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This study focuses on William Faulkner, whose works explore the demise of the slavery-based Old South during the Civil War in a highly experimental narrative style. Central to this investigation is the analysis of the temporal dimensions of both individual and collective guilt, thus offering a new approach to the often-discussed problem of Faulkner’s portrayal of social decay. The thesis examines how Faulkner re-narrates the legacy of the Old South as a guilt narrative and argues that Faulkner uses guilt in order to corroborate his concept of time and the idea of the continuity of the past. The focus of the analysis is on three of Faulkner’s arguably most important novels: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. Each of these novels features a main character deeply overwhelmed by the crimes of the past, whether private, familial, or societal. As a result, guilt is explored both from a domestic as well as a social perspective. In order to show how Faulkner blends past and present by means of guilt, this work examines several methods and motifs borrowed from different fields and genres with which Faulkner narratively negotiates guilt. These include religious notions of original sin, the motif of the ancestral curse prevalent in the Southern Gothic genre, and the psychological concept of trauma. Each of these motifs emphasizes the temporal dimensions of guilt, which are the core of this study, and makes clear that guilt in Faulkner’s work is primarily to be understood as a temporal rather than a moral problem.
“Chunking” spoken language
(2021)
In this introductory paper to the special issue on “Weak cesuras in talk-in-interaction”, we aim to guide the reader into current work on the “chunking” of naturally occurring talk. It is conducted in the methodological frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics – two approaches that consider the interactional aspect of humans talking with each other to be a crucial starting point for its analysis. In doing so, we will (1) lay out the background of this special issue (what is problematic about “chunking” talk-in-interaction, the characteristics of the methodological approach chosen by the contributors, the cesura model), (2) highlight what can be gained from such a revised understanding of “chunking” in talk-in-interaction by referring to previous work with this model as well as the findings of the contributions to this special issue, and (3) indicate further directions such work could take starting from papers in this special issue. We hope to induce a fruitful exchange on the phenomena discussed, across methodological divides.
“Chunking” spoken language
(2021)
In this introductory paper to the special issue on “Weak cesuras in talk-in-interaction”, we aim to guide the reader into current work on the “chunking” of naturally occurring talk. It is conducted in the methodological frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics – two approaches that consider the interactional aspect of humans talking with each other to be a crucial starting point for its analysis. In doing so, we will (1) lay out the background of this special issue (what is problematic about “chunking” talk-in-interaction, the characteristics of the methodological approach chosen by the contributors, the cesura model), (2) highlight what can be gained from such a revised understanding of “chunking” in talk-in-interaction by referring to previous work with this model as well as the findings of the contributions to this special issue, and (3) indicate further directions such work could take starting from papers in this special issue. We hope to induce a fruitful exchange on the phenomena discussed, across methodological divides.
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).
This book explores how capitalism shapes the formation of the economic subject in modern European writing. How are subject positions determined by the subject’s relationship to money and work? How fair is a society that predicates social inclusion upon employment? And what happens when full employment is impossible? The volume traces how literary authors and social theorists have answered these questions in different social and historical contexts from the nineteenth century to the present day. The contributions confront the imperatives of productivity, notions of success and failure, the construction of work cultures and environments, the (in)visibility of certain labour groups, and the implications of the body as a productive site.
