820 Englische, altenglische Literaturen
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This article explores a recent performance of excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935/36–1942) entitled Engaging Eliot: Four Quartets in Word, Color, and Sound as an example of live poetry. In this context, Eliot’s poem can be analysed as an auditory artefact that interacts strongly with other oral performances (welcome addresses and artists’ conversations), as well as with the musical performance of Christopher Theofanidis’s quintet “At the Still Point” at the end of the opening of Engaging Eliot. The event served as an introduction to a 13-day art exhibition and engaged in a re-evaluation of Eliot’s poem after 9/11: while its first part emphasises the connection between Eliot’s poem and Christian doctrine, its second part – especially the combination of poetry reading and musical performance – highlights the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of Four Quartets.
This essay approaches T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935–1942) from the perspectives of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critical practice of reparative reading and of Paul Ricoeur’s poststructuralist hermeneutics. It demonstrates that Sedgwick’s and Ricoeur’s approaches can be productively combined to investigate hermeneutic processes in which the textual energy of a dissemination of meaning is redirected by a reparative or integrative impulse. In Four Quartets, this impetus induces the creation of semantic innovation through a violation of semantic pertinence, that is, through novel, tensional and provisional connections between formerly separate textual elements and semantic units.
Rezensiertes Werk
Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur - Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2014 337 S. - (Literatur - Kultur - Theorie, 19)
The dissertation proposes that the spread of photography and popular cinema in 19th- and 20th-century-India have shaped an aesthetic and affective code integral to the reading and interpretation of Indian English novels, particularly when they address photography and/or cinema film, as in the case of the four corpus texts. In analyzing the nexus between ‘real’ and ‘reel’, the dissertation shows how the texts address the reader as media consumer and virtual image projector. Furthermore, the study discusses the Indian English novel against the backdrop of the cultural and medial transformations of the 20th century to elaborate how these influenced the novel’s aesthetics. Drawing upon reception aesthetics, the author devises the concept of the ‘implied spectator’ to analyze the aesthetic impact of the novels’ images as visual textures.
No God in Sight (2005) by Altaf Tyrewala comprises of a string of 41 interior monologues, loosely connected through their narrators’ random encounters in Mumbai in the year 2000. Although marked by continuous perspective shifts, the text creates a sensation of acute immediacy. Here, the reader is addressed as implied spectator and is sutured into the narrated world like a film spectator ― an effect created through the use of continuity editing as a narrative technique.
Similarly, Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2002) coll(oc)ates disparate narrative perspectives and explores photography as an artistic practice, historiographic recorder and epistemological tool. The narrative appears guided by the random viewing of old photographs by the protagonist and primary narrator, the photographer Paresh Bhatt. However, it is the photographic negative and the practice of superimposition that render this string of episodes and different perspectives narratively consequential and cosmologically meaningful. Photography thus marks the perfect symbiosis of autobiography and historiography.
Tabish Khair’s Filming. A Love Story (2007) immerses readers in the cine-aesthetic of 1930s and 40s Bombay film, the era in which the embedded plot is set. Plotline, central scenes and characters evoke the key films of Indian cinema history such as Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” or Raj Kapoor’s “Awara”. Ultimately, the text written as film dissolves the boundary between fiction and (narrated) reality, reel and real, thereby showing that the images of individual memory are inextricably intertwined with and shaped by collective memory. Ultimately, the reconstruction of the past as and through film(s) conquers trauma and endows the Partition of India as a historic experience of brutal contingency with meaning.
The Bioscope Man (Indrajit Hazra, 2008) is a picaresque narrative set in Calcutta - India’s cultural capital and birthplace of Indian cinema at the beginning of the 20th century. The autodiegetic narrator Abani Chatterjee relates his rise and fall as silent film star, alternating between the modes of tell and show. He is both autodiegetic narrator and spectator or perceiving consciousness, seeing himself in his manifold screen roles. Beyond his film roles however, the narrator remains a void. The marked psychoanalytical symbolism of the text is accentuated by repeated invocations of dark caves and the laterna magica. Here too, ‘reel life’ mirrors and foreshadows real life as Indian and Bengali history again interlace with private history. Abani Chatterjee thus emerges as a quintessentially modern man of no qualities who assumes definitive shape only in the lost reels of the films he starred in.
The final chapter argues that the static images and visual frames forwarded in the texts observe an integral psychological function: Premised upon linear perspective they imply a singular, static subjectivity appealing to the postmodern subject. In the corpus texts, the rise of digital technology in the 1990s thus appears not so much to have displaced older image repertories, practices and media techniques, than it has lent them greater visibility and appeal. Moreover, bricolage and pastiche emerge as cultural techniques which marked modernity from its inception. What the novels thus perpetuate is a media archeology not entirely servant to the poetics of the real. The permeable subject and the notion of the gaze as an active exchange as encapsulated in the concept of darshan - ideas informing all four texts - bespeak the resilience of a mythical universe continually re-instantiated in new technologies and uses. Eventually, the novels convey a sense of subalternity to a substantially Hindu nationalist history and historiography, the centrifugal force of which developed in the twentieth century and continues into the present.
