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"Unavoidably side by side"
(2011)
Language portraits are useful instruments to elicit speakers' reflections on the languages in their repertoires. In this study, we implement a "portrait-corpus approach" (Peters and Coetzee-Van Rooy 2020) to investigate the conceptualisations of the languages Afrikaans and English in 105 language portraits. In this approach, we use participants' reflections about their placement of the two languages on a human silhouette as a linguistic corpus. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analyses using WordSmith, Statistica and Atlas.ti, our study shows that Afrikaans is mainly conceptualised as a language that is located in more peripheral areas of the body (for example, the hands and feet) and, hence, is perceived as less important in participants' repertoires. The central location of English in the head reveals its status as an important language in the participants' multilingual repertoires. We argue that these conceptualisations of Afrikaans and English provide additional insight into the attitudes towards these languages in South Africa.
Against the pain
(2023)
Allegory and the poetic self
(2022)
This book is the first collective examination of Late Medieval intimate first-person narratives that blurred the lines between author, narrator, and protagonist and usually feature personification allegory and courtly love tropes, creating an experimental new family of poetry. In this volume, contributors analyze why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries. The editors identify and discuss three predominant forms within this family: debate poetry, dream allegories, and autobiographies. Contributors offer textual analyses of key works from late medieval German, French, Italian, and Iberian literature, with discussion of developments in England, as well. Allegory and the Poetic Self offers a sophisticated, theoretically current discussion of relevant literature. This exploration of medieval “I” narratives offers insights not just into the premodern period but also into Western literature’s subsequent traditions of self-analysis and identity crafting through storytelling.
Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a ‘crisis of imagination’ (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate.
Bridehood revisited
(2008)
It has been observed for many African languages that focussed subjects
have to appear outside of their syntactic base position, as opposed to
focussed objects, which can remain in-situ. This is known as subjectobject
asymmetry of focus marking, which Fiedler et al. (2010) claim
to hold also for Akan. Genzel (2013), on the other hand, argues that
Akan does not exhibit a subject-object focus asymmetry. A questionnaire
study and a production experiment were carried out to investigate
whether focussed subjects may indeed be realized in-situ in Akan. The
results suggest that (i) focussed subjects do not have to be obligatorily
realized ex-situ, and that (ii) the syntactic preference for the realization
of a focussed subject highly depends on exhaustivity.
This paper reopens the discussion on focus marking in Akan (Kwa,
Niger-Congo) by examining the semantics of the so-called focus marker
in the language. It is shown that the so-called focus marker expresses
exhaustivity when it occurs in a sentence with narrow focus. The study
employs four standard tests for exhaustivity proposed in the literature
to examine the semantics of Akan focus constructions (Szabolsci 1981,
1994; É. Kiss 1998; Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007). It is shown that
although a focused entity with the so-called focus marker nà is
interpreted to mean ‘only X and nothing/nobody else,’ this meaning
appears to be pragmatic.
Filming illegals
(2013)
The aesthetic phenomenon of the uncanny in literature and art is a spatial and gendered aesthetic concept, which is expressed in the spatial characteristics of a literary or photographic narrative. The intention of this thesis is to evaluate the entanglement of the uncanny, space, domesticity and femininity in the context of Gothic literature and photography. These four objects can only be read in their interplay with each other and how they each function as structural principles in the framework of Gothic fiction and photography. The literary texts, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lovely House” (1950) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959) as well as Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits that will be discussed further share one particular quality; they use the haunted house motif to express the protagonist’s psychological state by transferring mental hauntings onto the narrative’s spatial layer. The establishment of a connection between the concepts at hand, the uncanny, domesticity, spatiality and femininity, is the basis for the first half of the thesis. What follows is an overview of how domestic politics and gendered perceptions of and behaviors in spaces are expressed in the Gothic mode in particular. In the literary analysis two ways in which the Freudian uncanny constitutes itself in the haunted house narrative, first the house as the site of repetition and second the house as a stand-in for the maternal body, are examined. Drawing from Gernot Böhme’s and Martina Löw’s theoretic work on space and atmosphere the thesis focuses on the different aesthetic strategies that produce the uncanny atmosphere associated with the Gothic haunted house. The female subjects at the narratives’ center are in the ambiguous process of disappearing or becoming, this (dis)appearing act is facilitated by their haunted surroundings. In the case of the unnamed narrator in “Wall-Paper” her suppressed rage at her husband is mirrored in the strangled woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper. Once she recognizes her doppelganger the union of her two selves takes place in the short story’s dramatic climax. In Shirley Jackson’s literary works the haunted houses, protagonists in themselves, entrap, transform, and ultimately devour their female daughter-victims. The haunted houses are symbols, means and places of the continuous tradition of female entrapment within the domestic sphere, be it as wives, mothers or daughters. In Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits the themes of creation/destruction and becoming/disappearing within the ruinous (post)domestic sphere are acted out by the fragmented and blurry female figure who intriguingly oscillates between self-empowerment and submission to destruction.
