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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.
The development of speaking competence is widely regarded as a central aspect of second language (L2) learning. It may be questioned, however, if the currently predominant ways of conceptualising the term fully satisfy the complexity of the construct: Although there is growing recognition that language primarily constitutes a tool for communication and participation in social life, as yet it is rare for conceptualisations of speaking competence to incorporate the ability to inter-act and co-construct meaning with co-participants. Accordingly, skills allowing for the successful accomplishment of interactional tasks (such as orderly speaker change, and resolving hearing and understanding trouble) also remain largely unrepresented in language teaching and assessment. As fostering the ability to successfully use the L2 within social interaction should arguably be a main objective of language teaching, it appears pertinent to broaden the construct of speaking competence by incorporating interactional competence (IC). Despite there being a growing research interest in the conceptualisation and development of (L2) IC, much of the materials and instruments required for its teaching and assessment, and thus for fostering a broader understanding of speaking competence in the L2 classroom, still await development. This book introduces an approach to the identification of candidate criterial features for the assessment of EFL learners’ L2 repair skills. Based on a corpus of video-recorded interaction between EFL learners, and following conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methodology as well as drawing on basic premises of research in the framework of Conversation Analysis for Second Language Acquisition, differences between (groups of) learners in terms of their L2 repair conduct are investigated through qualitative and inductive analyses. Candidate criterial features are derived from the analysis results. This book does not only contribute to the operationalisation of L2 IC (and of L2 repair skills in particular), but also lays groundwork for the construction of assessment scales and rubrics geared towards the evaluation of EFL learners’ L2 interactional skills.
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.
The dissertation examines aspects of the interlingual lexical processes of word recognition and word retrieval in Hungarian-German bilinguals learning English as a foreign language, with particular respect to the role of cognates. The purpose of the study is to describe the process of lexical activaton in a polyglot system and to model the mental lexicons and the ways entries in the lexicons are connected and activated (e.g. activation through direct word association or through concept mediation). Three dependent variables are studied in quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data taken from experiments: rate of accurate responses, response latencies and phonological interference. The results of the experiments are interpreted in the framework of a multiple language network model.
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.
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).
Remembering the dismembered
(2020)
This thesis – written in co-authorship with Tanzanian activist Mnyaka Sururu Mboro – examines different cases of repatriation of ancestral remains to African countries and communities through the prism of postcolonial memory studies. It follows the theft and displacement of prominent ancestors from East and Southern Africa (Sarah Baartman, Dawid Stuurman, Mtwa Mkwawa, Songea Mbano, King Hintsa and the victims of the Ovaherero and Nama genocides) and argues that efforts made for the repatriation of their remains have contributed to a transnational remembrance of colonial violence.
Drawing from cultural studies theories such as "multidirectional memory", "rehumanisation" and "necropolitics", the thesis argues for a new conceptualisation or "re-membrance" in repatriation, through processes of reunion, empowerment, story-telling and belonging. Besides, the afterlives of the dead ancestors, who stand at the centre of political debates on justice and reparations, remind of their past struggles against colonial oppression. They are therefore "memento vita", fostering counter-discourses that recognize them
as people and stories.
This manuscript is accompanied by a “(web)site of memory” where some of the research findings are made available to a wider audience. This blog also hosts important sound material which appears in the thesis as interventions by external contributors. Through QR codes, both the written and the digital version are linked with each other to problematize the idea of a written monograph and bring a polyphonic perspective to those diverse, yet connected, histories.
Die Dissertation untersucht von Autorinnen (Louisa Johnson, Jane Loudon, Maria Theresa Earle, Gertrude Jekyll, Elizabeth von Arnim) verfasste Ratgeberliteratur zum Hausgarten für ein weibliches Lesepublikum, mit dem Anspruch an eine praktische Gartentätigkeit, im Zeitraum von 1839 bis 1900. Die Genderperspektive steht hieraus folgend im Mittelpunkt der vorliegenden Arbeit. Der Fokus auf die bürgerliche Mittelklasse ergibt sich aus der Autorinnenperspektive und der angesprochenen Leserschaft. Die Behandlung des Gartens wird einer Analyse unterzogen, die nach der weiblichen Sicht auf den Garten und einem spezifisch weiblichen Selbstverständnis der garteninteressierten bzw. gärtnernden Frauen fragt. In ihrer Beschäftigung mit dem Garten leisten die Frauen einen Beitrag zur Konzeption von männlich und weiblich, zur Bewertung von Geschlechternormen und deren Verhandlung. Das Schreiben und Lesen über den Garten sowie hieraus resultierende Handlungen waren mit der Konstruktion weiblicher Identität verknüpft. In ihrer befreienden Konzeption des Gartens heben sich diese Frauenstimmen zu Weiblichkeitsvorstellungen von anderen gesellschaftlichen zugeschriebenen Wirkungsbereichen ab. An die bürgerliche Frau herangetragene Rollenerwartungen werden in den Werken weder affirmativ bestätigt noch offen subversiv hinterfragt. Es handelt sich vielmehr um ein subtiles Unterlaufen durch das Anbieten von Handlungsfeldern, die dem Wunsch nach Selbstverwirklichung und Selbstbestimmung entgegen kamen. Im Garten als vermeintlich kleinem, hausnah-restriktivem Kontext nehmen die Frauen neue Rollen an und variieren diese. Der Beschäftigung mit dem Garten kommt daher ein protofeministischer Charakter vor dem Einsetzen der Ersten Frauenbewegung zu, so dass von einem Gartenfeminismus als Instrument zur weiblichen Bewusstwerdung gesprochen werden kann.
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.