien: Covenant
Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017) can be seen as an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The
Tempest. While the science-fictional settings of this adapted film accentuate the Renaissance
characteristics of the ideas and images presented in The Tempest, inversely, the framework of the
Renaissance radicalizes the modern ethical and aesthetic paradigm. This paper especially focuses
on Alien: Covenant’s interpretation and representation of the late Renaissance idea of
humanity/inhumanity. Alien: Covenant interprets and reconstructs the representations in The
Tempest, such as the subjugation/subordination relationship between the “human” and the Other,
the conditions of humanity, and the extremities of humanity represented as tyranny and monstrosity.
That is, this modern interpretation mines the scepticism about humanity and humanness inherent
in The Tempest and expands and deforms it into abjection and horror. What is more, Alien:
Covenant not only interprets The Tempest in an extreme way, but also applies this Renaissance
framework to represent the crisis of humanity in modern times. Comparing the Renaissance text
and the modern film, this paper seeks to explore three areas: 1. Common factors among the
Renaissance and modern representations; 2. The loss of meanings of Renaissance representations
when they are presented in a modern form; 3. Hidden Renaissance problems exposed by the
modern interpretation.
4.
Erzsébet Stróbl (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest,
strobl.erzsebet<at>kre.hu)
Remaking History: Queen Elizabeth I at Shakespeare’s Globe
The production of Swive [Elizabeth], the new play by Ella Hickson, references both the revered
space of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and the story of England’s Virgin Queen in order to
explore the possibility of reimagining history for a new generation. For the last four hundred years
many works of fiction have revised the stories about Queen Elizabeth I and thereby created an
elaborate and constantly broadening web of cultural symbols surrounding her figure. Hickson’s
play, however, challenges many of the audience’s assumptions by systematically deconstructing
the sense of history throughout the play. The Elizabethan-styled stage façade is removed right at
the beginning of the show, the character of Elizabeth Q is disrobed of her sixteenth-century
302
costume, and the era’s religious and social beliefs are dismissed. What is left of the myth of the
Queen is a representation of her which both engages and disengages with the Elizabethan age,
claiming “Together – we get to remake things. Re-believe. Our histories.” The paper will address
the issue of how the play, as staged at Shakespeare’s Globe for its premier in December 2019,
recreates Queen Elizabeth for the early twenty-first century, and what elements of her longstanding cult are discarded or maintained to construct a global cultural relevance for the iconic
Virgin of English history.
5.
Prof. György E. Szönyi (University of Szeged, Hungary, geszonyi<at>gmail.com)
Renaissance Magic in Modern British Fiction from Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1862)
to Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy (2011-14)
The fascination and fantasizing about the supernatural world and eventual human
interaction with it goes back as far as the most ancient cultures and has been represented since the
emergence of literature. Since the time of Romanticism up to the present there has been a flow of
Anglo-American fiction attracted to the great esoteric revival of the Renaissance, offering culturalhistorical as well as fantastic-oriented insight into early modern magic and the emergent Magus,
whether it be Prospero or Doctor Faustus. The underlying motivations for this interest are at least
fourfold: 1/ The (partial) failure of the “Enlightenment project,” resulting in re-enchantment and
occultism. 2/ Fascination with the past, antiquarian, cultural-historical curiosity. 3/ “Orientalism”
that idealizes or demonizes the orient, focusing on those features that are lacking in Western culture.
4/ Satisfaction of the ever-present need of humans to be entertained with the thrill of dangerous,
supernatural stories; fantasies about the oppressed Other. In this theoretical framework I look at
some much-read and discussed novels, ranging from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story,
through Gustav Meyrink’s The Angel of the West Window (1927), Patrick Harper’s Mercurius
(1990), John Crowley’s A Egypt tetralogy(1987-2007) to Jennifer Lee Carrell’s Haunt Me Still
(2010), and Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy.
6.
Prof. Rowland Wymer (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom,
rowland.wymer<at>aru.ac.uk)
Representing the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Literature and Film
The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 was the single most notorious episode in the French
Wars of Religion. An early literary response to it was Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris
(1593) which appears to pander to the prejudices of its London Protestant audience while being
open to less comfortable interpretations. There have been many subsequent representations of the
Massacre in plays, novels, films, and television, often as a way of addressing more contemporary
episodes of ethno-religious hatred and mob violence. The Massacre forms one of the four narrative
strands in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the film with which he tried to make amends for the
racism of Birth of a Nation. It is also the context for a particularly sombre and morally serious
four-part story in the third series of Doctor Who (1966), though the original tapes no longer exist.
Like the more famous Dalek episodes from this period, the storyline is undoubtedly connected to
the new understanding of the Holocaust which developed in the 1960s. An earlier fictional
treatment of the Massacre was the Alexandre Dumas historical romance La Reine Margot (1845)
which became the basis of two French films with the same title. The most impressive of these was
directed by Patrice Chereau in 1994. The film was intended to be a comment on the ethnic
303
cleansing which was then taking place in Yugoslavia but its use of historical atrocities as the
context for a full-blown romantic melodrama raises the kind of questions more usually asked of
Holocaust novels and films.
304
Poster Session
Thursday 2nd September 14:45-15:15
Posters are accessible here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uh9h8dsiw4yjjll/AABedQn-soRDxBy0oukos6g-a?dl=0
Chair: Vincent Renner, Université Lyon 2
P1: Metaphorization of Economic Concepts in Business Discourse
*Yelena Yerznkyan (Yerevan State University, Armenia, yerznkyan<at>ysu.am)
*Susanna Chalabyan (Armenian State University of Economics, Armenia,
s.chalabyan<at>gmail.com)
*Lusine Harutyunyan (Armenian State University of Economics, Armenia,
lusineharutyunyan100<at>yahoo.com)
Metaphor has been researched from different perspectives for centuries. Within the framework
of traditional approach, it was viewed as a figure of speech where only its stylistic peculiarities
were examined. The contemporary approach to metaphor implies the consideration of its
cognitive potential as it sheds light on the comprehension of metaphoric shifts taking place in
human mind. Namely, the founders of conceptual metaphor theory G. Lakoff and M. Johnson
(1980) state that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature and
metaphors help us understand one kind of thing (the target domain) in terms of another (the
source domain). The paper analyzes the phenomenon of economic concepts’ metaphorization
in business discourse, provides a classification of the most common types of conceptual
metaphors occurring in economic texts, as well as examines the versions of their translation
from English into Armenian. The examples reflecting basic economic concepts such as
economy, money, business, etc., were taken from the British National Corpus and studied in
terms of their frequency and economic context usage. The contextual analysis has enabled us
to select those cases where these concepts were used metaphorically, whereas the cognitive
analysis has shown how metaphors help us conceptualize economic phenomena in a more
comprehensive way. The contrastive analysis of English and Armenian economic metaphors
has revealed that there are cases of full equivalence where we can observe word for word
correspondence and there are partial equivalents where not all but some of the lexical units in
metaphoric word combinations coincide with the English ones. In contrast with the above
mentioned cases, we can come across some metaphors the translation of which requires the
readers to have professional background and be quite familiar with the workings of economy
to be able to understand and interpret metaphoric concepts.
P 2: Trumping Twitter: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism in President Trump’s Tweets
*Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo (Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, Italia,
gscottodicarlo<at>unior.it)
The present work is part of a study concerning the discursive manifestations of U.S. President
Trump’s sexist attitudes and practices. It aims to investigate the linguistic strategies utilised by
President Trump to represent women by specifically analysing his Tweets, which are one of his
privileged forms of communication. The purpose of the study is two-folded: drawing upon
Mills’ model of sexism (2008), the first part of the study will analyse a corpus of all Trump’s
negative Tweets against women since the beginning of his 2016 campaign (July 2015). The
305
second part of the work will focus on Trump’s usage of benevolent sexism, a form of
discrimination based on the idea that women are weak and need to be protected, that they should
respect traditional gender roles, and that they should be idolised for their sexual availability.
Drawing upon Fiske and Glick’s Ambivalent Sexism Theory (1996), the second section will
thus analyse Trump’s positive Tweets addressing women during the same time-span used for
the first corpus. Both sections shed a light on how President Trump’s vocabulary perpetuates a
male-centric hierarchy in which women are to be kept away from significant social roles.
