Showing papers in "European Journal of English Studies in 2009"

Working with Concepts

Abstract: Interdisciplinarity in the humanities should seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than in methods. Concepts are the tools of intersubjectivity: They facilitate discussion on the basis of a common language. But concepts are not fixed. They travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods and between geographically dispersed academic communities. Between disciplines, their meaning, reach and operational value differ. These processes of differing need to be assessed before, during and after each ‘trip’. All of these forms of travel render concepts flexible. It is this changeability that becomes part of their usefulness for a new methodology that is neither stultifying and rigid nor arbitrary or ‘sloppy’. This paper aims to explore the value of such unsettled concepts for interdisciplinary work in the Humanities.

‘Culture’ and ‘Communication’ in Intercultural Communication

Abstract: Two major influences on contemporary societies dictate that diffusion and hybridization of communicative norms will be an increasingly significant feature of our communication landscape: Transnational population flows; and the impact of mediated communication, including by means of the Internet. This study explores implications of different ways of viewing the ‘cultural’ and ‘communication’ dimensions of intercultural communication in such volatile circumstances. It considers the risk of reproducing cultural stereotypes in characterizing the speakers engaged in intercultural communication and the types of communication they engage in. It also examines the ‘inter’ that allows intercultural communication to be something active, with scope for creative fusion, initiative and change. By way of conclusion, we suggest that intercultural communication studies may need to be reconceptualized if the field is to engage adequately with further possible convergence (including communicative convergence) between cultures.

Imaginative Geography as a Travelling Concept: Foucault, Said and the spatial turn

Abstract: In his 1982 essay on ‘Traveling Theory’, Edward Said argues that the transfer of ideas in the humanities and the social sciences is influenced by both ‘conditions of acceptance’ and ‘resistances’. The journey of theories, he explains, is never unimpeded. Following this observation, the present study wishes to explore further the factors determining the itinerary of theories. It puts forward the thesis that the interdisciplinary reception of theory is a selective – and historically variable – process, depending on the receiving discipline's dominant paradigm, which directs the researchers’ attention to those aspects of the received theory that can best be adapted to their present purpose. In the process, individual concepts are isolated from their original context and reintegrated into a new theoretical and disciplinary environment. My example of this is the divergent use of Michel Foucault and Edward Said in the contexts of the respective linguistic and spatial turns, firstly as pioneers of discourse anal...

Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are

Abstract: Paul Fry’s most recent book, published as the first in the revived ‘Yale Studies in English’ imprint associated in particular with Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man, is one of three major new studies of Wordsworth’s poetry, alongside Simon Jarvis’s Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (2007) and David Simpson’s Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern (2008). All three draw very different, even conflicting, pictures of Wordsworth, the first seeing him primarily as a poet, the second as a philosopher, and the third as a social critic, yet all attest to a renewed vitality in Wordsworth studies after a twenty year lull. If Fry expresses a conscious debt to Hartman’s ‘broadly phenomenological’ approach to Wordsworth (p. xi), de Man’s more skeptical view of poetic language is also present, making this a late, but paradoxically also very timely, addition to the Yale School of criticism. At ease with the critical tradition both recent and more remote, writing in a highly readable style that often makes use of witty metaphors to demonstrate its point (comparing a sonnet to a bottle of whiskey, for example, or reading P.D. James alongside a spot-of-time), Fry presents us with a bold because simple thesis, a ‘High Argument’ of sorts that contributes as much to lyric theory as it does to Wordsworth criticism. Like Keats and A.C. Bradley before him, his stated aim is ‘to bring the hiding places of Wordsworth’s original power to light’ in the poetry between 1787 and 1817 (p. ix). The book opens, like Simpson’s, with the hunger-bitten girl episode from Prelude IX, yet with an opposite motive in view. Moving away from politics and from the political unconscious of new historicism, Fry argues that Wordsworth’s poetry is ontological first and only secondarily political (p. 2). The Wordsworth we (re)discover here is primarily concerned with nature (this despite Alan Liu’s notorious claim that ‘there is no nature’). He is not the staid nature poet imagined by the Victorians, however, nor is he the eco-warrior encountered in recent ‘green’ criticism, but a writer who radically parts ways with Enlightenment anthropocentrism, coming across as Keatsian in his negative capability and use of autumnal effects. Wordsworth’s poetry is not green but grey, Fry argues, a ‘spousal verse’ that seeks to reveal being itself in ‘the nonhumanity that ‘‘we’’ share with the non-human universe and that revelation is the hiding-place of his power’ (p. x). Fry calls this common denominator the ‘minerality of being’ (p. 10), a downward pull expressed through a lyric moment of indetermination as opposed to the distinctions established through reason and language. Wordsworth’s leveling politics, like his imaginative sympathy, stem from this leveling ontology: ‘Equality for Wordsworth was never a political idea’ (p. 6).

