Showing papers in "European Journal of English Studies in 2007"

Beyond the word

Abstract: Current methodologies in corpus linguistics have revolutionised the way in which we study language, allowing us to make accurate and retrievable observations and analyses using a range of written and spoken data from naturally occurring contexts. Yet, while current corpora allow us to explore multimillion word databases, they fail to represent language and communication beyond the word. This is problematic as social interactions are in fact multimodal, combining both verbal and non-verbal elements. This article reports on preliminary developments in this area carried out as part of an interdisciplinary project based at the University of Nottingham, funded by the UK-based Economic and Social Sciences Research Council, which is exploring how we can utilise new textualities in order to develop the scope of what a corpus can reveal and provide the tools for exploring discourse in specific contexts of communication. The specific linguistic focus of this project is the exploration of the roles and nature of ges...

Getting the Picture: Word and Image in the Digital Archive

Abstract: This article is about looking: looking at images and the problematics of seeing and interpretation that this activity entails; and looking for images, in the sense of searching for the pictures that one would like to see. A significant development of the age of digital reproduction, of a technological environment that allows access to more visual images than ever before, is that these two ‘looks’ have become entangled. For the user of digital archives and databases, there has to be a way of finding and retrieving relevant images from a corpus of hundreds, even thousands, of images, which can then be seen and interpreted; while for the developer of these digital repositories, the interpretative process has always already begun: one has to analyse the images in order to determine how they can, or should, be searched. This article, then, is literally about ‘getting the picture’, of the new possibilities of searching for, across and within pictures that is opened up by recent technologies. However, it is also about the problems raised by this process. In particular, it explores the implications of textually describing, or ‘marking up’ images so that they can be searched.

Making sense of digital textuality

Abstract: One of the fundamental developments brought about by interactive and multilinear digital technology is the greater structural fragmentation of texts and the consequent re-evaluation of textual coherence. While the concept of text is contingent on some internal coherence, the new text type of electronic hypertext places new challenges on this paradigm by allowing ways of reading texts which would appear to disturb rather than build coherence. In relying on the flexible negotiation of readerly expectations with actual continuities experienced as the reading progresses, hypertextual coherence both encourages us to re-evaluate the rules of textual coherence from a more pragmatically oriented point of view and echoes some of the most recent theoretical views of how we interpret words in their surrounding co-text. This article presents an outline for a linguistic analysis of hypertextual coherence and points out the new dimensions of coherence left unaccounted for by conventional models. What happens when multi...

Surfing the text

Abstract: The creation of and search for meaning in a remediated narrative is the subject of Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves The novel problematises identity formation through narrative in an age of endless information and media overload Chapter 9, or the Labyrinth Chapter, is an example of the ways in which the novel takes advantage of a reader's navigation strategies Lev Manovich writes in relation to the digital environment, ‘if there is a new rhetoric or aesthetic possible here, it may have less to do with the ordering of time by a writer or an orator, and more to do with spatial wandering’ (The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001: 78) In a sense, Chapter 9 both is and represents the digital format; it is an intricate web of nodes presented for the reader to explore Though the computer has offered a new form of freedom to both reader and writer, early experimentations in digital media have been influenced by the narrative form of print text Further, the experimentation in digital fiction can be c

Introduction: From ‘Law-and-Literature’ to ‘Law, literature, and language’: A comparative approach

Abstract: Two recent articles in major American publications suggest that the discipline called ‘Law-and-Literature’ may be coming to an end. 1 Addressing literary scholars in the PMLA, Julie Stone Peters (2...

When is authorial intention not authorial intention

Abstract: This article uses the practice of the law of England and Wales to illuminate what is happening when literary theorists invoke authorial intention. We argue that in interpreting contracts, wills and statutes, judges employ the language of intention (what the contractor/testator/legislature ‘meant’) to inform their decisions, but that this linguistic usage is misleading. For in practice, judicial interpretation is firmly text-based. The language of intention remains solely to foster certain illusions about the ability freely to contract, bequeath possessions and enact legislation on a democratic basis. Applying this model to literary interpretation, we find a similar sleight-of-hand taking place. While theorists such as E. D. Hirsch and Stanley Fish promote authorial intention as the basis of interpretation, their actual practice is a matter of text-based hermeneutics.