Tweets conveying hostile sexism depict women as weak, incompetent beings who are mentally
instable on one hand, and dishonest dangerous liars on the other, and thus not capable of
achieving and keeping significant roles in society. On the other hand, Tweets conveying
benevolent sexism consider women as generally lacking strength, skills, and ability, and thus
they have to be cherished and complimented when capable of achieving something, just like a
father would do with his children. Yet, through utterances conveying gender differentiation and
intimate heterosexuality, Trump does recognise that women are essential in his work and life,
as they are able to verbally, emotionally, and physically support him in ways men do not. His
usages of hostile and benevolent sexism are actually two sides of the same coin: they both
confirm the idea of women as an inferior sex. Trump’s eventual victory in the 2016 U.S.
elections could suggest that his ideologies might be widely shared by part of the American
population, and thus the findings of this study may serve as an overview of Americans’ attitudes
towards gender discrimination. His political ascendency speaks to how these ideological beliefs
are dangerously ingrained in language and society, and they should not be underestimated as
they might have significant consequences for the stability of democracy. Dismissed as jokes
played by a public personality, the President’s statements might not be “just words”
(Farenthold, 2016), but a mirror of gender discrimination that is difficult to shatter.
P 3: Affective Gender: Navigating the unknown in contemporary female solo travel
writing
*Gemma Lake (University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom, gemma.lake<at>myport.ac.uk)
Scholars interested in women’s solo travel writing have long assigned central importance to the
role of gender. Recent scholarship in the humanities has offered new perspectives on affect,
emotion and phenomenology. Bringing together the two, this presentation for the first time
interrogates the role of gender in, and its bearing on, the female solo traveler’s exploration of
space in Dervla Murphy’s In Ethiopia with a Mule and Rosemary Mahoney’s Down the Nile:
Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff. It does this through the analysis of internalised manifestations of
affect and in so doing suggest a more fluid and flexible approach to the genre.
306
ESSE Doctoral Symposium
Coordinator : Prof. J. Lachlan Mackenzie (lachlan_mackenzie<at>hotmail.com)
The Doctoral Symposium will take place on Zoom. The book of abstracts is available here:
http://www.esse2020lyon.fr/fr/pages/esse-2021-doctoral-symposium
Strands
Convenor
Convenor
Literatures in English
Dominic Rainsford (Aarhus)
Isabel Carrera (Oviedo)
English Language & Linguistics
Lieven Buysse (KU Leuven)
James Walker (Lyon II)
Alan Riach (Glasgow)
Teresa Botelho (Un.
Nova, Lisbon)
Cultural & Area Studies
Schedule
31 August 2021 - 10.30-12.30: English Language & Linguistics 1 (ELL)
31 August 2021 - 14.45-16.45: English Language & Linguistics 2 (ELL)
1 September 2021 - 10.30-12.30: Cultural & Area Studies (CAS)
1 September 2021 - 14.45-16.45: Literatures in English 1 (LIT)
1 September 2021 - 17.00-19.00: Literatures in English 2 (LIT)
List of participants
ID Strand
Applicant
e-mail
Supervisor
Association
University
1 CAS
Sheila Brannigan
sbrannigan<at>fcsh.unl.pt
Teresa Botelho
Portugal
Nova Lisboa
2 CAS
Syrine Jerbi
syrine.jerbi<at>aiesec.net
Éva Eszter Szabó
Hungary
Eötvös Lórand
3 CAS
Eszter Láncos
eszterlancose<at>gmail.com
Tibor Fabiny
Hungary
Pázmány Péter Catholic
5 CAS
Miguel Sebastián
Martín
Nadezda
Seliverstova
Ayham Aref
Abdallah Abu Oruq
Soukayna Alami
miguelsm<at>usal.es
Pedro Javier Pardo Spain
García
seliverstovanadya<at>gmail.com Laurence Roussillon- France
Constanty
ayham.abuorooq<at>arts.unideb. Nóra Séllei
Hungary
hu
alam.soukayna<at>gmail.com
Nóra Séllei
Hungary
Salamanca
Juan José Arroyo
Paniagua
Vanessa Bonnet
jarroy01<at>ucm.es
Complutense Madrid
Ana María Crespo
Gómez
Elena Guerreira
Labrador
Cristina Hurtado
Botella
José-Carlos Redondo Spain
Olmedilla
elena.guerreira.labrador<at>usc.e Laura María Lojo
Spain
s
Rodríguez
cristina.hurtado1<at>um.es
Juan A. Suárez
Spain
6 CAS
7 LIT
8 LIT
9 LIT
10 LIT
11 LIT
12 LIT
13 LIT
vanessa.bonnet<at>etu.univcotedazur.fr
acg877<at>inlumine.ual.es
Carmen M. Méndez Spain
García
Christian Gutleben France
Pau and Adour Region
Debrecen
Debrecen
Côte d’Azur
Almería
Santiago de Compostela
Murcia
307
14 LIT
Marta Lucari
15 LIT
16 LIT
Krystian Piotrowski krystian.piotrowski<at>doctoral.u Robert Kusek
j.edu.pl
Lenka Žárská
lenkazarska<at>mail.muni.cz
Milada Franková
26 LIT
Györgyi Kovács
kovacsgyorgyi0528<at>gmail.com Veronika Ruttkay
17 ELL
Célia Atzeni
celia.atz<at>gmail.com
18 ELL
Julie Dallinges
jdallin<at>uwo.ca
19 ELL
Sarah Dobiášová
sara.dobiasova<at>gmail.com
20 ELL
Celia Fullana
celia.fullana<at>urv.cat
21 ELL
Ivaylo Gorchev
ivlg<at>abv.bg
22 ELL
Paula Schintu
paulasch<at>usal.es
Martínez
Elizaveta Smirnova cmelizaveta<at>yandex.ru
23 ELL
24 ELL
25 ELL
marta3791<at>hotmail.it
Elisabetta Marino
Italy
Rome Tor Vergata
Poland
Kraków
Czech
Republic
Hungary
Brno
Eötvös Lórand
Florence Binard and France
Christopher Gledhill
Linda Pillière
France
Paris Diderot
Nadĕžda Kudrnáčová Czech
Republic
Isabel Oltra Massuet Spain
and Elisabeth Gibert
Sotelo
Desislava
Bulgaria
CheshmedzhievaStoycheva
Javier Ruano García Spain
Brno
Javier Pérez-Guerra
Spain
Vigo
Czech
Republic
Czech
Republic
Brno
Tereza Šplíchalová tereza.splichalova<at>mail.muni.c Bohumil Fořt
z
Iveta Žákovská
zakovska<at>mail.muni.cz
Jan Chovanec
Aix-en-Provence
Tarragona Rovira i Virgili
Shumen Konstantin
Preslavsky
Salamanca
Brno
308
Index
Abbreviations
PLEN – Plenary Lecture
PL – Parallel Lecture
RT – Round Table
S – Seminar
P – Poster
Convenors appear in bold type
A
Abakumova
Abdel-Rahman Téllez
Abrahamson
Adam
AdamiaTshum-Abkhazian
Aiello
Akehurst
Alaez Corral
Álvarez López
Ambrosini
Andreani
Andrieu
Anesa
Angelaki
Antosa
Antović
Aralica
Arias
Arikan
Arizti
Asprey
Azcuy
Olga
Shadia
David
Martin
Zoia
Jacqueline
Anne-Marie
Maximo
Esther
Richard
Angela
Wilfrid
Patrizia
Vicky
Silvia
Mihailo
Tamara
Rosario
Seda
Bárbara
Esther
Mary Kate
abakumova-ob<at>mail.ru
abdelshadia<at>uniovi.es
d-abrahamson<at>northwestern.edu
adam<at>ped.muni.cz
a.zoia777<at>gmail.com
jacqueline.aiello<at> unife.it
annmarieakehurst<at>icloud.com
alezmaximo<at>uniovi.es
eal<at>uniovi.es
richard.ambrosini<at>uniroma3.it
angela.andreani<at>gmail.com
wilfrid.andrieu<at>univ-amu.fr
patrizia.anesa<at>unibg.it
vicky.angelaki<at>miun.se
silvia.antosa<at>unikore.it
mihailo.antovic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs
vtaralica<at>gmail.com
rarias<at>uma.es
bulutsedaarikan<at>gmail.com
barizti<at>unizar.es
esther.asprey<at>warwick.ac.uk
mazcuy<at>monmouth.edu
S17
S54
RT1
S8
S17
S11
S26
S54
S30
S40
S34
S12
S7
S41
S38
PL11
S3
S22, S62
S54
S36
S59
S32
B
Babić
Bajetta
Bak
Bakay
Bakina
Bakshi
Bălănescu
Barát
Bartie
Bartkuvienė
Baş
Baseotto
Basova
Bastida-Rodríguez
Željka
Carlo
John S.