Writing an alternative Australia : women and national discourse in nineteenth-century literature
(2007)
In this thesis, I want to outline the emergence of the Australian national identity in colonial Australia. National identity is not a politically determined construct but culturally produced through discourse on literary works by female and male writers. The emergence of the dominant bushman myth exhibited enormous strength and influence on subsequent generations and infused the notion of “Australianness” with exclusively male characteristics. It provided a unique geographical space, the bush, on and against which the colonial subject could model his identity. Its dominance rendered non-male and non-bush experiences of Australia as “un-Australian.” I will present a variety of contemporary voices – postcolonial, Aboriginal, feminist, cultural critics – which see the Australian identity as a prominent topic, not only in the academia but also in everyday culture and politics. Although positioned in different disciplines and influenced by varying histories, these voices share a similar view on Australian society: Australia is a plural society, it is home to millions of different people – women, men, and children, Aboriginal Australians and immigrants, newly arrived and descendents of the first settlers – with millions of different identities which make up one nation. One version of national identity does not account for the multitude of experiences; one version, if applied strictly, renders some voices unheard and oppressed. After exemplifying how the literature of the 1890s and its subsequent criticism constructed the itinerant worker as “the” Australian, literary productions by women will be singled out to counteract the dominant version by presenting different opinions on the state of colonial Australia. The writers Louisa Lawson, Barbara Baynton, and Tasma are discussed with regard to their assessment of their mother country. These women did not only present a different picture, they were also gifted writers and lived the ideal of the “New Women:” they obtained divorces, remarried, were politically active, worked for their living and led independent lives. They paved the way for many Australian women to come. In their literary works they allowed for a dual approach to the bush and the Australian nation. Louisa Lawson credited the bushwoman with heroic traits and described the bush as both cruel and full of opportunities not known to women in England. She understood women’s position in Australian society as oppressed and tried to change politics and culture through the writings in her feminist magazine the Dawn and her courageous campaign for women suffrage. Barbara Baynton painted a gloomy picture of the Australian bush and its inhabitants and offered one of the fiercest critiques of bush society. Although the woman is presented as the able and resourceful bushperson, she does not manage to survive in an environment which functions on male rules and only values the economic potential of the individual. Finally, Tasma does not present as outright a critique as Barbara Baynton, however, she also attests the colonies a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England. Tasma attests that the colonies had a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England and demonstrates how uncertainties and irritations emerged in the course of Australia’s nation formation. These three women, as writers, commentators, and political activists, faced exclusion from the dominant literary discourses. Their assessment of colonial society remained unheard for a long time. Now, after much academic excavation, these voices speak to us from the past and remind us that people are diverse, thus nation is diverse. Dominant power structures, the institutions and individuals who decide who can contribute to the discourse on nation, have to be questioned and reassessed, for they mute voices which contribute to a wider, to the “full”, and maybe “real” picture of society.
When moral authority speaks
(2023)
What’s in an irish name?
(2006)
Content: 1. Introduction: The Irish Patronymic System Prior to 1600 2. Anglicisation Pressure 3. Anglicisation: 1600-1900 3.1. Phonetic Approximation 3.2. Simplification 3.3. Translation 3.4. Mistranslation 3.5. Equivalence with Existing English Surname 3.6. Multiplicity of Anglicised Forms 3.7. Anglicisation of Prefixes 4. The Call to De-Anglicise 5. Current Personal Naming Patterns in Ireland 5.1. Current Modern Irish 6. Traditional Naming: “X (Son/Daughter) of Y (Son/Daughter) of Z” 7. Nicknames 8. Conclusion
The great Old English epic 'Beowulf' has been dated to practically every century between the 6th and the 11th century, depending on the criteria of dating adopted and the approaches advocated by the respective scholars. As the text successfully avoids to provide definite cues or evidence for a definitive date, these scholarly attempts reveal more about the respective scholars' research interests than offering uncontroversial dates. The point of dating 'Beowulf' then seems to provide scholars with the opportunity to anchor their own personal understanding of the poem within the century of their own personal predilection.
Extract: That the Celtic languages were of the Indo-European family was first recognised by Rasmus Christian Rask (*1787), a young Danish linguist, in 1818. However, the fact that he wrote in Danish meant that his discovery was not noted by the linguistic establishment until long after his untimely death in 1832. The same conclusion was arrived at independently of Rask and, apparently, of each other, by Adolphe Pictet (1836) and Franz Bopp (1837). This agreement between the foremost scholars made possible the completion of the picture of the spread of the Indo-European languages in the extreme west of the European continent. However, in the Middle Ages the speakers of Irish had no awareness of any special relationship between Irish and the other Celtic languages, and a scholar as linguistically competent as Cormac mac Cuillennáin (†908), or whoever compiled Sanas Chormaic, treated Welsh on the same basis as Greek, Latin, and the lingua northmannorum in the elucidation of the meaning and history of Irish words. [...]