The untranslatability of law

Abstract: As a direct consequence of the idiosyncrasies of its sources and interpretive procedures, every legal system has its own kind of language. In particular, the language of American contract law presents a variety of lexical features that often make them ‘untranslatable’ into Spanish. With American English serving as the lingua franca of the vast majority of commercial transactions worldwide, translating its legal texts into Spanish is an imperative, especially within the scope of bilateral commercial agreements between Spain and the USA. Through a close analysis of the terminological traits of this field, this article identifies and discusses fuzzy terms (false cognates or ‘false friends’) along with technical terms, whose similarity in both languages and Latin origin renders their translation problematic. Through the analysis and comparison of the legal meanings and contexts of these terms in both languages, this study aims to make a contribution to their translation.

The ends of metaphor

Abstract: This study examines recent works of literary criticism and theory which make use of chaos theory, and analyses their explicit and implicit assumptions concerning interdisciplinary knowledge. Whether the prime motivation is to draw on the authority of science, to transgress the borderline between the disciplines in order to question the knowledge produced by them, or to gain an overarching transdisciplinary status for literary or cultural analysis, these texts reflect different conceptions of the knowledge produced by the sciences, by literary analysis, and even by literature itself. A detailed investigation of the writings on chaos theory and literature reveals within this seemingly narrow field a wide variety of epistemological assumptions, and comparing them can give us a clearer picture of what can and cannot be achieved by combining literary studies and the natural sciences.

Con)temporary law

Abstract: In ‘(Con)temporary Law’ the author offers some observations on how to perceive the bond between law and literature, that are particularly pertinent for legal practice. Beginning with a discussion of the historical roots of the movement, she advocates – as a legal professional – taking a humanist standpoint towards Law-and-Literature that encompasses a hermeneutic and literary-ethical perspective. Due to its institutional origins, the focus of European scholarship has until now largely been on work done in the United States and the United Kingdom. Given this, the author proposes new developments for European Law-and-Literature scholarship.

Diagrammatic thinking in literature and mathematics

Abstract: This article discusses the way both mathematics and literature share an iconic character crucial to their specific semiotic regime, which can be traced back to the implication of the diagrammatic property of both natural language and formal language. Peirce and Wittgenstein are the main references. The contribution of Gilles Châtelet is evoked.

The laws of fiction:: Legal rhetoric and literary evidence

Abstract: This essay addresses arguments from Derrida's ‘Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ in order to formulate an alternative approach to ‘law in literature’ which could be called ‘literature as law’. Its main interest lies in the way literary texts use the critical representation of law and legal rhetoric to establish the superiority of their own rhetoric and the laws of ‘literary evidence’. As an example, the essay will discuss central passages from James F. Cooper's The Pioneers (1823).

The aural literacy of Ulysses

Abstract: The Garland Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition (1986 [1984]), edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, marks a watershed in twentieth-century editorial practice and textual study. Availing itself of pioneering documentary procedures – genetic transcription and collation ‘electronically typeset by pagina GmbH in Tubingen from the processed text generated by the editing program TUSTEP’ (McGann, Criticism 27.3 [1985]: 283 – 305 at 301) – and the innovative blending of German and Anglo-American editing methods, the Garland Ulysses establishes, on its left-hand pages, a continuous manuscript text recording the work's highly complex stages of textual development, and on its right-hand pages, a clear reading text that Joyce never saw. Taking this editorial turning point as its own departure, this article conceives a new textuality on aligning the compositional and transmissional diachrony of Ulysses with the study of orality and literacy. The alignment rests upon the conceptual sca...

Wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance

Abstract: Thomas Love Peacock, in his essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, opposes ‘the progress of knowledge’, as accelerated by historians and philosophers, to ‘the rubbish of departed ignorance’, as wallowed in by poets This opposition seems categorical, and invites resistance from poets and those supporting the cognitive claims of poetry; P B Shelley duly obliged However, what happens if one does indeed wallow in the specific kind of ‘rubbish’ designated, ironically, by Peacock? This essay aims to find out, with reference to Wordsworth's poem ‘The Danish Boy’ (rubbished by Peacock) and to Theodor Adorno, German connoisseur of rubbish In Wordsworth, Peacock and Adorno, we can sense the shadow of knowledge in the form of its determinate negation Poetry is haunted by the particular knowledge it lacks, and this study argues thus for a kind of negative poetic knowledge By returning to the rubbish of departed and not yet departed ignorance, this essay hopes to trope a heap of commodities into something else

Performative metatexts in metadata, and mark-up

Abstract: The intellectual task of text modelling is an essential part of the procedures in migrating language into a digital condition. The act of modelling calls our understanding of texts into a remarkable level of self-consciousness and awareness. The challenge to render explicit much of what is left implicit in habitual reading practices or interpretive acts creates frameworks of understanding through these models – schematic abstractions of content, relations, readings and other aspects of textuality. Intellectual insights spring from an encounter with the tasks of creating metadata and mark-up schemes, style sheets and file structures, and in creating the schema that allow a relation between access, storage, display and other features of manipulation. These insights are also useful outside the technical arena, for the cultural import of decisions that modelling puts into place as well as for the way they offer purchase on the process of reading and understanding. This article discusses text modelling in a di...