How did humans respond to the eighteenth-century discovery of countless new species of animals? This book explores the gamut of intense human-animal interactions: from love to cultural identifications, moral reflections, philosophical debates, classification systems, mechanical copies, insults and literary creativity.
Dogs, cats and horses, of course, play central roles. But this volume also features human reflections upon parrots, songbirds, monkeys, a rhino, an elephant, pigs, and geese – all the way through to the admired silkworms and the not-so-admired bookworms.
An exceptionally wide array of source materials are used in this volume’s ten separate contributions, plus the editorial introduction, to demonstrate this diversity. As eighteenth-century humans came to realise that they too are animals, they had to recast their relationships with their fellow living-beings on Planet Earth. And these considerations remain very much live ones to this day.
Introduction
(2023)
Introduction
(2013)
The article is dedicated to the problem of social bonds that is negotiated in Troilus and Cressida. Troilus and Ulysses embody an old, traditional order of the world that is out of joint, while Cressida's behaviour and her way of interacting indicate a different and new regime of social regulation that is about to take over. With its complex superposition of (touches of) love and war, Troilus and Cressida brings together rituals of touch, anarchic speech acts, and a gendered perspective on the world that associates touch and temporality with 'frail' femininity and temptation. With unrivalled intensity, the play puts to the spectator that the basic condition of touch, i.e. exposing oneself to another, entails an incalculable risk. Hector tragically falls for the vulnerability inherent in touch and the audience suffers with him because they share this existential precondition on which modern society is 'founded.' The gloomy, inescapable atmosphere of societal crisis that Troilus and Cressida creates emphasises the fact that the fragility of touch is not to be overcome. The fractions - no matter whether Greek, Trojan, or those of loving couples - cannot simply be reunited to form a new, authentic entity. Generating at least some form of social cohesion therefore remains a challenge.
Kleine Kosmopolitismen
(2017)
Longevity narratives
(2018)
The essay looks at longevity narratives as an important configuration of old age, which is closely related to evolutionary theories of ageing. In order to analyse two case studies of longevity published in the early twentieth century, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall's book Senescence (1922) and the British dramatist Bernard Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921), the essay draws on an outline of theories of longevity from the Enlightenment to the present. The analysis of the two case studies illustrates that evolutionary and cultural perspectives on ageing and longevity are ambivalent and problematic. In Hall's and Shaw's texts this is related to a crisis narrative of culture and civilization against which both writers place their specific solutions of individual and species longevity. Whereas Hall employs autobiographical accounts of artists as examples of longevity to strengthen his argument about wise old men as exclusive repositories of knowledge, Shaw in his vision of longevity as an extended form of midlife for both genders encounters the limits of age representation.
Luhmann in da Contact Zone
(2016)
Our aim in this contribution is to productively engage with the abstractions and complexities of Luhmann’s conceptions of society from a postcolonial perspective, with a particular focus on the explanatory powers of his sociological systems theory when it leaves the realms of Europe and ventures to describe regions of the global South. In view of its more recent global reception beyond Europe, our aim is to thus – following the lead of Dipesh Chakrabarty – provincialize Luhmann’s system theory especially with regard to its underlying assumptions about a global “world society”. For these purposes, we intend to revisit Luhmann in the post/colonial contact zone: We wish to reread Luhmann in the context of spaces of transcultural encounter where “global designs and local histories” (Mignolo), where inclusion into and exclusion from “world society” (Luhmann) clash and interact in intricate ways. The title of our contribution, ‘Luhmann in da Contact Zone’ is deliberately ambiguous: On the one hand, we of course use ‘Luhmann’ metonymically, as representative of a highly complex theoretical design. We shall cursorily outline this design with a special focus on the notion of a singular, modern “world society”, only to confront it with the epistemic challenges of the contact zone. On the other hand, this critique will also involve the close observation of Niklas Luhman as a human observer (a category which within the logic of systems theory actually does not exist) who increasingly transpires in his late writings on exclusion in the global South. By following this dual strategy, we wish to trace an increasing fracture between one Luhmann and the other, between abstract theoretical design and personalized testimony. It is by exploring and measuring this fracture that we hope to eventually be able to map out the potential of a possibly more productive encounter between systems theory and specific strands of postcolonial theory for a pluritopic reading of global modernity.