The Concept of Performativity in Narratology

Abstract: This essay traces the travelling concept of performativity across the field of narratology. Distinguishing different forms of interdisciplinary transfer, the text offers a definition of performativity in narratology and attempts to give a systematic account of how the concept has been adapted to narratological research. I argue that the concept of performativity can refer to two distinct levels of the narratological investigation – to the story level and to the narrator's agency or act of narration, and that this act can also be considered in a wider pragmatic and cultural context. Special attention is given to the relation between the concepts of performativity and performance on the one hand, and the relation between performativity and speech act theory on the other.

The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism

Abstract: ANN BANFIELD, 2000, reprinted 2006, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 451 pp., 0 521 03403 5, pb £29.99 The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism sets out to addr...

Social Intelligence: The key to intercultural communication

Abstract: In this essay it is argued that social intelligence is a necessary prerequisite for being a successful intercultural communicator. The latest research in the field of social intelligence is based o...

Linguistic Nationalism and the Emergence of the English Native Speaker

Abstract: This article examines the rhetoric of national character as deployed in the concept of the English ‘native speaker’. The emergence of the concept and its attendant discourse is analyzed through a corpus of texts that extends from the mid-19th century to just after World War I, including not only linguistic classics but also collections of lesser known periodical articles. As the analysis shows, the second half of the 19th century was a period in which linguists started to think differently about languages and their speakers. The concept of the native speaker provided an important way of labeling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others, crucially connected to nationalism and Anglo-Saxonism; as such, it has had repercussions up to the present day, as the debate surrounding the native speaker in the World Englishes context shows.

Negotiating Europe's Lingua Franca

Abstract: English has spread and is used around the world, often as a rational choice made by professional groups and bilingual speech communities. In Europe, it is used as a language of wider communication or a lingua franca. This study argues that although English can be the means of expression of local or national or European identities, and even though ‘Euro-English’ has some identifiable features, it is unlikely to develop into a distinct, stable, codifiable and teachable variety, wholly independent of native English norms.

S is for Spaniard

Abstract: How are representatives of different nations portrayed in English picturebooks whose specific aim is to present a variety of foreign countries for the amusement of young readers? Taking as its main example Spaniards and how they feature in picturebooks and ABCs for children during the long 19th century, this paper observes the context of contemporary history as well as the conventions of discourse such as intertextuality, and asks how national stereotypes are deployed specifically for the target audience of young readers. The composite nature of picturebooks is taken into account in an analysis which addresses the iconography of the visual representation of national character, its verbal construction, and the interplay of the textual and the pictorial.

Towards a Cultural and Historical Imagology

Abstract: The paper explores forms and functions of the rhetoric of national character in 18th-century British literature. British writers mobilised the rhetoric of national character not only to define themselves collectively against others, but also to influence political controversies at home; in particular the class- and gender-based struggle for political rights in the emerging British nation. To analyse the forms and functions of images of national character, this paper develops a framework for a cultural and historical imagology. This framework integrates a social constructivist view of national character and national identity with discursive, rhetorical, and cultural approaches to literature. Emphasis is placed on the role that narrative devices and intermedial strategies play for constructions of national character. It is concluded that ‘national character’ not only consists of the attributes typically predicated to a specific nation; rather it is also a formal and even aesthetic construct, which relies on...

The Rhetoric of National Character: Introduction

Abstract: Cultural, literary, and popular representations of collective peculiarities and behaviour frequently invoke ‘national character’ as a motivating explanation. Stereotypical in nature, such character...