Gönül
Anna
Sandeep
Olivia
Erzsébet
Angela
Linara
Işil
Paola
Tatiana
Patricia
zeljka.babic<at>flf.unibl.org
c.bajetta<at>univda.it
john.bak<at>univ-lorraine.fr
gonulbakay<at>gmail.com
heart-anna<at>yandex.ru
Sandeep.Bakshi<at>univ-paris-diderot.fr
olivia.balanescu<at>gmail.com
zsazsa<at>lit.u-szeged.hu
angela.bartie<at>ed.ac.uk
linara.bartkuviene<at>flf.vu.lt
isil<at>boun.edu.tr
paola.baseotto<at>uninsubria.it
tanyatako<at>gmail.com
pbastida<at>uib.es
S18
S34
RT1
S38
S17
S30
S49
S24
S26
S45
RT3, S51, S66
S13
S17
S30
309
Battisti
Baudry
Bauer
Bayer
Bazarnik
Beganović
Bell
Bell
Bellot
Bényei
Berberich
Berensmeyer
Chiara
Samuel
Matthias
Gerd
Katarzyna
Velid
Katie
Emilie
Andrea Roxana
Tamás
Christine
Ingo
Berk Albachten
Bermúdez de Castro
Bernard
Bernard
Berryhill
Berton
Berton
Beyvers
Bieri
Bigongiari
Bilge
Binard
Bizzotto
Blackburn-Daniels
Blanchet
Blick
Blin-Cordon
Blondel
Bloor
Böhmerová
Böhnke
Boichard
Bolchi
Boll
Bondi
Bonnet
Borbely
Borbely
Bordet
Borham-Puyal
Bory
Botelho
Boucher
Bowles
Braber
Braid
Brake
Özlem
Juanjo
Stéphanie
Catherine
Michael
Jean
Danièle
Sarah E.
Thomas E.
Giulia
Zeynep
Florence
Elisa
Sally
Béatrice
Bill
Peggy
Hanna
Tracy
Ada
Dietmar
Léa
Elisa
Julia
Marina
Alma-Pierre
Juliana
Carmen
Geneviéve
Miriam
Stéphanie
Teresa
Abigail
Hugo
Natalie
Barbara
Laurel
chiara.battisti<at>univr.it
samuel.baudry<at>univ-lyon2.fr
m.bauer<at>uni-tuebingen.de
gerd.bayer<at>fau.de
k.bazarnik<at>uj.edu.pl
v.b.borjen<at>googlemail.com
katieloubell<at>me.com
e.j.l.bell<at>leeds.ac.uk
andrearoxana.bellot<at>urv.cat
tamasbenyei<at>yahoo.com
christine.berberich<at>port.ac.uk
ingo.berensmeyer<at>anglistik.unimuenchen.de
ozlem.berk<at>boun.edu.tr
j.bermudezcastro<at>uib.es
stephanie.bernard<at>univ-rouen.fr
catherine.bernard<at>u-paris.fr
Michael.Berryhill<at>tsu.edu
jam.berton<at>wanadoo.fr
daniele.berton<at>wanadoo.fr
Sarah.Beyvers<at>uni-passau.de
bieri4nanzan<at>gmail.com
g.bigongiari<at>gmail.com
Zeynep.bilge<at>msgsu.edu.tr
fbinard<at>eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr
bizzotto<at>iuav.it
sally.blackburn-daniels<at>open.ac.uk
bblanchet<at>univ-catholyon.fr
wblick<at>qcc.cuny.edu
peggy_cordon<at>hotmail.com
anna150479blondel<at>gmail.com
tracy.bloor<at>univ-amu.fr
adela.bohmerova<at>uniba.sk
dboehnke<at>uni-leipzig.de
Lea.Boichard<at>univ-smb.fr
elisa.bolchi<at>unife.it
j.boll<at>uni-konstanz.de
marina.bondi<at>unimore.it
almapierre.bonnet<at>sciencespo-lyon.fr
juliannaborbely<at>gmail.com
carmenborbely<at>yahoo.com
gbordet<at>eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr
miriambp<at>usal.es
stephanie.bory<at>univ-lyon3.fr
tbotelho<at>mail.telepac.pt
a.boucher<at>aston.ac.uk
hugo.bowles<at>unifg.it
natalie.braber<at>ntu.ac.uk
barbara.braid<at>usz.edu.pl
l.brake<at>bbk.ac.uk
RT2
S60
S35, S57
S35
S34
S60
S60
S50
S55
S55
S53
S13
S41
S40
S55
RT1
S25
S29
S62
S1
S37
S61
RT3, S66
RT6
S66
S48
S27
S40
S29
S7
S9
S27
S59
S27
S61
S18
S23
S56
S56
S11
S56
S23
S35
S60
S60
S59
S33
S42
310
Brancaz-McCartan
Brantley
Brasme
Bratu
Brault-Dreux
Braun
Brazzelli
Brewer
Britain
Brown
Brugio
Bruś
Bubíková
Buchowska
Bugliani
Butoescu
Buysschaert
Buysse
Lauren
Kate
Isabelle
Andreea
Elise
Alice
Nicoletta
Charlotte
David
Sarah Annes
Davide
Teresa
Šárka
Dominika
Paolo
Elena
Joost
Lieven
lauren.brancaz-mccartan<at>univ-smb.fr
mary-katherine.brantley<at>univ-lille.fr
isabellebrasme<at>gmail.com
abratu<at>yahoo.com
braultel<at>wanadoo.fr
alice.braun<at>u-paris10.fr
nicoletta.brazzelli<at>unimi.it
charlotte.brewer<at>hertford.ox.ac.uk
britain<at>ens.unibe.ch
sarah.brown<at>anglia.ac.uk
davide.burgio<at>sns.it
tbrus<at>poczta.onet.pl
sarka.bubikova<at>upce.cz
dominika<at>wa.amu.edu.pl
paolo.bugliani<at>fileli.unipi.it
elenabuto<at>yahoo.co.uk
joost.buysschaert<at>ugent.be
lieven.buysse<at>kuleuven.be
S25
S7
S54
S10
S54
S54
S46
S12
PLEN2
S67
S61
S42
PL14
S42
S53
S56
S3
PL13
C
Çakmak Özgürel
Calvo-Pascual
Campos-Pardillos
Campoy-Cubillo
Capitani
Caporale
Carpenter
Carrasco Carrasco
Carrera Suarez
Carretero
Carter McKee
Cartron
Casado-Gual
Castagné-Véziès
Castelló Fabregat
Cavalieri
Chalabyan
Chalupský
Chamonikolasová
Chapuis
Chardin
Charlot
Chłopicki
Cho
Chovancova
Chovanec
Ciambella
Cimitile
Ciocca
Čirić-Fazlija
Cansu
Mónica
Miguel Ángel
Mari Carmen
Maria Elena
Silvia
Olivia
Rocio
Isabel
Marta
Kirsten
Audrey
Núria
Clotilde
María
Silvia
Susanna
Petr
Jana
Sophie
Jean-Jacques
Claire
Władysław
Hyunyoung
Barbora
Jan
Fabio
Anna Maria
Rossella
Ifeta
cansu.ozgurel<at>tedu.edu.tr
mocalvo<at>unizar.es
ma.campos<at>ua.es
campoy<at>uji.es
mariaelena.capitani<at>unipr.it
caporale<at>ua.es
olivia_carpenter<at>g.harvard.edu
rocio.carrasco<at>dfing.uhu.es
icarrera<at>uniovi.es
mcarrete<at>filol.ucm.es
Kirsten.McKee<at>ed.ac.uk
audrey.cartron<at>univ-amu.fr
ncasado<at>dal.udl.cat
clotilde.castagne-vezies<at>univ-lyon2.fr
castellofabregatmaria<at>gmail.com
silvia.cavalieri<at>univr.it
s.chalabyan<at>gmail.com
petr.chalupsky<at>pedf.cuni.cz
chamonik<at>phil.muni.cz
sophie.chapuis<at>univ-st-etienne.fr
chardin<at>unistra.fr
clairecharlot.sorbonne<at>gmail.com