This text is a contribution to the research on the worldwide success of evangelical Christianity and offers a new perspective on the relationship between late modern capitalism and evangelicalism. For this purpose, the utilization of affect and emotion in evangelicalism towards the mobilization of its members will be examined in order to find out what similarities to their employment in late modern capitalism can be found. Different examples from within the evangelical spectrum will be analyzed as affective economies in order to elaborate how affective mobilization is crucial for evangelicalism’s worldwide success. Pivotal point of this text is the exploration of how evangelicalism is able to activate the voluntary commitment of its members, financiers, and missionaries. Gathered here are examples where both spheres—evangelicalism and late modern capitalism—overlap and reciprocate, followed by a theoretical exploration of how the findings presented support a view of evangelicalism as an inner-worldly narcissism that contributes to an assumed re-enchantment of the world.
Modality in Kakataibo
(2015)
This paper explores the semantic space of modality in Kakataibo
(Panoan). It is found that Kakataibo makes a distinction in the modal
space based on the modality type. Circumstantial modality is encoded
by a construction while the epistemic space is conveyed by the second
position enclitics =dapi ‘inferential’, =id ‘second-hand information’
and =kuni ‘contrastive assertion’. However, none of these strategies to
encode modality restricts the quantificational force, leaving it
underspecified. These facts are consistent with the predictions of
current typologies of modal systems.
This contribution is organized as follows: in section 1, I propose a formulation of the Mirror Principle (MP) based on syntactic features; the examples will be taken from Causatives and Anti-Causatives that are derived by affixes (in Russian, Czech, Polish, German, English as compared to Japanese and Chichewa) by head-to-head movement. In section 2, I review some basic facts in support of a syntactic approach to Merge of Causatives and Anti-Causatives, proposing that theta roles are also syntactic Features that merge functional affixes with their stems in a well-defined way. I first try to give some external evidence in showing that Causatives and Anti-Causatives obey a principle of thematic hierarchy early postulated in generative literature by Jackendoff (1972; 43), and later reformulated in terms of argument-structure-ordering principle by Grimshaw (1990:chapter 2). Crucial for my paper is the working hypothesis that every syntactic theory which tries to capture the data not only descriptively but also explanatively should descend from three levels of syntactic representation: a-structure where the relation between predicate and its arguments (and adjuncts) takes place, thematic structure where the theta-roles are assigned to their arguments, and event structure, which decides about the aspectual distribution and division of events.
Postcolonial Justice
(2016)
Postcolonial Justice' addresses a major issue in current postcolonial theory and beyond, namely, the question of how to reconcile an ethics grounded in the reciprocal acknowledgment of diversity and difference with the normative, if not universal thrust that appears to energize any notion of justice. The concept of postcolonial justice shared by the essays in this volume carries an unwavering commitment to difference within and beyond Europe, while equally rejecting radical cultural essentialisms, which refuse to engage in "utopian ideals" of convivial exchange across a plurality of subject positions. Such utopian ideals can no longer claim universal validity, as in the tradition of the European enlightenment; instead they are bound to local frames of speaking from which they project world.
Postcolonial Piracy
(2016)
Media piracy is a contested term in the academic as much as the public debate. It is used by the corporate industries as a synonym for the theft of protected media content with disastrous economic consequences. It is celebrated by technophile elites as an expression of freedom that ensures creativity as much as free market competition. Marxist critics and activists promote flapiracy as a subversive practice that undermines the capitalist world system and its structural injustices. Artists and entrepreneurs across the globe curse it as a threat to their existence, while many use pirate infrastructures and networks fundamentally for the production and dissemination of their art. For large sections of the population across the global South, piracy is simply the only means of accessing the medial flows of a progressively globalising planet.
Postcolonial piracy
(2014)
Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity.
Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.
Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.