Voicing the Music in Literature

Abstract: The musicality of literature is a constant preoccupation, if not always a clearly delineated one, of literary studies. To speak of a novel as a symphony, a dialogue in terms of counterpoint, or a literary style as melodic, is hardly exceptional. In an ever-increasingly interdisciplinary academic world, ‘music and word studies’ has proved to be a particularly popular field of enquiry, the concept of ‘musicality’ playing a central but also controversial role in our appreciation of literature. But what do we mean when we speak of a text's musicality? What, in fact, for that matter, do we mean when we speak of music's musicality? Very rarely do we seek answers to such questions and yet, without those answers, our interdisciplinary critiques can only be built on very shaky foundations. When using the term, we assume we are speaking a common language which somehow transcends the boundaries of our own artistic fields. We assume that we are speaking of the same thing, despite the fact that within musicology itsel...

Travelling Concepts in English Studies

Abstract: Concepts are first and foremost intellectual tools of academic discourse: They fulfil heuristic, cognitive and descriptive functions and thus enable discussion and exchange on the basis of a common...

Translating The Metaphors We Live By

Abstract: Lakoff and Johnson's groundbreaking Metaphors We Live By (1980) has been widely translated. Drawing on a corpus of three translations into Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish), the study considers the cross-cultural productivity of conceptual metaphors, as well as the intercultural negotiations at play in the translation process. While most conceptual metaphors seem to cut across these closely-related cultures, their linguistic realizations still present a significant degree of variation.

‘To See Ourselves as Others See Us’: The Scot in English eyes since 1707

Abstract: English attitudes towards Scotland have been conditioned over centuries by the political relationship between the two countries and how it impacted on the dominant areas for the production of English print culture (London and the south east). Before 1603, this area of England had little contact with Scotland; in that year, the arrival of a Scottish court in London heralded a much expanded Scottish presence in English publications. Highlanders and Lowlanders were not separated in English stereotyping at this stage. Political tensions in the 1640s and 1650s, and initial Scottish hostility to the Union of 1707, led to more negative stereotyping of Scots and Scotland, which in turn gave way to the benign stereotyping of the era of the British Empire, when Scottishness was an acceptable ‘local nationality’ within the wider Pax Britannica. During this period, significant distinctions can be seen between ‘Highland’ and ‘Lowland’ or military/international and civil stereotypes. Following the decline of the Empire...

The Dragon and The Raven: Saxons, Danes and the problem of defining national character in Victorian England

Abstract: This article focuses upon images of Danes and Saxons in the large body (100+) of British literary texts and the great quantity of artwork that was produced during the long 19th century as part of the Victorian cult of the Saxon king Alfred. It investigates how images of Danes as an exotic or dangerous Other in 19th-century ‘Alfredian’ texts might complicate simple readings of those works as triumphally progressive and linear visions of history, suggesting instead the existence of cultural anxieties about the stability of British union and the hybridity of the English population. It investigates whether there is a case for reading negative images of Guthrum as a means of displacing onto the Danish nation those worrying negative qualities associated generally with northern nations in the 19th century; thus facilitating a less problematic idealisation of the Saxon Alfred. Conversely, it also considers to what extent positive images of Guthrum complicate or challenge Victorian claims about a distinct Saxon ‘t...

Botany, Sexuality and Women's Writing 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant

Abstract: SAM GEORGE, 2007 Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press ix + 261 pp., 978 0 7190 7697 8, hb In the late eighteenth century, botanical writing for and by women was at the epicentre of ...

English as a Foreign Literature

Abstract: Concepts travel (or fail to travel) within the disciplines as well as between them: The conceptual approach of any one subject can vary dramatically according to the institutional, national or historical culture of knowledge in which it is conducted, raising important questions about the role of academic context and community in influencing the aims and findings of research. The discipline of studies in English language and literature in Europe is a remarkable case in point: The increasing currency of English as an international lingua franca has – alongside the many political questions this raises – transformed continental European English Studies into a prime site in which concepts in literary and cultural studies have travelled between diverse national philological contexts. Yet there remains a considerable divide between the study of English Literature in the anglophone world and what might be called ‘English as a Foreign Literature’. Focusing in most depth on the relationship between ‘domestic’ Engli...