chlopicki<at>gmail.com
hcho23<at>gmu.edu
barbora.chovancova<at>law.muni.cz
chovanec<at>phil.muni.cz
f.ciambella<at>unitus.it
annamariacimitile<at>tiscali.it
rciocca<at>unior.it
ifetaciric<at>yahoo.com
S24
S65
S4
S3
S41
PL9
S57
RT4
S30
S11
S26
S4
S54
S3
S14
S19
P1
PL15
S8
S29
S24
S19
S29
S7
S19
S53
S29
PL2
S50
311
Coatalen
Cobo Piñero
Cojocaru
Coperías-Aguilar
Cordier
Correia
Corrizzato
Cortes
Cosculluela
Coste
Coste
Courtois
Crawford Camiciottoli
Csizér
Cuadrado Payeras
Curelly
Currás Prada
Curry
Guillaume
María Rocío
Alina
María José
Meriel
Alda
Sara
Viviana
Cécile
Bénédicte
Marion
Cédric
Belinda
Kata
Lidia María
Laurent
María Paula
Emma
guillaume.coatalen<at>u-cergy.fr
rociocobo<at>gmail.com
alina.cojocaru<at>univ-ovidius.ro
maria.j.coperias<at>uv.es
meriel.cordier<at>uca.fr
al.correia<at>fcsh.unl.pt
sara.corrizzato<at>univr.it
vcortes<at>gsu.edu
cecile.cosculluela<at>univ-pau.fr
Benedicte.Coste<at>u-bourgogne.fr
marion_coste<at>live.fr
cedric_courtois<at>yahoo.co.uk
belinda.crawford<at>unipi.it
weinkata<at>yahoo.com
lidiamaria<at>usal.es
laurent.curelly<at>uha.fr
paula.cprada<at>udc.es
e.curry<at>vam.ac.uk
S34
RT2
S44
S57
S29
S54
S6, S19
S3
S3
S42
S50
S35
S4
S14
S65
S29
S65
S60
D
D’Amore
Davie
De Meyer
De Nervaux-Gavoty
Debouzie
Del Bove
Delesalle-Nancey
Demoux
Den Tandt
Denti
Depraetere
Desmarais
Devi
Di Ferrante
Di Gregorio
Di Pardo Léon-Henri
Di Pietro
Diani
Dickinson
Discry
Ditrani
Doğan
Domagała-Zyśk
Domenec
Domínguez Romero
Domotor
Dontcheva-Navratilova
Đorđević
Doró
Dossena
Manuela
Neil
Anne-Laure
Laure
Chloé
Marion
Catherine
Anna
Christophe
Olga
Ilse
Jane
Gayatri
Laura
Giuseppina
Dana
Alessandra
Giuliana
Rachel
Charles-Henri
Maria Elena
Pelin
Ewa
Fanny
Elena
Teodora
Olga
Jasmina
Katalin
Marina
m.damore<at>unict.it
neil.davie<at>univ-lyon2.fr
al.demeyer<at>gmail.com
denervaux<at>u-pec.fr
chloe.debouzie<at>univ-lyon2.fr
marion.del-bove<at>univ-lyon3.fr
catherine.delesalle<at>univ-lyon3.fr
anna.demoux<at>uca.fr
Christophe.Den.Tandt<at>ulb.ac.be
odenti<at>unica.it
ilse.depraetere<at>univ-lille.fr
J.Desmarais<at>gold.ac.uk
gdevi<at>lockhaven.edu
laura.diferrante<at>uniroma1.it
giuseppina.digregorio<at>unict.it
danaleonhenri<at>gmail.com
alessandra.dipietro<at>students.unibe.ch
giuliana.diani<at>unimore.it
R.Dickinson<at>mmu.ac.uk
chenri.discry<at>univ-artois.fr
elena.ditrani<at>gmail.com
pelin1dogan<at>gmail.com
ewadom<at>kul.pl
fanny.domenec<at>u-paris2.fr
elenadominguez<at>filol.ucm.es
teodora.domotor<at>hotmail.com
navratilova<at>ped.muni.cz
jasmina.djordjevic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs
dorokati<at>lit.u-szeged.hu
marina.dossena<at>unibg.it
S22
S34
S54
S40
S43
RT1
S6
S3
RT6
S59
S6
S7
S1
S30
S11
S21
S3
S42
S63
S14
S6
S11
S54
S18
S10
S1
RT5
312
Drąg
Dressen-Hammouda
Drozdovskyi
Dubkova
Duchet
Dujarric
Dureau
Đurović
Dušková
Ɖurić
Wojciech
Dacia
Dmytro Ihorovych
Maria
Jean-Louis
Florence
Yona
Tatjana
Libuše
Dubravka
moontauk<at>gmail.com
dacia.hammouda<at>uca.fr
drozdovskyi<at>ukr.net
dubkova.maria.v<at>gmail.com
jean-louis.duchet<at>univ-poitiers.fr
florence_dujarric<at>yahoo.fr
kinbot<at>free.fr
tdjurovic<at>sbb.rs
libuse.duskova<at>ff.cuni.cz
dubravka2012<at>gmail.com
S34
S7
S32
S44
S12
S26
S34
S10
S8
S66
E
Eguibar Holgado
Emons-Nijenhuis
English
Epstein
Escudero Alías
Espinosa Zaragoza
Esteves Pereira
Eveno
Miasol
Wiesje
Elizabeth
Hugh
Maite
Isabel
Margarida
Jehanne
eguibarmiasol<at>uniovi.es
emons<at>box.nl
eenglish<at>cardiffmet.ac.uk
hughepstein<at>hotmail.co.uk
mescuder<at>unizar.es
isabel.espinosa<at>ua.es
margarida<at>ilch.uminho.pt
jehanne.eveno<at>ens-lyon.fr
S30
S20
S37
S40
S36
S4
S51
F
Fabiszak
Facchinetti
Faden Gürbüz
Favre
Federici
Fedulenkova
Ferdjani
Fernández-Morales
Fernández-Santiago
Fiedler
Fierro Porto
Fiorato
Fize
Flores
Fois
Fornet Vivancos
Fortin-Tournès
Fořtová
Franceschi
Franchi
Francis
Frank
Franklin-Landi
Freddi
Fries
Fuga
Funk
Fusco
Jacek
Roberta
Nevin
Valérie
Annalisa
Tatiana
Youssef
Marta
Miriam
Sabine
Monica
Sidia
William
Cristina
Eleonora
Antonio
Anne-Laure
Nicola
Valeria
Barbara
Robert
Michael C.
Rebecca
Maria
Marie-Hélène
Beatrice
Wolfgang
Carla
fabiszak<at>amu.edu.pl
roberta.facchinetti<at>univr.it
nevingrbz<at>gmail.com
v.favre<at>univ-lyon2.fr
annalisafederici3<at>gmail.com
fedulenkova<at>list.ru
youssef.ferdjani<at>univ-tln.fr
fernandezmmarta<at>uniovi.es
mirfer<at>ugr.es
sfiedler<at>uni-leipzig.de
monicafierroporto<at>gmail.com
sidia.fiorato<at>univr.it
william.fize<at>univ-lyon1.fr
cristina.flores<at>unirioja.es
eleonora.fois<at>unica.it
antonio.fornet<at>upct.es
al.fortin-tournes<at>wanadoo.fr
fortova<at>phil.muni.cz
valeria.franceschi<at>univr.it
barbara.franchi<at>newcastle.ac.uk
r.francis<at>wlv.ac.uk
michael.frank<at>es.uzh.ch
Rebecca.FRANKLIN-LANDI<at>univ-cotedazur.fr
maria.freddi<at>unipv.it
marie-helene.fries<at>univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
beatrice.fuga<at>sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
wfunk<at>uni-mainz.de
carla.fusco<at>unich.it
S61
S19
S28
S42
S15, S17
S23
S54
S62
S2
S7
S35
S56
S9
S59
S65
S1