Recollecting Bones
(2016)
In the same “guarded, roundabout and reticent way” which Lindsay Barrett invokes for Australian conversations about imperial injustice, Germans, too, must begin to more systematically explore, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “the connections and the differences between anti-semitism and anti-black and other racisms and asses[s] the issues that arise when it can no longer be denied that they interacted over a long time in what might be seen as Fascism’s intellectual, ethical and scientific pre-history” (Gilroy 1996: 26). In the meantime, we need to care for the dead. We need to return them, first, from the status of scientific objects to the status of ancestral human beings, and then progressively, and proactively, as close as possible to the care of those communities from whom they were stolen.
Reflections of Lusáni Cissé
(2016)
Reflections of Lusáni Cissé
(2020)
This essay reads Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a milestone in the decolonisation of British fiction. After an introduction to Selvon and the core composition of the novel, it discusses the ways in which the narrative takes on issues of race and racism, how it in the tradition of the Trinidadian carnival confronts audiences with sexual profanation and black masculine swagger, and not least how the novel, especially through its elaborate use of creole Englishes, reimagines London as a West Indian metropolis. The essay then turns more systematically to the ways in which Selvon translates Western literary models and their isolated subject positions into collective modes of narrative performance taken from Caribbean orature and the calypsonian tradition. The Lonely Londoners breathes entirely new life into the ossified conventions of the English novel, and imbues it with unforeseen aesthetic, ethical, political and epistemological possibilities.
The article focuses on the rebellious subplot of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest that forms around Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, and reads it as a satyr play. Demonstrated is how the Dionysian subplot stands in close analogical connection with the play’s main action. It is also argued that the storyline emphasises a dimension of the play that is of high relevance to the analysis of its metatheatrical implications. The correspondences between the main action and the satyr play elements highlight the important role that intemperance, excess and the suspension of control play in the Shakespearean theatrical setting.
Sentence type marking is realized by two suffixes in Aymara, one marks
declaratives and the other polar sentences (polar questions and negated
sentences) by picking out one or two propositions, respectively. A third
suffix, initially associated with wh-questions, turns out to be a (scalar)
additive and unrelated to sentence type. The sentence-type-related suffixes
associate with focus and the additive can associate with focus by
attaching to the focused constituent.
Sound matters
(2016)
This essay proposes a reorientation in postcolonial studies that takes account of the transcultural realities of the viral twenty-first century. This reorientation entails close attention to actual performances, their specific medial embeddedness, and their entanglement in concrete formal or informal material conditions. It suggests that rather than a focus on print and writing favoured by theories in the wake of the linguistic turn, performed lyrics and sounds may be better suited to guide the conceptual work. Accordingly, the essay chooses a classic of early twentieth-century digital music – M.I.A.’s 2003/2005 single “Galang” – as its guiding example. It ultimately leads up to a reflection on what Ravi Sundaram coined as “pirate modernity,” which challenges us to rethink notions of artistic authorship and authority, hegemony and subversion, culture and theory in the postcolonial world of today.
The paper investigates Turkish texts from heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany in a pseudo-longitudinal setting, looking at pupils' texts from the 5th, 7th, 10th and 12th grades. Two types of dynamics are identified in the advanced acquisition(1) of Turkish orthography in the heritage context. One is the dynamic of language contact, where in certain areas of the orthography, we find a re-interpretation of Turkish principles according to the German model. However, this changes as the pupils grow up. The second dynamic is the heritage situation. The heritage situation on one side leads to the establishment of new practices, and it also leads to a higher degree of variability of spelling solutions in those areas, where the orthographic system of Turkish poses challenges to every writer, whether monolingual and growing up in Turkey or heritage speaker.
The Author as Researcher
(2019)
This article proposes a new perspective on avant-garde travel writing through the lens of scientific field work, investigating these new writing techniques in Boris Pil’niak’s expedition prose. In the 1920s, the researching writer represents a hidden, but influential counterpart to the widely propagated figure of the working writer. While the author as producer combines word and deed in an operative act, the author as researcher investigates the production of knowledge. This entails revising the centrality of facts. Literature as artistic research subverts factography by going beyond the horizons of veristic data registration to include uncharted realms and vague possibilities. This exploration leads to specific genres: the author as researcher tries his hand at a kind of laboratory text, a prolific genre at the intersection of testing equipment, recording media, and hypothetical thought. Not confined to a sterile lab, avant-garde writer-researchers, as members of research expeditions, oscillate between their home writing desks and the remote depths of the emerging USSR. At the same time, they explore writing practices situated between data acquisition, sampling, fact-finding, observation and recording.