Visual Culture
(2004)
Victorian Women Artists
(2010)
This article explores a sequence organizational phenomenon that results from the use of a loosely specifiable turn format (viz., That's + wh-clause) for launching (next) sequences while at the same time connecting back to a prior turn. Using this practice creates a sequential juncture, i.e., a pivot-like nexus between one sequence and a next. In third position, such junctures serve to accomplish seamless sequential transitions from one sequence into a next by presenting the latter as locally occasioned. The practice may, however, also be deployed in second position to launch actions that have not been made relevant or provided for by the preceding action and exhibit response relevance themselves. The sequential junctures then become retro-sequential in character: They transform the projected trajectory of the sequence in progress and create interlocking sequential structures. These findings highlight that sequence is practice, while pointing to understudied interconnections between tying and sequentiality. Data are in English.
This essay focuses on the work of Mexican/Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose main aesthetic principle lies in the criss-crossing of cultural, geographic and linguistic borders. Through his unique fusion of genres, discourses and media, Gómez-Peña creates a hybrid art form that also transgresses more conventional definitions of what constitutes culture. One of the central features of his "New World Border" (1992-1994) performance is the artistic transposition of site-specific border identities and texts to a global level; i.e., the border (and its transgression) becomes a metaphor to address a multiplicity of aesthetic, cultural and socio-political agendas. His performance "Temple of Confessions" (1994) aims, among others, at debunking the rather celebratory discourse of mainstream U.S. multiculturalism. In addition, his project of "reverse anthropology", which informs a number of his performance pieces, seeks to retain the resistance potential of minoritarian art by subverting hegemonic power hierarchies. As will be shown, his representational strategy of "as if" is used by Gómez-Peña and his collaborators to envision a postnational and transcultural spaciousness of the Americas.
Towards Eurasia
(2019)
In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.
This study examines language ideologies and communicative practices in the multilingual Vaupes region of northwestern Amazonia. Following a comparative overview of the Vaupes as a 'small-scale' language ecology, it discusses claims from existing ethnographic work on the region in light of data from a corpus of video-recordings of sociolinguistic interviews and spontaneous everyday conversations. It shows how a practice-based and interdisciplinary approach combining language documentation methodology and ethnographic, structural linguistic, and interactional perspectives can contribute to understanding of macro and micro aspects of multilingualism, thus contributing to future work on the Vaupes, typologies of small-scale multilingual ecologies, and language contact research.
This article addresses problems of authorship and creative authority in popular music, in particular in view of a pervasive split between modes of aesthetic production (involving modernist assemblage, multiple authorship, and the late capitalist logic of major label policies) and modes of aesthetic reception (which tend to take popular music as the organic output of individual performers). While rock musicians have attempted to come to terms with this phenomenon by either performing a ‘Romantic’ sense of authenticity (basically by importing folk values to the production process) or ‘Modernist authenticity’ (by highlighting experimen- tation and alienation), Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, creators of Gorillaz, found a third way which ingeniously allows them to do both. By creating a virtual rock band, and by hiding their own media personalities behind those of their virtual alter egos, they brought themselves into a position which allows them to produce ‘sincere’ popular music which ‘playfully’ stages the absurdities of major label music business while very successfully operating within its very confines.
Too Poor for Debt
(2020)
Deleuze launches his description/prediction of the emergence and imminent consolidation of the society of control as a postscript. The text thus announces itself as an afterthought, a supplement appended to some complete larger textual body, from which it is, however, unmoored as it is launched as an independent self-standing text that, moreover, does not indicate to what it is an addendum but instead, on what it speaks. By this token, the Postscript unhinges the conventional notion according to which a supplement signals “the addition of something to an already complete entity” (Attridge 1992: 77). By marking his text as the adjunct to an absent main body, Deleuze appears to concede and at the same time emphatically embrace the necessary incompleteness of this short précis on the post-disciplinary regime. My argument in the following will be that the supplementary status of the Postscript does not so much signal some subversive or dissident gesture in the name of the minor or the molecular (even though it does that, too); instead, it primarily serves to keep at bay and contain an exteriority that it aims to ‘confine by exclusion’1; and that exteriority, I will argue, is the Third World.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (Hrsg.), Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray; Münster, Nodus, 1996
(1998)
The language situation in the Philipines between the many different native languages and English is complex. The book under review outlines the various contact situations, focussing on the contact between Tagalog, the most important indigenous language of the Philipines on the one hand and English on the other. This serves as the basis for a detailed discussion of the sociological determinasts of the contact continuum between Tagalog on the one hand and Standard English on the other. The main asset of the book is to be found in its well informed survey character resulting from personal teaching experience.
Think local sell global
(2010)