S19
S65
S59
S46
S7
S11
S6
S34
S55
S44
313
G
Gaballo
Ganteau
García Zarranz
Garson
Garzone
Gay
Gefter Wondrich
Gehring
Geoffroy
Gesuato
Gevirtz
Gheorghiu
Giglioni
Gimeno-Pahissa
Gintzel
Giordano
Giovannelli
Glatt
Glavanakova
Glotova
Godard Desmarest
Golubkova
Gómez Castro
Gómez Martínez
Gordievskaya
Goroshkova
Görtschacher
Gottlieb
Goudet
Graham
Graziadei
Viviana
Jean-Michel
Libe
Cyrielle
Giuliana Elena
Julie
Roberta
David
Sophie
Sara
Karen
Oana
Cinzia
Laura
Inga
Walter
Laura
Carra
Alexandra
Elena
Clarisse
Ekaterina
Cristina
Marta
Maria
Renata
Wolfgang
Henrik
Laura
Lesley
Daniel
Gregová
Guarracino
Guignery
Gulati
Guseva
Gutiérrez Lanza
H
Haas
Hager
Haghshenas
Hall
Hamilton
Hannigan
Harley
Harris
Harutyunyan
S19
S36
RT4
S41
PL3
S40
S62
S34
S66
S9
S57
S61
S6
S28
S14
S6
RT6
S60
PL17
S22
S26
S4
S63
S13
S17
S60
S27
S2
S54
S25, S42
S46
Renáta
Serena
Vanessa
Beata
Marina
Camino
viviana.gaballo<at>unimc.it
jean-michel.ganteau<at>univ-montp3.fr
libe.g.zarranz<at>ntnu.no
cyrielle.garson<at>univ-avignon.fr
giuliana.garzone<at>iulm.it
julie.gay<at>univ-poitiers.fr
gefter<at>units.it
David.Gehring<at>nottingham.ac.uk
geoffroysophie974<at>gmail.com
sara.gesuato<at>unipd.it
karen.gevirtz<at>shu.edu
Oana.Gheorghiu<at>ugal.ro
cinzia.giglioni<at>uniroma1.it
laura.gp77<at>gmail.com
i.bauer<at>rwb-essen.de
Walter.giordano<at>unina.it
laura.giovannelli<at>unipi.it
carra.glatt<at>biu.ac.il
a_glavanakova<at>hotmail.com
elena.glotova<at>gmail.com
clarisse.godarddesmarest<at>u-picardie.fr
katemg<at>yandex.ru
cristina.gomez<at>unileon.es
marta.gomezm<at>unican.es
margord<at>mail.ru
goroshkovfamily<at>gmail.com
Wolfgang.Goertschacher<at>sbg.ac.at
gottlieb<at>hum.ku.dk
lauragoudet<at>gmail.com
lesley.graham<at>u-bordeaux.fr
daniel.graziadei<at>romanistik.unimuenchen.de
renata.gregova<at>upjs.sk
serena.guarracino<at>gmail.com
vanessa.guignery<at>ens-lyon.fr
beatagulati<at>gmail.com
marina-guseva-2002<at>mail.ru
camino.gutierrez.lanza<at>unileon.es
Renate
Tamar
Leila
Kelly
Craig
Tim
Anne
Laurence
Lusine
haas<at>anglistik.uni-kiel.de
tamar.hager<at>gmail.com
leilahaghshenas<at>yahoo.com
Kelly.Hall<at>cedarcrest.edu
craig.hamilton<at>uha.fr
thannigan<at>ait.ie
aharley<at>scrippscollege.edu
laurence.harris<at>sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
lusineharutyunyan100<at>yahoo.com
RT3, S66
S37
S42
S48
S7
S48
S22
S4
P1
S8
S41
S35
S14
S15
S63
314
Hassard
Headlandová Kalischová
Heilmann
Hélie
Herold
Hidalgo Downing
Higgs
Hiippala
Hodgson
Hologa
Houston
Hudeček
Kirsty
Irena
Ann
Claire
Katharina
Laura
Lyndon
Tuomo
Andrew
Marie
Chloe
Lana
kirsty.hassard<at>vandadundee.org
kalischova<at>mail.muni.cz
HeilmannA<at>cardiff.ac.uk
Claire.helie<at>univ-lille.fr
katharina.herold<at>bnc.ox.ac.uk
laura.hidalgo<at>uam.es
higgs<at>unistra.fr
tuomo.hiippala<at>helsinki.fi
andhodgson1<at>gmail.com
marie.hologa<at>tu-dortmund.de
c.houston<at>reading.ac.uk
lhudecek<at>ihjj.hr
S26
S8
S62
S59
RT6
S11
S3
RT5
S54
S25
S43
S12
I
Iamartino
Iannaccaro
Idrissi
Irmtraud
Isani
Ivanova
Ivanova
Izmir
Giovanni
Giuliana
Achraf
Huber
Shaeda
Alexandra
Marina
Sibel
giovanni.iamartino<at>unimi.it
giuliana.iannaccaro<at>unimi.it
achraf-idrissi<at>outlook.com
Irmtraud.Huber<at>anglistik.uni-muenchen.de
shaeda.isani<at>gmail.com
sandralikeis54<at>gmail.com
marina.ivanova<at>phil.tu-chemnitz.de
sibeleceizmir<at>gmail.com
S63
S56
S22
S4
S15
S18
S50
J
Jakonen
Jamet
Janković
Jasenowski
Jauni
Jedele
Jenkin-Smith
Josephi
Josse
Jovanović
Jukić
Juntunen
Teppo
Denis
Ljiljana
Jaroslaw
Heidi
Anna-Tina
Daniel
Beate
Hélène
Vladimir Ž.
Tatjana
Hanne
teppo.jakonen<at>jyu.fi
denis.jamet<at>univ-lyon3.fr
ljiljana.jankovic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs
wljasen<at>gmx.de
heidi.jauni<at>tuni.fi
anna-tina.jedele<at>tuni.fi
jenkind3<at>aston.ac.uk
beate.josephi<at>sydney.edu.au
helene.josse<at>univ-paris3.fr
vladimirz.jovanovic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs
tjukic<at>ffzg.hr
hanne.juntunen<at>tuni.fi
S1
S23
S9
S53
S1
S46
S60
RT1
S3
S9
S55
S46
K
Kabir
Kader
Kalicanin
Karali
Karasik
Karpinski
Kascakova
Katiboğlu
Kaup
Kaya
Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Kellner
Kérchy
Ananya Jahanara
Fujeena Abdul
Milena
Sebnem Nazli
Vladimir
Eva C.
Janka
Monica
Judith
Şebnem
Ewa
Melanie
Anna
ananya.kabir<at>kcl.ac.uk
fujeena1013<at>gmail.com
mkostic76<at>gmail.com
skarali<at>our.ecu.edu.au
vkarasik<at>yandex.ru
evakarp<at>yoku.ca
janka.kascakova<at>ku.sk
monica.katiboglu<at>bilgi.edu.tr
judithkaup<at>yahoo.com
sebnemkaya2005<at>yahoo.co.uk
ewa.keblowska-lawniczak<at>uwr.edu.pl
kellner<at>rwb-essen.de
akerchy<at>ieas-szeged.hu
S30
S63
S25
S41
S17
S61
S37
S13
S20
S54
S61
S14
PL1, S22
315
Kérchy
Kerslake
Khalaf
Kiehl
Kitsi-Mitakou
Kleimenova
Klein
Klitgård
Klitgård
Kloppmann-Lambert
Kluwick
Kocic-Zambo
Kocot
Kohlke
Kontaxi
Kontra
Košinaga
Kostadinova
Kostadinovska-Stojčevska
Kostova
Kozak
Kronshage
Kübler,
Kudrnáčová
Kulinich
Kunitz
Kušnír
Kuznetski
Vera
Lorraine
Omar
Christine
Katerina
Victoria
Sascha
Ida
Ebbe
Claire
Ursula
Larisa
Monika
Marie-Luise (Mel)
Eleni
Edit H.