The commuting island
(2011)
In 1735, the Leipzig professor of medicine Samuel Theodor Quellmaltz (1696–1758) designed and built an artificial horse. He presented it in an illustrated construction manual, which included precise information about the materials and dimensions of this wooden horse for therapeutic use. This contribution analyses Quellmaltz’s invention of the ‘machine horse’ as a medical and technological contribution to prevalent theories about the paradigmatic role of the machine in Enlightenment thought.
According to Aikhenvald (2007:5), descriptive linguistics or linguistic
fieldwork “ideally involves observing the language as it is used,
becoming a member of the community, and often being adopted into
the kinship system”. Descriptive linguistics therefore differs from
theoretical linguistics in that while the former seeks to describe natural
languages as they are used, the latter, other than describing, attempts
to give explanations on how or why language phenomena behave in
certain ways. Thus, I will abstract away from any preconceived ideas
on how sentences ought to be in Awing and take the linguist/reader
through focus and interrogative constructions to get a feeling of how
the Awing people interact verbally.
We report findings from psycholinguistic experiments investigating the detailed timing of processing morphologically complex words by proficient adult second (L2) language learners of English in comparison to adult native (L1) speakers of English. The first study employed the masked priming technique to investigate -ed forms with a group of advanced Arabic-speaking learners of English. The results replicate previously found L1/L2 differences in morphological priming, even though in the present experiment an extra temporal delay was offered after the presentation of the prime words.
The second study examined the timing of constraints against inflected forms inside derived words in English using the eye-movement monitoring technique and an additional acceptability judgment task with highly advanced Dutch L2 learners of English in comparison to adult L1 English controls. Whilst offline the L2 learners performed native-like, the eye-movement data showed that their online processing was not affected by the morphological constraint against regular plurals inside derived words in the same way as in native speakers. Taken together, these findings indicate that L2 learners are not just slower than native speakers in processing morphologically complex words, but that the L2 comprehension system employs real-time grammatical analysis (in this case, morphological information) less than the L1 system.
Rezensiertes Werk
Theresa Biberauer u. George Walkden (Hgg.): Syntax over Time: Lexical, Morphological, and Information – Structural Interactions - Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 418 S.
In October 2016, following a campaign led by Labour Peer Lord Alfred Dubs, the first child asylum-seekers allowed entry to the UK under new legislation (the ‘Dubs amendment’) arrived in England. Their arrival was captured by a heavy media presence, and very quickly doubts were raised by right-wing tabloids and politicians about their age. In this article, I explore the arguments underpinning the Dubs campaign and the media coverage of the children’s arrival as a starting point for interrogating representational practices around children who seek asylum. I illustrate how the campaign was premised on a universal politics of childhood that inadvertently laid down the terms on which these children would be given protection, namely their innocence.
The universality of childhood fuels public sympathy for child asylum-seekers, underlies the ‘child first, migrant second’ approach advocated by humanitarian organisations, and it was a key argument in the ‘Dubs amendment’. Yet the campaign highlights how representations of child asylum-seekers rely on codes that operate to identify ‘unchildlike’ children. As I show, in the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants‘, childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can, ultimately, be disproved.
Think local sell global
(2010)
Touching at a Distance
(2023)
Studies the capacity of Shakespeare’s plays to touch and think about touchBased on plays from all major genres: Hamlet, The Tempest, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing and Troilus and CressidaCentres on creative, close readings of Shakespeare’s plays, which aim to generate critical impulses for the 21st century readerBrings Shakespeare Studies into touch with philosophers and theoreticians from a range of disciplinary areas – continental philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, sociology, phenomenology, law, linguistics: Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Niklas Luhmann, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, J. L. AustinTheatre has a remarkable capacity: it touches from a distance. The audience is affected, despite their physical separation from the stage. The spectators are moved, even though the fictional world presented to them will never come into direct touch with their real lives. Shakespeare is clearly one of the master practitioners of theatrical touch. As the study shows, his exceptional dramaturgic talent is intrinsically connected with being one of the great thinkers of touch. His plays fathom the complexity and power of a fascinating notion – touch as a productive proximity that is characterised by unbridgeable distance – which philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Nancy have written about, centuries later. By playing with touch and its metatheatrical implications, Shakespeare raises questions that make his theatrical art point towards modernity: how are communities to form when traditional institutions begin to crumble? What happens to selfhood when time speeds up, when oneness and timeless truth can no longer serve as reliable foundations? What is the role and the capacity of language in a world that has lost its seemingly unshakeable belief and trust in meaning? How are we to conceive of the unthinkable extremes of human existence – birth and death – when the religious orthodoxy slowly ceases to give satisfactory explanations? Shakespeare’s theatre not only prompts these questions, but provides us with answers. They are all related to touch, and they are all theatrical at their core: they are argued and performed by the striking experience of theatre’s capacities to touch – at a distance
Unavailable
(2023)
It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian–English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence–picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.