The Fawlty Rhetoric of National Character

Abstract: While the connection between English humour and national character continues to be debated nostalgically or critically in England, several examples of ‘English humour’ have meanwhile been exported, adopted, and adapted by other nations. In this article, we trace a few examples of the specific uses (national as well as trans-national) to which the shared knowledge and enjoyment of a key scene in the situation comedy Fawlty Towers has been put by Danish TV viewers. A melange of prejudice, politics, parody, and farce surrounding a young Danish MP's public behaviour in April 2007, while under the influence, was interpreted and made popularly intelligible (or was it?) through the familiar prism provided by John Cleese in the role of Mr. Basil Fawlty pretending to be Adolf Hitler in order to entertain an unfortunate group of German hotel guests. We conclude with some methodological reflections on stereotype and humour.

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-century Literatures in English

Abstract: no longer tenable. True, Henry VI wishes ‘to be a subject’ (2 Hen. V1, IV. viii. 6) and leaves the empty parliament for someone else to occupy (Jack Cade), but the Bolingbrokes in the second tetralogy (and especially Prince Hal) show us that Arnold’s claim – that Shakespeare elaborates an ‘opposition between theatrical relations of power and monarchy’ (p. 161; emphasis in original) – may be pushing the revision of New Historicism a little bit too far. The ‘third citizen’ in the title of the study is one of the plebeians in Coriolanus, whom Arnold discusses in the final chapter. The citizen’s recognition of the representational paradox neatly sums up his own representational dilemma: ‘We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do’ (Cor., II. iii. 4–5). He represents the subjected subject who is fooled into believing that by giving up his power to representatives (who claim to speak in his name), he actually empowers himself. By drawing our attention to the ‘bamboozlement of political representation’ (p. 199) in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and by highlighting its tragic repercussions for the characters in Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Oliver Arnold’s book offers a refreshing and stimulating new perspective on the literary presentation and negotiation of parliamentary politics. Arnold’s study is an insightful, provocative and at times brilliantly written work that will hopefully help to reinvigorate the currently ailing field of new historicist studies.

Contingencies of Comparison

Abstract: World literature is a ‘travelling concept’ that describes the intensification of the international and interdisciplinary exchange of contents, norms and values. A historical reading of Goethe's invention of the term in 1827 will show that ‘travelling’ also indicates how far the concept of world literature is in itself susceptible to travelling, to transfer and transmission. Depending on the different functional, cultural and disciplinary contexts, it can be used in very different ways. Studying Carlyle's Sartor Resartus from this perspective will help us to determine why the discursive beginnings of the term go necessarily hand in hand with strategies of institutional restraint and societal control.

Introduction: English studies and intercultural negotiations

Abstract: Intercultural communication is a daily occurrence for many, if not most, people. As James Clifford put it, 20 years ago: This century has seen a drastic expansion of mobility, including tourism, mi...

Legitimacy, Comprehension and Empathy: The Importance of Recontextualisation in Intercultural Negotiations

Abstract: In this essay I argue against the notion that power is an input that ensures control over discourse and suggest that locally-specific cultural variables will determine what sort of language is effective within specific contexts and who is eligible to deploy this language legitimately. Drawing on examples from fieldwork in Guyana, South America, I illustrate how recognition of both external and local prestige was an important factor in successful discourse and illustrate how each of these was manifest in specific linguistic features. I go on to suggest that collaborative discourse that develops the interplay between these different discourse systems and which promotes changes in relations that go beyond the site of the discourse itself is a viable alternative to the struggles that inevitably arise when temporary renegotiations of control are exposed as strategic ploys to maintain the hegemony of the dominant group.