Jelena
Vitana
Bisera
Ludmilla
Katarzyna
Eike
Natalie
Naděžda
Marina
Silvia
Jaroslav
Julia
kerchyv<at>gmail.com
kerslake<at>ua.es
omar.hashem<at>uninsubria.it
christine.kiehl<at>univ-lyon2.fr
katkit<at>enl.auth.gr
victoria.kleimenova<at>yandex.ru
klein.sascha.28<at>googlemail.com
idak<at>ruc.dk
ebbek<at>ruc.dk
ckloppma<at>eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr
ursula.kluwick<at>ens.unibe.ch
larisa<at>ieas-szeged.hu
monika.b.kocot<at>gmail.com
m.l.kohlke<at>swansea.ac.uk
kondax<at>uth.gr
ehkontra<at>gmail.com
jmilosavljevic87<at>gmail.com
vitana.kostadinova<at>gmail.com
k_bisera<at>yahoo.com
l.kostova<at>ts.uni-vt.bg
katarzyna.kozak<at>uph.edu.pl
eike.kronshage<at>phil.tu-chemnitz.de
nkubler<at>eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr
kudrnada<at>phil.muni.cz
marina-kulinich<at>yandex.ru
silvia.kunitz<at>kau.se
jaroslav.kusnir<at>unipo.sk
jul<at>tlu.ee
S22
S28
S20
S41
S51
S17
S38
S13
S52
S6
S46
S22
S48
S33
S52
S14
S66
S13
S10
S64
S53
S60
S6
S9
S13
S1
S32
RT2
L
Labetoulle
Lake
Laniel
Lanone
Lasa Álvarez
Lasorak
Latorraca
Laurent
Lausberg
Lazarevska-Stančevska
Lázaro
Le Brun
Le Duff
Leblond
Lecomte
Legard
Lehtinen
Lei
Lemercier-Goddard
Leotta
Aude
Gemma
Marie
Catherine
Begoña
Natacha
Rossella
Béatrice
Sylvie
Jovanka
Alberto
Xavier
Pierre
Diane
Héloïse
James
Andreas
Xu
Sophie
Paola Clara
aude.labetoulle<at>lecnam.net
gemma.lake<at>myport.ac.uk
marie.laniel<at>gmail.com
catherine.lanone<at>sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
b.lasa<at>udc.es
natacha.lasorak<at>ens-lyon.fr
rlatorraca<at>unisa.it
beatrice.laurent<at>u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
Sylvie.Lausberg<at>laicite.net
jovanka<at>ukim.edu.mk
alberto.lazaro<at>uah.es
xavier.lebrun<at>univ-angers.fr
pleduff<at>unistra.fr
diane.leblond<at>univ-lorraine.fr
heloise.lecomte<at>ens-lyon.fr
jameslegard<at>icloud.com
andreas.lehtinen<at>abo.fi
xu_lei <xu_lei<at>nju.edu.cn
sophie.lemercier-goddard<at>ens-lyon.fr
pcleotta<at>unict.it
S7
P4, S48
S42
S40
S38
S49
S1
S22
S24
S10
S52
S42
S29
S55
S26
S46
S62
S43
S7
316
Leroux
Letissier
Lewis
Leydier
Liashchova
Lobejón Santos
Lochner
Lopez Sande
López-Ropero
Lorenzo-Modia
Louviot
Lowrey
Loxley
Lucari
Lukl
Lurbe
Lytkina
Agnès
Georges
Carys
Gilles
Liudmila
Sergio
Liani
Sergio
Lourdes
María Jesús
Elise
John
James
Marta
Jiří
Pierre
Sofia
agleroux<at>parisnanterre.fr
georges.letissier<at>univ-nantes.fr
carys.lewis<at>univ-brest.fr
leydier<at>univ-tln.fr
lescheva09<at>gmail.com
sergio.lobejon<at>unileon.es
liani.lochner<at>lit.ulaval.ca
sergio.sande<at>usc.es
lourdes.lopez<at>ua.es
maria.lorenzo.modia<at>udc.es
elise.louviot<at>univ-reims.fr
j.lowrey<at>ed.ac.uk
james.loxley<at>ed.ac.uk
marta3791<at>hotmail.it
lukl<at>phil.muni.cz
pierrelurbe<at>gmail.com
other0world0op<at>gmail.com
S3
S60
S23
S23
S15
S63
S28
S32
S28
S56
S20
S26
S26
S45
S8
S29
S15
M
Machová
Mackenzie
Macura
Maior
Majee
Malá
Malá
Malá
Malaymar
Malcolm
Malysheva
Manerko
Manoïlov
Marcellin
Maria de Oliveira e Silva
Marín-Arrese
Marino
Martanovschi
Martí Solano
Martín de la Rosa
Martín Salván
Martínez del Barrio
Martínez Quiles
Martinière
Martinková
Martino
Maslauskienė
Mason
Maurel
Mayer
McCann
Petra
Lachlan
Sergej
Eniko
Shantanu
Markéta
Marcela
Lucie
Deniz
David
Aleksandra
Larissa
Pascale
Katia
Claudney
Juana I.
Elisabetta
Ludmila
Ramón
Victoria
Paula
Carla
Teresa
Nathalie
Michaela
Pierpaolo
Greta
Lisa
Sylvie
Mariia
Fiona
264221<at>mail.muni.cz
lachlan_mackenzie<at>hotmail.com
sergej.macura<at>fil.bg.ac.rs
enikomaior<at>yahoo.com
majeeshantanu<at>gmail.com
Marketa.Mala<at>ff.cuni.cz
marcela.mala<at>tul.cz
luckasmile<at>yahoo.co.uk
denizmalaymar<at>hotmail.com
dmalcolm.pl<at>gmail.com
sasha.malysheva<at>list.ru
wordfnew<at>mail.ru
pascale.manoilov<at>parisnanterre.fr
katia.marcellin<at>gmail.com
claudneyoliveira<at>ufg.br
juana<at>filol.ucm.es
marino<at>lettere.uniroma2.it
ludmila.martanovschi<at>gmail.com
ramon.marti-solano<at>unilim.fr
mvmartin<at>filol.ucm.es
ff2masap<at>uco.es
martinezbcarla<at>uniovi.es
mariateresa.martinez<at>ua.es
nmartiniere<at>gmail.com
michaela.martinkova<at>upol.cz
pierpaolo.martino<at>uniba.it
greta.maslauskiene<at>flf.vu.lt
l.mason<at>nms.ac.uk
maurelsylvie<at>free.fr
mariia.mayer<at>uha.fr
mccannfiona<at>gmail.com
S38
Doc. Sym.
S51
S32
S60
PL16
S3
S6
S13
S27
S15
S4
S3
S36
S14
S11
S44, S49
S41
S2
S11
S36
S30
S28
S40
S9
RT6
S11
S26
S36
S23
PLEN1
317
McIlroy
McKinley
Meminaj
Meyer
Mezghani
Mihajlović
Mihaljević
Mijers
Milagros
Miller-Blaise
Millot
Milone
Mišić Ilić
Mitsi
Moine
Molina
Monaco
Montini
More
Moreno Tova
Moreno-Álvarez
Moritz
Moroz
Mortensen
Mosca
Mousazadeh
Mudure
Müller-Wood
Muradian
Tara
Laura Janeth
Mariglena
Anja
Louati
Ljiljana
Milica
Esther
Pilar
Anne-Marie
Philippe
Giulio
Biljana
Efterpi
Fabienne
Silvia
Angelo
Donatella
Octavian
Manuel
Alejandra
Nuzha
Nina
Peter
Valeria
Sara
Michaela
Anja
Gaiane
mcilroy<at>meiji.ac.jp
laurajanethmckinley<at>gmail.com
mariglena.meminaj<at>gmail.com
anja.meyer<at>univr.it
lilia.louatii<at>gmail.com
ljiljana.mihajlovic<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs
mmihalj<at>ihjj.hr
e.mijers<at>ed.ac.uk
pilar.milagros<at>boun.edu.tr
miller-blaise.am<at>wanadoo.fr
philippe.millot<at>univ-lyon3.fr
giulio.milone<at>phd.unipi.it
bmisicilic<at>gmail.com
emitsi<at>enl.uoa.gr
fabienne.moine<at>u-pec.fr
silvia.molina<at>upm.es
angelo.monaco<at>gmail.com
donatella.montini<a>uniroma1.it
octavian.more<at>lett.ubbcluj.ro
manuel.moreno.tovar<at>ut.ee
morenoalejandra<at>uniovi.es
moritz<at>unistra.fr
nina.a.moroz<at>gmail.com
engpm<at>cc.au.dk
valeriamosca1606<at>gmail.com
sara.mousazadeh<at>gmail.com
mmudure<at>yahoo.com
wood<at>uni-mainz.de
g.murad<at>ysu.am
S1
S28
S45
S51
S62
S3
S12
S26
S66
S29
S6
S36
S2
PL18
S21
S4
S36
S43
S44
S13
S66
S14
S51
S62
S36
S28
S38, S56
S20
S8
N
Nabiałek
Naciscione
Nagano
Nakamura
Nayder
Neumann
Nicolosi
Niemeyer
Nocella
Núñez Puente
Nyman
Anna
Anita
Akiko
Yuki
Lillian
Claus-Peter
Maria Grazia
Mark
Jessica Jane
Carolina
Jopi
annanab<at>amu.edu.pl
naciscione.anita<at>gmail.com
nagano.9<at>u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp
midvil<at>kanto-gakuin.ac.jp
lnayder<at>bates.edu
cpneuman<at>unizar.es
mariagrazia.nicolosi<at>tin.it
mark.niemeyer<at>u-bourgogne.fr
jessicajane.nocella<at>unimore.it
c.nunez<at>udc.es
jopi.nyman<at>uef.fi
S14
S23
S9
S67
S60
S50
S36
S42
S18
RT4
S46
O
Oanca
Olholm Eaton
Oliva
Oncins Martínez
Onega
Onysko
Monica
Mark
Simona
José Luis
Susana
Alexander
monica.oanca<at>lls.unibuc.ro
engme<at>cc.au.dk
Simona.OLIVA<at>univ-cotedazur.fr
oncins<at>unex.es
sonega<at>unizar.es
Alexander.Onysko<at>aau.at
S20
S23
S61
S2
S36
PL6
318
Oparina
Orestano
Oró-Piqueras
Oruç
Ounoughi
Ożarowska
Olga
Francesca
Maricel
Sinem
Samia
Aleksandra
oloparina<at>yandex.ru
francesca.orestano<at>unimi.it
maricel.oro<at>udl.cat
sinoruc<at>metu.edu.tr
samia.ounoughi<at>univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
ozarowska.aleksandra<at>gmail.com
S18
S22
S54
S44
S48
S13
P
Palacios
Palade
Palander-Collin
Palinkašević
Panajoti
Parrino
Paterson
Patrascu
Pavan
Pelclová
Pellicer-Ortin
Pennisi
Peraldo
Pereplotchykova
Pérez Escolar
Pérez García
Pérez-Llantada Auria
Pernon
Perojo Arronte
Perreau
Perret
Peruzzo
Petit
Petrar
Petrina
Petropoulos
Petrovska
Peynaud
Pezaire
Phillips
Pillière
Pimentel Biscaia
Pinyaeva
Pípalová
Pittock
Pividori
Pizziconi
Pleßke
Podlewska
Pogońska-Baranowska
Poix
Polli
Ignacio
Bianca Gabriela
Minna
Radmila
Armela
Maria
Adrian
Ecaterina
Elisabetta
Jana
Silvia
Giulia Adriana
Emmanuelle
Svitlana
Marta
Fernando
María Carmen
Niaz
María Eugenia
Louisa
Caroline
Katia
Laurence
Petronia Popa
Alessandra
Jacqueline
Irina
Caroline
Juliette
Lisa A.