‘Plagiarism, Popularity and the Dilemma of Artistic Worth: E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross’s Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899).’

Abstract: This essay will focus on the unpublished legal papers relating to the 19th-century Irish women authors E. Œ. Somerville (1858 – 1949) and Martin Ross (1862 – 1915) and their case of plagiarism against the authors of By the Brown Bog in 1913. The article will begin by summarising the ways in which the introduction of copyright law in Great Britain in 1709 altered aesthetic and legal definitions of authorship, and how this new conceptualisation of the author figure effectively disenfranchised collaborative modes of creativity and literary production. In so doing, the essay will investigate Somerville and Ross's classification as popular, collaborative short story writers. The popularity of their Irish R.M. tales, it will be argued, harmed their case of plagiarism. The study will use a detailed analysis of Somerville and Ross's legal correspondence to argue for the ways in which copyright law not only defined the ‘author’, but also the term ‘originality’, which was sorely affected by aesthetic and moral conc...

Unwritten constitutions?: British exceptionalism and New Zealand equivocation

Abstract: Constitutions are situated examples of performative language: they affirm national sovereignty, interpellate citizens as national subjects, and iterate national histories. Such texts are typically written documents setting out the system of founding principles according to which a nation-state is constituted and governed, and, most particularly, locating its sovereign power. Can a nation, then, have an unwritten constitution? While written constitutions both found and define modern nations, Britain and New Zealand are regarded as two of the very few exceptions to this rule. In each national context, a tension is at work between the written and the unwritten, between the ‘letter’ of the most fundamental laws and their unwritten ‘spirit’. In light of calls for changes to existing constitutional arrangements and competing international and indigenous claims, this article explores the legal and cultural investments within and between Britain and New Zealand in having an ‘unwritten’ constitution. Drawing on po...

How to articulate genuine experience in, of and through language

Abstract: If literature is concerned with epistemology, there must be a type of knowledge, and a type of truth, that are specific to literature This essay attempts to give an account of this knowledge and this truth by developing a proposition advanced by Steve McCaffery, the language poet and theorist, that the task of literature is to articulate genuine experience of, in and through language This involves at least two concepts of form, one derived from Marx, the other from Merleau-Ponty, a critique of Saussurean linguistics, and various literary illustrations, from the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg to Brian Friel's play, Translations

The bright light of science and the dim truth of art

Abstract: Some prominent scientists look forward to a time when science will explain everything and the humanities become redundant. This essay examines these claims and ways in which philosophers have responded to them. These responses often fail to acknowledge the pervasiveness of the scientific ambition that is at issue, and do not make use of the strongest counter-arguments, such as those concerning the fundamentally abstract and inaccessible nature of exhaustive scientific explanation. The article points to a kind of doubling of scepticism in the most ambitious scientific claims, and their affinity with religious and Utopian projections. Instead of espousing an anti-science or relativist viewpoint, the essay claims that a routine dependence upon science is compatible with acknowledgement of the possibility of radical scepticism, and that we have a rational and even scientific need for the natural sciences to be supplemented by philosophy and literature (exemplified here by Keats's ‘Ode to Psyche’).

Turning history into culture

Abstract: The central premise of this essay is that literature is one of the realms of epistemology that should not, and actually cannot, be discussed in opposition with science, simply because they are two parallel ways of articulating human experience into coherent forms. Structured at the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics and sociology, the article is an attempt to reveal the particular way in which the narrative discourse assimilates and restores experience, so that the text becomes the space within which ‘the museum’ of humanity is perpetually reassessed and invested with new significance. This ‘bringing back to life’ of the museum, with its trajectory from explanation to comprehension, from syntactic to hermeneutic relations, from iconology to archaeology, and from rigid patterns to flexible frames, reveals more subtle relations between ontology and epistemology, offering a more adequate perspective on our own ambiguity as cultural beings.