820 Englische, altenglische Literaturen
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Postprint (11)
- Article (10)
- Doctoral Thesis (4)
- Review (2)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
- Master's Thesis (1)
- Journal/Publication series (1)
Language
- English (27)
- German (4)
- Multiple languages (1)
Keywords
- 17th century (1)
- 19. Jahrhundert (1)
- Age studies (1)
- Australia (1)
- Australien (1)
- Awara (1)
- Berühren (1)
- Blumenberg (1)
- Brecht (1)
- Caitlin R. Kiernan (1)
Poema
(2023)
POEMA ist ein komparatistisch angelegtes Jahrbuch, das sich der systematischen Erforschung von Lyrik und Gedicht widmet. Es richtet sich an Fachwissenschaftlerinnen und Fachwissenschaftler aller Philologien wie auch der mit anderen Kunstformen befassten Wissenschaften und der philosophischen Ästhetik. POEMA erscheint als Open-Access-Journal wie auch als Print-on-Demand-Fassung im Universitätsverlag Kiel | Kiel University Publishing. Die wissenschaftlichen Beiträge werden in einem double-blind Peer-Review-Verfahren begutachtet.
Hawaiki according to Tupaia
(2023)
This essay looks into the concept of an ancestral homeland in Remote Oceania, commonly referred to as Hawaiki (‘Avaiki; Havai‘i; Hawai‘i).
Hawaiki intriguingly challenges Eurocentric notions of ‘home.’ Following the rapid settlement of the so-called Polynesian triangle from Samoa/Tonga at around 1000 AD, Hawaiki has emerged as a concept that is both mythological and real; genealogical and geographic; singular and yet portable, existing in plural regional manifestations.
I argue that predominantly Pakeha/Popa‘ā research trying to identify Hawaiki as a singular and geographically fixed homeland is misleading.
I tap into the archive surrounding the Ra‘iātean tahu‘a and master navigator Tupaia who joined Captain Cook’s crew during his first voyage to the Pacific to offer glimpses of an alternative ontology of home and epistemology of Oceanic ‘homing.’
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.
Narcissus and Echo
(2012)
George Eliot’s late novel Daniel Deronda tackles big, fundamental political questions that radiate from the societal circumstances of the novel’s production and reach deep into our present-day life. The novel critically analyses the capitalistic, morally flawed and standard-less English society and narrates the title hero’s proto-Zionist mission to found a Jewish nation that re-establishes history, meaning and ethical values. This study attempts to trace the novel’s two models of society and time by bringing them into resonance with the myth of Narcissus and Echo famously rendered by Ovid. The unloving, self-referential, visual Narcissus is read as the model for the capitalistic world of spectacle and speculation. Echo’s loving, memory-bearing voice forms an important part in the construction of the sublating unity of the Jewish nation-to-come. Guided by this resonance between George Eliot’s novel and Ovid’s myth pieces of critical theory and philosophy are woven into the study’s fabric. The resulting analysis dissects and deconstructs the novel’s fascinating and highly complex patterns of conditions of possibility for the fabrication of the redeeming Jewish nation, the very same conditions that the novel presents as the conditions of possibility for narrating a meaningful story.
Marronage or underground?
(2022)
I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place.
Despite their overt focus on inexplicable alien forces, cosmic horror stories are also determined by their human cast. Far from being merely fodder for horror, the characters significantly contribute to the generation of meaning, including that of the supernatural entity or phenomenon itself. The same holds for the narrators' (implicitly) political perspectives on the world of which they are part. Much of the perspective propounded in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories partakes of myth, adopting in particular the latter's universal view and pronounced sidelining of humanity as a whole, which it intensifies to the point of horror. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this universal perspective is consistent with the racism permeating and structuring Lovecraft's writing. Though eschewing racism and universalism, the cosmic horror of Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" negotiates literary reflections of colonialism from an unreflective white perspective.
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.
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.
Today’s focus on the 1930s as a time of radical politics paving the way for the apocalypse of the Second World War ignores the complexity of the decade’s cultural responses, especially those by British women writers who highlighted gender issues within their contemporary political climate. The decade’s literature is often understood to capture the political unrest, either narrating people’s chaotic movement or their paralysed shock. This book argues that 1930s novels collapse the distinction between movement and standstill and calls this phenomenon Dynamic Stasis. This Dynamic Stasis thematically and structurally informs the novels of Nancy Mitford, Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys. By disrupting the oft-repeated cliché of the 1930s as the age of political extremes, gender politics and negotiations of femininity can emerge from the discursive periphery. This book therefore corrects a persistent gender blind spot, which opens up a (re)consideration of authors that have been overlooked in literary criticism of 1930s to this day.
Touching this dreaded sight
(2020)
Ausgehend von der in Shakespeare zweimal wiederkehrenden Phrase „Touching this dreaded sight“ widmet sich der Beitrag mithilfe ausgewählter Stellen aus Shakespeares Hamlet und The Tempest der Wirkkraft des frühneuzeitlichen Theaters. Er geht der Frage nach, wie Zuschauer*innen eines Stückes aus der Distanz be-troffen und ge-rührt werden. Um dem nachzudenken, wie diese Distanz zwischen dem Visuellen, dem Schauen im Theater, und dem Haptischen, der Berührung, überbrückt werden kann, helfen frühneuzeitliche Vorstellungen von theatraler Ansteckungskraft und Hans Blumenbergs Konzept menschlicher Betreffbarkeit.
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.
Rezensiertes Werk:
George, Rosemary Marangoly, Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. - Hb. viii, 285 pp. - (Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik ; 62(4)) ISBN 978-1-107-04000-7.
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)
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.
Rezensiertes Werk
George, Rosemary Marangoly, Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. - Hb. viii, 285 pp. - (Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik ; 62(4))
ISBN 978-1-107-04000-7.
This article considers Isabella Bird’s representation of medicine in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) and Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), the two books in which she engages most extensively with both local (Chinese/Islamic) and Western medical science and practice. I explore how Bird uses medicine to assert her narrative authority and define her travelling persona in opposition to local medical practitioners. I argue that her ambivalence and the unease she frequently expresses concerning medical practice (expressed particularly in her later adoption of the Persian appellation “Feringhi Hakīm” [European physician] to describe her work) serves as a means for her to negotiate the colonial and gendered pressures on Victorian medicine. While in Japan this attitude works to destabilise her hierarchical understanding of science and results in some acknowledgement of traditional Japanese traditions, in Persia it functions more to disguise her increasing collusion with overt British colonial ambitions.
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.