This article investigates the nature of preposition copying and preposition pruning structures in present-day English. We begin by illustrating the two phenomena and consider how they might be accounted for in syntactic terms, and go on to explore the possibility that preposition copying and pruning arise for processing reasons. We then report on two acceptability judgement experiments examining the extent to which native speakers of English are sensitive to these types of 'error' in language comprehension. Our results indicate that preposition copying creates redundancy rather than ungrammaticality, whereas preposition pruning creates processing problems for comprehenders that may render it unacceptable in timed (but not necessarily in untimed) judgement tasks. Our findings furthermore illustrate the usefulness of combining corpus studies and experimentally elicited data for gaining a clearer picture of usage and acceptability, and the potential benefits of examining syntactic phenomena from both a theoretical and a processing perspective.
Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices
(2021)
This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted.
In her lifetime, Dymphna Cusack continually launched social critiques on the basis of her feminism, humanism, pacificism and anti-fascist/pro-Soviet stance. Recalling her experi-ences teaching urban and country schoolchildren in A Window in the Dark, she was particularly scathing of the Australian education system. Cusack agitated for educational reforms in the belief that Australian schools had failed to cultivate the desired liberal humanist subject: 'Neither their minds, their souls, nor their bodies were developed to make the Whole Man or the Whole Woman - especially the latter. For girls were encouraged to regard their place as German girls once did: Kinder, Küche, Kirche - Children, Kitchen and Church.' I suggest that postwar liberal humanism, with its goals of equality among the sexes and self-realisation or 'becoming Whole', created a popular demand for the romantic realism found in Cusack′s texts. This twentieth century form of humanism, evident in new ideas of the subject found in psychoanalysis, Western economic theory and Modernism, informed each of the global lobbies for peace and freedom that followed the destruction of World War II. Liberal ideas of the individual in society became synonymous with the humanist representations of gender in much of postwar, realistic literature in English-speaking countries. The individual, a free agent whose aim was to 'improve the life of human beings', was usually given the masculine gender. He was shown to achieve self-realisation through a commitment to the development of “mankind”, either materially or spiritually. Significantly, the majority of Cusack′s texts diverge from this norm by portraying women as social agents of change and indeed, as the central protagonists. Although the humanist goal of self-realisation seems to be best adapted to social realism, the generic conventions of popular romance also have humanist precepts, as Catherine Belsey has argued. The Happy End is contrived through the heroine′s mental submission to her physical desire for the previously rejected or criticised lover. As Belsey has noted, desire might be considered a deconstructive force which momentarily prevents the harmonious, permanent unification of mind and body because the body, at the moment of seduction, does not act in accord with the mind. In popular romance, however, desire usually leads to a relationship or proper union of the protagonists. In Cusack′s words, the heroine and hero become “whole men and women” through the “realistic” love story. Thus romance, like realism, seeks to stabilise gender relations, even though female desire is temporarily disruptive in the narrative. In the end, women and men become fully realised characters according to the generic conventions of the love story or the consummation of potentially subversive desire. It stayed anxieties associated with women seeking independence and self-realisation rather than traditional romance which signalled a threat to existing gender relations. I proposed that an analysis of gender in Cusack′s fiction is warranted, since these apparently unified, humanist representations of romantic realism belie the conflicting aims and actions of the gendered subjects in this historical period. For instance, when we examine women′s lives immediately after the war, we can identify in both East and West efforts initiated by women and men to reconstruct private/public roles. In order to understand how women were caught between “realism and romance”, I plan to deconstruct gender within the paradigm of this hybrid genre. By adopting a femininist methodology, new insights may be gained into the conflictual subjectivity of both genders in the periods of the interwar years, the Pacific and World Wars, the Cold War, the Australian Aboriginal Movement at the time of the Vietnam War, as well as the moment of second wave Western feminism in the seventies. My definition of romantic realism and the discourses that inform it are examined in chapters two and three. A deconstruction of femininity and the female subject is pursued in chapter four, when I argue that Cusack′s romantic narratives interact in different ways with social realism: romance variously fails, succeeds, is parodic or idealised. Applying Judith Butler′s philosophical ideas to literary criticism, I argue that this hybridisation of genre prevents the fictional subject from performing his or her gender. Like the “real” subject - actual women in society - the fictional protagonist acts in an unintelligible fashion due to the multifarious demands and constraints on her gender. Consequently, the gendering of the sexed subject produces a multiplicity of genders: Cusack′s women and men are constituted by differing and conflicting demands of the dichotomously opposed genres. Thus gender and sex become indefinite through their complex, inconsistent expression in the romantic realistic text. In other words, the popular combination of romance and realism leads to an explosion of the gender binary presupposed by both genres. Furthermore, a consideration of sexuality and race in chapter five leads to a more differentiated analysis of the humanist representations of gender in postwar fiction. The need to deconstruct these representations in popular and canonical literature is recapitulated in the final chapter of this Dissertation.
Language and Content
(2014)