Figurations of exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov

Abstract: (aesthetic or ecological), whereas Wordsworth’s concept of nature is one of ontology and unity. By re-instilling Wordsworth as a nature poet who ‘recovers things from their forms and names’ (p. 202), Fry claims to part ways with the Yale School, and more specifically with de Man’s theory of poetic language as anthropomorphism (p. 67). The book closes, however, with the disquieting assertion, concordant with poststructuralism, that ‘the oneness of the nonhuman felt as prior to the semeiosis of the human, was an efficacious illusion’ (p. 203). Behind both Fry’s and de Man’s ideas on nature and language lies Martin Heidegger, strangely quoted only once, at the very end, to show how the ontic moment of the lyric answers our desire to ‘offset the biases of knowledge . . . and partly suspend the workings of the ego’ (p. 202). If a Heideggerian Wordsworth can help us better understand the radical nature of his poetry and put to rest clichéd notions of the egotistical sublime, its bracketing out the world, like its fundamental conservatism, guard against any utopian appropriations of Fry’s argument: Poetry makes nothing happen with a vengeance here. By the time he wrote ‘Ode to Duty’, Wordsworth too had realized that there perhaps was more to life than simply being what we are. From this realization, unfortunately, came the loss of his poetic power.

Nigh-No-Place

Abstract: Jen Hadfield’s collection Nigh-No-Place, which won her the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize, is remarkable for the radical-witty suppleness of its concept of the collection as free network, as a developing set of stories within the islands of its concerns. Written under the sign of the wanderer through unknown and unknowable territories, the collection works with three modes of attention: One to the Shetland islands where she now lives, then to the travel writing generated by a journey to Canada, and third to the animal world allowed to inhabit the pages in sharp language encounters at the edge of it all. She works with domesticated animals mostly, the dog, the horse and the cat, as though to overturn Adam’s thrall and rename by way of discovered othering and affectionate instinct. That instinct is procedural as much as it is thematized: Just as the journeys into foreign utopian zones, the no-places of the earth marginal to modernity, are redreamt not as primitivist sanctuaries, but as language crucibles, so the skirl of words generated by the beast fables unpick Adamic masteries and Lawrentian egotistic encounters. The poems do so to discover friendly animal-centred speech forms that attend to the insides active in all vocalization, understand animal subjections at this environmental endgame, and also acknowledge Jen Hadfield’s own yearning for other creaturecreative knowledge, as with this comic hymn to the hedgehog:

New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women's Prose

Abstract: preoccupation with the occult on the part of a modernist writer did not by any means amount to a withdrawal from the real world – quite the contrary, in fact. It is not a novel observation, and Hickman does not pretend that it is; but it is a case that needs making every so often. Another testimony to her tact is found in her fine discussions of H. D.’s and Yeats’s difficult relationships with their fathers. It is a pity that it has to be stated that H. D.’s feminism and sexual orientation did not necessarily place her across a divide from her ‘masculine’ male contemporaries, but it does. Similarly, Hickman’s warning against the notion that ‘it is on the basis of an association with the maternal sphere that women writers belong in modernist or feminist literary canons’ (p. 184) is justified. The last-mentioned aspects of Hickman’s engagement with her topic reflect on conditions in the present-day academy, in which preoccupation with modernism shows no signs of abating. Indeed, it keeps finding new forms, in teaching as well as in research. A particularly astute comment on current classroom realities will conclude this review of three very different contributions to the literature on modernism. Describing her efforts to introduce reading strategies which would allow both Jewish and Muslim students to acknowledge their positions, Kinereth Meyer, drawing on Yung-Hsing Wu, points out that ‘although the academy may encourage readers of texts to engage in an active and individual positioning, it does so while at the same time aiming for a multiculturalism without the conflict that such diversity may engender’ (p. 271 in Däumer and Baghee’s volume). As she says, the result is a ‘multiculturalism without a multi’ (p. 271 in Däumer and Bagchee’s volume). Modernist texts lend themselves particularly well to attempts to resolve that paradox. We are undefeated as long as we go on trying.

Within and Beyond the Nation

Abstract: This essay analyses contemporary poetry by Irish and Galician women and assesses how it is affected by tensions between national discourses and those that reach beyond the nation. Gender and national identity are permeated, to various degrees, by transnational ideologies such as feminism, Celticism and Catholicism, but these are transformed by the sociocultural specificities of each community. Local interests move to alliances with other nations which are seen as sharing similar objectives, while language choice, torn between the vernacular and the global, becomes a decisive constituent of the writers' self-image. The study demonstrates that many Irish and Galician women poets express their disaffection towards national and transnational discourses that construe them as symbolically central but grant them little social agency.