Ways of Worldmaking
(2020)
Writing travel, writing life
(2022)
The book compares the texts of three Swiss authors: Ella Maillart, Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Nicolas Bouvier. The focus is on their trip from Genève to Kabul that Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach made together in 1939/1940 and Nicolas Bouvier 1953/1954 with the artist Thierry Vernet. The comparison shows the strong connection between the journey and life and between ars vivendi and travel literature.
This book also gives an overview of and organises the numerous terms, genres, and categories that already exist to describe various travel texts and proposes the new term travelling narration. The travelling narration looks at the text from a narratological perspective that distinguishes the author, narrator, and protagonist within the narration.
In the examination, ten motifs could be found to characterise the travelling narration: Culture, Crossing Borders, Freedom, Time and Space, the Aesthetics of Landscapes, Writing and Reading, the Self and/as the Other, Home, Religion and Spirituality as well as the Journey. The importance of each individual motif does not only apply in the 1930s or 1950s but also transmits important findings for living together today and in the future.
The political legacy of the Martinican poet, novelist and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) is the subject of an ongoing debate among postcolonial literary scholars. Responding to an influential view shaping this debate, that Glissant’s work can be categorised into an early political and late apolitical phase, this dissertation claims that this division is based on a narrow conception of 'engaged political writing' that prevents a more comprehensive view of the changing political strategies Glissant pursued throughout his life from emerging. Proceeding from this conceptual basis, the dissertation is concerned with re-reading the dimensions of Glissant's work that have hitherto been relegated as apolitical, literary or poetic, with the aim of conceptualising the politics of relation as an integral part of his overall poetic project. In methodological terms, the dissertation therefore proposes a relational reading of Glissant’s life-work across literary genres, epochs, as well as the conventional divisions between political thought, writing and activism. This perspective is informed by Glissant's philosophy of relation, and draws on a conception of political practice that includes both explicit engagements with established political systems and institutions, as well as literary and cultural interventions geared towards their transformation and the creation of alternatives to them. Theoretically the work thus combines a poststructuralist lens on the conceptual difference between 'politics' and 'the political' with arguments for an inherent political quality of literature, and perspectives from the Afro-Caribbean radical tradition, in which writers and intellectuals have historically sought to combine discursive interventions with organisational actions. Applying this theoretical angle to the analysis of Glissant's politics of relation results in an interdisciplinary research framework designed to explore the synergies between postcolonial political and literary studies.
In order to comprehensively describe Glissant's politics of relation without recourse to evolutionary or digressive models, the concept of an intellectual marronage is proposed as a framework to map the strategies making up Glissant's political archive. Drawing on a variety of historic, political theoretical and literary sources, intellectual marronage is understood as a mode of radical resistance to the neocolonial subjugation for which the plantation system stands historically and metaphorically, as an inherently innovative political practice invested in the creation of communities marked by relational ontologies, and as a commitment to fostering an imagination of the world and the human that differs fundamentally from the Enlightenment paradigm. This specific conception of intellectual marronage forms the basis on which three key strategies that consistently shape Glissant's political practice are identified and mapped. They revolve around Glissant's engagement with history (chapter 2), his commitment to fostering an imagination of the Tout-Monde (whole-world) as a political point of reference (chapter 3), and the continuous exploration of alternative forms of community on the levels of the island, the archipelago and the Tout-Monde (chapter 4). Together these strategies constitute Glissant's personal politics of relation. Its abstract characteristics can be put in a productive conversation with related theoretical traditions invested in exploring the political potentials of fugitivity (chapters 5), as well as with the work of other postcolonial actors whose holistic practice warrants to be described as a politics of relation (chapter 6).
On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid.
Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes.
The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.