Linda
Maria Sofia
Elena
Renata
Murray
Cristina
Sergio
Nora
Anna
Aleksandra
Cécile
Chiara
ignacio.palacios<at>usc.es
butar.bianca<at>gmail.com
minna.palander-collin<at>helsinki.fi
palinkasevic<at>gmail.com
armelap<at>assenglish.org
Maria.parrino<at>unive.it
adrian.paterson<at>nuigalway.ie
catipatrascu<at>gmail.com
elisabetta.pavan.1<at>unipd.it
pelclova<at>phil.muni.cz
spellice<at>unizar.es
pennisigiulia<at>gmail.com
emmanuelle.peraldo<at>univ-cotedazur.fr
s.pereplotchykova<at>knu.ua
martaperez<at>uloyola.es
perezfernando<at>uniovi.es
llantada<at>unizar.es
niaz.pernon<at>univ-montp3.fr
eperojo<at>fyl.uva.es
louisa.perreau<at>gmail.com
carolineperretcultureconflict<at>gmail.com
kperuzzo<at>units.it
laurence.petit<at>univ-montp3.fr
petronia.petrar<at>gmail.com
alessandra.petrina<at>unipd.it
jpetr<at>yorku.ca
irina.petrovska<at>yahoo.com
caroline.peynaud<at>univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
juliette.pezaire<at>sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
phillipl<at>newpaltz.edu
linda.pilliere<at>univ-amu.fr
msbiscaia<at>ua.pt
el.pinyaeva<at>yandex.ru
renata.pipalova<at>pedf.cuni.cz
murray.pittock<at>glasgow.ac.uk
mariacristina.pividori<at>uab.cat
sergio.pizziconi<at>unistrasi.it
ra.plesske<at>ovgu.de
podla<at>autograf.pl
ola.pogonska<at>gmail.com
c.poix<at>univ-lyon2.fr
chiara.polli<at>unitn.it
PL8
S64
PL12
S18
S45
S22
S42
S49
S9
S11
RT2
S19
S55
S32
S30
S18
S23
S56
S24
S28
S4
S21
S55
PL4
S61
S10
S6
S59
RT1
S12, S13
RT4
S32
S8
S26
S50
S6
S26
S14
S65
S1
319
Polosina
Polovinkina
Popescu
Popova
Poulain
Praisler
Prest
Prtljaga
Pudełko
Pulham
Nataliya
Olga
Dan Horatiu
Irina
Alexandra
Michaela
Céline
Jelena
Brygida
Patricia
netalie<at>yandex.ru
olgapmail<at>mail.ru
dhpopescu<at>yahoo.com
irapo<at>mail.ru
alexandra.poulain<at>sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
michaela.praisler<at>ugal.ro
celine.prest<at>gmail.com
jpivan<at>sezampro.rs
b.pudelko<at>op.pl
p.pulham<at>surrey.ac.uk
S44
S37
S32, S48
S32
Q
Quijada Díaz
Carmen
quijadacarmen<at>uniovi.es
S13
R
Radu
Ragni
Rale
Rallo
Rambousek
Ramel
Randall
Rao
Ratail
Ratia
Rauer
Re
Reichmann
Reményi
Renner
Renwick
Revest
Rewiś-Łętkowska
Reynier
Riaño Alonso
Riccardi
Rice
Richter
Riestra-Camacho
Riou
Riquet
Rodet
Rogez
Rogobete
Rohrauer
Romo Mayor
Rosane
Rossato
Roussillon-Constanty
Rousvoal
Adrian
Cristiano
Élise
Carmen Lara
Jiří
Annie
Ailsa Marion
Eleonora
Lucie
Maura
Christine
Anna
Angelika
Andrea Ágnes
Vincent
Adam
Didier
Anna
Christine
Cristina
Silvia
Alan
Virginia
Rocío
Marine
Johannes
Pauline
Mathilde
Daniela
Leona
Paula
Olivia
Linda
Laurence
Nolwenn
adrian.d.radu<at>gmail.com
cristiano.ragni<at>unito.it
elise.v.rale<at>gmail.com
clarar<at>uma.es
Jiri.Rambousek<at>phil.muni.cz
annie.ramel<at>gmail.com
ailsamarionrandall<at>gmail.com
erao<at>unisa.it
lucie.ratail1<at>univ-lyon3.fr
maura.ratia<at>helsinki.fi
cr30<at>st-andrews.ac.uk
anna.re<at>iulm.it
reichmanna<at>gmail.com
remenyi.andrea<at>btk.ppke.hu
vincent.renner<at>univ-lyon2.fr
adam.renwick<at>univ-lyon2.fr
revest<at>unice.fr
a.letkowska<at>gmail.com
christine.reynier<at>univ-montp3.fr
rianocristina<at>uniovi.es
silvia.riccardi<at>anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
ARice<at>uclan.ac.uk
virginia.richter<at>ens.unibe.ch
riestrarocio<at>uniovi.es
marine.riou<at>univ-lyon2.fr
johannes.riquet<at>tuni.fi
pauline.rodet<at>univ-lyon3.fr
Mathilde.rogez<at>univ-tlse2.fr
dani.rogobete<at>yahoo.com
leona.rohrauer<at>mup.cz
paularmg<at>unizar.es
obr23<at>cam.ac.uk
linda.rossato<at>unive.it
laurence.roussillon-constanty<at>univ-pau.fr
nolwenn.rousvoal<at>laposte.net
PL5
S67
S41
S62
S37
S40
S14
S66
S22
RT5
S20
S6
S45
S1
S61
S60
S18
S40
S33
S23
S19
S42
S30
S34
S28
S46
S54
S3
S46
S23
S61
S49
S8
S36
S35
S64
S21
S23
320
Rudnicka
Ryvityte
Ryzhkina
Marta
Birute
Elena
martar<at>amu.edu.pl
birute.ryvityte<at>flf.vu.lt
phraseologinya<at>mail.ru
S14
S4
S17
S
Sáenz R
Sáez
Sahakyan
Šamalová
Samson
Sánchez-Palencia
Sanders
Sandhaug
Sandrock
Sansonetti
Sargsyan
Saric
Sarikaya-Sen
Sarré
Sasu
Schlenzig
Schmied
Schneider
Schofield
Schultz
Scotto di Carlo
Scully
Sedláčková
Seiler
Sel
Séllei
Shimada
Shraideh
Sifaki
Sigona
Silaški
Simonin
Simpkins
Sims
Šinkūnienė
Skëndo
Skjærstad
Skolik
Skotnikova
Slapkauskaire
Šmilauerová
Smith
Smolka
Sokołowska-Paryż
Sousa Oliveira
Andrea
Marta Ortega
Inesa
Michaela Sojková
Barney
Carolina
Michael
Christina
Kirsten
Laetitia
Mariana S.
Martina
Merve
Cédric
Ileana
Kristin
Josef
Daniel
Lily
Fabrice
Giuseppina
Roger
Jitka
Annina
Asseline
Nóra
Masaharu
Khetam
Evgenia
Concetta
Nadežda
Olivier
Fiona
Carissa
Jolanta
Irena
Torunn
Joanna
Alisa
Ruta
Tereza
Jos
Vladislav
Marzena
Manuel J.
andrea.saenzr<at>e-campus.uab.cat
marta_ortega<at>ub.edu
inesa.sahakyan<at>univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
michaela.samalova<at>seznam.cz
barney.samson<at>city.ac.uk
csanchez<at>us.es
Michael.Sanders<at>manchester.ac.uk
christina.sandhaug<at>inn.no
ksandro<at>uni-goettingen.de
l.sansonetti<at>parisnanterre.fr
mariana.sargsyan80<at>gmail.com
daimonbell93<at>gmail.com
sarikaya<at>baskent.edu.tr
cedric.sarre<at>sorbonne-universite.fr
sasuileana<at>gmail.com
k.schlenzig<at>uni-koeln.de
josef.schmied<at>phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Daniel.Schneider<at>anglistik.uni-muenchen.de
lilycschofield<at>gmail.com
fabrice.schultz<at>uha.fr
gscottodicarlo<at>unior.it
ScullyRM<at>cardiff.ac.uk
jitkasedlackova<at>mail.muni.cz
annina.seiler<at>es.uzh.ch
asseline.sel<at>unamur.be
sellei.nora<at>arts.unideb.hu
shimada.masaharu.fu<at>u.tsukuba.ac.jp
kshraid1<at>binghamton.edu
evsifaki<at>uth.gr
cmsigona<at>ubu.es
nadezdasilaski<at>gmail.com
osimonin<at>gmail.com
fionasimpkins<at>gmail.com
carissa.sims<at>univ-lyon1.fr
jolanta.sinkuniene<at>flf.vu.lt
irena_skendo<at>yahoo.gr
torunn.skjarstad<at>inn.no
jskolik<at>uni.opole.pl
alisa.skotnikova<at>gmail.com
ruta.slapkauskaite<at>flf.vu.lt
denaira<at>seznam.cz
jos.smith<at>uea.ac.uk
smolka<at>pf.jcu.cz
m.a.sokolowska-paryz<at>uw.edu.pl
mjsousaoliveira<at>gmail.com
S45
S52
S7
S14
S46
S30
S21
S34
S46
S43
S23
S40
RT2
S7
S34
S14
S18
S42
S7
S29
P3
S23
S14
S20
S43
S37
S9
S4
S52
S64
S10
S20
S23
S11
S10
S45
S64
S15
S62
S64
S46
S8
S28
S32
321
Starza Smith
Stelzer
Stephan
Stevenson
Stoukou
Strinyuk
Stróbl
Sturiale
Suárez Lafuente
Suárez Rodríguez
Suhr
Summerer
Sundmark
Swärdh
Szabó
Szczepan-Wojnarska
Szőke
Szołtysek
Szönyi
Szuba
Daniel
Emanuel
Matthias
Emily
Irene
Svetlana
Erzsébet
Massimo
María Socorro
Ángela
Carla
Jakob
Björn
Anna
Éva
Anna
David
Julia
György E.
Monika
daniel.s.smith<at>kcl.ac.uk
emanuel.stelzer<at>univr.it
engms<at>cc.au.dk
emily.stevenson<at>exeter.ox.ac.uk
enstoukou<at>enl.auth.gr
strinuk<at>mail.ru
strobl.erzsebet<at>kre.hu
msturial<at>unict.it
lafuente<at>uniovi.es
suarezrangela<at>uniovi.es
carla.suhr<at>helsinki.fi
Jakob.Summerer<at>gmx.de
bjorn.sundmark<at>mah.se
anna.swardh<at>engelska.uu.se
szabo.eva<at>btk.elte.hu
szczepanwojnarska<at>gmail.com
beszelo86<at>gmail.com
julia.szoltysek<at>us.edu.pl
geszonyi<at>gmail.com
monika.szuba<at>ug.edu.pl
S34
S53
S32
S43
S51
S28
S67
RT5
PL7, RT3, S66
S30
RT5
S45
S22
S34
S1
S64
S64
S48
S67
S28
T
Tasdelen Saglam
Tatar
Tchamitchian
Téchené
Tegelman
Thirriard
Tholoniat
Thomas
Thomas
Thomson
Thomson
Timofeeva
Tollance
Topolovská
Toska
Tóthová
Trajanoska
Trapateau
Tripković-Samardžić
Tsoneva
Tůma
Tupan
Turton
Naciye
Nikola
Raphaëlle
Claire
Aino
Maryam
Yann
Jane
Héloïse
Simon
Tara
Olga
Pascale
Tereza
Bledar
Lenka
Ivana
Nicolas
Vesna
Petya
František
Maria-Ana
Stephen
naciyetasdelen<at>gmail.com
nikola.tatar<at>filfak.ni.ac.rs
raphaelle<at>epistrophy.fr
claire.techene<at>univ-lyon2.fr
aino.tegelman<at>tuni.fi
maryam.thirriard<at>univ-amu.fr
yann.tholoniat<at>univ-lorraine.fr
j.e.thomas<at>associate.hull.ac.uk
heloise.ln.thomas<at>gmail.com
thomson<at>hhu.de
t.thomson2<at>napier.ac.uk
olga.timofeeva<at>es.uzh.ch
pascale.tollance<at>univ-lyon2.fr
tereza.topolovska<at>pedf.cuni.cz
bledartoska<at>yahoo.co.uk
tothova<at>teiresias.muni.cz
trajanoska<at>uacs.edu.mk
nicolas.trapateau<at>univ-cotedazur.fr
vesna.tripkovic-samardzic<at>fvu.me
p.coneva<at>ts.uni-vt.bg
tuma<at>phil.muni.cz
m_tupan<at>yahoo.com
stephen.turton<at>ell.ox.ac.uk
S52
S10
S41
U
Udalova
Ukhanova
Ummels
Lilya
Maria
Adriënne
lilya.udalova<at>gmail.com
umhanova<at>mail.ru
a.ummels<at>student.ru.nl
S15
S4
RT1
S46
S37
S40
S40
S65
S20
S26
S20
S46
S10
S14
S37
S12
S41
S64
S1
S45
S12
322
Urbann
Ureczky
Katharina
Eszter
katharina.urbann<at>uni-koeln.de
ureczkyeszter<at>hotmail.com
S14
S54
V
Vaccarelli
Valueva
Valverde
Van Dam
Van der Yeught
Vanfasse
Vara
Vega Umaña
Vélez Núñez
Vesala
Vignaux
Vilceanu
Villegas-López
Voicu
Volkova
Vujić
Francesca
Anastasiya
Beatriz
Frederik
Michel
Nathalie
Maria
Ana Laura
Rafael
Meeria
Michèle
Titela
Sonia
Ana
Sofia
Jelena
fvaccarelli<at>unite.it
valueva.nastya231<at>mail.ru
bvalverd<at>ujaen.es
F.vanDam<at>let.ru.nl
michel.vanderyeught<at>univ-amu.fr
nathalie.vanfasse<at>univ-amu.fr
marivara<at>enl.auth.gr
vega.analaura<at>gmail.com
rafael.velez<at>gm.uca.es
meeria.vesala<at>gmail.com
michele.vignaux<at>univ-lyon2.fr
elavilceanu<at>yahoo.com
villegas<at>uhu.es
ana.voicu17<at>gmail.com
sv.sofi12<at>gmail.com
jelenajvujic<at>gmail.com
S6
S15
S32
S37
S4
S60
S51
S7
S57
S46
W
Wadoux
Walezak
Walker
Wallart
Warchał
Wawrzyczek
Weiss
Whyte
Wiedemann
Wieszczek
Wilson
Witalisz
Witen
Wood
Woods
Wymer
Wyn Jones
Charlotte
Emilie
Jim
Kerry-Jane
Krystyna
Irmina
Jane
Shona
Julia
Krystyna
Adam
Alicja
Michelle
Claire
Claire
Rowland
Richard
wadoux<at>gmail.com
emiliewalezak<at>yahoo.fr
jim.walker<at>univ-lyon2.fr
kjwallart<at>yahoo.fr
krystyna.warchal<at>us.edu.pl
irmina<at>hektor.umcs.lublin.pl
weissj<at>bway.net
shona.whyte<at>univ-cotedazur.fr
Julia.Wiedemann<at>ku.de
kw8g11<at>soton.ac.uk
adam.wilson<at>univ-lorraine.fr
alicja.witalisz<at>up.krakow.pl
michelle.witen<at>uni-flensburg.de
claire.wood<at>leicester.ac.uk
c.woods<at>ulster.ac.uk
rowland.wymer<at>anglia.ac.uk
WynJonesR<at>cardiff.ac.uk
S33
S65
Y
Yakovenko
Yebra-Pertusa
Yerznkyan
Yekaterina
José María
Yelena
yakovenko_k<at>rambler.ru
jyebra<at>unizar.es
yerznkyan<at>ysu.am
S13
S36
P1
Z
Zanoni
Zhukava
Zibalas
Zimbroianu
Zimina
Roberta
Hanna
Deividas
Cristina
Evgenina V.
roberta.zanoni<at>univr.it
anna.lyumi<at>mail.ru
deividaszib<at>gmail.com
cristina.zimbroianu<at>uam.es
ezimina<at>rambler.ru
S61
S15
S26
S63
S23
PL10
S57
S56
S15
S3
S35
S18
S26
S21
S7
S28
S63
S12
S2
S22
S60
S60
S67
S23
323
Zirker
Zisi
Zittlau
Angelika
Roland
Andrea
angelika.zirker<at>uni-tuebingen.de
roland.zisi<at>univlora.edu.al
andrea.zittlau<at>uni-rostock.de
S60
S45
S22